HELENE: The Day The Mountains Changed

By: FWN Chief Meteorologist Chris White

Two years later, I can still smell it.

That probably is not where anyone expects a meteorologist to begin a story about a hurricane. You would probably expect me to start with the models, the rainfall totals, the radar or the track of Hurricane Helene as it raced north from Florida toward the southern Appalachians. All of those things matter, and we will get to them, because the numbers behind Helene are almost unbelievable. But when I close my eyes and think about September 27, 2024, the first thing that comes back is not something I saw on a computer screen.

It is the smell.

River mud. Stagnant water. Wet wood. That unmistakable smell left behind when a river has gone places a river was never supposed to go.

I did not smell it that Friday. I was still working at Burke County 911 while western North Carolina was coming apart around us. For days, my world had been radar screens, weather models, radios, telephones, situation reports, resource requests and an endless stream of information that seemed to get worse by the hour. Somewhere outside those walls, the same storm I had spent days forecasting was tearing through my own family’s property. I knew it was happening. Messages were coming in. Pictures eventually started arriving. I knew houses were gone. But there was not time to stop and process what that meant. There was always another telephone ringing, another road disappearing, another community we could not reach, another person who needed help.

It would be seven days before I finally stood on my family’s land and saw what Helene had done to us.

By then, I knew six family homes were gone and nine buildings had been destroyed. I knew our river cabin was gone too. That cabin was much more than a building to us. It was one of those places that quietly becomes part of a family’s identity. More than a hundred family members, extended family, friends and people from our churches had gathered there over the years. Meals had been cooked there. Children had played there. Stories had been told there so many times that everybody knew how they ended, but we listened anyway. It was a gathering place, and like most gathering places that have always been there, I do not think any of us ever seriously considered the possibility that one day it simply would not be.

Seven days after Helene, Burke County Commissioner Burns rode with me up there. The river was still running high as Lake James continued spilling water downstream, and the closer we got, the more obvious it became that photographs had not prepared me for what I was about to see. Where there had been grass, there was sand and silt. Debris was tangled through the tree lines. Pieces of people’s lives had been carried downstream and deposited wherever the water decided to leave them. Then there was that smell. Mud, muck, stagnant water and wet wood. Anyone who has walked through a major flood knows it. Once you have smelled it, you never really forget it.

I walked toward where our cabin had stood. The tile floor was still there. Parts of the kitchen walls remained. Almost everything else was gone. I could stand on that tile and know exactly where everything used to be. I knew where people sat, where meals were prepared, where children played and where adults stood around talking. I could almost hear the voices that had filled those rooms. Except there was no room anymore. There was no roof above me. There were no walls around me. There was open sky, mud, debris and the river.

Then I started looking around at the rest of the family property. One cousin’s entire house had been lifted from its foundation and carried roughly a hundred yards across the field before the water deposited it in the yards of my aunt and cousins. Another family home was somehow still standing, but portions of its walls had been ripped away. Another aunt and cousin’s home was not damaged. It was simply gone. The basement and concrete floor remained, but the house that had stood above them had vanished. Two other family homes were gone as well, leaving concrete foundations behind as evidence that families had lived there only a week earlier.

Six homes. Nine buildings. Generations of property and memories changed in a matter of hours.

Standing there, however, I kept coming back to one thought: we were blessed. That may sound strange when you are standing in the middle of that much destruction, but it was true. Our family was alive. They had evacuated before the first rain drop. By then, we knew enough about what had happened elsewhere in western North Carolina to understand exactly how much that mattered. Other families were walking through debris looking for something far more important than a photograph, a piece of furniture or part of a house. They were looking for people. Some were preparing funerals. Some were still waiting for answers. Some had heard the voice of someone they loved for the last time during the storm.

There is a verse I have thought about many times since Helene. Psalm 46 begins, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” I do not believe faith means trouble never comes. Helene certainly taught us otherwise. Faith, for me, was knowing God was still there when everything familiar around us seemed to be disappearing. It was finding the strength to keep answering the next call while worrying about my own family. It was watching people serve strangers while their own homes were damaged. It was standing on that river bottom seven days later, looking at what was gone, and still being able to thank God for what remained.

Concrete can be poured again. Walls can be rebuilt. Someday another cabin can stand beside that river. People cannot be replaced. Our family still had one another, and standing in that destruction, that mattered more than anything Helene had taken from us.

For fourteen days I had dealt with the disaster. Forecasting it, living it, and now standing on that river bottom, I finally met our disaster face to face.

But that is not where this story began.

To understand how we ended up there, standing in river mud where generations of my family had once gathered, you have to go backward. Not to Friday morning. Not even to Thursday. You have to go back to the beginning of that week, when Helene was still hundreds of miles away and the mountains looked exactly as they always had.

Because the disaster that struck western North Carolina on September 27 did not begin when Hurricane Helene arrived. The atmosphere had been preparing the mountains for days.

Before Helene

By Tuesday, September 24, I did not like what I was seeing.

Being a meteorologist means spending a lot of time looking at things that have not happened yet. Most of the time, that is fairly routine. You look at one model and compare it with another. You look at ensembles, moisture, timing, terrain and the upper-air pattern. You look for what could go wrong with the forecast. Then you make the best call you can with the information in front of you.

This was different. Every time new data came in, the picture was not getting better. It was getting worse.

