ASHEVILLE, North Carolina — At 7:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept.
27, Chris Trusz was standing on one of the bridges spanning the Broad River in Chimney Rock. He wanted to get a photo. It had been raining steadily for 36 hours and the river was running 10 inches above normal.
Trusz, who’d moved to the western North Carolina mountain town 18 months earlier, wasn’t worried; residents had been warned there might be a bit of flooding. He got his picture and walked up the hill to his home. “Normally I have a sliver of a view of the river,” he said.
“Now I’m looking and can see the river clearly.” By the time he got back to Main Street, the Broad was three times as wide and running 30 inches high. Within the hour, buildings had slid off their foundations, some taken down by the furious mud-colored current and disappearing completely.
“We were watching homes wash by, all kinds of debris,” said Trusz. Worse, he recalled, were the cars being carried away, some with their headlights still on. “I can’t unsee that,” said Trusz, three weeks after Hurricane Helene took down several western North Carolina towns, paralyzed the entire region, and killed at least 123, a number that will almost certainly rise and may prove unknowable.
It is one of several terrible unknowns the residents of western North Carolina now face. That they were unprepared for Helene is not on them – neither was the government nor anyone else. The “once in a thousand years” storm was not supposed.