This town was wiped out by Helene. How does it come back?

CHIMNEY ROCK, N.C. – Several times each day, Rose Senehi makes the short walk from the house where she has lived for two decades to sit in a worn rocking chair along the banks of the Rocky Broad River.

The scene before her on a recent evening would have been unimaginable before last September, when Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters all but wiped out this beloved mountain village.

The once-languid river now runs through a 500-foot-wide canyon of boulders and sediment, its banks stripped of the trees that once lined it. In the distance, Senehi could see what was left of the quaint downtown, where many businesses vanished and others remain in various states of disrepair, and where even now water and electricity have been slow to return.

Gone was the Old Rock Cafe and the Chimney Rock Brewery. The floods had claimed the Village Scoop ice cream shop, the miniature golf course, the Mexican restaurant, the Evening Shade lodge. Empty lots sat where so many of her neighbors’ houses once stood.

Yet amid the destruction were signs of Chimney Rock’s slow resurrection. Senehi could see a makeshift road that had recently restored access from the north. One crew was installing new sewer lines; another was working on a temporary bridge to popular Chimney Rock State Park. The sounds of whirring table saws and pounding hammers echoed down Main Street.

“I can’t keep my eyes off it,” Senehi, 86, said of all the good and bad before her.

Even with all the damage that Helene wrought throughout western North Carolina, few spots were transformed as swiftly and dramatically as Chimney Rock. And few face such profound choices in the storm’s wake.

“You had the town wiped away,” said Chimney Rock Mayor Peter O’Leary, noting that nearly a third of the village’s 46 businesses – including his family’s historic general store – were destroyed and that the rest sustained damage.

“Now you have a blank slate. What do you do with it?”

Beyond the day-to-day recovery lie questions of how to rebuild a place adored by generations of visitors but now forever changed. How do you create something new in Chimney Rock, but preserve the town’s soul?

‘A blank slate’

O’Leary, whose family had two stores side by side, has thought a lot about those questions.

Standing in his gutted outdoor supply store one recent afternoon, with its new wood floors and swaths of fresh drywall, O’Leary said the goal is to maintain Chimney Rock’s character while building back in a way that can endure. Doing that, he said, will require creativity, as well as sustained help from state and federal governments, businesses and nonprofits.

For now, most days are dedicated to the more immediate concerns of the village’s roughly 130 residents, and to the worry, financial strain and uncertainty that persist.

On a recent afternoon at the fire department, many of the town’s remaining business owners gathered with staffers from a nonprofit that was offering grants to assist in rebuilding.

“I think right now is kind of the hardest part for a lot of folks,” said April Schick, 72, who owns two stores in Chimney Rock that were wrecked but are still standing.

“In the beginning, you are in survival mode. Then in helping-everybody mode. Now, we’re into trying-to-pay-your-bills mode,” she said. “It’s very overwhelming.”

Having her stores closed for more than seven months has forced Schick to live off savings and run up credit card debt for the first time in her life. A federal disaster loan has not come through. Help from volunteers has been a godsend, but so much work remains.

She hopes to reopen at least one store by early summer, in time for the July Fourth holiday. In the meantime, she has been operating a booth at a resort area half an hour away that offered rent-free space to businesses displaced by Helene.

Schick has faith that Chimney Rock will thrive again.

But she and others acknowledge it has been difficult to see other hard-hit downtowns in the region declare themselves back open, to see spring festivals resume and tourists return while Chimney Rock remains largely closed off from the outside world.

“It’s depressing,” Schick said.

Shari Cummings, 66, has ridden a similar roller coaster of hope and frustration.

“We basically lost everything we had in 15 minutes,” she said, recalling the spot where she and her husband lived and, along with a business partner, ran the Hickory Nut garden center and gift store.

Before Helene, they’d never experienced flooding in their building, which had stood since the 1940s. But early on the day of the storm, they awoke to water coming through the kitchen floor. They retreated upstairs to the retail store, but quickly fled as the water rose.

Within minutes, most of the 7,750-square-foot building had been swallowed by the river. Today, only a sign out front remains.

Like others here, Cummings is eager to begin again: “It’s my home, and I want to go home.” She believes customers will follow. “So many families have grown up there, and they will continue to come,” she said, “but they have to have something to come back to.”

Still, questions far outnumber answers. She isn’t sure what federal and state aid she might ultimately receive. She doesn’t know how she’ll afford to rebuild a structure that was paid off but no longer exists.

“No one is going to finance us right now because all we own is a parking lot,” she said. Despite that constant limbo, she tries to hold fast to optimism.

“You get these minutes of sadness,” she said, “but you have to get back up and keep going.”

‘We want to finish

what we’ve started’

Shane Zoccole zoomed through the flood-battered town in his all-terrain vehicle, pointing out the many projects his South Carolina-based Christian aid group, Spokes of Hope, has undertaken since the storm.

