When Newtown resident Dave Bonan booked a flight to see his friend in late September, he thought the trip would be filled with hiking and live shows, a time where they could take in the beauty of the western North Carolina region where she lives.

He had just visited her small town of Weaverville, eight miles north of West Asheville, earlier this July, and planned to stay there from September 25 to October 1.

“We were just gonna have a fun week really,” Bonan told The Newtown Bee over the phone on October 8. “And then I arrived on September 25 two hours right before the rain came in.”

Instead, Bonan never left Weaverville until October 5. Hurricane Helene first made landfall in Florida on September 26 and gradually worked its way up through the southeastern region of the United States, with its historic levels of rainfall and intense winds causing widespread damage, power outages, and flooding.

Hurricane Helene didn’t hit North Carolina until the morning of September 27. However, Bonan says that the morning of September 26 was just a precursor to the hurricane, when he and his friend woke to a raging river in the hill behind her house.

“It was like the first flash flood … Like it wasn’t even on the radar, it just kind of hit all at once,” Bonan said.

The storm left as quickly as it came, and everything quieted down. Now a clear day, Bonan and his friend went out that evening to see a show in Asheville at live music venue The Grey Eagle. He and his friend went out to dinner, enjoyed the show, and then everything changed on the ride home later that night.

“Before you knew it … the winds really picked up with the rain. Our Uber driver was pretty much white knuckling it back,” Bonan said. “I’d say around three or four in the morning is when the winds really picked up.”

He and his friend woke up in the early morning of September 27 to the sound of a tree on the neighbor’s property falling inches from her house. When they peeked out the window, Bonan says they saw what looked like 75-80 mph winds.

Bonan and his friend weren’t the only ones awake. After the tree fell, a bunch of neighbors woke up and there were seven of them already standing outside, holding saws and clippers. Bonan says that they all just “went out there,” with rain beating down on them and the wind blowing at what felt like 50 miles an hour. They were out there for around an hour or two, focused on cleaning up the tree.

“And then water was rushing down the hill in this river, because you got a culvert in the street,” Bonan said. “People were raking things away and allowing the water to channel through because we were trying to dig trenches.”

Surviving The Storm

Hurricane Helene had finally hit North Carolina, and it hit harder than residents ever expected it to.

“I’ve done groundwork, direct aid going from person-to-person with [Hurricane] Sandy and the Rockaways — I was down there for two weeks — I know what a war zone looks like. And this was exactly that,” Bonan said.

Since his friend lived on a hilltop, Bonan says that the higher ground spared her home from the worst of the storm damage. They ventured out once they had more gas and could drive around to document everything, and Bonan says that “all around us, like all the towns, there was just destruction everywhere.”

“I would say like half the neighborhood houses were just … trees were on top of things. All the power lines were down completely. Traffic lights didn’t work. So we were lucky to be where we were, in a relatively small area where nothing too bad happened. But one block away in either direction there were houses toppled, stuff everywhere,” Bonan said.

He says when they went out to the rich part of Asheville, Biltmore Avenue, that the once small four lane road in the country was covered in layers of mud.

“I looked around at it and I’m like, ‘I’ve seen this road before just this summer, and now it looks like a dusty road in the desert or a dusty road in the Wild West.’ You couldn’t even see the asphalt. It was just layers of mud,” Bonan explained.

With the roads on all surrounding sides closed due to large mudslides and rockslides and bridges leading into Tennessee completely destroyed, aid couldn’t get in unless it came through a helicopter.

“So essentially, it felt like we were on an island. And that’s the scariest part, where the reliance on fossil fuels, the reliance on cell phone infrastructure; all that just disappeared for a few days,” Bonan said. “At least it did until mobile towers were brought in, and then more rockslides would get triggered, and the towers just would fall down. Then you couldn’t get enough bandwidth to even get a call out.”

They would have to go to Mission Hospital a couple miles away in Asheville since they had wi-fi in the lobby. However, the hospital had no running water, which meant that people couldn’t flush the toilets or even wash the sheets.

Water was a big issue for everyone. Even when water service was restored, residents were advised to boil their water since the water treatment facility was damaged by the hurricane. Bonan says they had to be careful when bathing so as to not get it in their mouths “because it wasn’t clean and who knows what was in it.”

People also had to ration their gas, planning out whether they had enough gas in their tank to make a drive back and forth to Asheville if they needed to.

