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In hard-hit Bat Cave, firefighters checked door to door for survivors

Bat Cave Fire Chief Steve Freeman describes his department's response to Hurricane Helene.

By Bill Moss, Published: November 5, 2024

BAT CAVE — Bat Cave Fire Chief Steve Freeman joined other first responders for regular briefings in the days leading up to Hurricane Helene. The warnings from Jimmy Brissie, the county’s emergency services director, became more dire by the day. Three days of rain from a cold front had saturated the ground and caused flooding already, ahead of the storm’s steady march north from Florida’s Big Bend.

“They said this is going to be as bad as the 1916 flood,” Freeman said. “That kicked us into high gear, and we started going and evacuating people and telling them that this is going to be bad.”

Freeman recalled the last major flood in the Hickory Nut Gorge, in 1996. But like everyone else alive, the only image he had of the 1916 flood was grainy black-and-white photos and the lore of mountain natives whose parents or grandparents had shared memories.

The last all-volunteer force in Henderson County, the Bat Cave Fire Department prides itself on a practical, hands-on, personal approach to fire protection. One by one, they knocked on doors.

“And we kind of scared them a little bit but it worked,” the chief said. “We told them, ‘Well, if you’re not going to evacuate, at least give us your name and address and next of kin’ and then handed them a black magic marker and said, ‘How ‘bout writin’ it on your arm.’

“That got their attention. And Gerton did the same thing. They went up there and told everybody along the river” to leave. “I think that’s what saved lives.

“We took it all serious,” he said. Even so, “We never dreamed it would be this bad.”

 

A near-death experience

Freeman was at home in Possum Holler, the next holler up from the fire station, with his wife, Joyce, on that Friday morning, Sept. 27, when Hurricane Helene thundered in.

“We were standing on the front porch about 8:45 or so watching the driveway wash away and the house shook,” he said. “I went from the front porch, through the house and went through the back door to see what it was. I had parked my vehicle ahead of time above the house, way away” on what he assumed would be high enough ground. “I come to the kitchen door to look out. I’ve got a ‘67 Mustang, which is my first car. I looked out my kitchen window just in time to see it get parked right in my wood shed in front of my deck.”

Next came his 2001 Ford Ranger pickup, washed down in the mudslide and flipped.

“And I heard more racket after that, so I went on out the door,” he said “It was another slide coming down the rest of the holler. I started running back toward the house, and I had an old backhoe setting there and the shed collapsed on me and pinned my head against the backhoe. And then God just pushed it back enough for me to get my head out. My wife’s standing there watching all this. She thought I was dead.”

They were alive, but for how long they weren’t sure.

“At that moment, I yelled at her to get in the truck,” Freeman said. “And we both ran and got in the truck. I just knew the whole mountain was coming down at that point and I figured if we got in the truck, if it washed the house away, we might have a chance of rolling in the truck.

“I had my near-death experience and that’s when I knew God was here for me.”

At that moment, it was time to pivot to his fire chief job. Using radios, firefighters mapped the district into five zones. Freeman got to work in Possum Holler.

“We started worrying about everybody else and we couldn’t get there (to the fire station) from here, even though it’s just a mile up the road,” he said. “We first walked down to the end of Possum Holler (Road) and then we realized we needed to start digging out to check on people above and down. That’s what we spent the next hours doing.”

'All those houses were swept away'

At the fire station on Gerton Highway, a handful of firefighters were on duty overnight Thursday, Sept. 26, when the Rocky Broad River rose and rose, a violent torrent carrying boulders and debris and parts of homes. Soon, the rising water threatened the firehouse itself.

Toby Linville talks about the destruction firefighters saw in real time as Hurricane Helene tore through the gorge.“The water had come into the building and broke the basement door,” Toby Linville said. “And then we start smelling propane, and it just ended up being a tank that had floated loose that was spinning around out here in an eddy.”

Linville had been assigned as part of the emergency response to stay overnight in Bat Cave. A former Rescue Squad chief, he was an experienced search-and-rescue specialist. (Appropriately, in his day job, he is the county’s floodplain administrator. “There are 700 houses in the flood plain that I’ll have to look at,” he told me.)  

By Friday morning, the river was rising on one side of the highway while floodwater and mudslides raced downhill on the other.

