An Insider's View of Helene from the NC Mountains

and how we got out

Hey everyone and welcome to another “running” article!

This article really isn’t much about running, to be honest. I just want to give an inside story of what Helene has done.

Whatever you have seen on the news…it’s worse than that.

Which is actually a rare occurrence.

For those of you that know us, Taylor and I live in Burnsville, North Carolina. A beautiful mountain town nestled just north of Asheville. One of the beauties is that we are also nestled in between 2 rivers that originate in our mountain range.

First of all, we are totally fine and our house is fine. We are out and with family.

But I wanted to take some time to give an order of events from our perspective, some of the info we learned, and the crazy weekend we had that can only be explained as a brief post-apocalyptic scenario…but with super kind and loving mountain folk.

Order of Events

Wednesday

Leading up to the storm, we obviously knew Helene was coming. We all knew we would have a chance of some minor flooding near river areas, but there was no real concern.

So to those naysayers…because I’ve seen some…not a lot…but some people say that people in Western NC should have evacuated:

I can assure you that not a single person or organization ever even mentioned the notion of evacuation. Nobody knew how disastrous this would end up being.

To make matters worse, we had a lot of rain Wednesday night and even lost power for a few hours. People were livid for the power loss because we were all out preparing for power loss on Thursday night.

But it came back on after a couple of hours and all was well.

Schools were officially canceled Thursday and Friday, but most people didn’t think it would be too bad. Our small group at church still planned to meet Thursday evening because rain wasn’t supposed to hit us until later that night anyways.

Thus, we went to sleep soundly.

Thursday

Thursday was a totally normal day.

Once again, nobody knew to evacuate or what the damage would end up being.

We were planning a nice weekend night Friday at our downtown hotel, the Nu Wray.

The reports were starting to get worse with possible flooding, but the keyword was still “possible.” We did end up canceling our small group because of that, but still, nobody we talked to was really worried.

Our brewery put out a notice that they would open late on Friday at like 2pm. So for all intents and purposes, we believed and we were prepped to lose power Thursday night, but we thought life would be back to normal by Friday evening.

So we went to sleep soundly.

Friday

Sometime around 5am I heard a large crack of thunder.

We rolled back over and went back to sleep.

Around 5:45am my alarm went off and my morning routine commenced. We still had power and it was raining, but not that hard.

After our morning routine and the sunrise we went outside to let the dogs out where we found a large tree had snapped at the top and landed in our newly planted grass.

But it was all God’s protection and an answer to prayer that it was only 10 feet from our house!

Something that many others couldn’t say…though we didn’t know that yet.

I almost went on my quality session run that morning, but my wife smartly didn’t let me. Little did I know that run would have been impossible…unless I wanted to turn it into a swim, but more on that later.

So we decided to do a morning workout in our home gym and go on with our day.

We didn’t see any other damage reports or anything online yet except for some flooding in Asheville.

Before our workouts we checked in with family and shared the crazy picture of our tree. They were all ok too.

Around 9am I checked in on work where my boss had also thoughtfully reached out via Slack and text to ensure we were ok.

I checked in, told them it was all good, no damage really. It wasn’t bad at all…

Then we lost power.

All was good, though! We knew power would go, we had fully charged phones, laptops, and a great hotspot. So we streamed Lord of the Rings and got to work for the day.

Then, around 9:30am we lost cell service.

This was the first unexpected thing to happen.

Ironically, the last text my dad sent me was: “Do ya still have power?”

I suppose no response is the response.

We waited around for a bit to see if power would come back and for the rain to stop. We ate some food, read, and did anything to pass the time.

Around 1 or 2 in the afternoon, the rain stopped and it turned into an absolutely gorgeous day.

We still didn’t know what happened…were we the only ones without cell service? Did other neighbors have issues? Did they have trees down?

Fortunately, all our neighbors were ok and even though many had trees down, all houses survived. We had one tree on our road that our amazing neighbor, Gerald, had already cut up and cleared!

When we got to the bottom of our hill, which touches 19E we saw a line of traffic…that’s odd?

We looked over to see our bridge at Jacks Creek rd, connecting to downtown Burnsville covered in debris, slowly being cleared.

Shoot…maybe this is worse than we thought…

Through asking many people we eventually found out that the river was rushing over the bridge, there was structural damage, a natural gas leak, and tons of debris including an entire pontoon boat!

We decided to go back home and wait an hour or so to check on the bridge again. At this point, we still figured downtown was fine, the vet was fine, and our Friday night at the Nu Wray and boarding the doggos was still the plan.

So we went home and worked on our scrap book that we’ve been putting off for almost a year now.

About an hour or so went by and we decided to check the road again. We also bumped into a neighbor who told us that our favorite park was “gone”... what does that mean? What does “gone” mean?

With traffic still backed up and many who said they’d been waiting for over 2 hours, we decided to go on a walk.

As we went we were able to inform tons of people about the bridge, many of whom were fleeing somewhere else, trying to get out, or get to Burnsville for who knows why. At the time it was strange…why are so many people fleeing? Was it really that bad?

