A Walk Around Barnardsville, North Carolina

As Media Milwaukee reporters drive into Barnardsville, North Carolina on an overcast April afternoon, dark clouds roll over the sky and a slight wind picks up. It’s not raining right now, but it will be later. The Ivy Creek that runs through town rolls in the distance, and only grows louder as the reporters pull into Andre Naylor’s driveway.

Naylor and his wife Joan, both stay-at-home artists, have lived on the creek for nearly 30 years. They’re two stalwarts in the tiny community of less than 600. Barnardsville lies 20 miles north of Asheville, a mountainous area once considered safe from natural disasters.

“If you go home tonight, and you’re sitting in your chair or you’re sitting in the kitchen or something like that,” said Naylor, “just imagine the next day, without any expectation that there’d be a hurricane in the mountains of North Carolina.”

Along with the rest of the western region of North Carolina, Barnardsville was devastated by Hurricane Helene in late September. Flooding and deadly mudslides ravaged the area, causing an estimated nearly $60 billion in damages. A total of 107 North Carolinians died in the storm, 43 of which were in Barnardsville’s Buncombe County. It is the most destructive natural disaster in North Carolina history. 

The Naylors’ property was ravaged by floodwaters from the storm. They had been in the area long enough to experience several floods over the years, but they were doubtful that this one would be anything to worry about. Their neighbor Phillip convinced them otherwise.

“He said ‘you guys need to get out,’” said Naylor. “And we said, ‘well, Phillip, we’ve been here like a long time, you’ve only been here about six or seven years.’ I said ‘We’ve seen the flooding, it’s not going to come close.’ ‘Look me in the eyes,’ he said, ‘you need to get the hell out of here.’”

The Naylors followed suit and evacuated their property. “Probably if our neighbor wouldn’t have come down, we probably would have been killed,” said Naylor. Tears began to well in his eyes as he began to recount the most devastating day of his life.

“The flood came from this direction, it came in the back door,” said Naylor, “knocked out the back door, the windows, and just loaded this up – and you can imagine when the water comes through, all of our furniture, our clothes, everything was jammed against the kitchen wall. So when we went in the back door, it was up to here, and we went, ‘What the hell are we gonna do?’”

Naylor described the aftermath as nothing short of apocalyptic. “There’s no lights, no telephone, no water, no nothing,” he said. “You just went back 200 years in time. No roads – you weren’t driving anywhere.”

Six months after the flood, the residential neighborhood is still in ruin. “It’s all changed, the landscape,” said Naylor. “I had an incredible garden, I had like ten raised vegetable beds, I had rows of perennials. You know, for 20 years I’ve been working on it.”

Several houses have been left completely dilapidated, and the storm’s path through the tiny town is still marked by flattened fields. A once-thriving community on the river is now left in disarray, even if it looks better than it did in September.

“This looks like heaven compared to after the flood,” said Naylor. “I mean, there was trees and logs everywhere, there was cars that were mangled laying in the fields, stuff like that. And you look around, and go, ‘Where do you even start?’ You can’t look at the whole picture, you gotta look at one of those little things you can do.”

Naylor walked reporters inside his home, which has undergone months of reconstruction following the flood. They’ve made a lot of progress with the help of volunteers that his wife recruited via Facebook, but there’s still much that needs to be done. It’s beginning to take shape, though. They’ve been able to outsource most of their furniture from local artisans, friends, generous donors and thrift stores. Naylor said an electrician from South Carolina came and stayed with the family for six weeks, rewiring the entire house.

Much of the reconstruction effort involved tearing up the house’s floorboards to prevent the growth of black mold. “But, our neighbors, they didn’t do nothing,” said Naylor. “We kept looking over there like, what is going on? Why aren’t they working on their property? One of the reasons why they weren’t working on their property is, they have jobs.”

Naylor realizes that he and Joan were in a much better position to deal with the wreckage than most.

“I’m retired. I’m here seven days a week, and they’re there for the weekend,” said Naylor. “So it must’ve been really hard for them to see us having volunteers here, seven days a week, helping us out. So we sent volunteers from here over there to help them, and now there’s some of the organizations that were helping us are now picking them up to help them also.”

They also acknowledge that FEMA did not give residents many options. He says that those who had their houses destroyed or damaged were given three choices: sell their home to FEMA for its original price to have it converted into green space, have their home rebuilt to be flood-proof (“jacking it up 10 or 12 feet,”) or pack up and leave.

“You don’t think about that stuff until you have time to think about it,” said Naylor. “The first months and months, we’re just fixing. Get in and do what you can, you know, get as much help as you can. So we were in that mode, and now that we’ve got heat in here and it’s sealed off and everything, and we’re starting to rebuild – we’re starting to reflect on different things that have been happening.”

Naylor and the reporters walked down to the nearby Ivy Creek, the once-measly stream that has now been blown open and elevated nearly 12 feet by deposits from the flood. Formerly a designated trout sanctuary with native species, large, unsightly rocks now make up the creek’s sediment and have since destroyed the habitat. 

“Just to give you an idea of what the flood left behind, none of this rock was here,” said Naylor. “This here was down to water level. Fishing is the last thing on my mind right now, but how would you even fish this? You’d have to slide down the hill.”

