Asheville residents have no running water and electricity, homeless shelters are full with waitlists, and authorities are warning of crime and lootings.
ASHEVILLE. N.C.—Tunnel Road is a major thoroughfare between Asheville and the Swannanoa Valley in western North Carolina. Before Hurricane Helene, hundreds of cars would cross a bridge en route to Downtown Asheville, cottages in the Blue Ridge Mountains, or Interstate 40 headed East or West.
That bridge is now blocked. The wreckage of an entire house is on top of it, deposited by the swell of flooding.
“You see a house on top of a bridge. That picture speaks a thousand words,” said U.S. Army physician Col. Alan Queen, an assistant incident commander of military personnel deployed for disaster relief, at the scene of the bridge.
Queen, whose hometown is Asheville, told The Epoch Times that the floods caused by Hurricane Helene were the worst in more than 100 years. “Even the Great Flood of 1916, which killed 80 people, was not as bad as this.”
The bridge is just one of many scenes of destruction visible in Western North Carolina—storefronts have been blasted open as if from an explosion, cars are upturned in ditches of muddy water, and tractor-trailers are mangled across roads and railways.
Helene, a major Category 4 hurricane, dumped 40 trillion gallons of water on several southern states between Sept. 24 and 29, with wind speeds reaching 140 miles per hour. There is no clear fatality count, though it has reached more than 200, with hundreds of people still missing.
In most places, the floodwater is gone, leaving large brown spots on the ground, but the suffering it brought persists. The community faces a cascade of problems for which there is no simple solution.
The Water Shortage
Perhaps the greatest irony of Helene is the dire lack of potable water after the floods. The storm completely destroyed Asheville’s water supply system. Water mains and underground pipes were swept away as the ground itself was removed by the torrent. Not a single building in town can access running water, and citizens survive by the thousands of gallons of water being shipped in every day.
By Arjun Singh
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