“We were here a week and a half after everything hit, and we haven’t left since,” he said. “We want to finish what we’ve started.”

Zoccole has overseen a stream of volunteers who have shown up week after week, month after month. They’ve helped residents clear away mountains of mud and debris, stripped buildings to the studs, laid new foundations and installed untold amounts of lumber and drywall, insulation and flooring – all for free.

At last count, Zoccole said, volunteers from more than 40 states have passed through. An Amish community in Pennsylvania sends a busload of skilled workers most weeks to live on-site and undertake construction projects and whatever else needs doing.

“This is my third trip,” Steve Esh, who works with the Lancaster County-based Great Needs Trust, said one afternoon as he rode shotgun with Zoccole to survey several projects in Chimney Rock and nearby Bat Cave. “It’s a good way to share our faith, and to help people get back on their feet.”

Even for those who have responded to other disasters and witnessed Helene’s destruction elsewhere, the first sight of Chimney Rock remains jarring.

“You can see pictures, but pictures and videos don’t even come close to the reality,” said Pat Hammond, who came from Upstate New York with her husband, John, to help with the rebuilding.

Many who have come to help are government contractors, working to restore washed-out roads, install temporary bridges until more permanent ones can be built, restore water and sewer lines, and reopen Chimney Rock State Park, which before the storm drew several hundred thousand visitors each year.

Others are donating their time and expertise – such as Jake Jarvis.

Jarvis, owner of Precision Grading in Saluda, N.C., has spent more than 230 days helping people throughout Hickory Nut Gorge dig out from the disaster. He and his employees have used their excavators, bulldozers and other heavy machinery to build private bridges, remove debris from landslides and demolish buildings that had to come down.

On a recent afternoon, he was working at the river’s edge, helping homeowners build protective stone walls and reclaim some of the land the floods had stolen. All along, he said, he has posted daily Facebook updates and funded his work solely through donations.

“These people, they’ve all become my family,” said Jarvis, who at times brings his 9-year-old daughter, Mya, along to help. “I tried to take a couple days off at one point, and it didn’t work out. You feel guilty when you leave because you know people still need you.”

Although there’s still a checkpoint regulating entry to Chimney Rock, the once ghostly quiet here has been replaced by the cacophony of recovery. Dump trucks and backhoes rumble down Main Street. Volunteers come and go, carrying construction supplies to various storefronts.

To the north, Zoccole was visiting a group of young Amish volunteers busy restoring a large, flooded-out storage garage. It was the group’s last day before heading home to Pennsylvania.

“The difference you made this week was massive,” Zoccole told them over the roar of a generator. What might seem a small contribution – framing a wall, building a deck, fixing a roof – adds up to something far greater. “I’m grateful. You have to know that.”

On the ride back to town, he gestured toward the river, which ran clear and lazily through the altered landscape.

“The trout are here. The fish are coming back,” he said. “It tells you, there is life.”

Building something resilient

Even now, there are constant reminders of all that was lost.

A wall inside the Riverwatch coffeehouse still lists “featured fall ice cream flavors” from last year.

The river banks are still strewn with debris – a testament to the ferocity of the floods. Bulldozers continue to clear out parts of Lake Lure, which once brimmed with the shattered remains of Chimney Rock. Small memorials rise from the lots of houses that no longer stand.

“You can’t put it back exactly the way it was,” said Don Cason, the tourism director for Rutherford County, who chairs the task force helping to imagine the next version of Chimney Rock.

At the same time, he said, there is a hunger to create something good from so much devastation – to “take what the good Lord has given us” and make the best of it. Cason and others believe that the widened, boulder-strewn Rocky Broad could become an asset, attracting tourists with a network of greenways and offering the chance to promote kayaking, tubing and other recreation.

With such aspirations come lingering questions. How long will it take? How will a tiny community fund ambitious projects? Should folks build back close to the river?

“When you put it all back, you have to be able to build resilience,” Cason said.

O’Leary, the Chimney Rock mayor, agrees that despite the resolve to return, any recovery must consider both the possibilities and the risks. “The river has shown us what it can do,” he said. “It’s only wise to take that into consideration as we rebuild.”

Rose Senehi, who fled just before the raging waters swept through and could not return home for months, plans to be here no matter what. From her riverside perch on a recent evening, she could see the flickers of rejuvenation.

Nearby, flowers bloomed on Lake Lure’s famous Flowering Bridge, damaged though it remains. The last of the day’s volunteers were working to shore up the foundation at a riverside inn. Word had spread that the state park could reopen to the public in a matter of weeks.

Senehi, an author, is writing a book about the event that changed Chimney Rock. Already, she’s interviewed dozens of locals about the floods and all that followed.

“The biggest takeaway I have,” she said, “is that for the people here, this is the worst thing that they ever could have imagined. And yet, it has brought out the best in them.”

She stood to head back to her home at the base of the mountain. But she would return to her chair by the river tomorrow, and each day after, to bear witness to whatever comes next.