Beth Trigg
This post contains traumatic content. Stop reading if you need to.
I am not even close to being able to tell the story of the last 5 days in Swannanoa.
What I will say to people who are not in the hardest hit areas of WNC is that there are still huge gaps in communication and many of the worst things that happened have probably not been reported or even understood yet. People are sharing first hand accounts in person or by text that make it clear to me that there are still many, many fatalities that have not yet been discovered or confirmed.
I have personally spoken to people who have dug living and dead people out of a mudslide, seen their neighbors swept away by water, and seen bodies that haven't been able to be recovered. We have heard stories from Montreat, Grovemont, Beacon Village, Botany Woods - these areas are miles apart from each other and each place really different from the others. A child told me he saw three houses slide down a slope into his neighborhood. Friends had to claw their way to safety with their 7 year old while their neighbors died in the river below them.
And that's only what we've managed to glean about places here in the Swannanoa Valley from communicating with people we know and are directly encountering. It looks like there are multiple other parts of the region horribly hard hit - Marshall, Chimney Rock (”there's nothing there”), Celo, maybe? Places they haven't yet reached in Transylvania County? Haywood? So many roads blown out and who knows what's on the other side. My sister and I each heard from nurse friends who have been working in different hospitals 50 miles apart that it is like a war zone.
As internet connections have returned we are seeing pictures of whole neighborhoods submerged, no doubt with residents in their homes. We don't even begin to know the full extent of this yet.
Western North Carolina is full of creeks, rivers, gulleys, and all manner of flowing water. Roads and neighborhoods are often called “___ Creek” - Haw Creek, Bent Creek, Garren Creek, Gap Creek to name a few in Buncombe County. Communities are often named after the river that flows through them like South Toe in Yancey or Tuckaseigee in Jackson County. We have hollers and steep coves. We have steep terrain and windy 2-lane or 1-lane roads.
Here many people live in trailers. Houses and trailers are often down at the end of a road or tucked in a cove or in a neighborhood along a creek or river or down at the bottom of a valley or on a slope. Towns were built along rivers and neighborhoods tucked in here and there as towns and communities grew. Realtors highlight “bold creek” in home listings as a selling point. Trailer parks are often near creeks or rivers and many houses and roads are near streams, creeks, and rivers.
Sometimes things flood here. Certainly we had our share of flood struggles during the 15 years I lived on a small farm in a river valley. But this event was nothing we would have ever thought possible.
Our neighborhood and the whole Swannanoa Valley is in the purple zone of this map, where the chance of getting this amount of rainfall in 48 hours was once in 1000 years. Which maybe just means no one's ever seen anything like that and there's no precedent in history. Streets, neighborhoods, places have been wiped off the map. People had no chance to escape.
Schools are closed indefinitely. People are not even close to being able to go to work. We are focused on: Food. Water. Medication. Transportation. Hygiene. Who is alive. Who is missing. Who is dead. I feel like we are very much still in triage and cleanup hasn't even really begun.
Please keep paying attention and drawing attention if you are not from here. This is going to be a long haul.
I am so profoundly grateful for community and the way people are showing up for each other here. How can we find a way through this unfathomable experience?