News

Eight months later, restaurants and stores starting to reopen

Clockwise, from top left, photo snapped by a city camera at 7:21 a.m. on Sept. 27 shows Helene flooding at Mud Creek; Maureen Cormier, a senior vice president at CVS, cuts a ribbon to celebrate the reopening of the store on May 12; the freshly renovated Harris-Teeter reopens next week; Moe’s Original BBQ owner Dave Rice shows the high-water mark from flooding at the restaurant after Helene.

By Amy McCraw, Published: June 5, 2025

The highwater mark at Moe’s Original BBQ was more than 6 feet above the floor after Hurricane Helene flooded offices and businesses at the lower elevations of Asheville Highway.
At the other major business hub hardest hit by the historic floodwaters — the south gateway at Greenville and Spartanburg highways — the waterline at McDonald’s reached 9½ feet, leaving nothing salvageable but the block walls and roof trusses.
In recent weeks, both restaurants have reopened — eight months after Helene left waterlogged walls, ruined furniture and useless equipment in her wake. The restaurants are just two of the many businesses that have had to muck out shells, tear out drywall and start over. There are signs of progress. Harris Teeter, the popular supermarket with its beloved senior discount day on Thursday, reopens next Tuesday with a big celebration. PetSmart on Greenville Highway has reopened, too, while Fresh Market next door is still renovating. Repairs are still under way in nearly all of the Beverly Hanks Center properties off Asheville Highway.
Here’s a roundup of what’s reopened and what’s still in the works:

At Moe’s, ‘shock and disbelief’

Moe’s Original BBQ in Hendersonville welcomed customers back inside for barbecue in May with a simple message on the sign out front: “We are reopening today. Don’t forget the banana pudding.”
Inside the Asheville Highway restaurant, owner Dave Rice said he was happy to be back indoors after serving customers from a food truck in the parking lot for the past several months.
“It feels great. It’s been a long time coming,” he said shortly before Moe’s opened its doors for lunch. “It’s like a weight off my shoulders. For a while, it felt like this time would never come.”
Along with new walls, furnishings and equipment, renovations inside include more seating and a bar. No beer or wine is available for now while Moe’s waits on its liquor license.
Moe’s closed its doors eight months ago when Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carlina.
Flooding from nearby creeks during the September storm pushed more than six feet of water into the restaurant and caused damage so severe that reopening meant gutting and completely remodeling the building.
Rice said he was shocked when he saw the damage for the first time shortly after the storm.
“In no way shape or form did I think it was as bad as it was. I was shocked. It was disbelief,” he said. “There was so much work to do it was basically starting from scratch.”
Rice needed a way to generate income and keep his staff employed once he realized how long repairs would likely take. So, he brought in the food truck about a month after the storm.
“We tried to be open seven days a week to make sure everyone knew we were here,” Rice said of the days Moe’s spent serving ribs, pulled-pork and roasted chicken from a truck. “We’ve had a lot of support from the community.”
Moe’s received a grant from the LoveHendo fund and a loan from the Small Business Administration to help cover the substantial costs of renovation, made all the more challenging because the business had no flood insurance.
Most Hendersonville businesses damaged by Helene, including Moe’s, found creative ways to continue serving their customers during the weeks and months after the storm, Henderson County Chamber of Commerce President Bob Williford.
“They found different ways to do it,” he said.

Beverly Hanks Center

Flooding from Helene swamped offices at the Beverly Hanks Center on Asheville Highway less than a mile from Moe’s.
Some of those businesses, including Morrow Insurance and Hendersonville Pediatrics, found other locations to serve clients and patients.
Morrow moved to the Holiday Inn Express on Upward Road immediately after the storm.
“We were taking claims on Monday morning,” Marsh Dark, the company’s president, said. “We’re working hard and not skipping a beat.”
The company then moved temporarily to Carriage Park and had hoped to stay there for a year. But Dark said he began looking for another location after homeowners objected to the business being located at the development.
Morrow eventually bought a building in Hendersonville that will become the insurance company’s new home once the current tenant relocates and remodeling work is done, Marsh said.
He projects that the company can move into its new home by the end of October at the earliest.
In the meantime, employees are either working from home or renting offices from other insurance companies in the area.
A debris-filled dumpster sits outside Hendersonville Pediatrics, where work is under way.
In an opinion piece he wrote in January, Dr. Derek Moss, a partner at the medical practice, said that five feet of water stood inside the building when Helene hit.
“We lost everything on the first floor: walls, examination tables, files, flooring, cabinets, lab equipment, desks, nursing stations. Only the cement slab and the wall studs were left,” he said.
While they wrangled for months with insurance companies, doctors worked in spaces offered by other clinics and agencies in the area.
Moss said last month he hopes repairs to the building at Beverly Hanks will be finished and doctors able to begin seeing patients there again in August.
“That’s almost 11 months since the hurricane,” he said. “It’s been rough. We feel lucky we can see patients.”
Renovating a medical office has special challenges other offices don’t have, including the need for sinks and specialized equipment in every room.
The repair and renovation work is expected to cost $1.4 million while insurance is expected to cover only $963,000 of the bill.
“It took four months to get the first check,” he said. “You expect things are going to go faster.”

