Road trip from California lands man in middle of Hurricane Helene

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WSPA) – On September 23, Jon Bailiff, who lives in California, said he joined an old friend from Wisconsin for a road trip to the mountains of western North Carolina.

Bailiff said neither of them could have imagined what they would run into a few days later.

“That expression, no one is coming to save you,” Bailiff said. “That was true.”

Deciding conditions had become too much, Bailiff and his friend got off the highway and stopped at a hotel right before Helene overtook Asheville.

“[There was] only one room left,” Bailiff said. “I booked that room and it saved us.”

It was the Holiday Inn, located off Tunnel Road in Asheville, that Bailiff said housed nearly 300 people with no power, no running water, and no communication with anyone outside of the hotel.

“We did not get communication from the outside world for three days, of any kind,” Bailiff said.

Hurricane Helene left many without homes. Many without power, water, food…and many lost their lives.

In the midst of chaos was a sight Bailiff said was heartbreaking.

“I might cry talking about this,” Bailiff said. “Totally soaking wet, he is in boots and shorts and a ripped t-shirt. They have a baby in their arms and a toddler and their home is gone. Everything.”

Bailiff said he then became part of a community fighting to help one another.

Giving someone he didn’t know a dry shirt off his back, from then on Bailiff said he and others essentially joined the hotel team who housed as many people as they could and fed everyone three hot meals a day.

“The devastation of lives,” Bailiff said. “What the staff at the hotel went through. Losing their homes and continuing to work and live at the hotel now because they don’t have a home to go back to.”

“The rain was torrential, torrential, and unrelenting,” Bailiff recalled. “I realized right then that the death toll was going to be very high because if his immediate circle had five fatalities, than the death toll was going to be extrapolating from that.”

Those are testimonies Bailiff said hold a lot of weight.

“To leave after working so hard to help so many people for so long it was a weird thing to not be doing that anymore, sort of survivors guilt,” Bailiff said.

Bailiff was able to fly out of Asheville a few days after Hurricane Helene hit but he said the relationships he made with the people of North Carolina are something he will never forget and he still has the people impacted, and the gracious hotel staff, on the forefront of his mind, even across the country.

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