‘It’s Our Hurricane Katrina’: Asheville Residents Describe Death, Destruction, Danger After Hurricane Helene

By Arjun Singh

ASHEVILLE. N.C.—Tunnel Road is a major thoroughfare between Asheville and the Swannanoa Valley in western North Carolina. Before Hurricane Helene, hundreds of cars would cross a bridge en route to Downtown Asheville, cottages in the Blue Ridge Mountains, or Interstate 40 headed East or West.

That bridge is now blocked. The wreckage of an entire house is on top of it, deposited by the swell of flooding.

“You see a house on top of a bridge. That picture speaks a thousand words,” said U.S. Army physician Col. Alan Queen, an assistant incident commander of military personnel deployed for disaster relief, at the scene of the bridge.

Queen, whose hometown is Asheville, told The Epoch Times that the floods caused by Hurricane Helene were the worst in more than 100 years. “Even the Great Flood of 1916, which killed 80 people, was not as bad as this.”