Inside the Carolina mountain town that Helene almost wiped off the map

CHIMNEY ROCK VILLAGE, NC (AP) — The stone tower that gave this place its name has been under construction for nearly half a billion years — heated and pushed up from deep within the Earth, then carved and eroded by wind and water.

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

“It feels like I’ve been deployed overnight and found myself in a combat zone,” Iraq War veteran Chris Canada said as a massive twin-prop Chinook helicopter passed over his hometown. “I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”

Nearly 400 miles (644 kilometers) from where Hurricane Helene made landfall on 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 off the map.

The backs of restaurants and gift shops that boasted riverside balconies hang menacingly in the air. The Hickory Nut Brewery, which opened when Rutherford County got “wet” and began serving alcohol about a decade ago, collapsed Wednesday, nearly a week after the storm.

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

In another part of the city, houses that have not been swept perch precariously near the edge of a battered embankment. The city’s only suspected death – an elderly woman who refused pleas to evacuate – took place there.

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

A monster wall of water hits Chimney Rock hours after it hit Florida

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 pouring over US 64/74, the main road into town. It was just after 7am

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

Payne, 32, who has lived in this valley all his life, dropped the call and rushed back up the hill to the fire station, which was moved to higher ground following a devastating flood in 1996. Former Chief Joseph “Buck” Meliski, who worked on that previous flood, scoffed.

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

But when Payne showed him a video he had just shot — of water lapping over the bridge to the family’s Hickory Nut Falls campsite — the former chief’s mouth dropped.

“We’re ready, guys,” Meliski told Payne and the half-dozen or so others gathered there.

Suddenly, the ground beneath them began to shake – like the dreads 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, throwing boulders the size of a car as it headed toward the city. It seemed as if the wave was devouring houses, then spitting them out.

“There’s no water at that point,” Payne said. “It’s mud, this thick concrete-like material, you know what I mean? And whatever hits, it takes.”

A house crashed into the bridge from which he had filmed 20 minutes earlier. The range just “exploded”. Payne later found his steel beams “bent into a horseshoe shape around the boulders.”

At the fire station, some business owners in the group began “hysterically crying,” Payne said. Others simply stood in dumb disbelief.

Volunteers lost communications during the storm. But when the winds finally began to die down around 11 a.m., Payne said, the radios began “exploding with calls.”

Scenic Lake Lure becomes a wet debris pit

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 a stand-in for a Catskills resort in the 1987 Patrick Swayze summer romance “Dirty Dancing.”

Tracy Stevens, 55, a bartender at Hickory Nut, took refuge at the Lake Lure Inn, where she also worked. He watched as detritus from Chimney Rock and beyond poured into the marina, tossing boats aside and pushing up the metal sections of Downtown’s floating walkway like folds on a map.

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

Some of the debris has coalesced into a massive jam between the two bridges that link the cities — a utilitarian concrete affair that carried Memorial Highway over the Broad River and an elegant three-arched span known as the Blooming Bridge.

After 85 years of carrying Chimney Rock, the 1925 viaduct has been transformed into a verdant walkway adorned with more than 2,000 plant species. Now partially collapsed, the remains of the bridge are draped in a tangled mass of vines, roots and tree branches.

Some residents see signs of hope amid the near-complete destruction of their city

Canada, 43, who owns a stage rental and event production company, was at a music festival in Charlotte when the storm hit. The return to uniformed troops and armored vehicles kicking up dust in the streets brought back memories of his three combat tours in the Middle East.

“I’ve seen all the war and been through a lot of hurricanes,” said Canada, an Army veteran. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

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

While walking the banks of the Broad on Wednesday, Chris Canada found himself sniffing the telltale scent of death in the warm air.

And yet, there are signs of hope all around.

Payne — who climbs the rock in full gear every 9/11 to honor the first to die in the Twin Towers attacks — was encouraged to see members of the New York City Fire Department helping with door-to-door searches.

“We’re tougher than these rocks,” said Payne, whose day job is a construction site coordinator for a fast-food chain. “So it’s going to take more than that to scare us and set us free. It’ll be a while, but we’ll be back. Don’t count us out.”

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

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

“It was spectacular,” he said.

The mayor says his small town has the spirit and determination to rebuild

The flag flies at half-staff. But Mayor Peter O’Leary said that spirit 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 village resident RJ Wald’s brief online history. It soon became one of North Carolina’s first authentic tourist attractions.

O’Leary came to the city in 1990 to take a job as a park manager before it became part of the state park system. Two years later, he and his wife opened Bubba O’Leary’s General Store, named after 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 from the ridge high above. “Why did they come here? They came here and fell in love with it. It catches you. …

“He caught 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 has drafted the village charter since 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 way forward is hard to see.

When Helene struck, 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 is 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 by the river, his heart sank.

“There’s a whole section gone behind the building,” the South Florida native said Friday. “It’s not even safe to go in there right now.”

About all that remains of the adjacent Chimney Rock Adventure miniature golf course is the sign.

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

Sottile has heard 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 HOME,” he said. “Everybody helps everybody and I know we’re going to get through this. I know we will rebuild. I just pray that we can rebuild with us here to see that.”

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AP National Writer Tim Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.

Photo: North Carolina’s Lake Lure was covered in debris after Hurricane Helene flooded the area in late September. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

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