By Kailani “Birdie” Clarke ’16

Birdie recounts her experiences in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina—one of the deadliest U.S. storms of the 21st century.

My car took me as far as the fire station. First responders had cleared the fallen trees just enough that the ladder trucks and ambulances could join the omnipresent chorus of sirens. Once the wind stopped, there was silence. Then the sirens started, and did not stop. I parked on the remains of the shoulder and surveyed my path. The road forward was utterly ensnared by downed pines and pulverized oaks. It was Saturday, September 28, 2024, thirty-one hours after Hurricane Helene roared through Western North Carolina (WNC). The French Broad River, which runs through the city of Asheville, surged over its banks and gouged a bloody canyon through the earth, carrying away homes, roads, livelihoods, and people. Mudslides swallowed highways and stranded hollers. There was no way in or out of Asheville—or out of the Biltmore Equestrian Center (BEC), my workplace, where five of my coworkers and 54 horses were now trapped. I was trying to get to them. There was little else I could do. My best friend and roommate, Jack Wilson ’15, was safe, if trapped at his workplace. My parents knew I was okay. My turtle was fine, if a bit chilly. We’d lost power and most cell service the day before, but I had gotten through to my supervisor Caroline in a stroke of luck and satellite alignment. The barn was just a mile from where I stood, but completely unreachable by vehicle. Unless you have a chainsaw, Caroline told me, you’re not getting in.

I did not have a chainsaw. But I had a hiking pack, trekking poles, hundreds of trail miles under my boots, and a stark unwillingness to sit home, isolated in the cloying dread and silence. I knew how bad it was out there. I had seen the downed power lines, the cars abandoned in the middle of the highway, entombed in mud. I had stood in line for hours to enter the single open grocery store and stock up for what was sure to be a long-term ordeal. Asheville was in crisis and I was not qualified to hunt through rubble looking for the lost and the dead, but I could help my friends. 

I clipped on my pack, loaded with forty-five pounds of food, water, and survival gear, and started walking. This was familiar—a strategy I had used many times—when all else fails, carry all you can, and put one foot in front of the other.

Some hikers call trees that have fallen across trails “blowdowns.” The hurricane wind did not just blow these down, though—it shattered them, or felled them at the roots, the soil weakened by days of rain before Helene even made landfall. They littered the road by the dozen, an arboreal mass casualty event. The sharp scents of sap and heartwood lingered in the heavy air. I stopped to check the interior of a police car that had been crushed by a massive black pine. Broken glass, but no body, no blood.  

I climbed. I scrambled. I balanced on splintered trunks. In the short gaps between blowdowns I walked quickly, the click of my trekking poles the only near sound. No birds. No buzzing hum of insects. No squirrels rustling in the leaves as they stored food for the coming winter. Not a murmur of life in these woods, as if everything had been stunned into silence. Far off, the sirens screamed, immutable. An hour and half of hard bushwhacking later, I reached the first of two gates that permit entry to BEC, but the first gate was gone. In its place stood a wall of tangled oak, fifteen feet high and impenetrable. I went north, off the road, into the forest. I tiptoed along a propped-up willow trunk and surveyed my path.

The tunnel beyond the tangle was inaccessible, but I could go over it. I clawed my way up the 20-foot berm, wet loam clumping under my nails, and vaulted a low fence to find myself on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was early fall—leaf peeper season. This road should be choked with tourists. Instead, it was silent too, blowdowns barring it in either direction. I slid down the other side of the berm. The road was clear to the second gate; it had been crushed too, but a young cherry had fallen over the barbed wire chain link. I balance-beamed along it, the treads of my boots biting into reptilian bark, and jumped down on the far side. My legs ached and sweated and bled, but I hummed with a new energy. It was downhill now, toward the barn. I rounded a corner and smelled fresh sawdust. A trunk had been chainsawed and pushed off the road. Caroline had mentioned that Jared, who lives near the barn with his family, had started clearing the access road. I didn’t expect him to make it that far in one day. I would learn later that he cleared almost half a mile of enormous blowdowns in 36 hours. I’m still in awe of him.

When I finally entered the barnyard, I found Cierra, whose kindness and competence makes her one of my favorite coworkers. We hugged through our tears before she took me to my other colleagues—Cassie, our indomitable dressage coach, Annie, who had started just a few weeks before but whose wealth of equestrian knowledge was invaluable, and Caroline, our unflappable, good-humored supervisor. The fifth member of the “hurricane crew,” Mango, had hiked out that morning and had not been seen since; though worried, we trusted her street smarts and ferocious dedication to those in her care.

