FAIRVIEW, N.C. — Before Hurricane Helene last September, Stuart and Jackie Pacheo's home was wedged between the highway and a small creek in this town just outside Asheville.
"We're standing in what used to be the living room," says Mr. Pacheo, "The kitchen was behind you, a fireplace to the left. And this is where we spent the majority of our time right here."
Now, if you look closely, you can see the home foundation covered with mud. The couple lived here for 30 years, next to Mrs. Pacheo's mother, whose house is damaged, but still standing.
"This whole property was trees, trees, trees, trees," says Mrs. Pacheo looking around her property still in disbelief eight months after the storm hit on September 27. "And you see, there's just these few left."
As the Atlantic hurricane season begins, meteorologists are working to improve forecasting and warnings for the hazard that causes the most hurricane deaths: freshwater flooding. With climate change, storms are becoming bigger and wetter and are bringing large amounts of rain to inland areas, often with deadly consequences.
At least 249 people died during Hurricane Helene and its aftermath, according to the National Hurricane Center. Of those, 94 fatalities are attributed to rainfall flooding.
In September, the Pacheos, who are in their early 60s, knew a big storm was coming, but they weren't too worried. Other tropical systems had flooded their creek before, but water had never come into their home. Jackie had hurt her knee and was on crutches, and had a cat she didn't want to leave. They settled in as Helene's rain came down.
"We were asleep, and I got an alarm on my phone," recalls Mrs. Pacheo.
The message? "Evacuate now. Get out now," she says.
It was an emergency alert from Buncombe County sent to people who lived in low areas near rivers and tributaries that were beginning to flood.
"We grabbed what we could, and I tried to get my cat, but she wouldn't come with me because there was so much water out here already. So she perished in my house." Mrs. Pacheo says.
She decided to rip off her cast. She and her husband waded through the water to her mother's house next door, which also flooded.
"We had water coming from all directions. It looked like a raging ocean," says Mrs. Pacheo
From a second-floor window at her mother's house, the couple watched their home, their vehicles, and everything they owned wash away in the flood. They also felt their home crash into her mother's.
"It shook the whole house. We thought the whole thing was going to collapse. That's when we called 911," Mrs. Pacheo says, "they told us to hang sheets out the window and somebody would be here to help. And we just sat down and started praying because there wasn't anything else."
The Pacheos feel torn about staying and rebuilding or moving elsewhere, especially Mrs. Pacheo. "I've been here for the better part of my life," she says. "And this was my mother and father, and we [have] lived here since I was 11." But she says she's tired. "I'd like to just go away and forget about all of this and not deal with all of it, because it's a lot to deal with. Every day. Every day."
In western North Carolina a struggle to convey storm threat ahead of Helene
More than 100,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in North Carolina, some 500 miles inland from where it came ashore in Florida. Dozens of people drowned in Helene's floodwaters.
The director of communications for Buncombe County, Lilian Govus, says, "We all knew that a big storm was coming, but we weren't quite able to grab the attention in the way that we had hoped."
Govus hoped archival photos of the 1916 flood publicized before Helene might help warn people about what was coming. It didn't work. Two days before the storm hit, county officials declared a state of emergency and encouraged people in some communities to evacuate.
"I think only one media outlet attended that press conference ahead of the storm," recalls Govus. "And so really trying to get folks' attention to let them know how serious this was, was difficult."
Govus says she knew there was a problem when she couldn't get the message across to her own family.
"And I thought, if I can't get this emergency message to stick with my own husband and let him know that he needs to buy more than two gallons of water to get through this, then I knew that I had my work cut out for me and our team."
Even people who prepared for Helene, couldn't prepare enough
Many along the River Arts District, known as the RAD, a one-mile stretch of artists' studios along the French Broad River in Asheville, did prepare ahead of the storm, says Jeffrey Burroughs, president of the RAD.
Burroughs says many artists moved their work to a different location and, "they even went as far as to move things onto the second floor. But who even knew that it didn't even matter?" Because water reached the second floor in some buildings, says Burroughs, "It's terrifying."
Before Helene 750 artists worked on the RAD, a unique and vibrant arts district, Burroughs says, "that's quite marvelous and incredible." Currently, Burroughs says, "we have 350 artists back up and running," the Upper River Arts District is open now, but the Lower district, closer to the river, is not yet, says Burroughs.
The RAD took a big hit from Helene, with extensive flooding, widespread damage and losses for studios and artists in the district.
"The arts in Buncombe County, primarily Asheville, generates about $1-billion a year in sales," says Burroughs. "We are an essential part, an important part of Asheville."
In the aftermath of the storm, artists and volunteers helped clean up and preserve art found all over the area. Weeks went by with no running water or internet signal, says Burroughs, an imposing 6-feet-plus jewelry designer whose studio was not damaged by the storm.
Since January, the district has been brainstorming to reimagine what RAD will look like in the future. The goal is to bring back all the artists who lost studios, artwork, equipment and materials to the storm, says Burroughs.