A frontal boundary was becoming established across the region while deep tropical moisture was being pulled northward. Waves of heavy rainfall were expected across the foothills and mountains before Helene itself ever reached western North Carolina. That last part mattered more than almost anything. The ground was going to get soaked before the hurricane arrived.

At Foothills Weather Network, and multiple other weather outlets, the wording in our briefings became stronger as the week progressed. Five to seven inches of rain. Seven to ten inches in some of the higher terrain and along the eastern slopes. Localized amounts over twelve inches. Flash flooding. Mudslides. Life-threatening flooding. Here are a few graphics from those briefings.

By September 25, we put words into a headline that nobody uses casually: Catastrophic and Life-Threatening Flash Flooding Likely Over the Next 72 Hours.

Those were not words written for clicks. I wish we had been wrong. The forecast would.come to fruition though.

The easiest way I know to explain what happened next is with a sponge. Imagine putting a dry sponge in the sink and pouring water over it Tuesday. It absorbs the water. Pour more over it Wednesday and it absorbs that too. Keep pouring Thursday and eventually that sponge cannot take anymore. Now dump a bucket of water on top of it. The sponge is not absorbing that bucket. The water has to go somewhere else. Downhill, into the ditch, into the creek, into the river, across the road and eventually into somebody’s house.

By Thursday night, western North Carolina had become that saturated sponge, and the bucket was coming. Its name was Helene.

What researchers documented afterward shows just how loaded the landscape had become. Asheville Regional Airport had already measured more than four inches of rain before the worst of Helene arrived. More than nine inches fell across parts of southern Yancey County on Thursday alone. Streams were already surging while the hurricane’s primary tropical rainbands were still approaching.

Then came Friday, and rainfall totals that are difficult to comprehend even two years later. More than eight inches fell broadly across the mountains during the three-day event. A foot or more fell across large areas. More than eighteen inches fell in portions of Yancey, McDowell, Buncombe and Rutherford counties. Mount Mitchell measured 24.41 inches. Bearwallow Mountain measured 19.99 inches. An observing station at Busick in Yancey County reported an apparent three-day total of 31.33 inches. Spruce Pine measured more than twenty-four inches. Old Fort recorded 15.55 inches. Northwest of Marion, 12.77 inches fell.

At Asheville Regional Airport, the total reached 13.98 inches before the weather station itself lost communications Friday morning. Nearly three months’ worth of normal rainfall had fallen there in less than three days. At least a dozen observing stations recorded their wettest three-day period on record.

This was not one unlucky creek or one neighborhood caught under a thunderstorm. An enormous section of western North Carolina was being loaded with water at the same time. Every ridge had another drainage, every drainage had another creek, and every creek had another community downstream.

Then the mountains themselves became part of the equation. Tropical air carrying enormous amounts of moisture was forced upward by the Blue Ridge. As that air rose, it cooled and condensed, squeezing even more rainfall from an atmosphere already loaded with water. Meteorologists call that orographic lift. You do not need to remember the term. Just remember what it did.

The front, the predecessor rainfall, the tropical moisture, the terrain, the saturated ground and the already-rising rivers all came together. Helene did not walk into western North Carolina alone. The atmosphere had spent days setting the table for her.

And then she sat down.

When a Thousand Years Becomes Friday

After Helene, one phrase began appearing everywhere: 1-in-1,000-year rainfall.

It sounds almost biblical. It is also easy to misunderstand.

A 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event does not mean something happened in 2024 and cannot happen again until 3024. It represents roughly a 0.1 percent annual chance of reaching or exceeding a particular rainfall amount at a particular location and duration, based on the statistical record being used.

Here is my caveman explanation. Put 1,000 rocks into a bucket. Nine hundred ninety-nine are gray and one is red. Once a year, close your eyes and pull out one rock. The red rock is your 1-in-1,000 event. Then put it back. Next year all 1,000 rocks are in the bucket again. You could draw gray rocks for hundreds of years, or you could pull the red rock twice in a decade. Probability does not have a memory.

Now consider what happened during Helene. The estimated 1-in-1,000-year threshold for a 72-hour rainfall event around Asheville was roughly 11.4 inches. Asheville received nearly fourteen. At Mount Mitchell, the corresponding threshold was around 16.5 inches. Mount Mitchell measured 24.41 inches.

It did not simply touch the top of the chart. It went well beyond it.

That does not mean the atmosphere did something impossible. It means the storm produced rainfall at the extreme edge, and in places beyond the edge, of the historical statistics we normally use to describe what is possible.

Then all of that water began moving downhill.

At the USGS gauge on the Catawba River near Pleasant Gardens in McDowell County, you can almost watch the disaster unfold in a line on a graph. The river had already responded to the predecessor rainfall. Then Friday came, and the line started climbing again. Sixteen feet, then eighteen, then twenty.

At 1:53 Friday afternoon, the gauge reached 21.82 feet. The measured flow reached approximately 42,400 cubic feet of water every second.

That number is almost impossible to picture, so put it into gallons. Roughly 317,000 gallons every second. More than nineteen million gallons every minute. More than 1.1 billion gallons in an hour if that rate were sustained.

At one location on one river.

All of that water was coming from somewhere. It was running off mountains, pouring out of hollows, filling branches that normally carried barely enough water to notice, entering creeks, joining larger streams and eventually entering the Catawba. Every drainage was trying to empty at the same time. The following photos were submitted by followers.

