While many Louisiana residents are traumatized by their own experiences with major hurricanes and are watching heartbreaking stories from Appalachia in the aftermath of Hurricane Helen, New Orleans businessman Jay Mr. Butt is one of the people who is directly facing this damage.
The two shopping centers that Mr. Butt and several partners develop and own in historic Biltmore Village, just south of Asheville, N.C., are closed to quaint streets as the Swannanoa River crests over its banks after record rainfall. More than 9 feet of water flooded the area. Shopping street.
“Two times in a lifetime is a little too much,” said Butt, who served on the New Orleans City Council during Hurricane Katrina, when his Lakewood South home was flooded with 8 feet of water. “We never dreamed something like this would happen again, especially in North Carolina. At least we know what to do.”
Butt is not the only South Louisiana resident dealing with the aftermath of Helen, about 1,100 miles to the north. Many local residents have ties to North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, which are also facing impacts from the storm. Blue Ridge and the Smoky Mountains are popular vacation spots among Louisianans. Some people have vacation homes in the mountains. Some people have businesses or relatives in the area.
“There are a lot of people in southern Louisiana who have ties to North Carolina,” said William McIntyre, a real estate broker who moved to North Carolina from his hometown of New Orleans two years ago. “Anyone who lived through Katrina can really understand what people here are going through.”
rapids
The Appalachian region was particularly hard hit by the wreckage of Helen, which washed ashore along Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday.
Although the storm weakened as it headed north, it caused massive flash flooding across several states that were already saturated by previous weather systems. Roads and bridges were washed away, thousands of people were stranded, and mobile phone service was cut off.
The entire city of Asheville, a popular artistic enclave that has doubled in size over the past 30 years, had no potable water.
As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 1.5 million homes across the region remained without power, adding to the challenge of disaster recovery, according to poweroutage.us.
Eric Revels of New Orleans was one of those who started to get into the element. He fell in love with North Carolina, where he attended summer camp as a child. Today, his company Watershed produces state-of-the-art waterproof bags for recreational users such as kayakers and hikers, as well as the U.S. military. The company’s 15,000 square foot manufacturing facility, offices and warehouse is located approximately four miles north of Asheville in Woodfin, North Carolina. They took in 4 feet of water.
Revels, who lives in New Orleans, was at Woodfin on Tuesday to assess the damage and begin cleaning up.
“This isn’t like a flood in New Orleans, where the water gradually rises,” he said. “It’s coming at me with great force.”
Revels said the structural integrity of his building is sound and some of the items stored high on shelves may be salvageable. But he said it was too early to quantify the extent of the damage.
“We had a restoration company come in, but everything is still a mess,” he said. “Most of our employees are safe, but many of the people here are stranded and have no communication or running water.”
Revels is thankful he has flood insurance, a precaution he took when he nearly flooded in 2004. Butt’s shopping center, which totals nearly 100,000 square feet and includes tenants such as Lululemon and Lilly Pulitzer, also has flood insurance.
Some people are not so lucky.
“Here in North Carolina, I’ve heard estimates that only 10 percent of homes and businesses have flood insurance,” McIntyre said, citing people in the real estate industry. “In Tennessee, it’s even lower than that.”
“The foundation has been torn away.”
Peyton Burrell, a restaurateur and former New Orleanian, is among those without flood insurance. He graduated from the first class of the New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Institute in 2019 and opened a small pork business and pop-up restaurant in New Orleans called Gourmand in 2020.
But in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in 2021, Burrell and his wife decided to move to North Carolina. They opened a small tea shop and last year decided to take the plunge and open their own restaurant in Asheville’s trendy River Arts District.
After 14 months of construction, renovations to the small building on the banks of the French Broad River are nearly complete, and the new gourmand was scheduled to open later this fall. Then the remnants of Helen blew through, causing water levels on the French Broad to rise.
“It just knocked the building off its foundation and deposited it about 100 yards away,” Burrell said by phone Tuesday. “Fortunately, our appliances had not yet been delivered.”
Like Batt and the Rebels, Burrell is struck by the irony of being wiped out in the mountains of North Carolina. Until last week, it seemed like a relatively safe haven from hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and other destructive weather events.
“When I was a kid, we always took shelter here when there were hurricanes. We used to come here and play,” he said. Sure, we thought we were safe here. ”
Burrell still doesn’t know how he will recover or what he will do next. Other local residents have also begun the process of rebuilding.
“I’m from New Orleans, so I know how to approach this,” Revels said. “Just start cleaning and you’re going to give it your all.”