A person died inside a home in northwest Charlotte’s historic Hoskins neighborhood when a tree busted through the roof as Tropical Storm Helene pushed through North Carolina — the fifth state it passed through.
There was a crashing bang, silence, then sirens.
According to the Charlotte Fire Department, another adult was trapped with the person who died. That person was rescued, and two children inside weren’t harmed.
My dad’s suffocating, the victim’s adult son told a neighbor at about 5 a.m. Friday. He’d just come out of the Brookway Drive home that now had a gaping hole in its side.
That neighbor described the large-trunked tree as two trees joined at the base. Months before Hurricane Helene started barreling toward the United States, the other half of that tree had crashed onto another house. It’s had a blue tarp on its roof and a hole in its side ever since.
The tree probably should’ve been chopped down then, the neighbor said.
The neighbor, a purple-shirted woman who has lived two doors down from the affected home since the 1970s, didn’t want to give her name. She’d already spoken to television news, and too many people were calling to check on her, she said.
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As she spoke with The Charlotte Observer, two people in a green Kia Soul slowed in front of her brick home. The lawn was decorated with 20 potted plants, an angel bird bath, yellow bird houses and a bench held up by two stone squirrels.
“I heard the news, I just had to come check on you,” the passenger said.
“Oh, I’m all good, honey. It’s the house over there we should be worried about,” the neighbor replied.
The home, a block away from a Baptist church and a tobacco shop sharing borders with railroad tracks, still had branches inside, downed powerlines on the lawn and a sign from the fire department in the window:
“This building has been deemed unsafe.”
The family who lived inside can’t come back, according to the fire department. “Occupancy is prohibited.”
A few houses down, another massive, uprooted tree sprawled its branches across a yard. It was feet away from knocking into the home’s vinyl siding. A few top-level leafs touched its brick foundation.
Helene’s damage, death toll
At least 22 people have died in Tropical Storm Helene, which made landfall in northern Florida as a category 4 hurricane, according to NBC News . Floods surged through western North Carolina as the storms approached Thursday and moved through the state Friday.
Near Charlotte, slippery car crashes killed a four-year-old girl in Catawba County and a 58-year-old man in Gastonia.
The National Weather Service warned that Helene will “be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era,” and it forecast flooding comparable to Asheville’s floods of 1916.
While technology and infrastructure have made it easier to tell people when to get out of flood-prone areas and where to go, the damage these storms bring doesn’t dwindle.
Helene, similar to the weather events in 1916, interacted with another low-pressure system that settled over western North Carolina. That helped catapult Helene’s bands to the area, which started seeing rain days before Friday.
“We cannot stress the significance of this event enough,” NWS said in a release.
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