News

BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER HELENE: 'They're using the word catastrophic'

A city camera aimed south at Honor Air Park shows Mud Creek flooding on South Main at 6:50 a.m. on Sept. 27.

By Bill Moss, Published: March 27, 2025

John Mitchell was gazing out at the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday, Sept. 25, when he felt a gust of wind on his back. “I’ve got to go home,” he told a friend standing beside him.

Mitchell, the Henderson County manager, and his wife, Meredith, and their two young daughters traditionally joined many other families at Edisto Beach, South Carolina, the fourth week of September, when Bruce Drysdale Elementary School goes on fall break.

Mitchell had been on the phone with Rebecca McCall, the chair of the Board of Commissioners, more than once.

“And I said, ‘John, remember last year, you got all anxious and came back and nothing happened.’ I said, ‘Just stay on vacation. Enjoy your family.’”

The more the manager watched the weather forecast, the more certain the path of Hurricane Helene became. He rented a car so Meredith and the girls could stay at the beach. By 5 a.m. Thursday, he was on the road. An hour east of Hendersonville, Jimmy Brissie, the county’s director of emergency management, delivered the latest of many updates.

“I just got a call from the National Weather Service,” he said. “They’re using the word catastrophic.”

* * *

A former Rescue Squad chief who had worked his way up to lead the county’s highly regarded emergency response network, Brissie said the tone of the forecasters became more serious as the hours passed.

“I remember getting the phone call from a hydrologist with the National Weather Service that basically said, ‘We’re worried about y’all.’ With the precursor storm coming through with the frontal system Wednesday, most of Thursday, we had a flood before the hurricane got here,” he said. “We’re not strangers to flooding in Henderson County. We had a big one last Jan. 9. Had it just been a flood event, it would have been a similar flood event that we have a couple times a year. But that flood event followed immediately by the hurricane is what created the catastrophic impacts.”

Along with uttering the word “catastrophic,” forecasters were now also making reference to the Great Flood of 1916. Although no one alive had a memory of the flood, natives had long heard stories about it from their grandparents. That storm was the result of a one-two punch of heavy rain followed by a hurricane, this one making landfall around Charleston.

“The flood which followed the July 10 flood by only 6 days exceeds all others known in the basin by a wide margin,” the TVA said in a report in 1958. “This was one of the great floods of all time and was very devastating throughout the entire upper French Broad and western North Carolina region.”

“For those that follow Western North Carolina history,” Brissie said, “that point of reference of the flood of 1916 meant a lot. That’s what drove a lot of our initial messaging to our partner agencies like the fire departments — that this is not something to be taken lightly. And I have no doubt, speaking to some of the fire chiefs, that that messaging saved lives by encouraging folks to evacuate some of those flash-flood prone areas and taking extra precautions.”

Ominous as it was, the flood threat was only half the picture.

“The best analogy I heard was the flood of Hurricane Floyd with the winds of Hurricane Hugo at the same time,” Brissie said. “The wind event that we saw, in addition to the flooding, is what really created the challenges. We knew there would be landslides. We get more than five inches of rain, there’s a possibility of slope failures. But all the winds that we saw just increased drastically the damage and increased the power outages. So, it was literally the perfect storm. It tested everything that our community had ever faced before at the same time.”

Brissie, like every fire chief and first responder we interviewed for this project, identified hurricane Frances and Ivan in the fall of 2004 as a frame of reference.

Although early in the week, weather reports “started raising the hair on the back of our neck,” first responders were not expecting what they got, Sheriff Lowell Griffin said.

“I was a patrol supervisor during Frances and Ivan,” he said. “We were working nights. I thought that storm was devastating — power out for a lot of people for a long time — so I’m having flashbacks and that’s basically the scale we’re imagining as we’re building our strategies.

“I don’t think anybody could even fathom really what we were going to face. I know in 58 years I’ve never seen or heard of anything of this magnitude in this area before. We were kind of envisioning a model that was far smaller than what actually arrived here, especially on the far east end of the county.

“Nobody said, ‘Expect roadways to be washed away.’ We knew there were going to be trees down. Nobody said there’s going to be houses that are just washed off the side of the mountain. … Did we make preparations for it to wipe out all of the fiber optic cables and wipe out all of the cellular communications? No, we didn’t. Nobody did. Nobody in Western North Carolina did.”

* * *

Mitchell sped nonstop up I-26 from the beach straight to the emergency operations center. When he arrived, he huddled with Brissie about the next steps. They knew there was still time to warn people. They arranged for the IT people to post a map on line of the 100-year floodplain and had communications push out warnings.

“But that’s not good enough, because most people don’t watch. So, the secondary part of that was the chiefs” he said. “The chiefs had to go door to door, and they did.” The EOC also “did a reverse 911 call to every phone number in the county.”

