Inside the North Carolina mountain town that Hurricane Helene nearly wiped off the map
CHIMNEY ROCK VILLAGE, NC — The stone tower that gave this place its name was nearly half a billion years in the making: heated and thrust up from the depths of the earth, then carved and eroded by wind and water.
But in just a few minutes, nature undid most of what it had taken humans a century and a quarter to build in the mountain town of Chimney Rock, North Carolina.
“It feels like I was deployed overnight and woke up in … a combat zone,” said Iraq war veteran Chris Canada as a huge Chinook helicopter with twin propellers flew over his adopted hometown. “I don’t think it has sunk in yet.”
Nearly 400 miles from where Hurricane Helene made landfall along Florida’s Big Bend on September 26, the hamlet of about 140 residents on the banks of the Broad River has been all but wiped off the map.
The backs of restaurants and gift shops with riverside balconies dangle ominously in the air. The Hickory Nut Brewery, which opened when Rutherford County got “wet” and started serving alcohol about a decade ago, collapsed Wednesday, nearly a week after the storm.
The buildings across Main Street, while still standing, are choked with yards of reddish-brown mud. A sign at the Chimney Sweeps gift shop reads: “We are open during construction.”
In another part of the city, the houses that weren’t swept away sit precariously on the edge of a scoured riverbank. It’s the site of the city’s only suspected death: an elderly woman who refused to ask to be evacuated.
“Literally, this river is moving,” said village administrator Stephen Duncan as he drove an Associated Press reporter through the dusty wreckage of Chimney Rock Village on Wednesday. “We have seen a 1,000-year event. A geological event.”
About eight hours after Helene made landfall in Florida, Chimney Rock volunteer firefighter John Payne was responding to a possible gas leak when he noticed water flowing on US 64/74, the main road into town. It was just after 7 o’clock
“The actual hurricane hadn’t even come through yet and hadn’t hit yet,” he said.
Payne, 32, who has lived in this valley all his life, abandoned the call and rushed back up the hill to the fire station, which was moved to higher ground after a devastating flood in 1996. Former Chief Joseph “Buck” Meliski, who worked on the earlier flood, scoffed.
“It can’t be that early,” Payne remembered the older man saying.
But when Payne showed him a video he had just taken — of water flooding the bridge to the Hickory Nut Falls Family Campground — the former chief’s jaw dropped.
“We’re looking forward to it, guys,” Meliski told Payne and the half-dozen or so others gathered there.
Suddenly the ground beneath them began to shake – like the tremors that sometimes shake the valley, but much stronger. By then, muddy water was seeping under the back wall of the firehouse.
Payne looked down and saw what he estimated to be a 30-foot wall of water throwing car-sized boulders at the city. It seemed as if the wave were devouring houses and then spitting them out.
“It’s not water at that point,” Payne said. “It’s mud, this thick, concrete-like material, you know what I mean? And whatever it touches, it takes.”
A house hit the bridge he had been filming from less than twenty minutes earlier. The span simply ‘imploded’. Payne later discovered that the steel beams were “curved into horseshoe shapes around boulders.”
At the fire station, some business owners in the group began “crying hysterically,” Payne said. Others just stood dumb with disbelief.
The volunteers lost communication during the storm. But when the wind finally started to die down around 11 a.m., Payne said, the radios “began blowing up with calls.”
The pieces of what had once been Chimney Rock Village were now headed to the neighboring town of Lake Lure, which starred as a stand-in for a Catskills resort in Patrick Swayze’s 1987 summer romance film, “Dirty Dancing.”
Tracy Stevens, 55, a bartender at the Hickory Nut, took refuge at the Lake Lure Inn, where she also worked. She watched as trash from Chimney Rock and beyond flowed into the marina, tossing boats aside and pushing up the metal sections of the floating Town Center Walkway like the folds of a map.
“It looked like a flushing toilet bowl,” she said. “I could see cars, the roofs of houses. It was the craziest thing.”