“I mean, most people were just turning their cars on to drive or charge their phones. But, you know, people didn’t want to go further and risk running out of gas with their car on the way to get to a gas station somewhere else that didn’t have a line. Eventually, people just sucked it up and did that. And then it was easier to get more resources later on,” Bonan said.

Credit cards also didn’t work, and people had to pay with “strictly cash only.” Bonan says that, even a week and a half after the storm, his friend tried to use 12 different ATMs, and still had no luck. Anyone who didn’t have cash, he said, was screwed.

Community Comes Together

Even with the awful conditions, like people waiting in lines outside of supermarkets once they finally got in shipments of food, Bonan says that people started helping each other right from the start of the hurricane.

“There was no time to think. It was like everyone thought, ‘let’s help.’ It’s weird how that works, just survival instincts kicked in,” Bonan says. “I didn’t know any of these neighbors, but eventually we all came to be a quite close knit of like 20 people constantly checking in on each other, being there for each other.”

Bonan says that his tight knit group, which included his friend and his friend’s daughter, tried to make the most of their situation. They took turns caring for each other, hugged each other when they were down, and did what they could to make things easier for everybody.

They went to places wherever they could use their help. Bonan’s group would go out, cook a lot of food for them, and try to feed people. When roads into different places were blocked off, they found other ways to get in and tried to get food to those who needed it most.

“It’s such a blur. But, you know, we had the neighborhood kids come over and we did a lot of art on the driveway. We kept each other busy. We fed each other, and we checked in on the mental health of all the neighbors in the surrounding area,” Bonan said.

This supportive group dynamic was especially important for his friend’s daughter, who has special needs. Specifically, Bonan says that she has the rare genetic condition Wiedemann-Steiner Syndrome, autism, and “some other special needs all rolled into one.”

His friend’s daughter typically goes to school and has a nanny to support her, but everything was completely disrupted when the hurricane hit. According to Bonan, they have no school indefinitely until at least Christmas, and his friend is also out of work because of the storm.

“And you know, she gets federal funding that she has to apply to every year, but [her daughter] needs consistency and access to certain types of foods. It’s just that’s what she needs for her development and her school, and all that is out the window now,” Bonan said.

Everyone was thrust into a situation from the hurricane, and it left his friend’s daughter without access to all her medication and healthy, fresh foods. She was going through intense mood swings a lot of the time, so everyone came together and pitched in to try to take care of and support her however they could.

Bonan says that they all “kind of operated on autopilot” to take care of each other, timing their shifts to take breaks and became a well oiled machine. It’s that strong group dynamic that made Bonan feel some guilt when he had the chance to leave.

“I had all this guilt in me because I’m like, ‘I have to go home, but I don’t have to go home right away,’” Bonan explained. “And there’s a lot of emotions involved and a lot of love for each other, and so separating that is horrible. Even when the power eventually came on, I just felt like I had a responsibility to stay as long as I could, but I didn’t want to overstay my welcome either.”

Then Bonan found out that American Airlines was doing what he unofficially referred to as “hardship credits,” where they didn’t make him pay extra since the fees were hundreds of dollars, they just let Bonan keep his original ticket and fly home.

“It was a hard call,” Bonan said. “But it was either that or wait another two days and find another flight out of town. I’m like, ‘No, I just can’t. I can’t stay here any longer.’”

Moving Forward

As it stands now, Bonan is doing what he can to keep in close touch with his friend. Her home has mild water damage from the storm and even though they cleaned it up while he was still there, the new flooring she put in had to get ripped up.

“And, she doesn’t have the money for it, because you’re not going to get a claim out of FEMA for a payoff for like a year,” Bonan said. “Her job is closed indefinitely. And then there’s no schooling and no nanny … So she’s got no income, she’s got no one to watch her kid other than the person who’s staying with her.”

One of the biggest losses to them are the surrounding communities devastated in the wake of the storm. The towns of Marshall, Hendersonville, Chimney Rock, Lake Lure, and Swannanoa, as well as Hickory Nut Gorge, the 20,000-acre, 14 mile-long canyon nearby, were hit especially hard. His friend is actually from Connecticut, but she has lived in North Carolina for the past 16 years. To her, seeing those nearby towns she has loved over a decade suffer the damage that they have is nothing short of heartbreaking.

“All those small towns are destroyed. Like, those are really special towns to her because that’s where she spent a lot of her life. She lived around there, exploring and hiking and cherishing it. To have them suddenly not be on a map anymore, her heart just breaks. And my heart breaks for that too, because I know the areas now, and I know after visiting what it means to just not have these gems anymore,” Bonan said.

Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.