Baker’s Box

At The Baker’s Box next door to the Beverly Hanks Center, repair work and reopening after the flood took much less time than at many other businesses in the area.
Unlike Moe’s and other nearby businesses where floodwaters reached six feet or higher, flooding from Brittain Creek, which flows alongside the restaurant, reached only a foot and half deep.
The fact that the creek flooded into the building at all was hard to believe, said Mara Nichols, who owns the business with her husband, George.
The couple’s landlord told them the property had never flooded in the 50 years he had owned it; the creek had to rise five feet before it even overflowed its bank and submerged the restaurant patio.
“It never dawned on us,” she said. “We’re not even in the floodplain.”
The Friday afternoon after Helene hit, the couple drove to the site. They parked high and dry and looked down on what had become a lake.
“We saw we were flooded from across the street,” she said.
By Saturday the water had receded, and they were able to get inside.
“It was muddy, nasty and disgusting,” Mara said.
The owners and staff got to work that day cleaning the mud and throwing away food and equipment.
On Monday, they contacted their insurance company.
The restaurant was not covered by flood insurance but it did have coverage for their loss of income and food.
Their losses exceeded their coverage but it was “better than nothing,” Nichols said.
The restaurant also received a grant from the LoveHendo fund that helped cover some of the loss, she said. And their landlord gave them a free month’s rent.
Renovating the building required cutting and replacing the walls an inch above the water line and using dehumidifiers to dry out other areas.
Despite the damage and the work it took to reopen, Nichols said she never thought about relocating the business.
“It was a 1,000-year flood,” she said “We have 999 more to go.”

Harris Teeter ‘is brand spanking new’

Harris Teeter manager Natalie Gardner gazed at the glittering store interior with pride one recent rainy day as employees restocked shelves and workers put the finishing touches on a floor-to-ceiling renovation.
“Everything is brand spanking new,” she said with a smile.
The shiny floors, bright lights, new cash registers and fresh food that filled the space ahead of its reopening next week were a far cry from the destruction Gardner witnessed eight months ago.
She was at work the morning of Sept. 27 when Helene hit Henderson County. Water began pouring into the building at about 10:30 a.m.
“It happened so quickly,” Gardner said. “I thought I could get out, and then I couldn’t.”
She remained trapped inside for about four hours until floodwaters receded and she was able to make her way out.
Flooding inside the store reached four feet. Groceries floated off shelves while equipment, floors and walls became soaked in the water.
“It was a mess. That’s why we had to gut the whole thing,” Gardner said.
Harris Teeter will hold a Taste of Teeter reopening event from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 10, including a ribbon cutting, free samples and demonstrations. The store will remain open until 10 p.m. It will open for regular business on June 11.