Late Thursday night, Mitchell drove home and planned to get some rest before the storm hit. He couldn’t sleep. By 2 a.m. he was back at the EOC, watching satellite images of Helene’s march up the mountain.

“I watched the eye-wall come across the county,” he said. “It sounded like a freight train.” The walls of the EOC vibrated like a giant kettle drum. Water streamed down the walls. “It doesn’t matter how watertight they are. When it’s like that, there’s water coming in,” he said.

Although it was obvious by sunup Friday that Helene had caused a lot of damage, the worst was yet to come. The water would continue to rise everywhere through the day — on Mud Creek and all its tributaries, on Clear Creek from Bearwallow Mountain to the city, on Cane Creek from Fletcher to Broadmoor, on the French Broad River from Blantyre to the Asheville airport. Streams became raging creeks, creeks roared from their banks and grew into rivers, in many places the French Broad looked like a lake.

“The next disaster was going to take four or five hours to reach full maturity,” Mitchell said. Already, dozens of roads had been made impassable either by downed trees, downed powerlines or floodwaters.

“Staff members are coming in the door. People are trying to get in,” he said.

The manager knew he needed to set up the county government and activate all services that could help — first with the immediate emergency and next with recovery. He caught a break that helped him do it. The county building at 100 N. King St. was centrally located. It had parking, power and, intermittently, land lines that worked. Department heads, supervisors and even rank-and-file personnel were trickling in, raising their hand to do whatever was needed.

“I walked in the room with (building inspections chief) Crystal Lyda,” Mitchell said. “I handed her a satellite phone. ‘You’re in charge here. This is we’re going to build the government.’”

* * *

As the day wore on, the crisis mounted. Cell phone service went down, then land lines. The entire transportation system was close to unusable. Stores and gas stations were closed. The main water intake for the city water system — the water source for most of the county — was submerged by Mills River flooding and inoperable.

“We had some equipment and some water and some food, but not enough,” Mitchell said. “So, we had to go to places that had it. My recollection is that we ordered a tractor trailer load full of MREs.

“I was on the phone with the White House (saying), ‘We need food, water, communications. What you need to do right now is call down to Fort Bragg or the Port of Charleston, tell them to put the mobile communications gear on the road today. There’s probably 15 of those trucks sitting in a parking lot.’”

* * *

As Friday wore on, the 911 center became overwhelmed with calls — first downed trees and downed power lines, then rising water submerging vehicles, then high water flooding homes, trees crashing onto homes, landslides washing houses downhill, raging floodwaters causing roadways to crumble into creeks and rivers.

“During the height of the storm, before we lost communications, we had around a thousand active 911 calls on the board,” said Stephanie Brackett, the dispatch center manager. “All the fire departments, all EMS, rescue squad, sheriff’s office, were being dispatched multiple times. All of our dispatch terminals were full with 911 operators, and we even had extra people sitting on the floor helping to answer calls. It was just a maddening scene.”

So many calls filled the board that they crashed the system. If they did have phone service, people in peril could get help only by reaching their local fire department. Precious few had phone service of any kind, a communications void that would go on for days.

“Mr. Mitchell kind of coined the term: We ended up responding to a 2024 emergency at times with early-1900s technology,” Brissie said. “We had runners hand delivering information fliers to different parts of the community.”

Rising water throughout the day made for another unprecedented improvisation.

“On up into the day Friday, another challenge that we ran into was folks still have medical emergencies,” Brissie said. “Folks have heart attacks, folks have broken legs, and there were a number of calls on the south side of town that, once the interstate flooded, we couldn’t get ambulances to Pardee Hospital or to Advent. So, we worked with that (water rescue) team out of Charlotte and the Hendersonville Fire Department and the rescue squad to set up a boat ferry. We ferried patients off Grove Street from one ambulance across the water in a boat to another ambulance to get them to Pardee hospital.”

* * *

Despite Mitchell’s demand, military flatbeds carrying satellite communications systems never arrived. The manager was desperate to restore communications to emergency shelters, hospitals, the 12 rural fire departments, public works shops, the water plant. The solution, he knew, was Starlink, the Elon Musk-manufactured device that uses satellites to connect earth to cyberspace. Mitchell told one employee to head as far east, another as far west as needed to buy all the Starlinks from every retailer that stocked them.

“I want you to drive to the first Best Buy or Lowes or Home Depot you can find,” he told the drivers. “Walk in the door and say, ‘My name is John Mitchell, I’m the Henderson County manager and I wanna buy all the Starlinks you have.’ They’re going to tell you they don’t have any. And that’s when you’re gonna grab the manager by the hand and say, ‘Take me to the computer, and you and I are going to look up where they are.’”