“Water was shooting down on either side of the storage building over here,” Linville said. “So we didn’t really want to be in there, not knowing how bad it would get. It was flowing down the road from the bridge, from the ridge, everywhere.

“Those poles were breaking while we were standing there,” he said, pointing to power poles along the highway, since replaced. “Of course, power had been off since early that morning, probably 3 a.m.”

As the hard rain subsided, people found their way to what was left of Gerton Highway and hiked to the fire station.

“Folks started coming to us,” Linville said. “One of the groups brought an elderly lady down from just a couple houses down there, and then everyone else was just kind of walking to us, because (Highway) 9 was caving in. … You look left of the river — those houses are all gone. All those houses were swept away.”

‘My immediate thought was we were in trouble’

In the basement of the firehouse, firefighter Sarah Smith tried to salvage personal belongings as the flood surged.

“I was just standing on the stairs to see if we could get any of our stuff,” she said. “But it just came up so quickly we weren’t able to get the gear. It went from about 4 inches” on the floor to more than 6 feet “in about 38 seconds,” breaking a metal door.

Seeing that, “My immediate thought was we were in trouble,” she said.

The firefighters feared the firehouse could itself be swept away by the raging river.

“You could hear it creaking once the water got in there, because it was just rushing in,” Sarah said. “You could hear the water sloshing up under the floor. So we just had to move as quick as we could to get the food and supplies and fire trucks and things across road so we could keep everybody we had safe and fed and try to provide them some sort of comfort.”

Aside from that, there was nothing anyone could do but observe the relentless power of the flood.

“Clay (Freeman) and Dan Hayes from the rescue squad — both of them were praying for the water to go down,” Sarah said. “I was in a different spot doing the same thing, and the Lord just provided.”

 

The ‘scraggly’ hero

 

Bat Cave Fire Lt. Clay Freeman describes how a Marine appeared suddenly and fixed the generator that powered the firehouse.When floodwaters submerged the generator that powered the firehouse, firefighters worried they’d have no power for lights, refrigeration and cooking, no way to support both the emergency personnel and the survivors who had shown up at the station.

“All the fire department people tried and we couldn’t fix it,” recalled Clay Freeman, the chief’s nephew. (Clay’s claim to fame, when firefighters can look back and grin at a few moments, is having caught a 12-inch trout in the firehouse basement with his hands.)

“There was actually a guy that came off of Bat Cave Drive up here.” he said. “Real long hair like me, scraggly — didn’t look like he’d know what to do.

“He walked up and he said, ‘I’m a Marine and I fix generators.’ He went and got an air compressor, and a couple bottles of water right here and blew this out with an air compressor” after rinsing the muddy water out. “When he came back, all his beard and a bunch of his hair was burnt off. I was like, ‘Is it making power?’ He said, ‘Not yet. Give me about 20 minutes.’ And he got it running in about 20 minutes.”

The Marine’s name was Vincent Wright, assisted by his son, Logan.

He’s famous in Bat Cave: The scraggly Marine who showed up like an angel and got the lights back on.

 

HART saves the day

As the skies began to clear, Linville and the Bat Cave firefighters saw a sign of hope: choppers in the sky.

“We’d seen some kind of some reconnaissance flights that were just flying up and down the river, and then they landed at the church up here on the hill and they walked down,” Linville said. “They’re like, ‘Do you have any folks that need to be evacuated?’

“‘We’ve got a garage full of ‘em,’” Linville responded. “They probably flew six or eight flights.”

The rescuers were a Helo Aquatic Rescue Team crew, a special squad of the State Highway Patrol and National Guard known as a HART team. HART crews are made up of highly trained first responders from around the state.

 

‘The whole world is falling apart’

Herb Klann and his wife, Chelsea, woke before daybreak Friday to no power, trees down, a hard rain. Their home is on a ridge near the Bat Cave firehouse.

“Honestly, we kind of thought the worst was over,” he said. “It kind of let up, and we’re just going around checking on people, making sure everyone was okay. It looked like a mess, just a bad storm. But we had no idea what was coming. It was maybe 8:30 to noon on that Friday morning. My driveway became a raging river.”

Herb Klann and his family were among about 30 Helene survivors who were airlifted to safety.Herb and Chelsea tried their best to show a calm demeanor for the sake of their infant daughter, Hildegard, and 3-year-old son, Guenther.

