'Take action now': Inside the race to alert residents of Helene's wrath

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — If she had known the rivers would swallow whole towns and neighbors would be swept away, Lindsey Miller would have better prepared – or left her home altogether.

Her home near Boone, North Carolina, survived but there was no power, cell service or water. Some neighbors filled buckets from a nearby river to flush toilets and washed children with bottled water. 

Miller recalled hearing the ping of emergency phone warnings early on the morning of Sept. 27, just hours before the water rushed in. By then it was too late.

“We knew there was a storm coming, but we didn’t know it was going to be quite like that,” she said. “We really weren’t prepared at all.” 

As rescue teams combed rivers and towns for victims or survivors of the massive floods triggered by remnants of Hurricane Helene, communities grappled with the scope of devastation from the storm that caught many by surprise. The death toll across the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia as of Thursday afternoon was at 200 and expected to climb. In Buncombe County, North Carolina, the epicenter of the devastation that includes Asheville, officials so far have counted at least 72 dead.

Interviews with residents, experts, meteorologists and local officials paint a picture of a storm rapidly intensifying, barreling farther inland than usual with stunning ferocity. Authorities are just beginning the process of scrutinizing the alert systems that warned some but not all residents of the incoming catastrophic floods, and how systems could improve.

The historic disaster presented unique challenges for emergency officials trying to evacuate and safeguard residents in a mountainous region assailed by multiple floods and tropical-storm winds. Residents from Tennessee to North Carolina complained they weren’t given enough warning – or any warning at all – of the floodwaters that overtook their homes and the dams nearing their breaking points.

“There was no warning,” said Sunday Greer, a high school counselor at Sullivan East High School in Bluff City, Tennessee. “Basically, we did not receive anything officially.”

The emergency planning and response to the floods, from forecasts to evacuations, will be studied in the weeks and months ahead, said Russ Strickland, Maryland’s emergency management director and president of the National Emergency Management Association.

“This one came with greater strength than they anticipated,” he said. “Before it’s all over, there will be some very serious conversations with NOAA, the forecast office of NHC, state officials. Did they miss something? Was there an indication?”

Hurricanes, tornadoes, snow and heat: Sign up for USA TODAY's Climate Point newsletter for exclusive weather analysis.

Dire early warnings

As Helene gathered strength in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Buncombe County officials began taking phone calls from meteorologists as they tracked the storm's path and intensity.

Helene was several days away from making landfall near Florida’s Big Bend. But a cold front had recently swept through western North Carolina, unleashing storms and dumping more than six inches of rain in the mountainous region, swelling streams and saturating the ground. Helene was a large, strong, fast-moving storm – heading right at them and promising to dump more water.

Related:Maps track Hurricane Helene's 800-mile path of destruction across southeastern US

The situation looked so dire that by Wednesday, Sept. 26, Buncombe County officials declared a local state of emergency for low-lying areas, such as Asheville and Montreat, the county’s director of communication, Lillian Govus, told USA TODAY.

Later that day, they stood up an Emergency Operations Center in the county emergency services building just north of Asheville. County manager Avril Pinder, Assistant Emergency Services Director Ryan Cole and law enforcement and fire officials, among others, gathered to digest the data and forecasts and decide what to do with all of it. 

“CATASTROPHIC FLASH FLOODING POSSIBLE,” warned a post on the Buncombe County Facebook site that day, repeating the warning in Spanish for its nearly 22,000 Latino residents.

No evacuations were ordered.

‘This is really about to get bad’

Around the same time, Clay Chaney, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Forecast Office in Greer, South Carolina, settled into his workspace and began tracking Helene’s activity in the Gulf. Responsible for upstate South Carolina, western North Carolina and parts of Georgia, Chaney sensed mountain flooding would be the biggest threat to his region.

He was all too aware of the thunderstorms raking the region. Known as “predecessor events,” the storm created dangerous conditions for Helene’s path. A hydrologist in his office mulled over river gauge readings and other data to forecast flood threats.