The runners came home with Starlinks, and when conditions improved enough to allow flight, helicopters delivered the devices to fire departments and other isolated outposts around the county. Now, first responders had cellphone service and internet access. For the first time, as time allowed — conditions at night were too hazardous in most of the county to send out first responders for anything other than life-threatening calls — firefighters could watch news coverage of Hurricane Helene. The destruction was epic — extending far beyond the fire district and far beyond the county line.

* * *

The two Johns — Mitchell and Hendersonville’s city manager, John Connet — were each managing their own emergency operations centers. But they worked hand in hand throughout the disaster on numerous challenges. On Saturday morning, Mitchell was desperate to reach Connet. They needed to avert a fast-evolving crisis.

Connet had a foreboding sense himself. Home just long enough that morning to grab a shower, he noticed the water pressure was low.

“And then I started getting calls that the hospital may have to evacuate because they didn’t have water pressure on the upper floors,” Connet said. “That’s when we started realizing that we had major water leaks in the system at the same time our major intake was offline.”

Even though the city had filled all the elevated water tanks to capacity in anticipation of an outage, the water had been either consumed or had leaked into the ground from broken lines.

“We were blessed when the water came down enough for us to help ferry the city of Hendersonville people to the water plant,” Mitchell said. Workers got to the water intake and made repairs. “When they finished blowing it out, they flipped the switch and it came back on. That’s a miracle. It’s like taking your iPhone, throwing it in the lake, pulling it out and it comes back on.

“The blessing of that is so extreme,” he continued. “You can endure a lot. Water is really, really, really important. A key in that is that the hospital very nearly ran out of water. That was a crisis that we worked through.”

* * *

By Sunday night, the water had receded, two days of sunny weather had aided recovery efforts, water came out of the tap and ambulances could reach the hospital by land. Earlier that afternoon, Mitchell sat down and composed an email that went to all 882 county employees. We know things are tough, it said, but all who are able need to show up at 8 Monday morning at Blue Ridge Community College. You will be paid and you will have a job. It won’t be what you were doing 9-5 up until Friday. Early Monday, the manager climbed in his pickup truck and steered toward BRCC. As he got closer, his heart sank.

“It was like a movie. There wasn’t a whole lot of traffic. ‘Oh man, this is not gonna be good,’” he said. “Then I got around the corner and the whole parking lot is full. There was library staff, social services, health department — people had climbed over trees to get there.”

One of the more urgent jobs was to assemble a large team to make welfare checks at the homes of the many people that family members had called to check on. Phone banks at the both the city and county EOCs had taken hundreds of such calls.

“Especially at the EOC to begin with, it was ‘I can’t get a hold of my father,’” said Hendersonville Mayor Barbara Volk, who volunteered for phone bank duty in the days after the storm.

A team from building inspections and the tax office would make hundreds of welfare checks after Luke Small and Kevin Hensley pulled an all-nighter to write a program in the county GIS system. Using information from first responders on blocked roads, the program identified homes that needed to be checked and mapped how to reach them.

“By the end of the second or third night, Luke and Kevin had developed a system — and grabbed library staff, the staff from inspections — and they did wellness checks on all the checks that have been requested,” Mitchell said. “So, within a period of 72 hours after that, working 24 hours a day, they cut their way through trees, drove around power lines, around landslides.”

This makeshift band of rescuers, battlefield-promoted to hazard duty, in teams of two, completed 700 wellness checks.

* * *

When he first walked out of the emergency operations center on Asheville Highway Friday afternoon after the rain had stopped and the winds died down, Mitchell was overwhelmed not by a sight or a sound.

“I’ll never forget, as long as I live, I walked out the door and all I could smell was oak trees,” he said. The residue of an oak tree blown down by the wind “was like snow all over the county,” he said. Since then, in talking to tree experts, Mitchell has come to find out why.

“One of the weird things about the storm is that the predominant tree — the tree that suffered the most in the county — was the white oak, and many of them were ancient.,” he said. “It hit at just the right moment. All the sap was up in the tree, all the leaves had not turned — all the mass is up there, all the acorns had not dropped. It was the perfect moment.”

Mitchell mourns the loss of another tree, a majestic blue spruce in a corner of the Historic Courthouse plaza that shaded his office. The blue spruce was a favorite around town in the early 1900s.

“The people that planted them planted them in other really important buildings in the county. Rosa Edwards, Hendersonville High, other important buildings in the county, all had blue spruce trees right in front,” Mitchell said. “That tree almost certainly witnessed the last storm.” It’s been hauled away and “is drying now in an undisclosed location. We’re gonna do something with it.”

Mitchell kept a seedling from the tree. He’s entrusted it to agriculture extension agent Steve Pettis, who is in charge of nurturing it to outdoor planting stage. Someday, dignitaries will dig a hole in the ground and plant the seedling. Then, the young tree can grow tall and strong, and in its way, carry on the memory of the epic storm that blew down its mother, on September 27, 2024.