More than 100 people killed, and thousands missing, by Hurricane Helene

Scenes of destruction and suffering lay almost everywhere in Swannanoa, N.C. — cars in tree limbs, mangled homes, mud-choked roads and people desperate for water and food.

Just down the hill, and in every direction, lay almost indescribable scenes of destruction and suffering. Cars sat high in tree limbs by the Swannanoa River. Homes had been tossed and mangled, then deposited far from their foundations — sometimes upside down, sometimes torn in half — wherever the river left them.

A thick layer of mud covered the town, leaving many roads impassible and many homes and businesses buried, like some modern-day Pompeii. Even as the trees on the slopes above showed their first hint of autumn color, the air smelled heavy with muck and debris.

More than two days after Helene, National Guard troops came and went. Ambulances and police and fire sirens blared by every few minutes, as search-and-rescue missions pressed on. So many side roads remained impassable, the fate of the residents along them a mystery, just as the fate of so many small communities in this verdant corner of western North Carolina remain shrouded amid the lack of contact with the outside world.

Joe Dancy and Jenna Shaw described a scene from early Friday in Swannanoa that would seem almost hard to believe, if so many others here did not have similar tales of narrow, harrowing escape in the face of an unprecedented catastrophe.

Before dawn, they said, they awoke to walk their dog and saw water creeping up the yard. In less than an hour, as the water rose more than 4 feet, they scrambled to flee with their dog and three cats. At one point, realizing they were running out of time, Dancy screamed down the street to where he could see a member of the National Guard. The soldier tried to reach them but couldn’t in the fast-moving current.

“It was so fast,” said Shaw, 29, who was floating on the couple’s bed at one point. “We called 911, and it wouldn’t go through.”

Darcy and Shaw thought about retreating to the attic but realized they would be trapped if the water kept rising. Darcy’s truck soon floated away. Finally, the couple loaded their cats into a plastic bin and went out of their bedroom together into the rising current of the Swannanoa River.

“We thought, ‘If we don’t get out now, we’re not getting out.’”

“We are beyond lucky,” Dancy, 32, recalled. “There really was a moment there when we thought, ‘We aren’t going to make it.’”

Days after the storm struck, only limited supplies had reached this town and others around it. But on Sunday, the First Baptist Church had happened into enough water to hold out for a couple of hours, and peanut butter sandwiches and hamburgers to hand out to the growing line of people filing into the parking lot, which sits on a rare patch of high ground in this deluged place.

“We’re going to be a beacon up here,” said Melody Dowdy, 46.

The man who was grilling the burgers, T.J. Whitt, 43, shared his own story of loss.

“My whole house slid down the mountain about 60 feet with my whole family in it,” Whitt said. “But we made it out, by God’s grace. We’re more fortunate than most here because we were able to go back in and get our clothes, personal belongings, the stuff that’s most important to us — wedding rings, birth certificates. … We grabbed those and got out.”

Whitt, whose knuckles were bloodied from breaking out of his house in a panic, wondered aloud about what lies ahead for a place like Swannanoa, where he has lived for more than two decades.

“It’s never going to be the same,” he said. Swannanoa is not an upscale tourist and retirement mecca like Asheville, just to the west. There isn’t a glut of craft breweries and high-end restaurants. There is no attraction to equal the Biltmore House, the historic home and museum built for the Vanderbilt family. This is a community largely composed of working-class folks of modest means, many who have called this valley home their entire lives.

Each year, Whitt said, he and his wife buy the meat of a cow and freeze it to use over time. On Sunday, he had brought an entire cow’s worth of meat to grill hundreds of hamburgers to hand out to strangers in need. Somehow, in his own moment of trauma, he found gratitude.

“Thank God we were up the mountain, so we didn’t get flooded,” he said. “We have other family members who didn’t make it. … It’s tough. It’s going to be bad. We’re just going to try and do what we can do to take care of everybody.”

Nearby, Melody Dowdy nodded toward Whitt as he turned back to the grill.

“He lost everything, but he’s giving anything he’s got,” she said. “That is the beauty of the people in the mountains.”

By midday Sunday, Dancy and Shaw were shin-deep in the mud that covered the front yard and inside their small home on North Avenue in Swannanoa, trying to salvage part of his large record collection, her houseplants and anything else that hadn’t been destroyed — which wasn’t much.

Even amid the mess and the muck, they also felt fortunate. They were alive. Friends and family had come to help. Looking at the water mark nearly 6 feet high on their wall, they imagined how easily things could have turned out differently.

“Our whole life was here,” Shaw said of both their home and this town they love. “I think it’s not going to be the same for years.”

“It won’t,” Dancy agreed. “But I’m ready to rebuild. I’m not leaving.”

Despite that fortitude, a sense of sadness, desperation and uncertainty loomed above this once-picturesque town on Sunday. Not far away on Highway 70, hundreds of people lined up outside the Pisgah Brewing Company with jugs and bottles in hand, waiting for water that has been so hard to find. Nearby, someone discovered that an 18-wheeler wrecked during the storm was full of bottled water, and dozens of people came to grab cases and hand out cases to others, until police officers arrived and shouted for them to leave.

“You are stealing!” one shouted as the crowd dispersed.

A car is trapped in rubble in Swannanoa on Sunday. (Jesse Barber/The Washington Post)

Back in Swannanoa, as the daylight faded on another day with no power, no water and no certainty, parts of town seemed frozen in a time before the storm. The Ingles grocery store sign advertised tomatoes on sale. The Ace Hardware sign said, “Mums, $9.99.” Pumpkins still sat outside Ledford’s Produce.

But the new reality was inescapable.

On street after street, flooded and mangled homes and vehicles bore orange spray paint — a sign that authorities had been there to check for the dead and the living. Search-and-rescue teams pressed on as day wore toward dusk, and on one street by the river, officials murmured about the possibility that a body may have been located in the wreckage nearby. Several people had pitched a tent by a local school. Late in the afternoon, a helicopter landed at First Baptist Church to deliver supplies.

Not far away, Austin Decerbo, 28, stood talking with a friend, Mike Hollie, and pointed to the spot where his mother’s house had sat only days ago. Now there was nothing.

“I watched it float away. All you could see was river,” Decerbo said. “I grew up in that house. … It’ll never be the same. Nowhere near it.”

Hollie, 62, who said he raised his family here and has called Swannanoa home for decades, looked out on a once-familiar landscape.

“All these places are gone,” he said, describing one by one the multiple houses that had once lined the river, but which the river had carried away. “Unbelievable,” he said. “It’s been completely and entirely erased.”

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell toured south Georgia on Sunday and planned to be in North Carolina Monday.

“It’s still very much an active search and rescue mission” in western North Carolina, Criswell said. “And we know that there’s many communities that are cut off just because of the geography” of the mountains, where damage to roads and bridges have cut off certain areas.

Biden on Saturday pledged federal government help for Helene’s “overwhelming” devastation. He also approved a disaster declaration for North Carolina, making federal funding available for affected individuals.

President Joe Biden described the impact of the storm as “stunning” and said he would visit the area this week as long as it does not disrupt rescues or recovery work. In a brief exchange with reporters, he said the administration is giving states “everything we have” to help with their response to the storm.