By Tuesday, Sept. 24, Chaney and others began holding daily webinars, hour-long virtual chats with local and state emergency management officials in his region, including Buncombe County. At 3:30 p.m., more than 230 people dialed in, as Chaney talked through a series of slides showing Helene’s path, wind speed and the potential of severe flooding as it reached the Appalachian range.

Low-lying areas needed to be ready for “worst-case scenarios,” he told those on the call. Chaney patiently answered questions as the webinar stretched to nearly an hour.

The next morning, Wednesday, Sept. 25, Chaney reached his office and his heart sank – the rainfall totals from the earlier thunderstorms were as high as feared, up to 9 inches in some places. Fresh rains could create historic floods, he and others predicted. That day, rain from Helene’s outer bands began dropping in the region.

“We were like, ‘Oh crap, this is really about to get bad,” he said.

Rivers rise to historic highs

At the Sept. 25 webinar with emergency officials, Chaney stepped up the rhetoric, comparing the upcoming floods to those of the “Great Flood of 1916,” a deluge that overran towns, killed at least 80 people in Buncombe County and destroyed homes, factories and railroads.

His office also released posts on social media sites with dire predictions. 

“*URGENT MESSAGE*,” it began. “This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era. Record flooding is forecasted and has been compared to the floods of 1916 in the Asheville area.” 

The post added: “We cannot stress the significance of this event enough. Heed all evacuation orders from your local Emergency Managers …”

Throughout the region, river gauges were heralding unprecedented rises and forecasting historic highs. The gauge at French Broad River at Asheville showed the river rise more than 2 feet an hour, from 2.31 feet at 3 p.m. Wednesday to 10.19 feet at 9 a.m. Thursday.

“By Thursday, we’re pretty much forecasting the worst-case scenario,” Chaney said, “and letting our partners know about it.”

Not everyone was tuned in to the impending storm. Denia Zuniga, 44, a native of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, living about 10 miles east of Asheville in Swannanoa, had worked back-to-back shifts cleaning homes and had not been following the news.

As she left work late Thursday, a co-worker told her a hurricane was coming, but didn't say where. She didn't think much of it.

That night, it rained but otherwise nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She fed her kids, Estefany, 10, and Anthony, 18, and went to sleep with husband, Pedro Rivera Hernandez, 43, also from Honduras.

Her smartphone never rang with alerts.

‘Take action now’

In Buncombe County, officials were heeding forecasters' warnings.

At 4 p.m. Thursday, officials from Buncombe and Henderson counties, as well as the North Carolina Highway Patrol, held a virtual news conference over Zoom, broadcast over several official social media sites, to warn residents of the forecast of “catastrophic” and “historic” flooding and suggested, for the first time, that residents in flood-prone areas should evacuate.  

Pinder, the county manager, warned an estimated 15,000 homes in flood-prone areas could be impacted by flooding.

“We cannot stress enough the seriousness of this situation,” she said. “If you live in a flood prone area … you should take action now – right now.”

As Helene’s outer bands strummed into western North Carolina late Thursday and early Friday, dumping rain over the region, rivers swelled, quickly overflowing in some areas. At about 4 a.m., lights started to flick off across the county, as power outages swept the region.

Emergency personnel reported rivers in Buncombe County overtaking their banks and rushing down roads.

‘Niagara Falls for five hours straight’

At 5:30 a.m. Friday, Sept. 27, Chaney dispatched an urgent warning to Buncombe County: “FLASH FLOOD EMERGENCY FOR SWANNANOA RIVER VALLEY BELOW NORTH FORK RESERVOIR …” 

The message buzzed cell phones throughout the county as Wireless Emergency Alerts, the same alerts that warn residents of incoming tornados.

Forty-five minutes later, at 6:15 a.m., Buncombe County issued its own emergency warning: a mandatory evacuation order that beeped into phones via the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, FEMA’s system for local emergencies. The county didn’t need approval from the state to order the mandatory evacuation, Govus said.

But at that point, it was too late to get out, Chaney said.

“By the time you get a flash flood emergency, it’s way too late to evacuate,” he said. “At that point, your only option is to go to higher ground.”

Zuniga woke up early Friday morning as winds pounded the walls of her home. She peeked outside and saw a thin layer of water covering the yard and street outside. She shook her husband awake and checked her phone: No signal.