As the reporter and Naylor found themselves standing on the rocks above the creek, he began to reminisce on a feeling that he had never experienced until the storm struck.

“If you can imagine though, some of this stuff is surreal,” said Naylor, “because I would come out here the first three or four nights after the flood, and there’s no lights, you couldn’t hear a car, no planes. It was just stars, it was beautiful. Stars and the moon, but it was almost as if you had left the 21st century – so in a way, it was really kinda cool. I had never heard nothing before.”

In the days after the storm, Naylor says that a group of 40 to 50 younger people began to organize for relief in the town. They set up food, clothing and water distribution stations in the town firehouse, and aided with search and rescue efforts. 

“I didn’t know where they came from,” he said. “I didn’t know they lived in my neighborhood! It was incredible how the community came together, especially young people. You know, it probably saved people’s lives.”

On the other hand, he’s not as satisfied with government relief in the area. He told reporters about an incident that continues to bother him, starting with an offer that he was presented while at the distribution center.

“I went up there one day, I was getting some food and the lady said, ‘There’s a guy that came by and gave us a large amount of money, $250,000,’” said Naylor. “And she goes, ‘You need to start keeping your receipts.’ I said, ‘Yeah, okay’ – so I started keeping receipts in two manila envelopes, and I had them just about full. I kept asking her what happened, you know, I mean, it’s weeks and weeks went by and she goes, ‘Yeah, they’re trying to figure out how to distribute the money evenly and fairly.’”

It was a great plan in practice, Naylor thought. “So they got a committee together,” he said, “and they said if you go online and apply for it, then they will go through each application without knowing your name and decide what priorities are to distribute that money. I thought, great idea! Never heard from ‘em, weeks and weeks went by.” He began to get nervous.

“I went up there every week asking about it, and finally the lady that worked up there, she goes, ‘Well, they’re trying to get a hold of Joe Naylor.’ I said, ‘There’s no Joe Naylor. My wife’s name is Joan, and we were like one of the first or second people that applied for funding to help us, because that house right there was estimated $190,000 to repair.’ And so they had all my information, and I don’t think anybody got hit any worse than I did, it’s just that we’ve been on it.” 

There was silence on all fronts. “Then nothing happened. I guess about six weeks, eight weeks into the thing, we finally got a hold of the guy who was in charge of that and he goes, ‘I’m sorry to report that there’s no money available anymore. We’ve given it all away.’” 

Naylor was utterly shocked. “I said, ‘How could you have possibly given it all away, I’ve done everything you’ve told me to do.’ I think there was only 90 people that applied,” he said. “They didn’t give me $10, and I just felt cheated in a way. But I can’t feel cheated, because a lot of people have stepped up and given us stuff, helped us, bringing us meals and stuff. So I can’t feel too much, but I just felt like it was slimy.”

Naylor did say that FEMA gave him and Joan $25,000 for the damage to their property, but he estimates that the total damage to all they own adds up to at least $500,000. They appealed the claim to request more aid, but it has been pending for six months and counting. 

“There’s been a lot of stories like that,” said Naylor. “A lot of people were coming and telling us that they’re going to help us. ‘We’re going to come here and we’re going to help you from the beginning till the end. We’ll be here at the end, whenever you’re back in your house and everything is repaired.’ You wait for ‘em, wait for ‘em, they don’t show up.”

The Naylors have been frustrated by facetious offers of support, but more importantly, they’ve been overwhelmed by the outpouring of genuine human kindness in the aftermath of trauma.

“We had this lady who knew somebody, it might have been Haiti – it was one of those countries where there’s a lot of violence and stuff like that,” said Naylor. “There was a guy, a gentleman and his wife decided to adopt these children whose mothers and fathers were killed in genocide. And so there were probably like 26 or 27 kids, and they called us and he introduced each one of those children to us.”

The Naylors had previously housed refugees, so the call meant a lot to them. “They had absolutely nothing, and as bad as our flood was here, they’re living in stuff that was worse than what our flood looked like, you know. I mean, they’re in shanties and stuff like that. And all these wonderful, beautiful children, they’ve been traumatized, you know.” 

The Naylors and the children found common understanding, on opposite sides of the world.

“The guy called us up and said, ‘The children, they wanted to do something because they have lost everything, and they’ve been flooded before themselves,’” said Naylor. “And I think we had donated maybe $100 to them at one time, and they said, ‘Oh, we would like to do something for the family that was flooded in North Carolina’ – and all they had was onions. They were growing onions for a crop, to feed themselves and to make some money.”

Naylor started tearing up. He never expected to be on the receiving end of a gesture like this one. 

“They all came together one night and said, ‘We would like to sell all of our onions,’” said Naylor. “I think they sent us a couple hundred dollars, and for them, $100 is like $1,000,000. They have absolutely nothing, and they were willing to share it with us. I mean, there were stories like that, and what do you do with that, you know?”

It’s clear that this story meant more to Naylor than anything else. A relatively stoic man, he could barely reach the end of the story without emotion pouring out of him. In a time of tragedy, it was a reminder that there was still good to be found in the world.

“The kindness of people all over,” said Naylor, “sometimes it’s the people that are in a worse shape actually have the biggest hearts.”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club.