News

What we aimed to find in our Helene coverage

By Bill Moss, Published: May 12, 2025

You don’t want to get behind me when I’m driving my Rav4 down a slope out in the country.

I’m a slow-driving rubberneck, looking to the left and the right at the stream or creek beneath the bridge at the bottom of the hill. I’m looking at the fallen trees and the piles of debris on the upstream side, trying to spot the highwater mark, thinking of what tributaries feed this waterway and what creek or river this waterway empties into.

Call it an occupational hazard of Helene.

Here at the Lightning we have been working since last Sept. 27, you might say, on UNIMAGINABLE, the special section that we published last week, one day before the six-month anniversary of the hurricane. I’m not saying we knew in the hours after Helene exited to the northwest toward Tennessee and Kentucky the full magnitude of the storm’s damage at that moment. But it didn’t look long.

We were blessed at our house to lose only one tree, which fell away from the house, and to get power restored before sundown Monday. I have thought since the storm passed that living on a north-facing ridge saved us. The storm came from the south. Plus, southern Flat Rock, Tuxedo and Green River got less rain than Hendersonville, Fruitland, Edneyville and certainly the Hickory Nut Gorge.

I have been fortunate enough, if that’s the word, to visit Gerton, Bat Cave and Chimney Rock for reporting purposes. My windshield survey of storm damage is overwhelmed down there. It will be a long time before the roads are fixed in the gorge. We just have to be patient and thank the NCDOT for the work its crew achieved quickly to restore access — if one lane only — and for the work it’s starting on U.S. 64, U.S. 74 and N.C. 9 to rebuild two-lane roads.

On the left is our announcement of a reprint of our Helene special edition and how to buy one. Among the goals in the reporting that produced the six-months-later lookback was to answer some basic questions:

• What in the heck happened? Matt Matteson (better known as AskMatt) went back to Monday, Sept. 23, to trace the origins of Helene and track its path and its growth. Associate Editor Amy McCraw scored a long interview with Steve Wilkerson, the chief meteorologist at the Greer, S.C.-based office of the National Weather Service, who described the combined effects of the “predecessor rain event” and Helene, which dumped 21 (upper Mud Creek) to 34 inches of rain (the gorge).
• Why was the damage so great? The one person I could think of who knew the most about drainage basins, stormwater runoff and creek capacities was Bill Lapsley, who spent 50 years as a civil engineer designing systems to manage rainwater before his current career as a county commissioner. Short answer: If over three days 2½ feet of rain falls in our 72,000 acres of watershed, well, it’s not going to be good.
• Why weren’t we prepared? The question, which ricocheted off the walls of social media in the days after Helene, was the most annoying and ignorant reaction of all. It implied that our emergency responders didn’t prepare. We interviewed the fire chiefs of all 12 volunteer fire & rescue departments and many other first responders. There was not one that didn’t describe in detail preparations they made in advance —starting Tuesday. “Tell me what your idea of catastrophic is,” Sheriff Lowell Griffin told us. “Is your idea of ‘catastrophic’ U.S. highways being washed away. Nobody said, ‘Expect roadways to be washed away.’ We knew there were going to be trees down. Nobody said there's going to be houses that are just washed off the side of the mountain. … Did we make preparations for it to wipe out all of the fiber optic cables and wipe out all of the cellular communications. No, we didn't. Nobody did.”

The hardest hit areas like Gerton and Bat Cave and Deep Gap and Big Hungry are maybe a tenth of the way down the road to recovery. It’s a long road ahead.

A big difference in that corner of our mind that stores experience and memory — between Sept. 26 and every day after — is now we have lived through what before we could not imagine. Which leads to one more common response by everyone we’ve talked to: We hope to never see this again.

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Contact editor Bill Moss at billmoss@hendersonvillelightning.com.