News

Nearly 1,000 properties damaged or destroyed, with many more expected

County Manager John Mitchell discusses with county commissioners the number of structures that were destroyed during Tropical Storm Helene.

By Amy McCraw, Published: October 16, 2024

Damage assessments of a third of the county found that nearly 1,000 structures were either destroyed or sustained major damage when Hurricane Helene hit Henderson County, county officials said Wednesday.

Jimmy Brissie, the county’s emergency services director, told county commissioners during their regular monthly meeting that ongoing assessments by officials from various agencies so far have found that 798 structures, including homes, sustained major structural damage and are uninhabitable until they are repaired. Assessments have also identified 176 structures that were destroyed in the storm, he said.

  Assessments so far also identified 86 landslides in the county.

  Efforts to assess storm damage began in the hardest hit areas, Brissie said.

  Outside the meeting, Brissie said the number of buildings destroyed or with major damage in the county could climb into the thousands.

  County Manager John Mitchell told commissioners the numbers are an indication of how much people in Henderson County are suffering.

  “We’ve been through so much, and we’ve seen so much. I want the public to see it,” he said. “You’re beginning to see a snapshot of the scope of the disaster. We’re only a third through.”

  Rebecca McCall, the chairwoman of the board of commissioners, asked Brissie if the land underneath some of the damaged structures was also destroyed. Brissie said people conducting the assessment, who are sometimes from areas outside Western North Carolina, are using mapping information to determine where buildings once existed in hard-hit communities including Bat Cave, Gerton and Edneyville.

  “An inspector from Garner, North Carolina, might see an empty tract of land and not realize there was a home there,” he said. “We’re going back out with the GIS data to say there should have been a building here. There’s not evidence there ever was a building here.”

  Michael Edney, vice chairman of the board of commissioners, commented that the destruction will worsen the county’s housing shortage

  “We had a housing shortage before this. We’ve added at least a thousand families to that,” he said.

 He also asked if rivers that overflowed in the storm could be repaired.

Brissie said the county is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on beginning repairs to rivers where possible.

  “In some places the face of the river may have changed forever, as it did in 1916,” he said.

  Work is also beginning on repairing damaged roadways.

  Access to the Bat Cave and Gerton communities remains restricted as crews work to repair roads and assess damage.

  McCall warned what some have called “disaster tourists” to stay away from those communities.

  “Now is not the time to go into those areas,” she said.

  Commissioner Bill Lapsley said he recently visited Bat Cave and learned about emergency response crews who walked for hours and even spent the night on the ground in the community trying to search buildings for people.

     “It’s just an amazing situation for those people to have to deal with,” he said.

  Mitchell and Brissie both said that no people in Henderson County remain missing because of the storm.

  The number of storm-related deaths in the county remains at seven, Brissie said outside the meeting. Some of those deaths happened during flooding while others were caused by landslides and flowing debris, he said.