The death toll from devastating flooding in the Asheville area of western North Carolina more than tripled to 35 on Monday. This is because survivors in a town deep in the mountains testified that they had seen the bodies of the victims stuck in trees.
The death toll from Hurricane Helen, which has carved out a path of death and destruction across the Southeast since making landfall last Thursday, stands at 120 nationwide.
Rains ravaged mountains in Buncombe County, including Asheville, and swept away entire areas with flooding and mudslides. Roads were buried or washed away, leaving victims cut off from rescue teams.
“There was a body in the tree. We found a body under the rubble,” said Alissa, whose hometown of Black Mountain, a village of 8,400 people about 19 miles from Asheville, was nearly washed away.・Mr. Hudson said.
Hudson's neighborhood was evacuated, but she saw a stranger post a video of her home submerged up to the roof on social media.
“Videos of our house started being posted on Facebook,” Hudson said. “The floor caved in and the walls were gone. We had a shed in our backyard and they found it two miles away.”
Hudson and her boyfriend managed to escape before the worst of the flooding hit, but friends and neighbors trapped in the town were left with bodies floating in gutters and residents fighting for their lives against rising tides. He reported a tragic story.
Hudson's boss, Corbin Weeks, who coaches softball at a local college, pulled a family from their trailer home just before the trailer disappeared under a river of brown sludge. I helped.
“It's like a living hell that you can't wake up from,” Weeks said.
Kimberly and Jimmy Stone were separated from their daughter at local Montreat College. About 1,000 students were trapped there with no power and little cell phone service.
When the couple tried to drive into Black Mountain from Asheville, they encountered unspeakable devastation.
“Along the road, there were trees down, power lines down, structures down, cars crushed, railroad tracks destroyed. Buildings down on the road,” Kimberly Scott said.
Although the Scott family was eventually able to rescue their daughter, other students were left stranded on campus for several days, surviving on food cooked on gas stoves in the cafeteria.
Preliminary estimates put the total damage caused by Hurricane Helen at $34 billion, Fox Business reported.
As for Hudson and her boyfriend, their renter's insurance doesn't cover natural disasters, meaning they'll come out the other side of the disaster with almost nothing. “Literally everything we owned was gone. … My boyfriend lost all the equipment he needed for work: our furniture, appliances, family photos and records, The birth certificate was completely lost.”