Farther upstream around U.S. 221 near Marion, another graph shows the river surging to roughly 32 feet.

The most telling thing about those graphs is their shape. You can see the first rise from the predecessor rainfall. You can see the river attempt to fall. It never really gets the chance. Then Helene’s runoff arrives and the line takes off again.

That is the entire meteorological story written into a river gauge. The first rainfall loaded the system. Helene overwhelmed it.

But those lines were not simply climbing on computer screens. They were climbing porches, crossing roads, surrounding houses, undermining bridges and moving vehicles. Eventually, they were moving homes.

And while those lines were climbing, the phones started ringing.

The Voices on the Other End

There is a point during every major weather event when forecasting ends. Not because the forecast was wrong, but because the forecast has become reality. The most important information is no longer coming from a computer model. It is coming through a telephone.

The calls were from people whose homes were flooding, people who were trapped, people watching roads disappear and water enter their houses. There were people who could not get out, people with trees on their homes, people who had watched bridges wash away and people who could not reach parents, spouses or children. Over and over, the message was some version of the same thing: Please send somebody.

Across North Carolina, 911 centers began absorbing call volumes unlike anything many telecommunicators had ever experienced. Between September 26 and September 28, approximately 90,000 911 calls were handled statewide. On September 27 alone, the affected system saw a 586 percent increase in call volume compared with the same day a year earlier.

Those are enormous numbers, but numbers can hide the human part of a disaster. Think about what that meant from the other side of the telephone. Every ring represented somebody having one of the worst moments of their life. A telecommunicator answered, listened, tried to determine where they were, gave instructions, dispatched whatever resources could still reach them, disconnected, and immediately another line was ringing.

Then the systems we depended on to understand the disaster began failing inside the disaster. Cellular networks went down. Fiber was cut. Internet service disappeared. Commercial power failed. Public-safety radio infrastructure was affected. Roads to communications sites became impassable. Nineteen western North Carolina 911 centers ultimately had calls rerouted to 23 partner centers through North Carolina’s Next Generation 911 system.

That technology mattered. It meant someone standing beside a flooded river in the mountains could still have their 911 call answered somewhere else in North Carolina when their local center could no longer receive it. But technology could only do so much. It could keep the telephone answered, but it could not put the bridge back, clear the landslide or make an ambulance appear on the other side of a river.

And it could not answer one of the questions that began haunting emergency operations centers across the mountains: What is happening in the places we cannot hear from?

Silence during a disaster does not always mean everything is okay. Sometimes silence is the worst report you can receive.

By Friday morning, parts of western North Carolina were going silent.

The warnings themselves were becoming extraordinary. A Flash Flood Emergency is not just another flood warning. It is reserved for catastrophic, life-threatening flooding. During Tropical Storm Fred in 2021, one Flash Flood Emergency was issued in western North Carolina. During Helene, portions of twenty-one North Carolina counties were placed under Flash Flood Emergency warnings.

This was no longer one river, one valley or one city. The transportation network deteriorated so badly that NCDOT’s message at the height of the event was extraordinary: all roads in western North Carolina should be considered closed.

Think about what has to happen for a state transportation agency to say that, and then think about how many people were still calling 911.

Calls were not the only telecommunication service that was rerouted. The State of North CarolinaEmergency Management Emergency Support Function 2, assisted by NENA and The NC State 911 Board, and The NC Sheriffs Association, devoted telecommunications from their home 911 Centers, to the west. Those telecommunicators, like every other responder, dropped everything to help their neighbors in need.

When the Mountains Became Islands

McDowell County had spent the previous two days preparing. High-risk areas had been visited. Warnings had been distributed. Notifications had gone out. Equipment was positioned and shelters were opened. But preparation does not make water disappear, and by Friday the places we had spent days talking about were living the forecast: Old Fort, North Cove, Pleasant Gardens, Marion and the Catawba River corridor.

In Burke County, the calls had begun before daylight. Trees were down. Roads were flooding. Swift-water teams were moving. Fire departments were cutting their way through blocked roads. EMS crews were trying to find paths to patients. Emergency Management and 911 were trying to build a picture of a disaster from pieces of information arriving through communications systems that were themselves beginning to fail.

At the same time, somewhere outside those walls, my family was in the path of the same water.

Farther west, Rutherford County was being transformed. Lake Lure, Chimney Rock and the Rocky Broad River were places known for mountain views, restaurants, shops and weekends beside the water. Suddenly, they became places where buildings moved and roads disappeared. Caldwell County was dealing with water coming through mountain drainages around Wilson Creek and surrounding communities. Boone flooded. Swannanoa and Black Mountain were overwhelmed. Yancey, Mitchell and Avery counties were being cut apart by landslides, washed-out roads and failed communications. Photos via RutherfordCounty EM.

The mountains were becoming islands, not because every community was surrounded by water, but because the road in was gone, the bridge out was gone, the telephone did not work and nobody knew another way to reach them.

The rivers were rewriting history as this happened. At Biltmore, the Swannanoa River crested at 26.1 feet, more than five feet above its 1916 crest and even slightly above the estimated flood of 1791. Along that river, Helene produced what was effectively the worst known flood since North Carolina became a state. We were not simply watching old records fall. We were watching the mountains establish new ones.

