The mountaintops are frosted this morning and Mt Mitchell is recording 23 degrees, but we're holding in the high 30s in the valley. Tonight that cold air will settle on the valley floor, and we'll get a hard freeze. On Monday, we resumed MHHS cross country practice. Yancey County Schools will not be back in session for at least another 2-3 weeks, but fall athletic teams have been given the greenlight to resume practicing and competing. All practices need to occur between 12-4 so that everyone can be home before dark. Our conference championship will be at Madison on Thursday (only delayed one week). Regionals will be run as scheduled on 10/26 at Kituwah Mound in Swain Co. Most counties in the SW corner of the state were back to relatively normal operations within the first week or so post-Helene, and Madison (next county over to the west from Yancey) starts school this week. It goes to show that the epicenter of the damage is Yancey, Mitchell and Avery counties, and, to varying degrees, the counties south of us: Transylvania, Buncombe, McDowell, and Rutherford. Based on a combination of official records and anecdotal reports, Yancey received the most rainfall, and Mitchell got the brunt of the wind. Further west it was a big storm, and rivers whose headwaters were in that 20”+ of rain zone flooded violently, so river towns like Marshall and Swannanoa were severely impacted, but areas away from the rivers, like Mars Hill in Madison County, or downtown Asheville in Buncombe, sustained relatively minor damage. One kid on the team who lives in Mars Hill reports that they were without power for only a day and a half, and had their cable internet back in 5 days.
I’d been wondering about the “end by 4 pm to get home by dark” rule, until we welcomed back our runner who lives in Cattail Creek (a severely affected branch of the Cane River near Pensacola). We were very glad to see him, but he told us we aren’t likely to see him much more for awhile, since it took him two hours to get to the high school (normally a 30 minute drive). His own road on Cattail was wiped out, as was much of Hwy 197 between Burnsville and Pensacola. In terms of number of residents, Cattail Creek is close to the size of Celo Community. Most of his neighbors have left – either they don’t want to live with no power and no road access for an unknown number of months, or they no longer have a home. Some houses suffered landslides, some fallen trees, and some were swept away by the flood. Two of his neighbors perished in the storm.
My friend Cassie describes the scene in Burnsville as an “apocalyptic state fair.” Burnsville is a hill town, not a river town, so downtown was spared the worst of the storm – the town’s main issue is the failure of both their water supply and sewage systems. Wifi hotspots, distribution centers, and public showers/restrooms are set up in the parking lots of various shopping plazas, schools, and churches. Law enforcement vehicles and fire crews from all around the state are around town. The high school is a military outpost. The parking lots, normally crowded with school buses and the cars of teachers and students, are occupied by army trucks, humvees, tanker trucks, and mobile restroom facilities. Regional and federal agents of all stripes are sleeping at the school and using it as a base of operations for the county. The lower parking lot contains countless pallets of bottled water (hundreds of thousands of bottles – perhaps millions?). The hallways are crowded with pallets of other goods – canned food, snack food, and so many diapers for all ages, 0-100.
More than half the team has made it to practice Monday or Tuesday. Our options for running routes on campus, usually half decent, are now severely constrained. We explored a few sections of trail, but it required too much bushwhacking through fallen trees. We checked on the half-mile section of trail by the river; it is gone, as expected. The trail that dips down near the town’s sewage treatment plant will only require a couple of hours of chainsaw work to become passable. On a good day we can smell the wastewater plant while running on that trail – I like to joke with the kids that we can smell what Burnsville had for lunch. But yesterday the odor was raw and pungent. It’s been one thing to speculate about what is happening to Burnsville’s sewage during the outage, but it was a whole ‘nother thing to experience it in gasping breaths while running uphill.
On the drive to and from town, I finally saw firsthand the destruction of Micaville. Two creeks come together in Micaville: Ayles Creek flows off the NE flank of Celo Knob (6300’), and Little Crabtree Creek drains the entire east side of Burnsville and the slopes of a pair of 4900’ peaks that mark the northernmost tip of the Black Mountains range. Each of these watersheds collect rain from a few thousand acres, but normally they are modest streams that meet each other right behind the little old Micaville Post Office. The meeting of the waters is also the crossroads of 80S and 19E (there used to be a railroad, too).
An old stone schoolhouse in Micaville, built in the WPA era, once a high school for the east side of the county (South Toe Valley), has served just elementary students since school consolidation 50 years ago. The schoolhouse, in the flood plain of Ayles Crk, still stands, but suffered severe flooding and will never reopen. The spot where the two creeks collided with shocking force is a scene of utter destruction. The post office is completely gone. Where it once stood, you look over its cinderblock foundation to the creek, strewn with rubble and a pair of half-submerged and upside trucks. The repurposed denim factory (Taylor Togs) that housed Maples coffeeshop, Mountain Electronics, and an office of MCHP, was largely obliterated. Five feet of water flowed through the old Micaville general store, which has had recent iterations as craft gallery and gift shop; its future prospects look dim.
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