We decided we had nothing much else to do so we continued on a nice long walk down the road to see that our park was not just “gone”... it was a lake. Every tree down…the park used to be unseen from the road, but now you could see all the way to the other end covered in water, 3 baseball fields gone, playground gone, dog park gone, concession building gone.

All that was left were the big flood lights you can see in the distance.

Woa. This is bad.

When we got back to our little hill we saw traffic flowing over the bridge! Hooray!

At this point, we still didn’t know how serious things were. Piecing it together, though, we figured the vet was already closed (since it was past 5pm) and we shouldn’t stay at the Nu Wray anyways. So we got in our car to drive downtown and tell them they could give our room away to those who needed it.

They were very thankful, although they were already giving rooms away because they had no idea what reservations were in place, haha!

Praise God, though, downtown Burnsville was safe and sound. Nu Wray was helping give out rooms and people seemed to be out socializing, consoling, etc.

There is one regret we had from this whole experience. Thursday night we didn’t fill up on gas.

We had less than a quarter tank. 

We did everything else…we had flashlights, lanterns, gas stoves for cooking, charcoal and smokers and cast iron skillets, drinking water, a bathtub filled with water, plenty of food and dog food and cat food. Many of that was God’s coincidental protection.

We didn’t know if we needed to leave yet, or how widespread the power outages were. So we took what gas we had and drove all the way into Weaverville, thinking a different county would have power back on and we could fill up our car.

They did not.

We knew Asheville was flooded so we turned around and went home, thinking surely things would be better in the morning.

So we got home, ate dinner, and went to sleep soundly.

Saturday

Again, Saturday was a gorgeous day. We got up, made some pancakes, eggs, bacon, and coffee with a french press.

Great morning!

We then spent the rest of the morning cleaning our home, tidying it up, and blowing leaves and debris off our deck.

Then we decided to go down the hill and see if we could learn something.

Anything.

Not being connected to the internet was surreal to say the least. 

Even little things like noticing how often I check my phone every time I get up. Not being able to watch something to unwind at night. All very strange.

Silence all the time. It truly felt like a post-apocalyptic movie. 

Not to mention different people riding around on ATV’s, dirt bike gangs, and side by sides. Mud all over roads…it was turning into mad max with kind and gentle mountain folk.

We have a small gas station about a quarter mile from our home before that bridge I mentioned yesterday. At this point, we wanted to be very careful with our car gas. We thought we had enough gas to get to Asheville, but who knew if there was more gas there. We did have a full tank in the motorcycle which we knew could get us on a scouting mission of at least 60 miles out and back.

But until we had more info, we needed to walk.

So we loaded up a backpack with water, first aid kit, food, etc just in case we or someone else needed any and headed out.

Our little gas station had opened the inside to sell food and water for cash only. Still no power anywhere in Burnsville.

I went into the gas station and made what I can only explain as a post-apocalyptic Facebook post. I stood in line and just asked the question “hey, has anyone heard any news on power or the surrounding areas?”

And one by one anyone with any new news spoke up, other people asked clarifying questions, and that was that.

From that conversation I learned that from East Tennessee to Marion nobody had power or cell service. Early reports said it could be 4-6 weeks to get power on!

Nah…Friday people thought surely we’d have power on by Monday. 4-6 weeks? That seems ridiculous.

We also learned that I40 East and West out of the mountains were closed, as well as I26 North and South. So we were stuck. No way in and no way out.

Dang…that’s wild!

At this point we went back home and continued working on our scrap book and ate lunch.

I believe along with hotdogs and bratwurst on the grill for lunch, we also went ahead and cooked up some salmon, burgers, and steak for dinner. I also used my old boy scout knowledge and cooked up some corn bread in a cast iron skillet over the open coals.

We also decided to turn the car radio on to see if we could hear any kind of local broadcast as to what’s going on.

Fortunately, we learned that there was in fact a local station giving a report at 4pm!

So we ate lunch, did some more scrapbooking, and waited until 4 to listen.

The main important things we learned from the broadcast were:

• Cell service would be out for several days

• I26 south to South Carolina was now open!

At this point, we were thinking maybe we should leave. There is a way out and during this whole event the main thing we wanted was to inform loved ones we were ok. We knew we would be fine at home, but family members were probably worried sick.

There were rumors during this whole event of different areas you could go to get service, but those were also all debunked by other neighbors that tried them. And we couldn’t risk wasting gas.

We knew we wanted to leave, but in order to leave, we really needed to find out where gas was. 

We started brainstorming because another rumor we heard in the gas station that morning was that as of 4am downtown Asheville had power.

So, we figured I could take the motorcycle Sunday morning into downtown Asheville to see if there was gas. If there was, I could come back, we could load up the car, go get gas, and get out of dodge.

But before doing that, we wanted to get as much info as possible. So, later that afternoon, we decided to walk downtown to see if they had power yet or info on getting gas.

Again, we wanted to conserve gas, and it was only a 2.5 mile walk into downtown. To be honest, it’s actually one of my normal running routes, so it wasn’t weird at all for me.

We got downtown and confirmed they didn’t have any power whatsoever. 

However, we did see something more delightful.

Community.