Emergency management depends on information. We needed to know where the damage was, who was trapped, which road was open, which bridge was gone, whether an ambulance could get through, where the helicopter needed to go, which community needed water and which communications site needed fuel.

Helene did not remove those questions. It removed the answers.

McDowell County Emergency Services Director Will Kehler would later describe public-safety radio communications being compromised during the storm. In Yancey County, Emergency Management Director Jeff Howell described losing cellphones, 911 lines, landlines and communications with first responders. At one point, they essentially had to abandon their Emergency Operations Center and find another way to operate. Ham Radios were almost the only thing working.

That has always stayed with me. Not because anybody quit. They did not. They left the place built to coordinate the emergency because the systems they needed inside it no longer worked.

Somewhere along the way, the question changed from How bad is it there? to Is anybody there able to answer us?

There is a verse in Isaiah that reads differently to me after Helene: “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” I have thought a lot about those words because Helene showed us that faith does not mean we will never find ourselves in deep water. Sometimes we will. Sometimes literally. Faith is knowing we are not abandoned there.

Across western North Carolina that morning, people were wading, swimming, boating, climbing and eventually flying into those isolated places to make sure somebody else was not abandoned either.

Not Numbers. People.

One of the stories that came from the 911 response involved a baby in Avery County. The child was unresponsive. The cellular connection was deteriorating. The baby was cold and breathing shallowly. A telecommunicator stayed on the line and worked through emergency medical instructions, including helping the mother provide skin-to-skin warmth.

Then came a sound that mattered more than any rainfall total.

The baby cried.

Neighbors helped create access, and EMS eventually reached them.

That story is why I do not like allowing Helene’s numbers to become too large. Ninety thousand 911 calls sounds like a statistic, but it was not. Every call had somebody on the other end. A mother, a father, a child, a grandparent, somebody’s neighbor, somebody scared and somebody needing help.

They were not numbers.

They were people.

And Then the Sun Came Out

Sometime around mid-morning Friday, something almost cruel happened. The sky began to brighten.

After days of rain, and after a morning that seemed like it might never end, sunlight began breaking through portions of western North Carolina. Helene was pulling away. The rain eased. The wind began settling down. The waters raged and wouldn’t crest for another 24 hours. However, Responders could finally begin moving farther out to see what had actually happened.

The storm was leaving.

The disaster was just beginning.

For days we had watched computer models. For hours we had watched radar. Now we were looking through windshields, and the maps no longer matched the world.

Roads that existed Thursday were gone Friday. Bridges were missing. Homes were gone. Mud covered valleys. Creeks had carved new channels. Trees were piled in places trees had never been. Landslides blocked access. Responders arrived at familiar locations and discovered that the landmark they were looking for simply was not there anymore.

This was no longer forecasting. It was reconnaissance.

As responders pushed farther outward, another reality became obvious. Nobody knew the full extent of what had happened. Not the counties, not the state, not the media and certainly not the families desperately trying to reach someone in the mountains.

People called and got no answer. They called again. They sent texts. They refreshed social media. Inside isolated communities, people were doing the same thing in reverse. They were walking, climbing, cutting trees, checking on neighbors, calling names and trying to find someone with a functioning telephone or radio.

In some places, the first reliable information did not come electronically. It arrived when somebody physically made it over the mountain.

Water Everywhere, and Nothing Safe to Drink

Then came one of Helene’s cruelest ironies. Water was everywhere. It had fallen from the sky in historic quantities. It filled rivers, covered roads, ran through houses, moved cars and destroyed bridges.

Within hours, one of western North Carolina’s greatest needs was water.

Safe water. Drinking water.

Floodwater is not drinking water. The same disaster that filled every creek had damaged the systems that make water safe. Treatment plants lost power. Water mains broke. Distribution systems lost pressure. Pumps stopped. Intakes were damaged. Roads to critical facilities disappeared.

By Saturday, seven water plants in western North Carolina were closed, affecting nearly 70,000 households. Other plants had no commercial power or were operating on backup systems. Boil-water advisories spread across the region. In Burke County, water service disruptions affected multiple communities as crews tried to repair damaged infrastructure.

Communities that had spent days begging for the rain to stop were suddenly begging for bottled water. That contradiction still captures Helene better than almost anything I can write. More water had fallen than we could comprehend, and water had to be flown into the mountains because people had nothing safe to drink.

The mission changed. During the storm, the priority had been getting people out of the water. Now it was finding people who were still trapped, locating the missing, reaching the injured and keeping isolated communities alive. They needed water, food, medicine, insulin, baby formula, diapers, generators and fuel, and somehow those things had to cross mountains where the normal supply chain no longer existed.

The Air Bridge

There was not one Helene airlift. There were many operations happening at once. There was the organized government response involving North Carolina Emergency Management, the National Guard, Air National Guard, search-and-rescue teams, federal partners and mutual-aid resources. Military helicopters conducted rescues and hauled supplies. Public-safety aircraft flew missions. Separately, an extraordinary civilian helicopter effort began growing. Photos below were submitted.

Different aircraft and different missions were operating under different structures, but they were responding to the same enormous disaster.

The North Carolina Air National Guard could move supplies at a scale a private helicopter never could. C-17 Globemaster III aircraft carried enormous loads from Charlotte to Asheville. One early mission moved more than 100,000 pounds of food, water and critical supplies. Asheville Regional Airport became a major distribution point.

