The death toll from catastrophic flooding in the Asheville area of western North Carolina more than tripled on Monday to 35 — as survivors in remote mountain towns described seeing the bodies of victims stuck in trees.
Nationwide, there have been 120 fatalities from Hurricane Helene, which has cut a path of death and destruction across the Southeast since making landfall last Thursday.
The rains smashed the mountains of Buncombe County, which contains Asheville, washing away whole communities in floodwaters and mudslides. Roadways were buried or washed away, leaving victims cut off from rescue crews.
“There were bodies in trees. They were finding bodies under rubble,” said Alyssa Hudson, whose home of Black Mountain — a village of 8,400 people about 12 miles from Asheville — was all but washed away.
Hudson’s neighborhood was evacuated, but she saw videos posted by strangers on social media of her house submerged to the roof.
“We started seeing videos of our house posted to Facebook,” Hudson said. “Our floors are caved in, our walls are gone. We had a shed in our backyard that they found two miles away.”
Hudson and her boyfriend managed to escape before the worst of the flooding, but her friends and neighbors trapped in town reported harrowing tales of bodies floating in ditches and residents fighting for their lives against the rising tide.
Hudson’s boss Corbin Weeks, with whom she coaches softball at a local college, helped pull one family from a trailer home moments before it disappeared under a river of brown sludge.
“It’s like a f–king living hell that we just can’t wake up from,” Weeks said.
Kimberly and Jimmie Stone were cut off from their daughter at the local Montreat College, where around 1,000 students were trapped without power and little cell phone service.
When the couple tried to drive into Black Mountain from Asheville, they met a scene of almost indescribable devastation.
“All along the road, there were downed trees, downed power lines, structures collapsed, cars pushed over, train tracks destroyed. Buildings collapsed on the road,” Kimberly Scott said.
The Scotts eventually managed to rescue their daughter, but other students were stranded on campus for days, surviving food from the cafeteria cooked with gas-powered stoves.
A preliminary estimate puts the total damage from Hurricane Helene at $34 billion, Fox Business reported.
As for Hudson and her boyfriend, their renter’s insurance doesn’t cover natural disasters, and they will come out the other side of the disaster with almost nothing left. “Almost literally everything we own is gone. … My boyfriend lost all of the equipment for his business. Our furniture, electronics, family photos and records, birth certificates – completely gone.”
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