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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.
Lake Lure on a post-Helene morning makes you appreciate the wild determination that allowed people to settle in a place like Hickory Nut Gorge in the first place.
“Is today Saturday?” asked Cara Brock, owner of the Lured Market & Grill. “I don’t remember what day we finally got here.”
State Trooper Jesse Saucier, who was guarding the checkpoint into town as dump trucks and construction crews rumbled past, confirmed that it was indeed Saturday—a full week since the people of this picturesque valley woke up to a geological-scale calamity. “It’s like Groundhog’s Day,” Brock said. “What are we gonna do today? Clean up and feed people!”
Helene dumped a Biblical amount of rain in the Broad River watershed, nearly two feet in some places. And in the steep, spectacularly beautiful confines of Hickory Nut Gorge, where the river drops several hundred feet on its way to Lake Lure, that much water didn’t simply flood the villages along the riverbank. It obliterated large stretches in a cascading fury of mud, rock, and debris.
For much of that first week, the outside world might as well have been a myth to the people of Lake Lure, Chimney Rock, Bat Cave, and the little hamlets tucked into the coves upriver. No power, no phones, no roads or bridges, no way to call for help. People went days without knowing if their friends were alive or dead, or if aid was coming.
But they didn’t spend those days waiting around. Everyone in town has a story of helping to rescue neighbors, pulling trees off ruined houses, building improvised creek crossings where smashed bridges used to be. “The first two days, the local people did so much to help,” said Eli Cotellese, who worked as a watersports instructor at Lake Lure Adventure Company. “They just showed up,” bearing supplies and whatever equipment they had on hand.
Rutherford County is a rural place, and a surprising number of civilians had Bobcats, backhoes, logging trucks, and generators lying around, forming a small army of local relief long before outside aid arrived.
Brock and her family lived in Bat Cave, a riverside crossroads that was only about 11 minutes up the road from Lake Lure, back when there was a road. It had taken her a few days to make it into town after Helene, and by then the Lured Market had already become a hub for people to gather and swap news, stories, supplies, and comfort.
“Anybody with a head on their shoulders becomes a therapist,” said Mark Helms, who has spent many of his days since Helene checking on neighbors and salvaging wrecked boats out of the lake. He owns the Lake Lure Adventure Company, which offers boat rentals, wakeboarding lessons, guided fishing trips—pretty much anything fun you can do on the water.
Before Helene, business was good. Lake Lure and Chimney Rock are tourist towns, with fewer than 2,000 year-round residents combined. They’re so quaint and charming that you almost forget the rock faces looming 2,000 feet above, the sheer ruggedness of this gorge carved deep into the Blue Ridge Escarpment. They were the kind of places where Harley-hauling bikers stood in line for ice cream next to leaf-peeping families who’d just finished a round of mini golf or gem mining. Before Helene, finding a parking space along the crowded, narrow main street counted as a harrowing ordeal.
No one has any idea when those idyllic days will return. But they want you to know—fiercely insist that you know—that these towns are coming back. “We’re going to rebuild,” said Nick Sottile, who owns an inn and a pizza shop, both now wrecked, in downtown Chimney Rock. “We’re a small town, but we’re a powerful town.”
“Tell the real story,” he added.
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Anxiety and an Information Crisis
In the days since the storm, the real story has had to compete with a torrent of rumor and dark speculation. Posts on Facebook and X racked up thousands of views with politically tinged outrage and ALL CAPS accusations of secret government meetings and plans to seize the ruined remains of Chimney Rock.
The federal government is taking all of the land and bulldozing the remaining buildings. Property is being confiscated so the whole gorge can be turned into a lithium mine. Dead bodies are piled up in the rubble, the true death toll hidden by callous officials and complicit rescue workers.
It was enough to prompt the Rutherford County government to issue a press release on October 3 offering their own capitalized rebuttal.
“NO GOVERNMENT SEIZURE OF CHIMNEY ROCK: There was no ‘special meeting’ held in Chimney Rock on October 2nd involving discussions of the federal, state, or local governments seizing the town. These claims are entirely false,” county officials wrote, explaining that local leaders met with state lawmakers and congressional staff to give an update on relief efforts and advocate for more aid. “Our focus is solely on recovery, safety, and providing support to those affected by the storm.” As of Tuesday, Rutherford County had reported three storm-related deaths and 44 active missing person investigations.
Late last week, an Asheville-based YouTuber named Mark Honeycutt managed to make it down the washed-out road to Bat Cave, then hike and boulder-hop his way nearly three miles into the closed-off section of downtown Chimney Rock. He asked weary law enforcement officers and construction workers to help debunk the rumors. “There’s not bodies in the road, no,” said a cheerful Bobcat operator named Logan, taking a break from clearing debris to try and clear away nonsense. “If you look around, you don’t see people getting robbed at gunpoint, either … It’s sad what happened and everything, but we’re gettin’ it, we’re fixing it.” In a matter of days, the 20-minute video was viewed more than three million times.
The whole conspiratorial swirl became its own national news story, with prominent coverage about the toll of misinformation and eroding trust in government. “A torrent of conspiracy theories, rumors, and lies threatens to undermine efforts to provide accurate information and crucial resources,” the New York Times reported, citing the Rutherford County controversy. “The sheer number of falsehoods has alarmed officials and experts.”