Think about the supply chain that had to be created almost overnight. Supplies moved to Charlotte, were loaded onto a C-17 and flown to Asheville. They were unloaded, broken down into smaller loads and put on trucks where roads were passable. Where roads were not passable, supplies went back into helicopters. Those helicopters flew into isolated communities, unloaded, returned and did it again.

Sometimes a helicopter did not need to bring ten people out. Sometimes it needed to bring fifty cases of water in.

Then the civilian pilots started coming.

Saturday morning, September 28, Greg Biffle was at his shop when a friend contacted him about people stranded around Banner Elk. Biffle had a helicopter, so he went. What started small grew quickly. Pilots appeared. Coordinates were passed around. Supplies arrived. Helicopters loaded, flew west, returned empty and loaded again.

One story from those flights has stayed with me. Biffle was flying through the mountains when something flashed below. A man had removed a mirror from his bathroom vanity and was using sunlight to signal passing aircraft.

Before Helene, that person was connected to the rest of North Carolina by roads, electricity, telephones, stores and modern communications. After Helene, a bathroom mirror had become his emergency beacon.

Biffle saw it and turned around. The landing area was difficult, with steep terrain, power lines and very little room, but he eventually got down. The people below had been seen.

A bathroom mirror had done what the cellular network could not. It told somebody, We are here.

Finding Another Way

Food and water were not the only things isolated communities needed. They needed to communicate.

A cell tower can still be standing and be completely useless. It may have lost commercial power. Equipment may be damaged. The fiber connecting it to the rest of the network may be gone. Think of the tower as an entrance ramp. Your telephone may still be able to reach the ramp, but if the interstate beyond it has washed away, you are still not getting anywhere.

Helene washed away parts of the communications interstate.

Telecommunications crews began deploying temporary networks while permanent ones were being rebuilt. Cells on Wheels, portable sites, satellite systems, generators, temporary microwave links and specialized public-safety communications equipment moved into western North Carolina.

Every solution, however, created another need. Generators needed fuel. Fuel needed trucks. Trucks needed roads. Roads needed clearing. Sometimes restoring cellphone service started with somebody running a chainsaw miles away.

Around Lake Lure and Chimney Rock, normal transportation routes had been obliterated in places. Telecommunications crews needed to restore critical fiber connectivity through terrain where the normal road route no longer existed. Local professional whitewater kayakers became part of the solution, helping move fiber through the devastated gorge.

I love that story because it says something much larger about western North Carolina after Helene. Modern fiber-optic cable, carrying the communications of the twenty-first century, was being moved through a mountain gorge by kayakers because the road was gone.

The normal way no longer existed, so somebody found another way.

That became the story of the recovery.

When Help Came From Everywhere

By Saturday, the response had grown enormously. National Guard personnel moved west. Swift-water teams came from outside the region. Ambulances arrived. Urban search-and-rescue teams deployed. Aircraft filled the sky. Fire departments became staging areas. Churches became warehouses. Parking lots became landing zones.

But it would be a mistake to say recovery had begun. People were still being rescued. Communities were still being reached for the first time. Families were still searching. Roads were still being discovered destroyed. The tragedy had already taken shape, but western North Carolina was only beginning to understand its size.

Inside that tragedy, however, something else was happening. People came. Some came from the next county and some from the other side of North Carolina. Others came from states hundreds of miles away. Firefighters, paramedics, law enforcement officers, utility workers, pilots, heavy-equipment operators, church groups, businesses, nonprofits and ordinary volunteers arrived because somebody here needed help.

There is a passage in Galatians that says, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” I cannot think of a better description of what I watched happen after Helene.

People carried one another, and sometimes they did it literally. They carried people out of houses and children through water. They carried food onto helicopters and cases of bottled water into isolated communities. They carried chainsaws up roads, elderly neighbors to safety, generators into dark buildings and medicine to people who could not reach a pharmacy. When somebody could no longer carry their own burden, somebody else reached down and picked up part of it.

That was faith in action. It was not a sermon or a social-media post. It was work.

Seven Days

Then Friday morning came again.

October 4, 2024. Seven days after Helene.

The radar was quiet, the sky was blue and the rivers were beginning to settle back toward their channels, but western North Carolina looked like a different world. Search-and-rescue operations continued. Roads remained closed. Power remained out in communities. Food and water distribution sites operated from churches, schools, government buildings and fire stations. Helicopters still flew.

In many places, a fire department was no longer simply a fire department. It was the community. It was where you went for bottled water, where you charged a telephone, where you found food, where you asked whether anyone had heard from the family farther up the road and where you learned which bridge was gone and whether there was another way around.

The people staffing those stations had their own lives too. Some had damaged homes. Some could not reach family. Some had barely slept. Some had spent a week helping strangers while having no idea what they would find when they finally went home.

They kept showing up.

By then, the personal stories were beginning to emerge. Families were finally getting into places they had not been able to reach. Some found houses damaged. Some found houses moved. Some found foundations. Some found nothing.

And on day seven, it was finally my turn.

I was still working at Burke County 911. For seven days there had always been another call, another resource request, another road closure, another communications problem, another situation report or another thing that needed to happen before I could stop.

My family had started getting back into the river bottom. I knew what they were finding. I had seen photographs.

But knowing and seeing are not the same thing.

Commissioner Burns rode with me up to our family property. For the first time, I laid eyes on what Helene had done to us.

