The forgotten disaster in the mountains of North Carolina
I called a lumber mill in Asheville, North Carolina, over the weekend to ask about buying wood for board and batten siding.
It’s for a house in a town about an hour west of Asheville that my son is inheriting from his father.
In a stroke of bad luck, we finally got access to the house after a year only to find it flooded and completely ruined from broken water pipes…two days before Hurricane Helene swept up into the mountains of North Carolina and washed out whole towns, destroyed acres of forest and caused Biblical levels of destruction.
When I called yesterday, it was just to see if by chance the lumber mill was open.
The guy who answered just started talking. And what he told me really stunned me.
No, he’s not back open yet, he said. He and his crew have taken their equipment and are working 10 hours a day to clear an eight-acre debris field.
He said it’s eight acres piled high with cars, houses, building debris, bodies and trees all mashed together. The cars, he says, are crushed so completely that you can hardly tell the make and model.
“But what crushed them?” I ask.
The debris flow.
The incredible flow of water carrying this massive amount of debris washed out 200 acres of trees.
He described the landscape as totally changed, with beautiful clear water now where streams had been muddy, as the organic material has all been swept away.
The change is so dramatic that it doesn’t look like western North Carolina anymore, he says. It looks like Montana. There’s that much open sky all of a sudden.
It had never looked like that before.
The day after the storm, he and his son put on rucksacks and hiked for 15 miles to get to the camp, near the lumber yard. They brought supplies to give to anyone they might find who was hungry or thirsty, but most people they found had what they needed. One guy really wanted a beer and he said they had a tall-boy with them and gave it to him. (Or maybe he was kidding, because that seems a really long way to carry a can of beer in a rucksack.)
I felt bad asking about the wood for the board and batten. But I did. He recommended red oak, and said maybe he would be open in a few weeks and able to supply the wood in six weeks. He gave me a lot of details about how to do the board and batten — so many that I was starting to think it was a more complicated job than the guy I’d been talking to was up for. Did he have any carpenters he’d recommend? No, probably not, he said. The only carpenters in the area he’d recommend will be busy for a long time cleaning up the debris fields, clearing roads, helping people in the Asheville area put their houses back together. It will take many months, or longer. The ones who aren’t busy doing that he wouldn’t recommend.
I can’t help but think how strange it is that this destruction should be visited on the mountains of North Carolina, an area people see as safe — out of reach of the corrupting influence of the cities, distant enough from the centers of power that in the event of societal breakdown, life will carry on as usual, and high enough up in the hills that in the event of a hurricane or flood, these people living up in the mountains will for sure be safe.
Only, this time they weren’t.
Today at noon, President Donald Trump was in Asheville doing an outdoor press conference with several business owners from the area.
One of them thanked Trump for coming saying: “We need that shot of hope in the arm. We need to know we’re going to be OK, and not forgotten.”
We shouldn’t forget them.
https://americasvoice.news/?acpage=1158