By the time she threw on clothes and stepped outside to warn a neighbor, the water had risen nearly to her knees, she said. Everywhere she looked, water rushed around her. It was time to go, she thought.

She grabbed her kids and their passports and Hernandez drove them off in his truck. Within a few hours, floodwaters had completely swallowed their home. The water rushed up so fast that many of her neighbors were trapped in their homes and had to be rescued, Zuniga said.

"We lost everything," she said later at a shelter where she and her family retreated to in nearby Fletcher. "Everything we owned was in that house."

She wished she'd had an earlier warning.

"We would've evacuated," Zuniga said. "Knowing what was coming, we would've left."

All that Friday, walls of muddied water rushed down roads and highways, tossing houses off foundations, mauling bridges and sweeping residents into the torrent.

By afternoon, the French Broad River at Asheville had crested at 24.67 feet, breaking its record from the 1916 flood by more than a foot, according to NOAA. Another French Broad River gauge at Fletcher, marked its crest at 30.31 feet – more than 10 feet higher than its record crest in 2004.

Govus said they relied on river readings to decide when to evacuate. But the sheer scope and destructive force of the floods took everyone by surprise.

“It was like being hit by Niagara Falls for five hours straight,” she said.

‘Nowhere to get out of the way’

As other communities dug themselves out of the flood’s rubble, other residents and officials complained they weren’t given enough warning.

In East Tennessee, dams owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider, provided a critical mechanism for slowing the flow of Helene’s historic floodwaters as they tore down mountains across the state line.

Flooding upstream of the dams was devastating in some places, prompting a dramatic airlift evacuation of 62 people from a hospital rooftop in Unicoi County. The Nolichucky River, which turned the hospital into an island, flowed with nearly twice the volume of Niagara Falls over a small TVA dam downstream.

Eleven flooding deaths were confirmed in Tennessee by Oct. 2, and officials expected the number to grow. 

By the time the first flash flood emergency warnings buzzed into Kriston Hicks' phone at 9:20 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 27, the water already had muscled into her home in Hampton, Tennessee, that she shared with her 78-year-old grandfather and six dogs.

Deciding to evacuate, she waded through water to retrieve her grandfather and carry him to her van.

“No one came to tell me," Hicks said. "There is no siren in Hampton."

Though her home was destroyed by the flood and torn down on Wednesday, Hicks was reunited with four dogs.

Other residents received the alerts – but didn't heed them. In Erwin, Tennessee, Zully Manzanares saw the warnings that began the night of Sept. 26, but didn’t grasp the scope of the disaster headed her way.

“We've gotten them before," she said.

But she never thought the warnings would lead to the devastation she saw.

Manzanares, a Head Start program coordinator and bilingual Spanish speaker, helps immigrants in Erwin's Hispanic neighborhoods. At least three members of the community who worked at the Impact Plastics on the Nolichucky River have been confirmed dead or missing.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has opened an investigation into the incident, including allegations that employees were told to stay at work during the floods. The company has denied the allegations.

The flooding continued beyond the dams, too. Some downstream residents, like Greer, the Bluff City high school counselor, said they were not warned of continued flooding as the utility released record amounts of water through spill gates.

“They're … saying they've got to prepare for the next storm,” Greer said. “They didn't prepare for the first storm.”

On Thursday, Sept. 26, the day before the floods, Watauga County, North Carolina, officially declared a state of emergency. County officials sent out wireless alert warnings via cell phones, but with cell phone service down, many of those alerts never reached phones, said William Holt, the county’s emergency services director. 

As Helene approached and conditions deteriorated, Holt said emergency officials struggled with where residents could be safely evacuated – if there was such a route. An initial city shelter flooded and had to be moved, he said. Two people in the area died in landslides.

“The last thing we would want to do is to move someone from one area to another just to put them in harm's way,” he said, and added: “There was nowhere to get out of the way in this type of event.” 

Jervis and Kenning reported from North Carolina, Dassow reported from Tennessee. Reach Jervis on X: @MrRJervis.