The river was still high as Lake James continued spilling downstream. Where there had been grass, there was sand and silt. Debris filled the tree lines, and then there was the smell again: muck, mud and stagnant water.

I walked toward our cabin. The tile floor remained. Part of the kitchen walls remained. The rest was gone.

I stood there and knew where everything had been. I knew where people sat, where food was prepared, where our family gathered and where generations of memories had been made. Now there was open sky.

Around me were the remains of other family homes. One cousin’s house had been carried about a hundred yards. Another home still stood with walls ripped away. Another was completely gone, leaving only the basement and concrete floor. Two more family homes were gone as well.

Six homes and nine buildings had disappeared or been destroyed. A river bottom that had belonged to generations of our family looked like a beach covered in wreckage.

Then something happens when you walk through a place like that. You begin recognizing things, and debris stops being debris. A piece of wood belonged to somebody’s house. Something tangled in a tree came from somebody’s kitchen. That belonged to my cousin. That belonged to my aunt. Things that had spent decades inside someone’s home were suddenly scattered across a river bottom.

A lifetime can become a debris line in minutes.

For seven days, I had been dealing with the disaster. That afternoon, I finally met our disaster.

For a little while, I was not the meteorologist. I was not working at 911. I was not thinking about the next operational period. I was somebody’s son, somebody’s nephew and somebody’s cousin, standing in the ruins of places where my family had spent generations building a life.

That is when Helene finally caught up with me.

What Remained

Standing there, it would have been easy to say we had lost everything, but we had not. Our family was alive.

By then, we knew enough about what had happened elsewhere to understand exactly what that meant. Other families were walking through debris looking for people. Some were preparing funerals. Some had lost mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children and friends. Our family had lost buildings. Other families had lost people. My photos of the devastation are next.

Concrete can be poured again. Walls can be rebuilt. Another cabin can someday stand beside the river. People cannot be replaced.

There are moments in life when gratitude makes absolutely no sense on paper, and this was one of them. How could I stand among six destroyed homes and nine lost buildings and feel blessed? Because everybody I loved who should have been standing there was still able to stand there. That was enough.

Psalm 46 does not say the earth will never change. In fact, the verses that follow describe mountains being carried into the sea and waters roaring and being troubled. Then comes the command so many of us know: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

I understood that differently after Helene. Being still does not mean doing nothing. Sometimes being still means recognizing that after you have done everything you can do, there are things bigger than you. I could forecast the storm. I could help manage a response. I could answer the telephone, help send resources and explain why the river rose. I could not control the river.

Standing there on day seven, there was nothing left to forecast. The water had already spoken. All that remained was deciding what we would do next.

A Month Later

By October 27, Helene had been gone for a month. If you stayed on the right roads, you could almost convince yourself things were beginning to return to normal. The lights were on, stores reopened, cellphones worked and traffic moved.

Then you turned down another road and there it was again: mud and debris, a bridge missing, a house where a house did not belong or a foundation where a house did belong.

The helicopters had kept people alive, but helicopters could not replace bridges. Bottled water could not rebuild treatment plants. Generators could not permanently replace the electrical grid, and temporary cellular sites could not replace every mile of fiber. Recovery was becoming less dramatic and much slower.

The television cameras began leaving, but the work did not. Crews hauled debris while engineers inspected bridges. Utility workers replaced lines, telecommunications crews rebuilt fiber and water operators repaired systems. Volunteers cleaned houses. Local governments documented losses. Families filled out forms. First responders returned to answering everyday calls in communities that were anything but everyday.

Then the calendar kept moving. Halloween gave way to Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving gave way to Christmas. For families who had lost homes, those dates brought questions they had never expected to ask. Where do we gather now? Where do we cook Thanksgiving dinner? Where do the children wake up Christmas morning?

For my family, there would be no walking through the cabin door.

The first month taught us something the first week could not: surviving a disaster and recovering from one are two completely different things.

One Year

September 27, 2025 arrived almost impossibly fast.

By then, the progress was extraordinary. Roads had reopened, water systems were operating, businesses had returned and communications had been rebuilt. Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge had reopened to traffic while enormous permanent reconstruction continued. Green returned to river bottoms, vegetation grew over disturbed ground and visitors came back.

But if you knew what western North Carolina looked like before Helene, you could still see what had happened. A creek did not run exactly where it used to. A stand of trees was gone. A hillside carried a landslide scar. A road followed a different line. A bridge looked different.

For families, the changes were even more personal. A repaired highway did not rebuild a private bridge. A reopened restaurant did not bring back the business next door that never reopened. A new house did not erase the memory of the old one. A place can be rebuilt without ever becoming exactly the place you remember.

The first anniversary was not a finish line. It was simply a place to stop for a moment, look backward at how far we had come and then look ahead at how far we still had to go.

Burke County and City of Morganton’s one year documentary.

Two Years Later

Now it is September 2026.

The mountains are green again. Tourists are back. Most roads are open, and the rivers on most days look ordinary. Someone visiting western North Carolina for the first time could drive through some communities today and never understand what happened here.

But the scars remain if you know where to look.

North Carolina now estimates Helene caused nearly $60 billion in damage and recovery needs. More than 73,000 homes were damaged or destroyed and approximately 9,000 road sites were damaged. Most importantly, 107 people lost their lives in North Carolina.

