Inside a North Carolina mountain town that Hurricane Helene nearly wiped off the map

CHIMNEY ROCK VILLAGE, N.C. (AP) — The stone tower that gave this place its name was nearly a half billion years in the making — heated and thrust upward from deep in the Earth, then carved and eroded by wind and water.

But in just a few minutes, nature undid most of what it has taken humans a century and a quarter to build in the North Carolina mountain town of Chimney Rock.

“It feels like I was deployed, like, overnight and woke up in ... a combat zone,” Iraq War veteran Chris Canada said as a massive twin-propped Chinook helicopter passed over his adopted hometown. “I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”

Nearly 400 miles (644 kilometers) from where Hurricane Helene made landfall Sept. 26 along Florida’s Big Bend, the hamlet of about 140 souls on the banks of the Broad River has been all but wiped from the map.

The backs of restaurants and gift shops that boasted riverfront balconies dangle ominously in mid-air. The Hickory Nut Brewery, opened when Rutherford County went “wet” and started serving alcohol about a decade ago, collapsed on Wednesday, nearly a week after the storm.

The buildings across Main Street, while still standing, are choked with several feet of reddish-brown muck. A sign on the Chimney Sweeps souvenir shop says, “We are open during construction.”

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In another section of town, the houses that weren’t swept away perch precariously near the edge of a scoured riverbank. It is where the town’s only suspected death — an elderly woman who refused entreaties to evacuate — occurred.

“Literally, this river has moved,” village administrator Stephen Duncan said as he drove an Associated Press reporter through the dust-blown wreckage of Chimney Rock Village on Wednesday. “We saw a 1,000-year event. A geological event.”

A Monster Wall of Water

About eight hours after Helene made landfall in Florida, Chimney Rock volunteer firefighter John Payne was responding to a possible gas leak when he noticed water spilling over US 64/74, the main road into town. It was just after 7 a.m.

“The actual hurricane hadn’t even come through and hit yet,” he said.

Payne, 32, who’s lived in this valley his entire life, aborted the call and rushed back up the hill to the fire station, which was moved to higher ground following a devastating 1996 flood. Former chief Joseph “Buck” Meliski, who worked that earlier flood, scoffed.

“There’s no way it’s hitting that early,” Payne recalled the older man saying.

But when Payne showed him a video he’d just shot — of water topping the bridge to the Hickory Nut Falls Family Campground — the former chief’s jaw dropped.

“We’re in for it, boys,” Meliski told Payne and the half dozen or so others gathered there.

Suddenly, the ground beneath them began shaking — like the temblors that sometimes rock the valley, but much stronger. By then, muddy water was seeping under the back wall of the firehouse.

Payne looked down and saw what he estimated to be a 30-foot-high (nine-meter-high) wall of water, tossing car-sized boulders as it raced toward the town. It appeared as if the wave was devouring houses, then spitting them out.

“It’s not water at that point,” Payne said. “It’s mud, this thick concrete-like material, you know what I mean? And whatever it hits, it’s taking.”

A house hit the bridge from which he’d been filming not 20 minutes earlier. The span just “imploded.” Payne later found its steel beams “bent in horseshoe shapes around boulders.”

At the firehouse, some business owners among the group being ”crying hysterically,” Payne said. Others just stood in mute disbelief.

The volunteers lost communications during the storm. But when the winds finally began to quiet down around 11 a.m., Payne said, the radios began “blowing up with calls.”

A Lake of Rubble

The pieces of what had been Chimney Rock Village were now on their way to the neighboring town of Lake Lure, which played a starring role as stand-in for a Catskills resort in the 1987 Patrick Swayze summer romance film, “Dirty Dancing.”

Tracy Stevens, 55, a bartender at the Hickory Nut, took refuge at the Lake Lure Inn, where she also worked. She watched as the detritus from Chimney Rock and beyond came pouring into the marina, tossing aside boats and thrusting the metal sections of the floating Town Center Walkway upward like the folds of a map.

“It looked like a toilet bowl flushing,” she said. “I could see cars, tops of houses. It was the craziest.”

