Absolutely heartbreaking. And the devastated terrain is making it extremely difficult to get help in.
Unfortunately, several months ago WaPo instituted a policy that you "sign in to read your FREE article" which many folks will find unacceptable - including me (and told them so) but I have a subscription so was able to read it.
Anita Crowder stood in the warm October sun, her face weary, her shoes caked in mud, her blue eyes surveying a place she’d known all her life, but one that now seemed so unfamiliar.
“I buried my daddy two weeks ago,” Crowder, 67, said outside the home in Swannanoa her father had shared with his wife, Betty, for more than a half century. Six days after his funeral, on Sept. 27, the storm had hit and the river had swelled, devouring much in its path, including this small white house where Kenneth Crowder’s daughter had spent Thanksgivings and Christmases for as long as she could remember.
“I called him every day. If I didn’t call him, he called me,” said Anita, whose 87-year-old stepmother waded to safety through the floodwaters with the help of neighbors.
“It would have made him sick, seeing everything they worked so hard for washed away.”
Now, as she navigated rooms where the water had flipped and mangled furniture, where mud stuck to the walls and sat ankle deep on the floor, she tried to salvage a few old photos and tools and documents. She thought about how so much had changed so fast — both in her life, and in so many lives across this region.
“Two different eras,” she said. “Things will be totally different.”
The aftermath of Helene left Western North Carolina, including Swannanoa, littered with debris and mud, and loss in every direction. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
...Already, the storm has changed not only the physical landscape of this region, but the inner landscape of those who experienced this cataclysmic event.
“I’m trying to understand the magnitude of what is happening,” said Adam Smith, who endured the storm with his wife and two kids just outside Asheville, N.C. Smith, a scientist and economist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is also one of the nation’s foremost experts on the costs of extreme weather disasters, but not until this week had his own family experienced such a catastrophe firsthand...”
“For someone like myself who studies these [disasters] deeply over many years and understands them quite well,” said Smith, the NOAA scientist, “they can still surprise and shock us.”
He had spent the Tuesday before the storm working, tracking the latest additions to a list of weather events around the country that cause more than $1 billion in damages — a tally that had already reached 20 as of Sept. 1. A record 28 billion-dollar disasters hit the United States last year.
By the next day, the forecast was so alarming, Smith left work early.
He texted friends a dire warning the National Weather Service had issued, making clear Helene’s flooding would likely surpass that caused by tropical systems that passed through here in 2004 and 2021, and perhaps what had been the area’s historic flood of record in 1916.
Then he stepped out into his yard Wednesday evening and felt the ground — it was already saturated. The storm’s eye had not even made landfall in Florida and yet he began to dread how dramatic the flooding might become.
He found himself feverishly hunting for portable pumps and other supplies to protect his basement, which had flooded in 2021 when the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred brought deadly rains. He visited four stores that were sold out before he found the pumps, and he also grabbed sandbags and waterproof tape...
He finds himself in the fog of recovery. In the past, so much of his work on disasters was confined to spreadsheets, rather than the world outside his door...
A week after Helene, the skies above Western North Carolina buzz with constant traffic from private planes and small helicopters bringing in donations.
In one Black Hawk high above Ashe County on Wednesday, National Guard members scanned the mountainsides and valleys below...
Melody Dowdy makes a note of all the people who were considered missing, who have been found safe. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
