SWANNANOA, N.C. — Hurricane Helene left its mark on Swannanoa in Buncombe County. The Bee Tree community was one of the hardest hit areas there. People there said lives have been lost, though there is no official count of how many.
Charlene Hammond still can’t wrap her head around the destruction she sees along Bee Tree Road.
"Complete and total devastation,” she said.
The landscape is forever changed by the flooding that destroyed parts of Bee Tree, which is downstream from Bee Tree Lake, a water source for the city of Asheville.
"This is mind-boggling. Nothing like this ever happened before, literally, and we couldn't conceive or fathom the devastation or the amount of water or how fast it came through,” Hammond said.
She’s lived in a mobile home park in Bee Tree for 11 years.
“Don't want to move because I couldn't afford to move anywhere, especially in Buncombe County,” she said.
Her parents called it home for 30 years. “My dad worked so hard to buy this place and pay it off," she said.
Now, Hammond and her husband, Lee Hammond, must clean up the family home. They’re taking things minute by minute and leaning on the community.
"We get up every morning. We eat breakfast. We pray, we go out," Lee Hammond said. "We bring back water and gas for everybody. Not just for us. And everybody does the same thing.”
Along the way, they connected with Ryan Geist.
“Trying to slow down and just hear their stories and know their name and get to know people,” Geist said.
He lives nearby and jumped into action tackling immediate needs in the hours after Helene came through.
“Even after days, after the water went down, it was still like up to my stomach, you know, to get through the water to build this line for them,” Geist said, describing how he used ropes and pulleys to get food and water across the flooded creek.
In the days and weeks following the storm, Geist saw helicopters landing in the area and pulling people out and crews rebuilding the road.
Access was so limited in the first week that Geist said for the first three days, he and other volunteers biked two miles twice a day just to get cell service to call people on the outside and let them know the needs.
Helping is in his wheelhouse. Geist and his wife work for a mission organization for college students, and since he works in ministry, and college students were out of class due to the storm, helping people in Bee Tree essentially became their jobs.
Bee Tree Christian Church, a staple of this of the community for generations, is severely damaged. Debris is washed against the church. A tree was pushed inside. The storm opened up the front of the church, exposing the inside of the sanctuary.
"Heartbreaking. It really is,” Charlene Hammond said.
She said her dad attended the church.
“Every time the church was open, daddy would go to church,” she said.
“You’ve got to become the church, and I can tell you that people that have helped us and brought us supplies and cut down trees and cleared out mudslides, they became the church,” she said.
Good deeds have been visible in roadside donations – tables full of water and other supplies for people to take as needed. It’s help from people next door, who have become more than neighbors.
“This little trailer park has been the best community I have ever lived in. We have literally became a family,” Hammond said. “We’re going to rise from this.”
As residents look to the future, some said they would like to see a better alert system in place to notify people downstream of the dam of the potential for flooding.