Norwood, a blacksmith originally from Pittsboro, and le Roux, a 33-year-old artist from Georgia, had dated for three years before he proposed last summer.

Norwood woke up around 6 a.m. Friday and saw a nearby creek creeping close to his place, nestled with about a dozen other homes on the side of a mountain by Pisgah National Forest in McDowell County. “We need to go,” he told le Roux, who helped round up their cats, Ginger and Lily, in a crate. Carrying the bags they packed the night before, they loaded up their Subaru Outback. First they drove up the mountain. As they rounded a corner, mud and rocks, deposited by a slide, blocked the road. Then they drove down, but were stopped again, by fallen trees laying flat.

Norwood pulled out his chainsaw and tried to clear a path. “It was so windy and rainy that more and more trees just kept falling all around us, and we just agreed that it was too dangerous to be out here,” said Norwood. The couple drove back to the house in the dark rainfall.

Around 8:30 a.m., they walked to a neighbor’s with a generator and a Starlink satellite phone. Norwood texted his mother and his sister to let them know they were OK. As they sat and watched the water rise, they saw it push cars around and knock more trees down.

Then, through a window, he saw a wave of water, tree limbs and rocks sweeping down the mountain. It soon hit them. “We looked up and there was this wall of water and debris coming towards us, and a split-second later, the whole house was coming down,” Norwood said. And they were swept into a rushing river of mud and debris.

Norwood struggled to keep his head above water as branches, rocks and pieces of houses hit him in the face and pulled him under, pulling off his sandals and shirt. “I fully kind of accepted that I was going to die there,” he said. In no time, the water took Norwood about a quarter-mile, where he found himself stuck on a growing pile of tangled houses and debris atop something snagged below.

His arms were free and his head was above water, but two large pieces of wood had crushed his legs under the surface. A big log pushed at his back. Norwood heard his neighbor yelling. But he didn’t hear his fiancée. “I was just screaming, ‘hey, I’m here. Help. Please. Help,’ ” Norwood said.

As Norwood’s neighbor dug him out, pain in his legs set in. He started screaming for le Roux. “Julie, Julie, Julie,” he yelled, he said, for 20 minutes. But she never answered.

Anonymous wrote:W NC is primarily esp in Asheville - towns in valleys, located in the mountains. Their roads are not the best and it's a lot of rural communities.

With Helene approaching as a Cat4 hurricane, can't one deduce:
1. As mountain environments cause more rain to fall because they hold moisture in the air, isn't the amount of rain from Helene going to be earth shattering?
2. After days of rain already, the towns would be set up for instability - with more rain per above - wouldn't it be plausible for towns to be wiped out?
3. Near rivers, flooding is almost 10000% to be catastrophic - why would anyone think of mandatory evac?
4. Whether you choose to evacuate or not, your town is likely going to be devastated based on the above - isn't this accurate?

Why wasn't this message clear before Helene went through? I get why some residents didn't realize it but as this is pretty all scientific fact, why didn't the officials acknowledge it? It's as if everyone is so surprised by this but I mean, you knew the rains would be nuts and after days of bad rains already, living in mountains and next to rivers, hmmm, what might be worst case scenario?? Is it really hindsight?