Communities across East Tennessee, Western North Carolina and surrounding areas rally to recover from Helene’s wrath
Mountain folks are often characterized as rugged individualists used to fighting to eke out a living, battling against rocky soil; tough economic situations; marginalizing government entities; and sometimes even each other to do so. Appalachians are used to operating independently to achieve their goals, though they also are known to be fiercely loyal to family, friends and neighbors.
Something that Appalachians residing in the converging regions of East Tennessee, Western North Carolina and Southwestern Virginia have not had to contend with for generations is extreme, historical, life-threatening weather. Southern Appalachia is categorized as a deciduous temperate rainforest, and the mountains typically shield folks in this area from the intense weather intrusions faced by people in other parts of the country: blizzards in the North; tornadoes in the Midwest and Great Plains; wildfires and drought in the West; and the hurricanes that plague the coastal Southeast.
Hurricane Helene changed all of that beginning on the morning of Friday, Sept. 27, as the powerful storm system surged farther north than initially expected and ravaged Southern Appalachia – already saturated with three days of heavy precipitation – with strong winds, torrential rains, mudslides and the worst flooding the region had experienced in over a century. The impacts varied locally, but reports abounded across the region of winds exceeding 100 miles per hour and torrential rains accumulating in the dozens of inches, resulting in raging rivers rising multiple feet in a matter of hours, spilling into nearby towns, downing trees and power lines and destroying homes, businesses and even entire communities…