"People always say, we're going to come back bigger, we're going to come back stronger. Okay, great. What does that mean?" that's so esoteric, Burroughs says.
"For me, what that means is first, we're building back with creativity at the helm, at the heart, and then we say, okay, how do we create resilience? How do we create flood proofing?" Burroughs asks. "How do we create a way that comes back that this never happens again, that another person doesn't have to go through this again? You know, we have artists that lost their entire life's work and there's no way to recreate that."
Massive destruction in a bucolic rural community
Mars Hill is a rural community about a 20-minute scenic drive from Asheville. Sarah Bivins and her partner Barry Cooper live on Ivy Creek, which on most days meanders pleasantly past their small farm. During the storm, it was a raging torrent.
The couple shows visitors around their farm, which is still mostly covered in river mud with several large piles of lumber and debris. Before the storm, they grew medicinal herbs, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, among other things.
"We had hoop houses over there in the garden, but it's underneath this big pile of mud," says Bivins. Cooper finishes her sentence, "and chickens. That's the chicken house there. Unfortunately, all the chickens were in the house and they all drowned."
Only a few visiting Canada geese remain.
Standing next to the creek, it's hard to imagine it swelled up to 15 feet. From their house on a hillside, Cooper and Bivins watched as their vehicles and most of their farm washed away. Cooper says the creek has always been the soundtrack at the farm. During the storm, the water and everything it took along the way, became as loud as a roaring train.
"You could hear the sound of the river picking up and the sound of trees being snapped off at the base by other trees and debris in the middle of the river," Cooper recalls. "They were just being snapped off and so it was a horrible sound."
Cooper says he heard the warnings and declaration of a state of emergency prior to the storm, but he didn't think much about it.
"Do I want to say that a lot of times I think they sensationalize this sort of news?" says Cooper. "In some places, people really are in grave danger. If there wasn't a river here, there'd be nothing to talk about."
Bivins and Cooper have lived there for a little more than a decade. They could move somewhere else, "but this is what we like to do, we are comfortable here," Cooper says. They're committed to restoring their land and growing food again.
"You're connected to thousands of years of wisdom, people learning how to live in cooperation with the land and hopefully improve it," he says. Looking out into the distance, Cooper says, "You are getting that wisdom from your local community. The people that farm or garden are very interesting, very resourceful, very astute."
Easy to tell residents what's coming, but hard to get them to understand
In the eight months since the storm, Buncombe County official Lilian Govus has had time to think about why so many people stayed in their homes in low-lying areas.
Govus says it had been more than a century since the area had seen a flood like that. And people in the mountains pride themselves on being tough and resilient. In North Carolina, Govus says, nearly 80 people died from Helene's flooding, the majority of them in Buncombe County.
"And then also, we live in an area where we have nuisance flooding on a regular basis," says Govus. "And so when we were saying rivers were going to crest at 20 feet, 23 feet, it was impossible to even put that into a scenario where people could apply it to their own personal lives."
The deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, Jamie Rhome, says that's a phenomenon social scientists call "localization of risk."
"It's pretty easy, generally speaking, to convince people that something is coming. It's very hard to convince them something's going to happen bad at their house," Rhome says.
Two days before Helene hit the area, the National Hurricane Center issued an alert warning of "catastrophic and potentially life-threatening flash and urban flooding" in western North Carolina. The hurricane center had also begun using a new forecast map, which highlighted in red the risk of flooding posed to the area.
Rhome says there are several reasons why freshwater flooding is now the leading cause of death in hurricanes. Because of climate change, the storms now are carrying more moisture, moving slower and dropping more rain.
"And they're moving more inland than they have in the past. And so that's striking parts of the country that might not be as aware of their risk," says Rhome.
In past decades, storm surge was the largest cause of death from hurricanes. While that's still a major concern, improved forecasting and widespread evacuations from coastal areas in the path of a hurricane have helped reduce those deaths. Rhome says ordering evacuations from inland flooding poses a greater challenge.
"For an area like western North Carolina, where do you evacuate them to?" Rhome asks. "Because it's very hard to drive out of the flood risk if it's a multi-state risk."
There were hundreds of landslides in western North Carolina in Helene, which made evacuating even more difficult and dangerous.
Eight months after the storm, evidence of the damage is everywhere in western North Carolina. Thousands are still out of their homes. People are struggling to find places to live or to fix their damaged houses as another hurricane season gets underway.
Buncombe County's Lilian Govus says this isn't what people expected.
"We were supposed to be a climate refuge. I have friends here who moved from California a few years ago because this was the place to be," she says, "looking at the landscape of where the threats are, climate change is happening so quickly it changes the way that we need to be prepared for every single situation."
Govus says since Helene hit here, she's noticed a new interest in preparedness. She saw that earlier this year when the area was hit by a string of wildfires.
Even her husband, whom she tried unsuccessfully to motivate before Helene is now on board. He has a propane-heated shower and a system for harvesting rainwater ready for this hurricane season.
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