'I Don't Think It's Sunk In': The Town Hurricane Helene Almost Wiped Off The Map

CHIMNEY ROCK VILLAGE, N.C. (AP) — The stone tower that gave this place its name was nearly a half billion years in the making — heated and thrust upward from deep in the Earth, then carved and eroded by wind and water.

But in just a few minutes, nature undid most of what it has taken humans a century and a quarter to build in the North Carolina mountain town of Chimney Rock.

“It feels like I was deployed, like, overnight and woke up in… a combat zone,” Iraq War veteran Chris Canada said as a massive twin-propped Chinook helicopter passed over his adopted hometown. “I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”

Nearly 400 miles (644 kilometers) from where Hurricane Helene made landfall Sept. 26 along Florida’s Big Bend, the hamlet of about 140 souls on the banks of the Broad River has been all but wiped from the map.

The backs of restaurants and gift shops that boasted riverfront balconies dangle ominously in mid-air. The Hickory Nut Brewery, opened when Rutherford County went “wet” and started serving alcohol about a decade ago, collapsed on Wednesday, nearly a week after the storm.

The buildings across Main Street, while still standing, are choked with several feet of reddish-brown muck. A sign on the Chimney Sweeps souvenir shop says, “We are open during construction.”

In another section of town, the houses that weren’t swept away perch precariously near the edge of a scoured riverbank. It is where the town’s only suspected death — an elderly woman who refused entreaties to evacuate — occurred.

“Literally, this river has moved,” village administrator Stephen Duncan said as he drove an Associated Press reporter through the dust-blown wreckage of Chimney Rock Village on Wednesday. “We saw a 1,000-year event. A geological event.”

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