When Helene hit NC’s Green River Gorge, woman’s only escape route was over the mountain

When the house across the street exploded, Susan Figetakis knew it was time to run from the rising Green River.

Figetakis stowed her three cats in the top floor of her three-story home, put her birth certificate and a few key belongings in a knapsack and started to climb the mountain that rises behind her home on Green River Cove Road. This scenic part of Polk County is nestled into a valley between several mountains, with the river that gives the road its name running through a gorge at the bottom.

But on Sept. 27, that river frothed as Helene’s heavy rainfalls raised it. And the mountains that surround the road boomed with the sound of landslides from above and riverfront homes smashing below, Figetakis said.

Figetakis knew Helene was going to be bad. The area had flooded in 2018, damaging large portions of Green River Cove Road and flooding cars and property. Still, the water hadn’t crossed the road onto Figetakis’ property then.

Helene was different.

Days before the storm, the local fire department had come through to evacuate everyone on the northern edge of Green River Cove Road, which runs along the river. They didn’t say anything to Figetakis or the other people living on the southern side of the road.

‘One way out’

In the early hours of Friday morning, Figetakis watched as the water started to creep up the driveway to her house.

As the water was rising, Figetakis was making her escape plan. She didn’t know who else was on the road or how high the water would go. She thought about trying to stay, trying to retreat higher and higher in the three-story home.

The water spilled across Green River Cove Road and steadily crossed her yard.

About an hour later, the water was inside her walk-out basement, Figetakis said. The clock that had been in the basement was stopped at 9:30. Then, she said, the water was “just boiling up the stairs.”

It would end up reaching the second-highest stair to the home’s second floor.

“There’s only one way (out),” Figetakis said — the mountain.

Around 10 a.m., she saw a house on stilts across the street explode, something Figetakis believes happened due to a propane tank. She stowed the cats, then threw her birth certificate, a change of clothes, a spare pair of shoes and her cell phone charger into a knapsack.

Clad in a rain suit, Figetakis went out a back window and started to climb.

As she walked uphill, Figetakis tried to stay away from large trees, afraid of what would happen if the ground beneath them gave way in a landslide. Still, the ground underneath her feet was squishy, saturated from all of the rain that had fallen even before the storm arrived.

Figetakis described paying close attention to the ground, trying to walk where leaves from previous seasons seemed to still be clustered, because those were places where mudslides hadn’t yet disturbed the ground. The storm was just passing overhead at that point, and Figetakis remembered the rain picking up.

Around her, waterfalls were forming where there hadn’t been any before as the rain sought a path off the mountain she was trying to climb.

“It was actually quite beautiful,” Figetakis said.

Even though she didn’t have cell service, she texted her partner, Ernie Planck, who was driving home after a shift working as a helicopter pilot in Louisiana, evacuating workers from oil rigs as the storm churned through the Gulf of Mexico. Figetakis described what she was wearing and where she was walking, hoping he would be able to help someone find her or, in the worst case, her body.

“It was bad. I was just like, ‘Don’t give up. Keep going up, keep going up,’” Figetakis said.

As she told the story outside of her waterlogged home Monday afternoon, Figetakis stared into space, her gaze pointed in the direction of the debris-littered river but not focused on anything. Occasionally, Figetakis fidgeted with the N95 mask she was wearing, leaving smears of dark mud across the white mask.

She recalled how she felt like Bilbo Baggins walking through The Shire in “The Lord of the Rings.” She marveled at the fact that she had been able to walk up the mountain. And she said she had felt a strange sense of calm throughout the ordeal.

Eventually, as Figetakis climbed, she flipped to Facebook on her phone and saw that a friend was marked as online. She sent a message describing where she was.

Then she stumbled across an orange marker on a tree, a sign that she was on a trail. Figetakis described generally following the trail for a while, trying to stay above it when it dipped downward.

After walking for about two hours, Figetakis came to what she described as a small shed, and a friend was able to find her there after a neighbor told him where the trailhead was located. By about 2 p.m., Figetakis was off of the mountain.

Days later, Figetakis seemed almost surprised at her escape.

