In the resort town of Hot Springs, service workers take on leadership roles after Helene

What is a resort town without a resort?

What is a stop on the Appalachian Trail without anywhere to stay?

These questions face the residents of Hot Springs, North Carolina, in the months ahead. Significant sections of the spa that gives the community its name were carried into the French Broad River last Friday during Tropical Storm Helene. A row of outdoor hot tubs, No. 1 to No. 8, are gone. Severed pipes and several roofs stick into the sandy grounds.

Along with Marshall and Mars Hill, Hot Springs is one of three towns in Madison County, a remote area of tree-covered mountains and slaloming roads directly north of Asheville and less than 5 miles from Tennessee. Where Marshall is the county seat and Mars Hill a college town, Hot Springs revolves around tourism.

With the French Broad running north, the greater community of around 1,100 residents is a popular spot for white water rafting. It also boasts the only downtown in the state that the Appalachian Trail cuts directly through. And like much of Western North Carolina, the local leaves turn majestic colors in the autumn.

“We call these people leaf lookers,” said Karen McCall, who runs a Hot Springs rafting and tubing company with her husband. “All this town is is tourism. There’s nothing else here.”

As in other areas devastated by Helene , Hot Springs experienced not one local waterway flooding but two. In addition to the French Broad, an overwhelmed Spring Creek swept through the town center and its small concentration of shops, breweries and restaurants along Bridge Street. Keith Calloway watched from his second-floor apartment as the waterline consumed his specialty grocery store below. The creek receded Friday evening but his store was a soaking jumble. To get inside, he and a group tore down the entire front.

“The first two days we were cut off,” Calloway said. “But then (the North Carolina Department of Transportation) got this road put back together.”

A few doors down Friday morning, Rochelle Moon and two other women were shoveling mud out of the darkened local library. The shelves were bare, with a stack of salvaged books on a center table. Moon, a member of the nonprofit Friends of Libraries, said she hasn’t spoken to county officials about the library’s future. She simply arrived to Hot Springs on Wednesday, found the building in disarray, and began the process of clearing.

Volunteerism was evident throughout the community, as residents took on new responsibilities.

Last week, Sonya Phillips was a bar manager at a brewery off Bridge Street. On Friday, she was leading a massive recovery effort out of the Hot Springs public schools campus. Mounds of donated food, diapers, water, gallon buckets, trash bags and wipes filled the gymnasium throughout the day. Outside, someone asked Phillips about the logistics of a helicopter landing to drop off more supplies.

“There’s a whole airspace thing,” she advised before referring the person to an aviation contact she knew.

“Right now, it’s about trying to coordinate outreach with other communities, like Marshall, Barnardsville and Burnsville,” she said.

As volunteers kickstarted Hot Springs’ long recovery, law enforcement continued to search for Helene victims. Behind the Hot Springs spa, where Spring Creek meets the French Broad, agents for the North Carolina Bureau of Investigations removed a mass of tangled tree trunks. Additional personnel from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives were parked on the resort’s front lawn.

There have been four confirmed deaths in Madison County attributed to Helene. As of Friday morning, around 13% of the county’s 16,000 homes and businesses remained without power as authorities continue to look for those still missing.

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