AAfter keeping vigil all night, Jason Fesperman, 32, decided it was finally safe to sleep. By 6 a.m. last Friday, he assumed the worst of Hurricane Helene’s rain had passed. Jonathan Creek, the normally ankle-deep stream that flows through his backyard in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, stayed within its banks — albeit just barely.

A little over two hours later, his wife Dan woke him up in a panic. In Maggie Valley, heavy rain continued past 9 a.m. and flood waters were rising rapidly by 8:30 a.m. Her house was flooded up to the windows.

“I would say the water probably filled about an inch a minute,” he said. “I mean, it was pouring in, from the toilets, the windows, both doors.”

Blindly stuffing clean laundry into a sack, he joined his wife and seven-year-old son outside and somehow managed to start the Jeep, which was flooded up to the hood. Now the family is staying in a shelter with 30 other storm survivors and wondering what comes next.

Fesperman and his family are among the lucky ones – they escaped with their lives. More than 200 people have now been confirmed dead, both in Florida, where the hurricane first made landfall, and in a five-state region in the southern Appalachians that includes North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia. This number continues to rise as search and rescue efforts continue. The disaster has destroyed cities, caused billions of dollars in damage and prompted Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to visit the affected region.

The disaster struck in an area not intended to bear the brunt of Helene’s power and had worse impacts than the fabled flood of 1916. But the climate crisis has upended traditional models of hurricane season, producing storms that faster, wetter and stronger are powerful.

Helene was a powerful storm in its own right, but its impact was compounded by record-breaking rainfall in the days leading up to its arrival. Western North Carolina, which saw some of the worst impacts, had been dealing with drought for more than two months before the storm hit. But heavy rains on Wednesday and Thursday soaked the soil and caused rivers to swell. A weather station at the Asheville Airport reported nearly 10 inches of rain during the two-day period.

Helene made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 4 hurricane and moved rapidly northward. Hurricane-force winds and tornadoes swept through many of the affected communities, downing trees and power lines, but water was by far the more destructive force.

Average rainfall varies widely within the mountain region, but in many locations it ranges from 40 to 100 inches per year. Between 8 a.m. last Thursday and 8 a.m. Monday, western North Carolina frequently experienced rainfall over 10 inches. Hendersonville and Spruce Pine recorded more than 20 inches, and Busick, an unincorporated community an hour northeast of Asheville, recorded an unprecedented 30.78 inches. Those totals are consistent with the forecast, said Steve Wilkinson, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service forecast office in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina. However, it was difficult to comprehend the extent of the devastation such a storm would cause.

“When you start talking about very specific impacts, it’s hard to imagine in advance that something so extreme could have the impact that it did,” he said.

When rain falls on the coast, it can spread over flat land, be absorbed by coastal marshes, and eventually drain back into the ocean. But in the mountains, water must follow the topography and seek the path of least resistance as it rushes downhill. Heavy rains in the upper elevations increase in force as they descend, meeting runoff from other swollen tributaries to turn streams and rivers into raging oceans.

The water rushed through with devastating force, rearranging riverbeds, tearing out roads and wiping out entire communities. Wind gusts of 80 to 110 km/h caused trees to fall and power lines were already shaking in the saturated ground. High flows on the Broad River combined with heavy local runoff nearly wiped the tourist town of Chimney Rock from the map. Just across the state line in Erwin, Tennessee, a raging Nolichucky River destroyed the city’s hospital and industrial park and also tore away part of nearby Interstate 26.

“We’re just a grieving community,” said Erwin Mayor Glenn White. “We are simply heartbroken that our friends lost their lives. That’s the biggest problem for all of us.”

It has been a week since the storm hit and the extent of the damage is still unknown.

The death toll continues to rise as first responders search for missing people and head to inaccessible communities. Helene caused near-total cell phone and internet outages across the region, and some services have yet to be restored. Many people remain without power or drinking water – in many cases with no definitive timeline for recovery. Some parts of the city can only be reached by air.

Entire sections of Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge, a major trade corridor connecting Tennessee and Haywood County west of Asheville, were demolished. I-26 is impassable where the Nolichucky is racing toward Erwin. There is no estimated time frame for rebuilding these roads, but it will take at least months.

For many it is difficult to imagine a path forward. But this isn’t the first time Zeb Smathers, mayor of the city of Canton, 15 minutes west of Asheville, has had to find the way. In 2021, catastrophic flooding from Tropical Storm Fred devastated the small upriver community of Cruso before hitting Canton. Smathers worked hard to convince Canton’s businesses to stay in town and help the community rebuild after this “once-in-a-lifetime” storm – which came just 17 years after another major flood from Hurricanes Frances and Ivan. The city was still recovering from the onslaught when Helene arrived.

“When I went to the stores in this district three years ago, I expected, ‘Hey, this is once in a lifetime.’ “We’ll get you back on your feet,'” Smathers said. “I won’t do that this time. If they want to leave and say, “This is too much.” “We can’t do this again and again,” I will support them. If they want to stay, I will support them. It’s different this time, but it’s also reality. We must operate and lead in this world, not the world we want.”

As Jonathan Ammons, 39, surveys the rubble of his hometown of Asheville, he finds it difficult to imagine recovery. Asheville, a popular tourist destination known for its food, beer, music, art and idyllic mountain scenery, has changed. Music venues, breweries, restaurants, artists’ studios – all devastated by the flood.

“It’s hard to imagine an environment where this city recovers in a year or even five years,” Ammons said. “The landscape is not the only thing that has changed. All independent companies were broken up and wiped off the map. All the little towns that people would visit when they came here have just disappeared. I did relief work in St. Louis and New Orleans after Katrina, and this is on this level of destruction.”

Ammons and his girlfriend Claire Winkler, 51, consider themselves lucky to be alive. They left Winkler’s apartment on the Swannanoa River — “the most beautiful and idyllic place you would ever see,” as Ammons described it — at 4:30 a.m. Friday and waded through waist-deep water to make sure they would be able to feed a cat Winkler’s daughter, who was out of town. They weathered the rest of the storm inside their home, safe from the flooding, and were unprepared for the sight that awaited them when they returned to the apartment later that day.

As the river rose, most of the apartment complex’s residents moved their cars uphill to the nearby Root Bar for safe storage. But that building was demolished, a tree pushed through the middle of the two remaining walls and the roof.

“We hiked up the hill and walked across the property and we could see it rising to the horizon of the apartment and there was a whole building gone,” Ammons said.

The missing building had been smashed into a bridge and was reduced to a pile of sticks. The couple waded through six inches of mud that covered the stairwell to Winkler’s third-floor apartment, which looked “as if they had just put an entire living room in a washing machine and turned it on.” Winkler, a bartender, is unemployed and homeless. Ammons, a freelance food journalist who supplements his income through catering and craft cocktail events, misses the busiest months of the year. But these hardships seem small compared to the suffering of others.

The day after the flood, Ammons saw a woman standing next to the rubble. He remembered seeing their two young children in the apartments. The woman said she was looking for her ex-husband, who lived in the first building in the complex.

“I pointed to the bridge and said, ‘That’s the first building,'” Ammons recalls. As he spoke, cadaver dogs sniffed the rubble.

Faced with such tragic losses, local leaders are finding it difficult to even think about the logistics of rebuilding infrastructure, the economy and the community. But, White said, “We know this problem is coming quickly.”

“We have to keep going,” Smathers said. “What is the alternative? Do we leave our home or fight for it?”

For Smathers, White, Ammons and so many others who call the southern Appalachians home, the answer is clear.

“I have no intention of leaving,” Ammons said.