Life won’t soon be the same for communities in North Carolina’s mountains after Tropical Storm Helene. The French Broad and Swannanoa rivers swept through Asheville’s well-known Biltmore Village and River Arts District.
King Street in Boone, a postcard-perfect college town, turned into a rushing river. Interstate 40 is a chopped-up chain of closures.
And in one of the more alarming alerts in some time in this state, the National Weather Service issued an all-caps warning just after 11am Friday to say that a Lake Lure Dam failure was “IMMINENT” and that anybody downriver from it should move to higher ground immediately.
Nine disconcerting hours later, Rutherford County Emergency Management said engineers had examined the dam and lifted the “imminent” tag, to unanimous exhale. We won’t know for days the extent of the devastation.
Widespread cell phone outages and road closures, combined with the jagged terrain, made the scope impossible to assess.
Emergency crews in Buncombe County alone responded to more than 3,000 calls and carried out more than 130 swiftwater rescues Friday. Officials there called the situation an “active natural disaster.”
Just across the state line in Tennessee, 54 people were stranded on the roof of a hospital for about seven hours in Unicoi County, before officials declared them rescued just after 5pm, Axios Nashville’s Adam Tamburin reports.
A never-before-seen expansive set of extensive and life-threatening flash flood emergencies went into effect for Asheville and surrounding areas Friday.
The NC Department of Transportation issued a staggering warning at 11:15 a.m.: “All roads in Western NC should be considered closed. Do not travel unless there is an emergency or you are seeking higher ground.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper warned of landslides, and called the storm the worst in modern history for parts of western North Carolina.
Pieces of the eastbound lanes of 1-40 vanished along the North Carolina-Tennessee border at the Pigeon River Gorge, WBIR in Knoxville confirmed.
More than a foot of rain had fallen across much of the region as of Friday afternoon. Part of Yancey County, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, saw nearly 30 inches of rain, per the governor’s office.