Dozens of people were in our town square, the different restaurants were all out smoking, grilling, and cooking what food they could to give to people. It was amazing to see such a strong community.

We had a lady actually walk up to us as we sat eating a snack to ask if we knew how to use a french press.

Yet another surreal thing. She hadn’t had coffee Friday or Saturday and a neighbor had an old french press, but neither she nor her neighbor knew how it worked. She couldn’t Google it, so she just decided to ask people until she found someone that knew.

Luckily, I live off coffee and know pretty much every way to make coffee, and because of that Taylor knows all the ins and outs of it too. We also learned from her that both of our fire departments were setting up shelters for people, that the bridge into the next town, Spruce Pine, was totally gone, and they were worried our bridge was sinking. 

If that happened, Burnsville would be cut off. They were trying to set up a field hospital just in case, but nobody knew if that would happen.

A little worried the bridge would be gone before we got home, we decided to book it home to eat dinner.

Don’t worry…the bridge was still there.

But when we got across, we saw something wild!

The gas station had power! There was a huge line of cars actually pumping gas! This is our chance!

I walked up to a gentleman pumping gas and asked how long the power had been on, how long he’d been waiting, and if it was worth it to try and get gas. At this point the line of cars was like a half-mile long.

He told me that even though they had a $40 limit (which many people broke), it was cash only, and he had been waiting an hour and when he showed up the line was not very long.

He also said he helped build the place and the tanks were tiny. So probably not worth trying.

So we weren’t sure it was worth it to sit in traffic for multiple hours with our car, potentially run out of gas waiting, and then not even be able to get gas. 

We also ran into one of our friends from church who just got gas, so he graciously drove us home. 

We ate dinner and debated/strategized getting gas. 

We finally decided to go down with our 2.5 gallon gas can and the $18 of cash we scrounged up. However, when we got to the bottom, the line was just as long. I considered cutting and trying to convince someone to let me fill up my little tank since I didn’t have the car, but we decided against it. We figured if power was on there, then maybe downtown got power within that 2 hour window we were walking back, and we could scout it out in the morning.

But all in all, we ultimately decided we needed to leave Burnsville.

It was actually a difficult decision in a way. We were safe, had food and water, and were able to help. But with no way to contact anyone we really didn’t know where, who, or how to help.

Our only problem was we needed gas.

But we had a plan and so we still slept soundly.

Sunday

Sunday we got up early, made some coffee and pancakes, and then I took off on the motorcycle to scout out gas stations.

I passed our little one at the bottom of our hill and the line was super short, but I had no idea if they had gas or how much they had if they did.

So I kept going downtown and the first gas station I saw had power, tons of pumps, and super short lines!

I didn’t want to waste any time, so I took a quick u-turn and went home to get Taylor and the car.

We took off to that gas station, got in line, and waited for a few minutes…but…we started to notice the line wasn’t moving. Uh oh.

I decided to get out and go see if I could figure out what was taking so long.

I went up to someone I figured was pumping gas to ask what was up…

He informed me that he had been there for over an hour waiting for someone to show up and open the gas station up. The gas station wasn’t even open and nobody was pumping gas at all.

Nobody was there to unlock the door, nobody knew who or where the owner or managers were, and nobody knew if they would ever show up. It was all just a hope.

But we did learn the shell on the other side of town was pumping gas and had been since the previous evening. We debated what to do, prayed for God’s wisdom, and took off for the shell.

It was total chaos…3 different lines coming in, people not moving when they could, and it was a standstill.

Finally, an employee hero saved the day and started getting traffic flowing.

And after 2 hours of waiting, worried because they were dangerously close to being out of gas, we made it to the pump! We got premium gas because regular gas was super low and we thankfully were able to use our credit card and get a full tank of gas!

Still have no idea how the credit card worked, but I’m thankful because even with only $18 of gas, we were not sure if we’d make it. But with a full tank we were committed to leaving!

After that, we went home, packed up, left a note on our neighbor’s porch telling them we were leaving, and headed through Asheville south into South Carolina.

As we went through Asheville, it was absolutely wild to see the devastation. So many of our favorite restaurants were just washed away. The greenway where we spent many date nights walking by the river was all under water.

But we made it out. 

We made it to I85 where we finally started getting service, were able to get in touch with family, and made it to Taylor’s family in Greensboro safe and sound. And I was even able to keep my 667 day Duolingo streak.

And so we slept soundly once again.

In Summary

We were so fortunate to sleep soundly every night, and I praise God for that. But I know so many in our community are not able to do that even now when I’m publishing this.

Someone posted this and it is so true…Western North Carolina is a lot more than just Asheville. 

Asheville was demolished, for sure.

But there are also so many of our little rural towns that are still blocked in, roads demolished or underwater, bridges gone, and the only way in and out is through helicopter. Meanwhile, they are also still without any service or communication to the outside world.

It will take months, if not years, to return to normalcy in the entire region.

Also…if a storm is coming, remember to fill up on gas.

Even in the midst of devastation, I believe running can still help reduce stress, fear, and help you process everything going on. And without service, a good long walk did wonders for our mental health.

So until next time, remember to run with joy!