Doris Towers awoke to the beeping of her husband’s dialysis machine early Friday morning, meaning it had lost power. Her neighbor’s Christmas lights, still up from last year, had gone out. Those were early hints of Helene’s destruction to come. She hadn’t known a storm was on the way.
Across the mountains in Swannanoa, Joe Dancy and Jenna Shaw got up before dawn to walk their dog and saw floodwaters creeping toward their house. An hour later, after climbing out a window and plunging into swelling waters, a National Guard soldier helped them to safety.
Before this scenic, rustic Great Smoky Mountains refuge turned into a trap few residents saw coming, there were signs of Hurricane Helene’s unthinkable potential. Two days before the storm deluged Appalachian hillsides, dire forecasts warned it could bring “life-threatening” floods to the mountains around Asheville after making landfall in Florida. In hindsight, one local emergency manager called the predictions "spot on, terrifyingly so."
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