Chimney Rock: Town in North Carolina that was almost destroyed by Hurricane Helene

CHIMNEY ROCK VILLAGE, N.C. (AP) — The stone tower that gave this place its name took nearly half a billion years to form — heated and pushed up from deep in the earth, then carved and eroded by wind and water.

But in just a few minutes in the North Carolina mountain town of Chimney Rock, nature destroyed most of what had taken humans a century and a half to accomplish.

“It feels like I've been deployed overnight and woke up in … a combat zone,” Iraq War veteran Chris Canada said as a huge twin-propeller Chinook helicopter flew over his adopted hometown. “I don’t think it’s arrived yet.”

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

The backs of restaurants and souvenir shops that had riverfront balconies dangle menacingly in the air. The Hickory Nut Brewery, which opened when Rutherford County went “wet” and began serving alcohol about a decade ago, collapsed Wednesday, nearly a week after the storm.

The buildings on the other side of Main Street, while still standing, are clogged with meters of reddish-brown dirt. A sign at the Chimney Sweeps gift shop reads: “We are open during construction.”

In another part of the city, the houses that weren't washed away sit precariously on the edge of a washed-out river bank. This is where the city's only suspected death occurred – an elderly woman who refused requests to evacuate.

“This river has literally moved,” said Village Administrator Stephen Duncan as he drove an Associated Press reporter through the dusty rubble of Chimney Rock Village on Wednesday. “We saw a 1,000-year event. A geological event.”

A huge wall of water hits Chimney Rock hours after making landfall in Florida

About eight hours after Helene landed in Florida, Chimney Rock volunteer firefighter John Payne was responding to a possible gas leak when he noticed water pouring over US 64/74, the main road into town. It was just after 7 a.m

“The actual hurricane hadn’t even come through and hit yet,” he said.

Payne, 32, who has lived in the valley his entire life, abandoned the call and rushed back up the hill to the fire station, which was moved to higher ground after a devastating flood in 1996. Former Chief Joseph “Buck” Meliski, who worked during the earlier flood, scoffed.

“There’s no way it’s coming this early,” Payne remembered the older man saying.

But when Payne showed him a video he had just shot of water flooding the bridge to Hickory Nut Falls Family Campground, the former chief's jaw dropped.

“We're in, boys,” Meliski said to Payne and the half-dozen others gathered there.

Suddenly the ground beneath them began to shake – like the tremors that sometimes shake the valley, only much stronger. At this point, muddy water was seeping under the back wall of the firehouse.

Payne looked down and saw what he estimated was a 30-foot-tall (nine-meter-tall) wall of water throwing car-sized boulders as it raced toward the city. It seemed as if the wave was swallowing houses and then spitting them out again.

“It’s not water at this point,” Payne said. “It's mud, this thick, concrete-like material, you know what I mean? And whatever it hits, it takes time.”

A house crashed into the bridge from which he had filmed less than 20 minutes earlier. The margin simply “imploded”. Payne later discovered that the steel beams were “curved around boulders in a horseshoe shape.”

At the firehouse, some business owners in the group were “crying hysterically,” Payne said. Others simply stood there in disbelief.

The volunteers lost communications during the storm. But when the wind finally died down around 11 a.m., Payne said, the radios began “flooding with calls.”

Scenic Lake Lure turns into a wet rubble pit

The portions of the former Chimney Rock Village were now on the way to the neighboring town of Lake Lure, which starred as a stand-in for a Catskills resort in Patrick Swayze's 1987 summer romantic film “Dirty Dancing.”

Tracy Stevens, 55, a bartender at the Hickory Nut, fled to the Lake Lure Inn, where she also worked. She watched as debris from Chimney Rock and beyond poured into the marina, tossing boats aside and pushing up the metal pieces of the floating Town Center Walkway like the folds of a map.

“It looked like a toilet flushing,” she said. “I could see cars and rooftops. It was the craziest thing.”