Some of the rubble clumped into a huge logjam between the two bridges connecting the towns: a practical concrete affair that carried the Memorial Highway over the Broad River, and an elegant three-arch span known as the Flowering Bridge .
After carrying traffic to Chimney Rock for 85 years, the 1925 viaduct was converted into a green walkway decorated with more than 2,000 plant species. Now partially collapsed, the remains of the bridge are draped in a tangle of vines, roots and tree branches.
Canada, 43, co-owner of a stage rental and event production company, was at a music festival in Charlotte when the storm hit. Returning to uniformed troops and armored personnel carriers kicking up dust in the streets brought back memories of his three combat tours in the Middle East.
“I’ve seen the whole war and been through a lot of hurricanes,” said Canada, an airborne veteran. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Canada and his wife Barbie moved here from South Carolina with their two daughters in October 2021, partly to escape hurricanes. Barbie had vacationed here as a child, and it was close to the Veterans Administration hospital in Asheville.
While walking along the banks of the Broad on Wednesday, Chris Canada found himself sniffing the warm air for the telltale smell of death.
And yet there are signs of hope everywhere.
Payne – who climbs the rock every September 11 in full gear to honor the first responders who died in the attacks on the Twin Towers – was heartened to see members of the New York City Fire Department helping with doorsteps in his city. house searches.
“We are more stubborn than these rocks,” says Payne, whose day job is as a location coordinator for a fast-food chain. ‘So more is needed to deter us and drive us away. It will take a while, but we will be back. Don’t count us out.”
Outside the Mountain Traders store, someone has leaned a large wooden Sasquatch cutout against a utility pole, with the words “Chimney Rock Strong” painted in bright blue.
As park workers made their way to the top of the mountain Monday and raised the American flag, Duncan said people below cheered, and some cried.
“It was spectacular,” he said.
The flag flies at half-mast. But Mayor Peter O’Leary said it’s that spirit that will bring Chimney Rock Village back.
The town’s legacy of hospitality and entrepreneurship dates back to the late 19th century, when a local family began charging visitors 25 cents for a horseback ride up the mountain, according to village resident RJ Wald’s brief online history. It quickly became one of North Carolina’s first bona fide tourist attractions.
O’Leary came to the city in 1990 to take a job as a park manager, before it became part of the state parks system. Two years later, he and his wife Bubba opened O’Leary’s General Store, named after their yellow Labrador retriever.
“If you look around, most of these people here are almost all from somewhere else,” he said as he stood outside the firehouse as water from the 400-foot Hickory Nut Falls poured from the station. ridge high above. ‘Why did they come here? They came here and fell in love with it. It takes hold of you. …
“It got me.”
The 1927 portion of the store has collapsed, but O’Leary believes the larger 2009 addition can be saved. Duncan, who drafted the village charter in 1990, sees this as an opportunity to “take advantage of the new geography” and build a better city.
But for some, like innkeeper and restaurateur Nick Sottile, 35, the way forward is difficult to see.
When Helene struck, Sottile and his wife Kristen were on holiday in the Turks and Caicos Islands – their first holiday since October 2020, when they opened their Broad River Inn and Stagecoach Pizza Kitchen in what is believed to be the village’s oldest building.
In photos taken from the street, things looked remarkably intact. But when Sottile returned home and walked to the river, his heart sank.
“The back of the building is like a whole part of it is gone,” the South Florida resident said Friday. “It’s not even safe to go in there right now.”
About all that remains of the adjacent Chimney Rock Adventure mini golf course is the sign.
“You can’t even rebuild,” Sottile said. “Because there is no land.”
Sottile has heard horror stories from fellow entrepreneurs about rejected insurance claims. Without help, he said he has no money to rebuild the country.
But for now he’s just volunteering with the fire brigade and trying not to think too far into the future.
“This is a small town, but this is HOME,” he said. “Everyone helps everyone, and I know we will get through this. I know we will rebuild. I just pray that we can rebuild, while the US is here to see it.”
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AP National Writer Tim Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.