That last number deserves more than a passing sentence. There is no road reopening that balances 107 lives. No bridge replacement, federal check or ribbon cutting can do that. There are families for whom September 27 never really ended.

But the story two years later also deserves to include what happened after the water went down. Nearly 99 percent of state-maintained roads have reopened. More than 17 million cubic yards of debris have been removed. Thousands of public infrastructure projects have moved through the recovery process. Private roads and bridges that once left families cut off are being rebuilt. Water systems are being hardened, communications networks have been restored and communities are being connected again.

Yet 99 percent is not 100 percent. A section of U.S. 176 between Saluda and Tryon remains closed while NCDOT rebuilds portions of the highway in the steep North Pacolet River gorge. Permanent reconstruction continues along Green River Cove Road. Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge is open, but permanent reconstruction remains one of the largest transportation projects to come from Helene.

That is what two years later really looks like. Open does not always mean finished. Recovered does not always mean restored, and restored does not necessarily mean putting everything back exactly the way it was.

Building for the Next Storm

That brings me to one of the most important words in this story now: resilience.

It can sound like a word written for a government report, but Helene gave it a much simpler meaning. Resilience means not giving the next storm the same opportunity.

If a road failed, we need to understand why. If a bridge failed, its replacement should be built with Helene in mind. If a water plant was vulnerable, we need to protect it. If a generator sat where floodwater could reach it, move it. If one fiber route connected a community to the outside world, create another path. If the primary radio system fails, know what comes next. If the only way to warn somebody depends on a cellphone, have another way to reach them when that phone says No Service.

Resilience does not mean believing another Helene cannot happen. It can. The atmosphere does not know our building codes, a river does not care what a bridge costs and the mountain does not care how long a road has been there. Resilience means accepting those truths and using what Helene taught us.

Sometimes that means building stronger. Sometimes it means building higher. Sometimes it means building somewhere else. Sometimes the safest and wisest thing we can do is give the river room to be a river. There are places where resilience may mean having the courage not to put something back exactly where it was lost.

There is no defeat in that. There is wisdom in learning from what happened.

Billions of Dollars, One Family at a Time

The money attached to Helene is almost as difficult to comprehend as the rainfall. Two years into recovery, roughly $9.8 billion in public recovery funding has been awarded or disbursed through programs tracked by the state. North Carolina has committed billions of dollars of its own funding. FEMA Individual Assistance has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to households, while FEMA Public Assistance has obligated billions toward thousands of projects. Private insurance has paid billions more, and charitable organizations, churches, businesses and individual donors have poured additional money into the mountains.

Even after all of that, the work is not finished. North Carolina continues to identify billions of dollars in unmet recovery needs and has sought additional federal support for housing, water and wastewater systems, roads, local infrastructure, businesses and communities.

Numbers measured in billions can quickly lose their meaning, so I try to think about what those dollars actually become on the ground. They become a bridge that allows a family to reach home again, a repaired water line serving a community, a road carrying an ambulance back into a hollow or a fire station able to continue serving its district. They become a small business reopening its doors, a water plant better protected from the next flood and a communications system with another route available when the first one fails.

That is where billions of dollars eventually end up: one project, one community and often one family at a time. A hurricane can destroy something in minutes. Recovery does not run on the same clock.

The First Resilient System

We have spent two years talking about resilient roads, resilient bridges, resilient water systems and resilient communications, and we should. But western North Carolina’s first resilient system was never built from concrete, steel, fiber or radio towers.

It was people.

I saw it while the rain was still falling. I saw telecommunicators answer another 911 call after the last one had already broken their hearts. I watched firefighters climb into boats while the water was still rising and paramedics search for another route to patients they could not reach. Emergency managers tried to build a picture of counties they could no longer communicate with. Neighbors started chainsaws. Farmers brought tractors. Linemen slept wherever they could find room and got back to work. Water-system employees worked to restore service while their own communities were damaged.

I watched National Guard crews fly into the mountains and airmen load pallets of water and food. Civilian pilots climbed into helicopters. Greg Biffle saw sunlight flash from a bathroom mirror and turned around. Churches became warehouses, fire stations became distribution centers and parking lots became helipads. People who had lost almost everything still found something to give to somebody who had lost more.

That was western North Carolina’s first resilient system: the people.

Faith was woven through that part of my journey too. Not everybody who came here believed exactly what I believe, and they did not have to. Help did not come with a religious test attached. But I saw the teachings of my faith lived out in front of me again and again: feed somebody who is hungry, give water to somebody who is thirsty, care for your neighbor and carry somebody else’s burden when they cannot carry it themselves.

Sometimes the most powerful sermon is a case of bottled water handed through the window of a pickup truck. Sometimes it is the sound of a chainsaw coming up a blocked road, a helicopter appearing over a ridge or a stranger knocking on a door simply to ask, “Are you okay?” Sometimes faith is not something we say at all. It is simply showing up.

Look at Western North Carolina Now

Two years ago, there were moments when I wondered what would be left when the water went down. I think a lot of us did. We watched communities disappear from communication. We watched houses move and highways fall into rivers. We lost water systems, electricity, businesses and places generations of families assumed would always be there. Most painfully, we lost people.

Helene changed western North Carolina. There is no honest way to write this story without saying that. But Helene did not take western North Carolina.

