Soul-searching and regret over unheeded warnings follow Helene's destruction

Before Hurricane Helene’s landfall last week, the National Weather Service began an all-out blitz to alert emergency planners, first responders and residents across the Southeast that the storm’s heavy rains and high winds could bring disaster hundreds of miles from the coast.

Warnings blared phrases such as “URGENT,” “life threatening” and “catastrophic” describing the impending perils as far inland as the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. Smartphones buzzed with repeated push alerts of flash floods and dangerous winds. States of emergency were declared from Florida to Virginia. And the weather service reached back to 1916 for a precedent, correctly predicting Helene would rank among the “most significant weather events” the Asheville, North Carolina, area had ever seen.

But the red flags and cataclysmic forecasts weren’t enough to prevent the still-rising death toll. The number has soared to at least 215 across six states. At least 72 of those were in hard-hit Asheville and surrounding Buncombe County from flash floods, mudslides, falling trees, crumbled roads and other calamities.

“Despite the dire, dire predictions, the impacts were probably even worse than we expected,” said Steve Wilkinson, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service’s regional office in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina.

“We reserve this strong language for only the worst situations,” he said. “But it’s hard to go out and tell people this is going to totally change the landscape of western North Carolina.”

As the region begins its long road to recovery, a task complicated by cut-off communities, a lack of running water and still-spotty cellphone service, the growing number of casualties has prompted soul-searching among devastated homeowners and officials alike about whether more could have been done to sound the alarms and respond in a mountainous region that’s not often in the path of hurricanes.

“It sounds stupid to say this, but I didn’t realize it would be like bombs going off,” Brenton Murrell said after surveying his Asheville neighborhood strewn with mud and debris, military Osprey aircraft whirring overhead. “It’s like a war zone.”

Like many residents interviewed by The Associated Press, Murrell had never experienced the effects of a hurricane and felt detached from the danger despite receiving numerous warnings of “extreme risk of loss of life and property.”

Murrell said those words never really scared him, in part because his neighbors had been talking for days about the last big flood two decades ago and offered mostly reassuring words that “if you’re not in a low-lying area, you’ll be fine.”

“There was some sort of disconnect,” said Murrell, who now regrets riding out the storm at home with his wife, two children and dog, even though they are all safe. “It’s human nature to not truly comprehend something until you’ve felt it yourself.”

Many residents said they had not grasped the magnitude of the storm until it was too late. For some, evacuating became impossible as fallen trees and surging floodwaters made roads and bridges impassable. The cascade of emergencies caught seemingly everyone off guard.

Sara Lavery, of Canton, said she received multiple alerts last Thursday before the worst of the storm had hit and was alarmed at how quickly “flood watches” on her phone progressed to “flood warnings.” Then she looked out at the Pigeon River near her home and got really scared.

“We saw a tree the size of telephone pole, a kitchen sink, a bedroom dresser,” she said. “It was terrifying.”

Still, she and her fiance decided to stay, partly because their home was on high ground, partly to leave the roads empty for others and help out endangered residents in lower areas.

“Some people don’t have a place to go, some don’t have a four-wheel vehicle to get out,” Lavery said. “People always say, ‘Why didn’t you evacuate?’ Not everyone can.”

“We never thought this would happen,” she said. “Western North Carolina is the mountains.”

As the storm swept through, Mia Taylor, of nearby Hendersonville, said she received alerts on her phone about the threat of floods “but some of us were kind of just like, ‘Oh, it’s not that serious.’”

She tried to drive to a nearby town to shelter with her grown children but found “every which way was blocked off.” She ended up turning around only for her car to shut off in the rising waters.

“You didn’t think that it was going to be this bad,” she said.

Lillian Govus, a Buncombe County spokesperson, said that has been a familiar refrain since the storm because no one alive in the area had seen anything approaching Helene’s destruction. She described the storm’s pre-dawn arrival last Friday as “insidious,” noting some residents were in bed and may not have heard the emergency alerts.

“Folks were trying to evacuate, but there was nowhere to go,” she said. “If there’s a landslide, it doesn’t matter how high you go.”

Wilkinson, the meteorologist, said forecasters knew many days before the storm that Helene would be catastrophic for western North Carolina and began notifying the emergency management community in briefings and presentations, focusing primarily on flooding and secondarily on wind. Surrounding mountain towns like Asheville, a city of some 95,000, were of particular concern because the communities were built in valleys.

An AP analysis of social media postings and cellphone alerts found more than dozen were sent by Buncombe County and the National Weather Service on Wednesday and Thursday alone. And the language used to convey the threat from Helene — “extremely rare event,” “prepare for a life-threatening storm,” “Act Now!” — became increasingly dire as authorities urged people to seek higher ground and evacuate in some cases. The most alarming ones said the destruction could be the worst in a century, referencing the “Great Flood of 1916” in which 80 people were killed.

In one of its repeated postings on the social platform X, Wilkinson’s staff pleaded with residents to take its warnings “very seriously” and have multiple means of receiving alerts.

“We made an attempt based on previous events, to hit our warnings well ahead of time,” Wilkinson told the AP, “so the alerts went out before the high wind hit. They kind of kept coming.”

The weather service’s rainfall and wind speed predictions largely held up, Wilkinson said, with some areas receiving more than 1 foot (0.3 meters) of rain. Mount Mitchell State Park recorded wind gusts at 106 mph (171 kph). The French Broad River Basin saw rivers topping their highest-ever crests by several feet, the weather service reported, adding Helene brought “likely the most severe flooding in recorded history across Buncombe County.” Trees and powerlines were downed while hundreds of homes and businesses were flooded. Large stretches of highways were submerged, and some roads and bridges were completely wiped out.

“The last time a storm like this hit was in the Book of Genesis when Noah had to build an ark,” said Zeb Smathers, the mayor of Canton, North Carolina.

Wilkinson said it might be impossible to know the number of people who didn’t heed the warnings or didn’t get them. Cellphone service is sometimes spotty in the mountainous region and may have gotten worse as the storm rolled in.

“I honestly believe we did everything we could have done,” he said. “It’s sad that we couldn’t do more, but we’re trying to recognize that what we did made some difference.”

In the aftermath of the storm, Wilkinson’s office posted an emotional letter on X thanking first responders and calling Helene “the worst event in our office’s history.”

“As meteorologists we always want to get the forecast right,” it said. “This is one we wanted to get wrong.”

___

Mustian and Condon reported from New York. Brittany Peterson in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and Christopher Keller in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed reporting.