News

Big rain causes damage, triggers Helene PTSD

By Bill Moss, Published: May 26, 2026

Heavy rain overnight Tuesday caused road damage and overwhelmed drainage pipes, especially in the Hickory Nut Gorge. More than that, the rainstorm triggered a sense of panic for some folks in Bat Cave and Gerton who lived through Hurricane Helene in Henderson County’s hardest hit valley.

“There’s a whole lot of anxiety about this rain that we had yesterday, including me,” County Manager John Mitchell said Tuesday about mid-day. “There are no rescues. What is going on is people circulating old photos of Hurricane Helene on the internet.”

The storm activated the county’s well-oiled emergency response operations, which was involved in managing the situation in the gorge.

“We’ve got emergency management people down there,” Mitchell said. County communications chief Mike Morgan “is down there dealing with the TV media. Some roads have washed out, we’ve got some undersized culverts that have been washed out. It’s certainly a large rain event but if you start seeing that stuff on Facebook (suggesting otherwise) there’s not an emergency situation going on there.”

Mitchell and Morgan said while they did not diminish county residents' concerns, they try to ensure that accurate and helpful information gets to the public.

"It's the misinforation that we continue to battle," Morgan said.

Fire departments warned the public about the damage in social media posts overnight.

“Most of the roads in and around Gerton are damaged,” Gerton Fire & Rescue said in a Facebook post. “Many roads may look okay but have nothing under them. Please for your safety stay where you are until we can get assessment done and start emergency repairs.”

The N.C. Department of Transportation said in a news release Tuesday morning that crews were on the scene fixing several areas damaged by heavy rains near the Buncombe/Henderson County line along U.S. 74A. DOT crews closed U.S. 74A between Sugar Hollow Road and the Buncombe/Henderson County line to replace a 48-inch culvert that collapsed. Agency officials anticipated reopening the road later Tuesday.

Sheriff Lowell Griffin said he, too, had been hearing reports that exaggerated the impact of the emergency.

“There were trees down, culverts that couldn’t carry the water, washing driveways away, but outside of that, I don’t know of anything that’s happened that’s critical anywhere,” he said.

Emergency responders helped a family who called 911 when water rose around their home and damaged their driveway on Bearwallow Mountain Road.

“I’m not really sure that was as much a rescue as it was folks were stranded, and I don’t want to make light of their situation,” Griffin said. “I think they may have had a little water in some part inside the house, but it wasn’t like the house was floating away. I think it was more that the driveway washed away and just left them completely stranded than it was an urgent mission.”

Griffin said he was not surprised that people traumatized by the county’s worst natural disaster in September 2024 are on edge when heavy storms pound away.

“There’s going to be PTSD surrounding Helene for quite a while, probably the remainder of my career, however long that is,” he said. “But I will say that it does look like that storm really parked over the Little Pisgah, Bearwallow area and there was just a deluge that dumped on that area.”