Some of the debris coalesced into a massive jam between the two bridges linking the towns — a utilitarian concrete affair carrying Memorial Highway across the Broad River, and an elegant three-arched span known as the Flowering Bridge.

After 85 years carrying traffic into Chimney Rock, the 1925 viaduct was converted into a verdant walkway festooned with more than 2,000 species of plants. Now partially collapsed, the bridge’s remains are draped in a tangled mass of vines, roots and tree branches.

Signs of Hope

Canada, 43, who co-owns a stage rental and event production company, was at a Charlotte music festival when the storm hit. Returning to uniformed troops and armored personnel carriers kicking up dust in the streets awakened memories of his three combat tours in the Middle East.

“I saw the whole war and I’ve been through many hurricanes,” said Canada, an Army airborne veteran. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Canada and his wife, Barbie, moved here with their two daughters in October 2021 from South Carolina, in part to get away from hurricanes. Barbie had vacationed here as a child, and it was close to the Veterans Administration hospital in Asheville.

As he walked the banks of the Broad on Wednesday, Chris Canada found himself sniffing at the warm air for the telltale odor of death.

And yet, all around are signs of hope.

Payne — who climbs the rock in full gear each Sept. 11 to honor first responders who died in the Twin Towers attacks — was heartened to see members of the New York City Fire Department in his town helping with door-to-door searches.

“We’re more hard-headed than these rocks are,” said Payne, whose day job is as a site coordinator for a fast-food chain. “So, it’s going to take more than this to scare us off and run us out. It’ll be a while, but we’ll be back. Don’t count us out.”

Outside the Mountain Traders shop, someone has leaned a large wooden Sasquatch cutout against a utility pole, the words “Chimney Rock Strong” painted in bright blue.

When park employees cut their way to the top of the mountain and raised the American flag on Monday, Duncan says the people below cheered, and some wept.

“It was spectacular,” he said.

A Town Determined to Come Back

The flag is flying at half staff. But Mayor Peter O’Leary said it’s that spirit that will bring Chimney Rock Village back.

The town’s legacy of hospitality and entrepreneurial spirit dates back to the late 1800s, when a local family began charging visitors 25 cents for a horseback ride up the mountain, according to brief online history by village resident R. J. Wald. It soon became one of North Carolina’s first bona fide tourist attractions.

O’Leary came to town in 1990 to take a job as park manager, before it became part of the state parks system. Two years later, he and his wife opened Bubba O’Leary’s General Store, named for their yellow Labrador retriever.

“Most of these people here, if you look around, almost all of them are from somewhere else,” he said as he stood outside the firehouse, the waters of the 404-foot (123-meter) Hickory Nut Falls gushing forth from the ridge high above. “Why’d they come here? They came here and fell in love with it. It gets ahold of you. ...

“It got ahold of me.”

The 1927 portion of the general store has caved in, but O’Leary believes the larger addition built in 2009 is salvageable. Duncan, who drafted the village charter back in 1990, sees this as an opportunity to “take advantage of the new geography” and build a better town.

But for some, like innkeeper and restaurateur Nick Sottile, 35, the path forward is hard to see.

When Helene hit, Sottile and wife Kristen were vacationing in the Turks and Caicos Islands — their first break since October 2020, when they opened their Broad River Inn and Stagecoach Pizza Kitchen in what’s believed to be the village’s oldest building.

In photos taken from the street, things looked remarkably intact. But when Sottile returned home and walked around to the river side, his heart sank.

“The back of the building is, like, a whole section of it is gone,” the South Florida native said Friday. “It’s not even safe to go in there right now.”

About all that’s left of the adjacent Chimney Rock Adventure miniature golf course is the sign.

“You can’t even rebuild,” Sottile said. “Because there’s no land.”

Sottile has been hearing horror stories from fellow business owners about denied insurance claims. Without help, he said he has no money to rebuild.

But for now, he’s just volunteering with the fire department and trying not to think too far into the future.

“This is a small town, but this is, this is HOME,” he said. “Everybody helps everybody, and I know we’ll get through this. I know we’ll rebuild. I’m just praying that we can rebuild with US here to see it.”

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AP National Writer Tim Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.