Death toll triples in Asheville area after Hurricane Helene guts North Carolina: ‘There were bodies in the trees’
The death toll from catastrophic flooding in the Asheville area of western North Carolina more than tripled on Monday to at least 40 — as survivors in remote mountain towns described seeing the bodies of victims stuck in trees.
Nationwide, there have been at least 133 fatalities from Hurricane Helene, which has cut a path of death and destruction across the Southeast since making landfall last Thursday.
“There were bodies in trees. They were finding bodies under rubble,” said Alyssa Hudson, whose home of Black Mountain — a village of 8,400 people about 12 miles from Asheville — was all but destroyed.
The rains smashed the mountains of Buncombe County, which contains Asheville, washing away whole communities in floodwaters and mudslides. Roadways were buried or dissolved altogether, leaving victims cut off from rescue crews.
Hudson’s neighborhood was evacuated, but she saw videos posted by strangers on social media of her house submerged to the roof.
“We started seeing videos of our house posted to Facebook,” Hudson said. “Our floors are caved in, our walls are gone. We had a shed in our backyard that they found two miles away.”
Helene's path of destruction
- Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend coastline Thursday night as a Category 4 hurricane, pounding the state with 155-mph gusts and killing at least 13.
- Helene moved northeast into Georgia, where it was downgraded to a tropical storm by Friday morning, but winds and floods left 25 dead in the state.
- By Friday afternoon, Helene had moved over parts of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, where at least 29 died.
- Relentless rain drenched Appalachia Friday night, sending floodwaters and mudslides crashing through mountain towns.
- In North Carolina, at least 35 people died in the Asheville area, and a tornado injured 15 in Rocky Mount.
- Over the weekend, rescuers struggled to clear roads and recover bodies. The death toll is 192 and counting.
Hudson and her boyfriend managed to escape before the worst of the flooding, but her friends and neighbors trapped in town reported harrowing tales of bodies floating in ditches and residents fighting for their lives against the rising tide.
Hudson’s coworker Corbin Weeks, who coaches softball at a local college, watched crews slice a mobile home stuck on the road in half so that cars could pass through. He said he helped pull one family from a trailer home moments before it disappeared under a river of brown sludge.
“It’s like a f–king living hell that we just can’t wake up from,” Weeks said.
Kimberly and Jimmie Stone were cut off from their daughter at the local Montreat College, where around 1,000 students were trapped without power and little cellphone service.
When the couple tried to drive into Black Mountain from Asheville, the formerly quaint mountain town had become a veritable warzone – complete with helicopters and uniformed soldiers.
“All along the road, there were downed trees, downed power lines, structures collapsed, cars pushed over, train tracks destroyed. Buildings collapsed on the road,” Kimberly Scott said.
The Scotts eventually managed to rescue their daughter, but other students were stranded on campus for days, surviving on food from the cafeteria cooked with gas-powered stoves.
The Scotts eventually managed to rescue their daughter, but other students were stranded on campus for days, surviving on food from the cafeteria cooked with gas-powered stoves.
Devastating scenes played out all over the region: Trucks and campers scattered around like toys in a backyard. A flattened cargo container on a bridge over a writhing brown river. A woman cradling her child in a crowd huddled on a hillside where they found cellphone service, many sending a simple text: “I’m OK.”
The town of Chimney Rock, the shooting location for “Last of the Mohicans” and “Dirty Dancing,” is little more than a swamp. The shops and restaurants of its historic center were “washed away. Every bit of it, all of it,” a local official told Fox News.
One volunteer used a dozen mules to carry food, water, and diapers across the mud-covered highways.
“We’ll take our chainsaws, and we’ll push those mules through,” Mike Toberer said.
In Asheville, the city’s water system sustained heavy damage, and residents used buckets of dirty creek water to flush their toilets.
A preliminary estimate puts the total damage from Hurricane Helene at $34 billion, Fox Business reported.
As for Hudson and her boyfriend, their renter’s insurance doesn’t cover natural disasters, and they will come out the other side of the disaster with almost nothing left. “Almost literally everything we own is gone. … My boyfriend lost all of the equipment for his business. Our furniture, electronics, family photos and records, birth certificates — completely gone.”
“Almost literally everything we own is gone. … My boyfriend lost all of the equipment for his business. Our furniture, electronics, family photos and records, birth certificates – completely gone,” she said.
But what she will miss most of all are the friends and neighbors on her street – a community she has grown to love since moving to town from her home in Florida. Many of them will never return, she said.
“We were a mountain town, but now we look like a farm town. It’s all destroyed … A lot of people won’t be back.”
With Post wires