As we caught each other up, they showed me the river. I stared. I swore. The week’s heavy rainfall had already swelled it beyond its banks, but with Helene’s arrival and subsequent flooding, it exploded into a lethal brown torrent seething with debris and tearing at the red dirt, ten feet above its record height. It had swallowed our pastures, our parking lot, and nipped at the foundations of the lowest barns. Thirty feet beneath its hissing surface was the only other road out of BEC. I relayed the grim news from the outside. We talked. We planned. I dropped my supplies and took phone numbers. I would hike back out, retrieve more supplies, check on families, find Mango, come back the next day, and stay until the road was cleared. I hugged them all again and promised to return. Caroline and Cassie drove me to Jared’s cut line. I saluted them as I walked away. I did not look back. Bad luck.

I met Mango by the second gate with a hug and a gut-punch of relief. She’d made it out; everyone’s families and animals were okay. We talked briefly, then kept going in opposite directions. After a bolting black bear crossed the road a few yards in front of me, I talked and sang. The broken trees swallowed my voice as I stumbled through the twilight, toward home. Water, we soon saw, was the problem—too much in some places and not nearly enough in others. While the crew was covered by water cooler jugs, the mains that supplied the property itself were destroyed. By Saturday night, the horses ran out. Some grew so thirsty they licked the bottoms of their buckets dry. Dehydration will kill a horse quickly. Already dire, the situation was now near deadly.

On Sunday, help came out of the woodwork—literally. Kristy, a boarder, recruited some neighbors and hiked through the southern forest to BEC. They formed a bucket brigade at a spring-fed creek and filled a five hundred gallon tank in the bed of the farm truck, five gallons at a time, for hours. Joan, a cheerful vagabond living in her horse trailer with a pair of mules, was taking shelter at BEC. She suggested we yank gutter pipes away from the buildings and funnel rainwater into troughs. These simple solutions collected hundreds of gallons of clean water and were instrumental in the horses’ survival. Water access was also precarious beyond the barn. Flooding tore apart Asheville’s water system, and though hasty patch jobs largely restored the flow, what fell from the faucets was cloudy and chlorinated. With so much contamination, officials issued a counties-wide boil advisory that would last for months.

Sunday brought new movement. Bill and Ginger Cecil, the heads of the Biltmore Company and owners of several BEC horses, directed a chainsaw crew to the access road as soon as they learned the barns were trapped. The sawyers were halfway to the gates when I hiked past them that afternoon. They reached Jared’s cuts by nightfall, days before we expected. The following week was a blur of logistics, new protocols, generosity, laughter, frustration, and crying from hearts scraped raw. Cell service seeped back, bringing hails from our colleagues. Several lived in the worst-hit areas. We feared for their lives until they reached us.

News crept in too, of the hundreds still missing, of the whole districts of Asheville lost to the floodwater. Other towns were even worse. Some were almost gone entirely. The sirens transmuted into chainsaws, their nasal whine echoing off newly naked rock. The river receded and the destruction was staggering. At BEC, the flooding scoured half our acreage to the clay layer. The outdoor arena and event space, which hosted hundreds of endurance racers just days before the storm hit, lay demolished.

The vicious current tore fence posts from the ground, bent telephone poles, and carried nine horse trailers away. We found paddock gates wedged in tree branches twenty feet off the ground. Trunks were stripped and tangled in fencing lines. Life jackets and shredded innertubes from a business upriver dotted the dusty landscape in shocking bolts of neon. Everything was rimed with a fine ocher silt that stank like a Chesapeake low tide. It was shattering. Surreal.  

But above it was relief. In our case, everything lost was replaceable. The people and animals were not. The fact that every creature in their care, many of whom are old, fragile, medicated, and prone to sudden sickness, survived unharmed is a testament to the hurricane crew’s dedication and ingenuity. Except Cassie, who lives next to the barn, each of them volunteered to stay Thursday night instead of sheltering at home. They drove fencing in the howling rain, moved horses by headlamp, and worked into the wee hours only to rise with the sun. They kept 54 equines, three barn cats, a Great Pyrenees and each other alive during the worst natural disaster this region has ever seen. They will forever have my respect. With survival secured, the emotional fallout began.

In less than a day, WNC had changed forever. I worked. I cried. I volunteered. I slept uneasily, my dreams haunted by the otherworldly darkness of Appalachia with no light. When the crises in my community stabilized, I visited my parents in Centreville, Maryland in a fugue of exhaustion and grief. Old friends who know I live in Asheville asked if I was okay. I told them all the same thing: yes, I was lucky. The words were true, but thick and sour, like old sap. That luck is heavy. It lives in the same place as guilt and has a similar shape. I did not lose my house or car or friends. But others did, and more. Amid the devastation though, as always, came heroes. Volunteers from around the country rushed into WNC to help the living and seek the lost. Mountain Mule Packer Ranch of Mount Ulla, N.C. ferried supplies into the cut-off hollers on muleback.