“My kid’s asking to watch cartoons, and the whole world is falling apart literally in front of us,” Herb said. “My wife was trying to hold it together for the kids. ‘Hey, let’s read a book, try to cook some breakfast or something.’”

They survived and, like their neighbors, made their way to the firehouse.

“That afternoon, everyone started congregating down here. It was a mess,” Herb said. “There was maybe 20, 30 people, people crawling out of the woods. It was really, really, really bad.”

Herb worried about older people, wondered whether people were stranded, maybe badly injured.

“Thank God, we had about four search-and-rescue guys that came in the night before, and there was an ambulance here that had not been flooded or anything,” he said. “So I thought, as far as medical attention goes, we’re in pretty good shape.”

With roads closed in all directions, the HART team would be the Klann family’s salvation. The chopper picked up survivors, shuttled them to Edneyville and came back for more until all were carried to safety.

“It wasn’t an hour later (from when the HART team first landed) that my neighbor knocked on the door. She’s like, ‘You’re next’. So, clothes on our back — two kids, two cats and a dog — we were up and out,” Herb said. “They dropped us off at the Western Justice Academy, and we ended up getting shuttled to Hendersonville, where some family picked us up.”

Chelsea and the kids and pets have gone to stay with family in her hometown in Upstate New York. Herb figures he still has weeks’ worth of work to make the Bat Cave home livable.

Give me shelter

Bryan Rhodes, who was also at the Bat Cave firehouse the day I visited, recalled his adventure. The county’s capital projects manager, Rhodes, like every other county employee, was repurposed as part of County Manager John Mitchell’s massive hurricane rescue and recovery operation. Mitchell ordered Rhodes to get down to Edneyville Elementary School and open an emergency shelter. Armed with a chainsaw, Rhodes set out from Hendersonville.

“It took me all day to cut a loop out to get to Edneyville and I opened it up Saturday morning — me and three other community members. I was there for about 17, 18 days straight,” he said.

He described his role: “Managing all the people that were getting medevaced out of there, keeping detailed records of who was there, working directly with the EOC (emergency operations center), which was command, and dealing with the warehouse, making sure all my assets are here, that I was pushing to the right buttons. It was a logistics nightmare.”

“I was there to do what I could for the community,” he explained. “I probably cried a lot more than I thought I would.” A fourth generation Edneyville native, he mourned for the families that lost everything, for a familiar landscape wrecked beyond recognition.

“Anybody right now standing among us has probably not seen nothing like this in their lifetime,” he said. “1916 is what we compare it to, right? There’s very few people that was alive in 1916. It’s amazing. You can’t combat the power of nature.”

He was relieved, at least, that his family was safe.

“I was blessed,” he said. “My home was OK and I’ve got a strong wife who was there with my kids. That’s everybody’s story, right?”

 

‘We know everybody’

Chief Freeman and other Bat Cave firefighters have neither the time nor the inclination to follow social media chatter — fantasy about how hundreds of people are still missing or conspiracy tales about a government coverup of a high death toll or cadaver dogs still frantically sniffing atop mudslides.

“We got a bunch of people out,” the chief told me. “We were trying to keep track of everybody in our zone. That’s how we were accounting for people as we were getting them out and checking on them from day 1. We knew the first day that everybody was safe, and that’s kind of how all that went.”

“We’re all volunteers, and we all live in the district,” he added. “We know everybody.”

There was one fatality, on Edney Inn Road, when a home was swept away in a landslide. Today, no one is missing in Bat Cave. Brissie, the emergency manager, has said the number of missing persons countywide is zero.

I asked Chief Freeman what he made of Facebook or X or TikTok accounts that spread such fantastic exaggerations.

“We knew better because we had accounted for everybody,” he said. “All that social media — I don’t know what to think about that. I just know it wasn’t true.”

With an amused look, he added: “We still had people last week come in here from way off (and say), ‘We’re here to help rescue people.’”

That job is done. The 26 members of the all-volunteer Bat Cave completed the search, rescued stranded people, oversaw their evacuation by ground or air.

“We knew in the first day, two days, we had done made contact with everybody in Bat Cave-Gerton,” the chief said. “I can’t speak for anywhere else, but I can speak for here.”