CVS here was hardest hit in the pharmacy chain

Emergency responders gave employees of the CVS on South Main Street just 20 minutes to evacuate on the afternoon of Sept. 26.
The southern end of Hendersonville where the store is located was beginning to flood well ahead of Hurricane Helene’s arrival early the next morning, and emergency officials worried if the store stayed open even a few more minutes workers would be stranded.
Little did the employees know when they gathered their belongings and rushed out of the store that evening it would be eight more months before they would return to work in the building.
CVS celebrated the reopening of the store on May 12.
Maureen Cormier, a senior vice president at CVS, told people gathered for a ribbon-cutting that she was in awe of the work done to renovate the store and felt “excited we are open for the community again.”
Cormier noted that the CVS was one of the first stores to reopen in the South Gateway area after the storm.
Of all the CVS locations in Western North Carolina, the South Main Street store sustained the most damage from Helene and took the longest to reopen, said Brian Bache, a CVS regional director.
Bache visited CVS stores in Black Mountain and Swannanoa before coming to Hendersonville four days after Helene.
“We were so fortunate in both those locations. Black Mountain was untouched. Swannanoa opened quickly,” he said. “This was the hardest hit. We knew we wouldn’t be open soon.”
Flooding left four feet of water inside the store and caused extensive damage to its interior. Photographs on display during the reopening ceremony showed the building’s saturated carpet and the contents of its shelves scattered in piles along the floor.
“What we thought would take two or three months turned into eight,” Bache said of the work to first gut the structure and remake its interior.

At McDonald’s ‘nothing could be saved’

After 9½ feet of water filled the McDonald’s on Spartanburg Highway, only its four walls — which are made of cinder block and rebar — and its trusses could be saved, owner Teresa W. Edwards said.
“Walking in the door was just overwhelming,” she said. “Lobby furniture was tossed around, papers and small equipment were lying about, and as I walked through the kitchen, the devastation was unbelievable. Grill and fryers were lying on their sides, water, mud and sludge was all over the place. Nothing could be saved — equipment, food, shelving, nothing. There might have been a few tears.”
Edwards said she considered looking into relocating the business to another spot on Spartanburg Highway, but never thought about moving the restaurant away from the community.
“People who come here live in the community. Kids come after school. It’s a home-town store,” she said. “We used to drag Main, and you would come down here.”
The restaurant on Spartanburg Highway was also the first place her husband, U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, worked as a McDonald’s employee when he was a 16-year-old student at West Henderson High School.
The couple now own six McDonald’s restaurants in Hendersonville, Brevard and Canton.
Edwards managed to maintain 70 percent of the employees who worked at the Spartanburg Highway restaurant by moving them to other locations while the building was rebuilt.
The “billions sold” burger shop now features a new layout with customers placing orders to the left of the front door. Bathrooms are now located where orders were once taken.
Along with the new layout and updated décor, the rebuilt restaurant also includes state-of-the art kitchen equipment, a third drive-thru window and a “technology closet” that runs all the electronics in the building. Employees roll carts with shelves for condiments to deliver orders to customers.
Edwards spends a lot of her time pursuing insurance claims to cover the huge cost of renovation.
“I have never had to deal with such a crazy amount of insurance at one time. And even though you have a policy, that policy is broken down into about 15 different categories,” she said. “Let’s just say that my office manager Angie Johnson, myself and the insurance companies are still working on this monster.”

PetSmart reopens, Fresh Market renovating

The PetSmart on Greenville Highway also required extensive renovations before it could reopen.
Employees moved animals inside the store to safety when the flooding began during Helene.
But the three feet of water that stood in the building ruined all the merchandise and pet food. Water also damaged the floors and walls, employees said.
When workers eventually returned to the building for the first time, they were met with destruction and rot.
“It stunk,” one manager said. “It was vile.”
The damage required the store to replace all its equipment, fixtures and inventory, the company said in a news release.
The rebuilt store spans more than 14,000 square feet. It provides an assortment of pet care essentials and must-have items for cats, dogs, fish, birds, reptiles and small pets. The store also offers services, including a full-service grooming salon, Doggie Day Camp, PetsHotel boarding, pet training and a veterinary hospital.
In honor of the reopening, PetSmart Treats Rewards members can earn five times the Treats points on all in-store merchandise and services purchased at the Hendersonville location through June 7.
The Fresh Market next door to PetSmart remains closed.
A dumpster sits outside the supermarket’s front doors and a gutted interior with dirt floors was visible through the glass doors. Signs say “Making Your Store Even Better” and “Thank You for Your Patience.” The Lightning was unable to reach the Greensboro-based chain for comment on the renovations and a reopening date.
The Dollar Tree on Greenville Highway also remains closed while the Great American Hot Dog next door is open. The Executive II gas station recently reopened as well.
Haus Heidelburg, the popular German restaurant on Greenville Highway across from Publix, reopened soon after Helene’s floodwaters receded. Having survived Helene, the owners are dealing with the next challenge. The new White Street extension, connecting Greenville and Spartanburg highways, will run alongside the building. “This sign is moving but we’re not going anywhere,” the Haus declares.