Some of the debris coalesced into a massive traffic jam between the two bridges that connected the cities – a utilitarian concrete structure carrying Memorial Highway over the Broad River and an elegant three-arch bridge known as the Flowering Bridge.

After 85 years of carrying traffic to Chimney Rock, the 1925 viaduct was transformed into a green walkway with more than 2,000 species of plants. The remains of the now partially collapsed bridge are surrounded by a tangled mess of vines, roots and branches.

Some residents see signs of hope in the face of the near-total destruction of their city

The 43-year-old Canadian, co-owner of a stage rental and event production company, was at a music festival in Charlotte when the storm struck. The return to uniformed troops and armored personnel carriers kicking up dust on the streets brought back memories of his three combat tours in the Middle East.

“I lived through the whole war and experienced a lot of hurricanes,” said Canada, a U.S. Army airborne veteran. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Canada and his wife Barbie moved here from South Carolina with their two daughters in October 2021, partly to escape the hurricanes. Barbie had vacationed here as a child and it was near the Veterans Administration Hospital in Asheville.

As Chris Canada walked along the banks of the Broad on Wednesday, he sniffed the warm air for the telltale smell of death.

And yet signs of hope can be seen everywhere.

Payne – who climbs the rock in full gear every year on September 11th to honor the first responders who died in the attacks on the Twin Towers – was heartened to see members of the New York City Fire Department in his city assisting House searches helped.

“We are tougher than these rocks,” said Payne, who works full-time as a location coordinator for a fast-food chain. “So it will take more than that to deter and drive us away. It'll take a while, but we'll be back. Don’t count us out.”

Outside the Mountain Traders store, someone has leaned a large wooden Sasquatch cutout against a utility pole with the words “Chimney Rock Strong” painted on it in bright blue.

As park workers made their way to the top of the mountain Monday and raised the American flag, people below cheered and some cried, according to Duncan.

“It was spectacular,” he said.

The mayor says his small town has the courage and determination needed to rebuild

The flag flies at half-staff. But Mayor Peter O'Leary said it's that spirit that will bring back Chimney Rock Village.

The town's legacy of hospitality and entrepreneurship dates back to the late 19th century, when a local family began charging visitors 25 cents for a horseback ride up the mountain, according to a brief online history by villager RJ Wald. It soon became one of North Carolina's first true tourist attractions.

O'Leary came to the city in 1990 to take a job as park manager before the park became part of the state park system. Two years later, he and his wife opened Bubba O'Leary's General Store, named after their yellow Labrador retriever.

“If you look around, most of these people here are from somewhere else,” he said as he stood in front of the firehouse, from which water gushes from the 400-foot-high Hickory Nut Falls ridge high above. “Why did they come here? They came here and fell in love with it. It grabs you. …

“It got to me.”

The 1927 portion of the general store has collapsed, but O'Leary believes the larger 2009 addition can be saved. Duncan, who drafted the village charter back in 1990, sees it as an opportunity to “take advantage of the new geography” and build a better city.

But for some, like innkeeper and restaurateur Nick Sottile, 35, the path forward is difficult to see.

When Helene struck, Sottile and his wife Kristen were vacationing in the Turks and Caicos Islands — their first break since October 2020, when they opened their Broad River Inn and Stagecoach Pizza Kitchen in what is believed to be the village's oldest building.

In photos taken from the street, things looked remarkably intact. But when Sottile returned home and walked to the riverbank, his heart sank.

“The back of the building is kind of completely gone,” the South Florida native said Friday. “It’s not even safe to go in there right now.”

All that remains of the adjacent Chimney Rock Adventure mini golf course is the sign.

“You can’t even rebuild,” Sottile said. “Because there is no country.”

Sottile has heard horror stories from other business owners about denied insurance claims. Without help, he said, he would have no money to rebuild.

But at the moment he's just volunteering with the fire department and trying not to think too far into the future.

“This is a small town, but this is HOME,” he said. “Everyone helps everyone and I know we will get through this. I know we will rebuild. I just pray that we can rebuild with the United States here to see.”

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AP National Writer Tim Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.