“It’s crazy that the mayor of a town roughly 3,000 feet above sea level has to check tropical forecasts,” Zeb Smathers, mayor of Canton, told Spectrum 1 News. Smathers, however, wasn’t talking about Helene. That quotes comes from a 2022, and Smathers is reflecting on Tropical Storm Fred, which came through Canton in August of 2021.
As the article recounts, rain from the storm caused water levels in the Pigeon River to rise almost 20 feet, damaging homes and businesses in downtown Canton. The unincorporated community of Cruso—located upriver from Canton, along 276 en route up to the Blue Ridge Parkway—fared worse: six people died.
Tropical Storm Fred also brought a lot of rain to Asheville. I remember swaths of the River Arts greenway flooding, and River Drive being closed. That Labor Day, my brother came to visit, and we stayed up at the Pisgah Inn one night. After watching the sunrise there, we drove down 276 en route to hike Cold Mountain, and witnessed some of the destruction firsthand: garbage and mattresses hung from trees, the river was clearly broader and deeper than it had been, and the occasional house was shifted from its foundation.
“We didn’t hear it was this bad,” I remember thinking, before, unfortunately—but honestly—getting on with our hike, forgetting what I saw, and probably getting an overpriced dinner in Asheville somewhere that night, ostensibly detoxing the next day at the Sauna House, which is tradition when my brother visits.
I remember hearing about Canton and Fred, simply because I typically pay attention to local news, but it came and went as quickly as anything does in the news cycle. There weren’t GoFundMes littering my social media feeds. Folks weren’t posting about the difference between charity and mutual aid, directing others to the best use of their resources to help residents of Canton. I don’t remember any prominent #CantonStrong adjacent hashtags, but to those affected—people without the digital footprint, name recognition, and media fluency Asheville has—Fred didn’t just come and go. In fact, as the Smoky Mountain News reported in late October of last year, Canton hadn’t fully recovered from the deadly flooding in 2021 when Helene hit.
When Helene hit last year, it was a shock. I certainly didn’t take any stock in the fact that real destruction might happen when I watched the news and saw it heading towards WNC, and while I wasn’t in Asheville for the storm, had I been, I doubt I would’ve done much prepping, maybe getting some batteries for my camping lantern, a case of LaCroix, and some charcuterie makings just in case the power went out, but that’s a big maybe. What Smathers said in 2022 about a town 3,000 feet up in the mountains checking tropical storm reports being crazy, still holds today. However, acting like it came out of nowhere, like there wasn’t a deadly, damaging, expensive flood just 20 miles west of Asheville, is…I don’t know if I want to say an act of hubris, but it’s certainly indicative of how overwhelmed we are with content these days, just how fast the news cycle works, and a level of self-involvement that verges on the problematic (and transparently, I indicted myself pretty clearly here when mentioned earlier how I drove through Cruso, but then within hours put asid the destruction I saw, to think I’m sure, about something as important as which photos from the Cold Mountain hike I would make it into my Instagram carousel).
Helene was monumental. But she wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last strom to drop large amounts of water on us here in WNC. The collective we, just weren’t paying attention. Or maybe we just weren’t reading the right Substacks.
On August, 22, 2021, writer Dan DeWitt, wrote the following headline in the Brevard NewsBeat Substack, Fred’s Flood Was Bad. Future Flooding Is “Very Likely” to Be Worse, Climate Study Says.
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