May 19, 2025 · View in browser

As Hurricane Helene barreled toward Yancey County in North Carolina, communities along the Cane River in the Black Mountains were particularly vulnerable. But there were no evacuation orders, and few grasped what was coming.

In 1999, I spent 13 hours in a car alone on a gridlocked interstate with my first child, a 3-week-old baby, during the infamously disastrous mass evacuation from Hurricane Floyd. Since then, I’ve watched coastal states dramatically improve evacuation plans and move hundreds of thousands of residents out of harm’s way very effectively. As a result in recent years, far more people have died due to hurricanes’ freshwater floods in the continental U.S. than coastal storms surges. That proved true in Hurricane Helene.

Not long after Helene hit, much of the nation’s attention shifted to the presidential election and the horrible wildfires in California. But I had lived near the mountains of the Carolinas, so I was curious. I drove to North Carolina to see for myself what had happened there. When I arrived in Swannanoa and Asheville, I found a level of destruction that is hard to convey. But these places had gotten more coverage than others. 

So I continued north to Yancey County, a majestic and more rural place, where 11 people had died due to Helene, more per capita than anywhere else. When I arrived, the usual glory of the Black Mountains felt funereal, seemingly  every river and creek a tomb beneath mud, dead trees and the debris of people’s lives.

Remnants of the flash flood that destroyed a cottage owned by Janicke and John Glynn. Credit: Courtesy of John Glynn

Many people I interviewed shared stories of the trauma they endured because they were in their homes along rivers and creeks when Helene struck. I also spoke with local officials who care deeply about their constituents — who include their own families, often going back generations — but didn’t have the experience with public messaging and plans for evacuating people that coastal areas have been forced to learn. Several counties in Helene’s path, including Yancey, also lacked the detailed mapping of landslide hazards that officials might have had in hand if the state legislature had not paused the program for almost a decade. 

I hope that our initial story about Helene’s assault on Yancey County and those that follow honor the survivors and those who died. I also hope our reporting prompts critical inquiry into lessons learned from Helene — as Hurricane Floyd did more than two decades ago — so that inland officials can get people out of harm’s way ahead of the coming storms. And they are coming. Hurricane season begins on June 1. 

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