From the outside, it’s easy to dismiss rumors like these as typical internet crackpottery. But looking around the apocalyptic damage in Chimney Rock, imagining days spent without light, power, or any word from the outside world, the fear and anxiety are easier to understand.
Of course, there was no secret government meeting to divvy up the spoils of Hickory Nut Gorge. But in the months ahead, there will be meetings—lots of them—where outside experts and officials weigh the future of this beloved and fragile place.
Building inspectors will determine which structures can be salvaged and which are too unstable to save. Geologists and engineers will assess landslide threats and where it’s safe to rebuild. Insurance companies and banks will recalculate the risk they’re willing to finance along the banks of a newly wild Broad River. And state officials will have to figure out what kind of permanent roadway is viable on the steep, unstable outcroppings left along the riverbank.
Any one of those decisions can be life-altering for people who have already had their lives altered in sudden, violent fashion. “People are worried they won’t be able to come home,” said Lynette Staton, picking through the ruins of her vintage store in Bat Cave. “You’ve got old-timers who have lived here for ages, and no one knows whether they’ll be able to come back. No matter what happens, it’s never going to be the same.”
‘It’s Not the Same Place Anymore’
Back in Lake Lure, Mark Helms was working through the same grief, the dawning realization that whatever comes next will have to be different. “In Chimney Rock and Bat Cave, you’ve got people whose land is now in the river,” Helms said. “It’s not the same river anymore. It’s not the same place anymore. And we’ve got to decide what Chimney Rock is going to become.”
Working out a fair and healthy way to share those decisions, and give back some agency to people who’ve been battered by an act of God, is a critical aspect of disaster recovery. Caela O’Connell, an environmental anthropologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, studies how different communities bounce back from natural catastrophes—or fail to.
She said there’s a well-founded fear of outsiders making decisions about rebuilding while overlooking what local communities actually want. “Helping people make informed decisions is really important, so you need expertise and coordination,” O’Connell explained. “But we have so many studies and so much evidence that says when outside ideas are imposed, even with the best intentions, a lot of people leave and recovery is stunted. There’s a big risk in that.”
The fear that people will leave, that the homes, restaurants, and human geography of a place will change even more profoundly than they already have, runs deep in hard-hit towns. After the ground under your feet has literally fallen away, it’s natural to worry about what comes next.
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” said Staton, hunting through thick muck and smashed cinder blocks in search of things to save. “If I could, I would build back. But I just don’t know.”
As evening settled over Lured Market, and volunteers served heaping plates of lasagna to anyone who ambled over, Alex Vaughn looked around and noted with satisfaction that the crowd had grown in the days since the storm.
“Every day, things get a little bit better,” said Vaughn, who recently left his job as an engineer at Amazon to move back home to Lake Lure and open a taproom along the river. “I quit my job and put all of my money into a bar that washed away, so that’s great.”
Then, looking toward the Lured Market patio where a band would normally be setting up on Saturday night, he said suddenly, “We have got to get some live music back in here. Remind people that they don’t want to move away, remind people what was fun about this place. Everyone just standing around crying and eating all day is not super fun.”
That’s the right instinct, said UNC’s O’Connell. Sometimes the key institution in a town is the biggest church, or the chamber of commerce, or a major employer. Sometimes it’s the bar and grill where everyone comes to hear lakeside tunes. The point is that people need to gather, need to see that some semblance of normal life will return.
“It is those connections, an impossible-to-measure piece of resilience in communities, that are incredibly important,” O’Connell said. “When we look at communities that are able to recover, it’s their relationships with one another that often bridge these other things that are so hard to deal with.”
With the sun dipping behind the mountains and the construction crews headed out for the day, Vaugh and Helms decided it was time to head into town. The police checkpoints got more relaxed as the day quieted down, and the two men gathered some friends and drove down a mud-caked track toward Chimney Rock. They passed the half-collapsed Bubba O’Leary’s General Store and the stone towers that are now all that’s left of the bridge into Chimney Rock State Park. Just past the center of town, they pulled into an empty parking lot that should have been packed on a gorgeous fall evening.
A van full of Mennonite volunteer workers pulled up, and a flock of bonneted women and neatly bearded men stepped out to marvel at the scene. The gorgeous rock walls above, the ruined town below. At the edge of the parking lot, where there had once been a road lined with the Village Scoop ice cream shop, the Chimney Rock Brewing Company, Michael’s Sportswear, and a great Mexican restaurant with riverview seating, there was now a 25-foot mud cliff into boulder-strewn, fast-rushing water.
Helms opened a beer, pulled out a guitar, and settled onto the tailgate of his truck, looking upstream toward the roadless wilderness the Broad River had gouged back into the gorge. “It looks like Montana,” he said. Nothing like the old, peaceful Appalachian stream that was here before. “It’s actually really beautiful.”
Jesse Barber contributed reporting.
Eric Johnson is a writer in Chapel Hill. He has three kids, a patient wife, and assorted jobs with the University of North Carolina and the College Board. You can reach him at ericjohnson.unc@gmail.com.