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The Assembly is putting storm coverage outside of our paywall and making it free to republish in any local or regional outlet.
The creek rose fast once Helene hit—first four feet, then five. Twenty-three-year-old Abby Winkler had seen all she needed to before jumping in her brother’s truck Friday morning. Her family’s home sits at the back of the property, farther from the quickly rising creek than the other homes on her street. She headed out into the storm, hoping to convince her neighbors to come with her.
The mountain community of Meat Camp, about 10 miles north of Boone, was quickly becoming a scene of devastation. Floods, landslides, and sinkholes swept across the rural community of 2,300.
The Winklers had seen the creek rise to the road in previous storms, but nothing like this. It had been raining for three days before the worst of the storm hit Western North Carolina and the water consumed their yard and neighbors’ homes. By Friday morning, Abby Winkler said, she couldn’t watch any longer.
“My brother’s girlfriend looked out the window at the water and she said, if you’re going, you have to go now,” the Meat Camp native said.
Alone and plowing through the rising flood, she drove to her neighbors’ homes. She pleaded with one to evacuate.
“I looked at him and I said, listen, we can’t stop the water. It’s coming,” said Abby Winkler, a social worker in the area. Convinced to leave his home and belongings, he climbed in the truck with her.
Kristin Farmer and her baby were among the passengers on her first trip. She drove less than a half mile through more than three feet of water to get back to her house.
She returned into the raging storm for more people, this time accompanied by Farmer. “You guys have to run,” she said she told her neighbors. “I drove as fast as I could and I could feel the truck shifting underneath me.”
Gina Winkler watched her daughter arrive home around 10 a.m. with the second group of evacuees. “We were thinking she’s not going to make it,” the mother of four said. “But she made it through. I was never so happy.”
The Winkler house, where the four siblings and parents all live, became a refuge for some. Seven neighbors and their pets, plus seven Winkler family members, safely rode out the storm there.
Will Winstead said when the creek reached his front steps, he knew he needed to leave his brick home. The 2020 Appalachian State grad decided to evacuate when Abby Winkler knocked on his door.
He said the community is in disbelief.
“No one has seen anything like this,” Winstead said. “Some folks have all been here their whole lives. Some of them 60, 70 years and they just never seen anything close to it.”
The Winkler sons, Tyler and Caleb, serve as firefighters in the Meat Camp Fire Department. They were at the fire department during the storm. The firefighters trained for disaster response, but Helene was unprecedented. It was “chaotic,” Tyler Winkler recalled.
Since the storm, they have spent long hours at the firehouse, their days full with search and rescues, wellness checks, distributing supplies, and recovering bodies of people who died in the storm.
“It’s just catastrophic, there’s no other way to describe it,” Tyler Winkler said. “It’s nothing that you can put into words. It’s the once in a century flood our grandparents told about or something like that.”
Meat Camp resident and Appalachian State student Daniel Schweppe lost his home to the flood. He said he and his roommate narrowly escaped with a few belongings, driving to a friend’s apartment in downtown Boone before the creek’s surge filled their home and eviscerated everything inside. Their home was near Howard’s Creek, one of the Meat Camp areas most devastated by the storm.
“I feel like I ought to shed a tear, but it’s all been numb,” Schweppe said.
The roommates returned to what was left of their home on Saturday. Climbing over rotten logs and soaked debris to access the house, Schweppe stood in front of the ruined structure. “And then I realized our neighbor’s house was gone,” Schweppe said. His next-door neighbors were out of town when a landslide hit, he said. The landslide missed Schweppe’s home.
Others on Schweppe’s road did not survive. A landslide early Friday morning annihilated a family home, killing people inside, including a young child. Two neighbors who asked not to be named said they saw the fire department recover the bodies. The fire department declined to comment.
The two neighbors pointed out a pile of debris that they said was once the home, now lying at the foot of the mountain. A child’s teddy bear was among the wreckage, soaked in floodwater and mud.
“People have told me that, ‘Oh, we’re so lucky or fortunate, or whatever,’” Schweppe said. “It’s not fair that we were ‘fortunate’ and other people, like our neighbors, lost their lives.”
Plots where homes had stood lay bare under the gray Appalachian sky. Meat Camp Creek bore scars of the flood, with tangled branches, home appliances, furniture, clothing, and debris strewn on its banks.
“We watched the creek turn into a literal river,” Gina Winkler, Abby’s mother, said this week as she watched as ATVs weave around car-sized potholes near her property, hauling water to homes up the mountain.
Now, Meat Camp residents, mostly families and a few college students, are left to pick up the pieces of their community.
From Boone, there is only one road in and out of Meat Camp. But after the storm, the bridges and the roads were impassable. So one neighbor used his personal excavator to make the road and two bridges passable in a single day, Gina Winkler said.
“I’ve seen neighbors I didn’t even know we had,” she said.
The road to rebuilding will be years long until infrastructure and homes in rural North Carolina are fully repaired, said Richard Hardin of Episcopal Relief and Development.
“Just love our community,” Tyler Winkler said. “That’s all we can do right now.”
Ella Adams is a Boone-based journalist and editor for The Appalachian. She is an undergraduate anthropology student at Appalachian State University. Her work includes long-form features, narrative journalism, and ethnographic journalism.
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