Media Silence: N. Carolina Devastated by Deluge

Beth Trigg

16h ·

[[[ ]]] 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 neighborhood