“I just did it,” she said. “I had to.”

Landslides on Green River Cove Road

The descent to Green River Cove is tricky even in the best of times . There are 17 switchbacks on two miles of Green River Cove Road, with the steep grade earning a profile on DangerousRoads.org.

On a map, part of the road from Saluda into the valley looks like an EKG reading, with five remarkably consistent peaks, each with a switchback at the top and at the base.

Monday afternoon reddish dirt clearly marked where several landslides had occurred throughout the descent from Holbert Cove Road. In some places, metal guardrails hung in thin air, the dirt their posts had been driven into washed onto the road below.

About halfway down the mountain the face above had given way, leaving a hill of dirt the size of a large house gradually descending off of the cliff. It was possible to walk up and over the hill or to take a jolting ride on an off-road vehicle, but the one-lane road had only recently become accessible to the bravest car drivers after the National Guard used a bulldozer to smooth out the dirt.

Helene’s floodwaters destroyed 37 homes on Green River Cove Road, said Christina Hallingse, an acting spokeswoman for Polk County.

“They were essentially washed away. Those houses do not exist,” Hallingse said Tuesday.

Monday, small clutches of supplies sat in front of the houses that remained. Donations of bottled water, plastic bags, Nabs and a spare set of shoes neatly gathered on plastic folding tables like offerings to whichever passerby needed them right that instant.

Cleaning up, trying to stay

Before Helene, the banks of the Green River were 250 feet away from Figetakis’ house.

On a Google Streetview image taken in front of the home last December, it’s impossible to see through the thick clumps of trees to the river. Several buildings are clearly visible.

Helene changed all that.

The buildings were nowhere to be seen, and even large areas of debris from fallen structures seemed to be mostly absent. The trees had gathered in clumps throughout the riverbed. A new southern branch of the river seemed to be flowing where there had been dry land a little more than a week before.

“It’s just gone and now it’s like there’s a little Grand Canyon there,” Figetakis said, pointing to a new cliff on the river’s northern edge. “It’s really weird.”

Figetakis and Planck returned to their home shortly after the storm to retrieve the cats. They also started cleaning up the mess that Helene left behind.

The river had almost entirely flooded the home’s finished basement and nearly reached the second floor. A two-story garage that had sat behind their house was toppled onto its front, its roof facing the jagged remains of the street on Monday.

Just west of the house, an ATV trail had been formed out of still-slushy mud. East of the house, what remained of the road was so muddy that it was difficult to discern that the narrow strip that was being traveled was the shoulder and a small bit of the eastbound lane.

Clad in a white hazmat suit that had turned brown from the shoulders down, Figetakis made trip after trip into the basement, pulling out the items that she and Planck had collected over decades.

Mud-splattered items from the basement were piled outside, books and a drum set and mirrors and a lamp still wet.

As she carried the books out, Figetakis said she was thinking, “Oh my God, I wish I’d never gotten these.”

Two cars sat at odd angles in the front yard, where the river the had deposited them. An SUV sat askew, a mud splashed couch wedged up against it. A brand new ATV sat next to it — Figetakis and Planck’s current transportation.

The smell of mildew reached from the basement almost to the road, more than 50 feet away. Inside, an ankle-deep layer of mud still laid across the floor. The roar of a generator made it impossible to talk inside.

Back outside, Figetakis described the physical challenges of cleaning up, of lifting the heavy mud and moving all of her belongings.

But there’s also a monetary side to recovery, and like so many in Western North Carolina, Figetakis and Planck did not carry flood insurance.

“We really felt like we didn’t need it because of how high up we are. ... If we thought we had needed it or were even remotely close ...,” Figetakis said, trailing off.

Still, she has been drawn to the natural beauty of Western North Carolina since moving to the region in 1989. She’d like to find a way to keep living in the area, maybe even in the same house on Green River Cove Road. But for now, she’s not sure if it’s inhabitable and is staying at a nearby inn.

“I’d like to stay here but we’ll see what happens,” Figetakis said.

This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and Green South Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. If you would like to help support local journalism, please consider signing up for a digital subscription, which you can do here.