Look around today and you can see what happened after the storm. The doors are open. Roads lead back into the mountains. Children go to school. Water comes from the faucets. Businesses have reopened. Visitors have returned. People hike the trails again. Fire departments still answer the siren. Families are making new memories in places where, two years ago, it was difficult to imagine anything growing again.

There are scars, and I do not think we should hide them. Those scars belong to our story now. They remind us what happened, but they also remind us of everything it took to get from September 27, 2024, to where we are today.

We did not get here alone. Local governments helped. State and federal agencies helped. FEMA helped. The National Guard helped. Fire departments came from communities most of us had never visited. Utility crews came. Pilots came. Businesses, churches, nonprofits and volunteers came from across America, and we should never forget them.

But when they arrived, they found something already happening here.

Neighbors were helping neighbors.

That is not a slogan somebody invented after Helene. It is what happened before the first national television camera arrived and before anyone fully understood the size of the disaster. People were already helping people with boats, chainsaws, tractors, ATVs, pickup trucks, helicopters, church kitchens, fire stations and sometimes just their own two hands. County lines mattered a lot less when somebody on the other side needed help.

There was somebody who needed help, so somebody helped them.

What Helene Taught Me

I am a meteorologist. I can explain the rainfall, show you the maps and explain what 1-in-1,000 means. I can show you the river gauge at Pleasant Gardens climbing to 21.82 feet and pushing more than 42,000 cubic feet of water past that point every second. I can explain the predecessor rainfall event, orographic lift and why saturated ground made everything worse.

After a career in emergency services, I can also talk about 911, communications, interoperability, redundancy and disaster response.

But none of those things completely explain September 27, 2024.

People do.

So does faith.

I do not believe God promised us a life without storms. Scripture certainly does not say that. The Bible is filled with storms, floods, wilderness, loss, fear and people walking through circumstances they did not understand. The promise was never that the water would never rise. For me, the promise was that we would not walk through it alone.

For my family, Helene left six homes gone, nine buildings destroyed and a river bottom covered in sand and debris. It left a tile floor where our gathering place had been, concrete foundations where homes once stood and pieces of generations scattered through trees and downstream.

But my family was still there. Others lost more than buildings and collectables. They lost people. We pause and remember those who lost their loved ones.

That is something I will never take for granted again.

Two years later, western North Carolina is still rebuilding. Some roads remain closed. Some bridges remain temporary. Some families are still waiting. Billions of dollars of work remain, and there are places that will never look exactly the way they did on September 26, 2024.

Maybe the goal should not be to recreate September 26. Maybe the goal is to build a stronger September 27 for the next generation.

That is what resilience means to me now. It does not mean believing these mountains can never knock us down; we know they can. It does not mean believing another flood will never come; someday another one will. And faith is not believing the river will never rise.

Faith is knowing where you stand when it does.

It is trusting God when you cannot see the other side. It is continuing to serve when your own heart is heavy. It is being thankful for the people standing beside you even while you grieve what is gone.

Isaiah wrote that “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles.”

Western North Carolina was tired. We were bruised and grieving, and for a while parts of these mountains looked broken. But people got up. They picked up chainsaws and climbed into boats. Telecommunicators kept answering phones, pilots kept flying, utility crews restrung power lines and road crews began the long process of putting transportation routes back together. Water systems were repaired, homes were rebuilt and businesses reopened. Eventually people planted again, gathered around tables again, worshiped together again and found reasons to laugh again.

Life did not return all at once, and it certainly did not return unchanged.

But it returned.

When I think about Helene now, I do not want the last image in my mind to be a rainfall map, a house moving down a river or even the tile floor where my family’s cabin once stood. Those images will always be part of September 27, but they are not the whole story. I would rather remember what happened after the water came down: the neighbor who showed up with a chainsaw, the responder who answered another call, the pilot who flew another mission, the volunteer who drove through the night, the lineman who climbed another pole and the stranger who handed a case of water to someone they had never met.

That is what happened over and over again across these mountains. When a road disappeared, somebody looked for another way in. When a bridge was gone, somebody figured out how to get across. When the telephone stopped working, people found another way to communicate. When water systems failed, bottled water came by truck and helicopter. When normal fiber routes disappeared, people found ways to carry communications equipment through terrain that barely resembled the place it had been a few days earlier.

And then there is the man with the mirror.

Of all the images from Helene, maybe that is the one I want to keep. An isolated family had no working telephone, no usable road and no ordinary way to tell the outside world they were still there. So a man took a mirror from his bathroom and held it toward the sky. Sunlight flashed across the mountains, a pilot saw it, and he turned around.

There were a lot of dark moments after Helene, but somebody kept looking for the light.

Maybe that is as good an explanation of faith as I can give after everything we experienced. Faith did not keep the rain from falling, the river from rising or our family’s homes from being swept away. It gave me something to hold onto while they did. It reminded me that even when we could not see beyond the next call, the next hour or the next day, we were not walking through any of it alone.

Two years later, the mountains are green again, but they are not exactly the same mountains they were on September 26, 2024.

Neither are we.

Helene showed us how vulnerable this place can be, but what happened afterward showed us something far more important about the people who call it home. We carried one another when the burden became too heavy to carry alone, and when somebody needed help, somebody else found a way to get there.

That is who we were before Helene. It is who we were when the water rose, and it is who we became again as the water went down.

By the grace of God, two years later, it is still who we are.