West Virginian coal miners cleared paths, which would become roads, into cut-off towns. Donations poured in. WNC will forever be in debt to the first responders, arborists, linemen, civil workers and engineers, medical staff, construction crews, volunteers and countless others who kept this region alive. In Asheville, the good heart of this city has shined. Local organizations rendered aid as soon as the wind stopped. They still are, and they will be for years to come, long after the news cycle has moved on and outside aid has come and gone.

There will be other Helenes. There will be tornadoes, wildfires, landslides. The ocean will rise, as will average temperatures, and the acid in the ocean and the carbon in the air. No one is exempt from the consequences of that. But as I walked among the broken trees through the gathering twilight that day, both toward and away from people who were doing all they could to help, I remembered that humanity will rise too. For all the hatred, apathy, and willful ignorance in this world, there are those motivated by the inverse. People with a long view of our species and survival. People who give a damn. Though my life is currently consumed with basic survival, it is by looking to those people, and aspiring to be one, that I keep my head above water.

As Mr. Rogers’ mother said of hard times, “Look for the helpers.” In this, we find the root of our humanity, and the hope for its longevity. So look for the helpers, and if you are able, be one. In the meantime, we will carry all we can here in Western North Carolina and keep putting one foot in front of the other.

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Appalachians are tough people, with deep roots in their land and community. This region will endure, but rebuilding is a long, slow road. Here are some ways you can help:  

Support Western North Carolina Recovery Efforts

• Donate: Contribute money, time, and resources to local charities. These organizations are directly aiding the affected communities and urgently need support. 
• Research & Plan Donations: Use Facebook groups and local resources to learn about specific needs. If donating large items, ensure you have a contact and confirmed drop-off to avoid waste or overload. Don’t forget about lesser-known areas such as Swannanoa, Chimney Rock, Lake Lure, Old Fort, and Marshall that were also devastated.
• Support Local Businesses: Visit reopened towns and contribute to their recovery through respectful tourism. Manage your expectations while there. Show patience, tip generously, and, if possible, volunteer during your visit!
• Stay Informed: Avoid misinformation and conspiracy theories about the storm. Helene was a result of climate change, a stark reminder that no place is immune to its effects. Educate yourself, focus on facts, and advocate for action against climate change.

The following list of suggested non-profits was curated by Kailani “Birdie” Clarke ’16

BeLoved Asheville

Asheville-based charity focusing on direct resource provision and housing. Current donation needs include heaters and cold-weather supplies. They also distribute trailers and tiny homes to the unhoused. Funding is desperately needed for housing projects and to fund displaced families whose FEMA housing vouchers are drying up.

Samaritan’s Purse

Christian international disaster relief organization responding to crises worldwide. Excellent volunteer coordination and on-the-ground aid.

Hurricane Helene Clothing and Supply

New and like-new clothing distribution to the community.

Jake Jarvis and Precision Grading

Saluda-based earthmoving company assisting the surrounding communities. Jake and his team have provided free earthmoving and rebuilding services essentially nonstop since the day of the storm, thanks to donations, the need for which is ongoing.

Manna Food Bank

Food bank providing for 16 counties in WNC. Needs nonperishables and disposable. plates/bowls/cutlery.

Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry

Coordinating volunteer efforts in Asheville.

This sampler was suggested by members of the “Post-Hurricane Volunteer Needs and Offers Asheville, Hendersonville, Brevard” Facebook group. Please refer to that page and similar resources to learn the many other ways you can help. 

If you would like to donate to the employees at BEC, please Venmo Angela Poe at @Angela-Maria-5, 3341. Any monetary donations will be distributed evenly among staff. We also would be overjoyed to receive Nespresso pods and gift cards to local restaurants and workwear brands like Carhartt (heated vests would be amazing, winter is brutal in the mountains). We work ten-hour days year-round, and any morale boosters are very helpful. Our mailing address is Biltmore Equestrian Center, 1 Biltmore Estate Drive, Asheville, NC 28803. 

And if you would like to help me afford groceries, rent, medical copays (I have a chronic illness that has flared up badly since the hurricane) while my other, tourism-reliant job languishes until people return to Asheville, my Venmo is @Kailani_Clarke, 7147. My roommate and best friend Jack Wilson, a Class of 2015 Gunston alum, is earning his Master of Social Work at Western Carolina University and has also taken financial hits from the storm. His Venmo is @Jack-Wilson-166, 8608. Any help is wonderful, and enormously appreciated. 

The following list of suggested non-profits was curated by Laura Ridderhof ’74 

• To help artists: Emergency Relief Grant
• For river clean up: Conservation and Vitality for the French Broad River
• World Central Kitchen | Relief Team supports families impacted by Hurricane Helene*World Central Kitchen was a huge resource for Asheville. They did an incredible job and while they have now moved on, I recommend donating to them for future events! 
• A good way to support the grants that are being given out to get small businesses back on their feet: Always Asheville Fund