‘Civilization is pretty much gone’ after Helene tears through Spruce Pine, NC

With the mud ankle-deep inside her music store, and the water stains climbing 8 feet high on the walls, Angie Buchanan said goodbye to 50 years of teaching music in Spruce Pine.

Then she walked through the stinking sludge of Lower Street and tossed her prized cello on a trash pile.

“My life is in there,” she said. “It’s hard. Very hard.”

The Mitchell County town of 2,000 took a beating from the North Toe River, which destroyed its historic brick riverfront and left neighbors still enduring life without power, water or cell service a week after Hurricane Helene roared through.

“Our water treatment plant washed away,” said Sonja Emmett, who was out walking her dog. “All the garbage trucks washed away. Everything civilization is pretty much gone.”

Tiny Plumtree’s near-impassable roads

Nearby, the community store in tiny Plumtree still served as a Grand Central Station for side-by-sides carrying water, food, diapers and toilet paper up narrow, muddy, near-impassable roads where neighbors sat stranded.

And around midday Thursday, they learned one of their own had been found dead after a week. Nobody wanted to talk about it. They hugged and cried as the relief operation became an outdoor wake powered by generators.

Helicopters flew overhead, National Guard trucks rolled past and a community of 818 kept feverishly looking after each other, keeping a list of who is stuck where and who needs what, sending out side-by-sides like free DoorDash service.

“The main thing we don’t want is people to think, ‘These poor, old, ignorant Appalachian mountain people,’ ” said Libby Wise, running to check on her 90-year-old mother. “We have plenty of college-educated people here. We are so appreciative of all the outside people are doing for us. Please don’t think you’re sending food and water to a log cabin.”

Those still ‘unaccounted for’

Back in Spruce Pine, a makeshift relief station opened up outside L&L Furniture on the Upper Road, which barely escaped disaster, unlike its riverfront neighbor.

Many residents couldn’t get out of their houses until Sunday, and an army of 100 volunteers has cut them free one-by-one. One of them on Lower Road Thursday said he’d gotten out 15 families since last weekend.

But fears persist of those still “unaccounted for,” the term Spruce Pine uses rather than missing.

Much like Plumtree, neighbors keep a tally of who is where, sending volunteers out to check. But when the find empty houses, mostly intact, the communication blackout forces them to guess at whether their friends have taken up with family elsewhere or disappeared down the North Toe.

“I can sometimes get Facebook with a generator and a Starlink,” said Shirley Singleton, whose daughter owns L&L. “Kind of that’s how we’re finding people.”

Spruce Pine’s living room washed away

Down on Lower Street, David Niven was shoveling the mud out of DT’s Blue Ridge Java, also sunk under 8 feet of water.

“It’s only $2 million down the drain,” he joked. “I’ve got 40 gallons of gas sitting at my house. I’m blessed.”

He and his wife Tricia opened their coffee house 20 years ago, inside a building listed on the National Register.

“I wish you could have seen it,” she said. “We were the living room of Spruce Pine . Every church group met here. Everyone and anyone met here. God has kept us for 20 years through fires, through pandemic. On the third day after the flood, God spoke to me and said, ‘We’re rebuilding.’ “

On the day after the storm, before she even saw the ruined guitars, drums and dulcimers, someone broke into Buchanan’s music store and stole a harp.

“Kids, probably,” she said. “Probably just kids.”

Somehow, she thought, in storm or fair weather, she will get Spruce Pine playing music again.

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