This story is part of Voices After Helene, a special series from BPR examining the impact of Hurricane Helene one year out. See more stories and interviews here.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
When Darlene Kurkendall closes her eyes, she imagines the walls of her house falling away. She sees the people in her community — friends, neighbors, family — swept out of sight by a horrendous heap of moving earth. Her household only just survived the landslides that decimated her small, mountain-home community of Craigtown.
“The trees just piled up all down through there, and then the water, it was gushing the whole way down through here,” she said, pointing across the road.
Where there were once homes and trees, now there’s only mud and dirt. The landslide took the homes of her mom, and her brother and his wife.
“It just kept going down in the holler,” Kurkendall said.
Kurkendall has lived in Craigtown all her life, surrounded by dozens of members of her extended family. During Helene, a section of the mountainside, along with tons of mud and debris, slid down on top of them, suddenly taking 11 of her family’s lives, and 13 total in Craigtown. It was a type of slide called a “debris flow.” It likely happened in multiple waves, and hit the community at a speed of around 30 miles per hour – too quick for a real warning.
“The earth was shaking,” she said, and her voice, shook, too, as she spoke. “The most horrendous sound you ever heard. It sounded like trains crashing.”
There were more than 2,000 landslides during Hurricane Helene that killed 23 people and displaced many more. In Buncombe County alone, 145 landslides damaged 245 homes. A year after the storm, geologists and officials are working to prevent this scale of tragedy from happening in the future.
Since last September, state and federal geologists have been racing to figure out what went wrong, and understand how to make people safer. According to David Korte, who has been mapping landslides at the North Carolina Geological Survey. Where people live can put them in danger.
“The reason people put houses down or next to these streams down at the bottom of the mountain is because it's flat down there,” Korte said. “And you know why it's flat? It's because that's a debris flow deposit area.”
That means the mountain has been falling down the stream for thousands of years. Extreme rain destabilizes mountainsides, causing complex situations. According to the United States Geological Survey’s preliminary report of landslide risk following Helene, there’s additional risk in recent landslide scars, especially where new, steep slopes have been exposed around areas undercut by landslide or flood erosion, or where new springs of water have emerged from the ground.
The United States Geological Survey’s report connected the most severe landslides to the parts of the region that experienced the largest total rainfall, with 95% of slides occurring where rainfall was 10 inches or more. Geologists and climate scientists have warned that as climate change causes more extreme storms and heavier rains, landslides could happen more frequently.
“There are 100 Craigtowns,” Korte said. ”At least 100 in Western North Carolina.”
Deforestation can also make hillsides unstable, according to Korte. So can building homes. That’s why Buncombe County developed ordinances on building on slopes in 2010, according to county planner Nathan Pennington.
“The county was kind of a pioneer,” he said.
Buncombe County regulations require anyone building a home above 2,500 feet in elevation or on more than a 35% slope grade to consult with geotechnical engineers before construction.
Post-Helene, FEMA is supporting the state’s hazard mitigation buyouts, with funding going from the federal to the state and then to the local level to disburse to people whose homes are in dangerous areas. These funds could support people whose houses were destroyed, and keep them from living in dangerous spots. Buyouts are elective for homeowners, and allow people to be compensated for moving out of harm’s way.
Not every home with landslide damage is eligible for buyouts, however – some are just too complicated. In general, there are limits to what the county can do. Ordinances are preventative, and violations take time to address, Pennington said.
“Staff can issue a notice of violation for unpermitted work, and if compliance is not gained through this process, then we can involve legal and make a complaint to the court,” he said.
The county rules are only as strict as the state allows them to be, Pennington added. “If Raleigh says through a bill or statute that we cannot regulate something, then we must abide.”
The state has already passed a law that, some officials told BPR, impedes tighter local regulations on mountain construction. A law against downzoning — or decreasing development density or reducing permitted uses of a piece of land — passed on the state level late last year. It restricts local governments’ power to tighten or change zoning regulations without landowners’ consent, posing additional challenges to further regulation.
“What we can't do is prohibit people from developing to some extent on their property,” Pennington said. “We can pass regulations with some meaningful standards and make people aware of the risk, and that's largely what we try to do, especially to people that are moving here.”
People who move to the region from less mountainous landscapes simply may not understand the risk, he and other planners fear.
As a response to Helene’s extensive damage, Buncombe County is piloting a new program in Swannanoa to help address complicated landslides by remediating unstable slopes to make them more secure. FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Buyouts and FEMA’s Public Assistance program can help with simpler landslides on private and public land, but there’s no established fix for the the more complex landslides that impacted multiple properties. The county needs $17 million to remediate those slopes — money it doesn't yet have. The county currently is securing a $1.3 million contract to survey the site.
As for the people who already live here, some geologists are hoping that people choose to move out of harm’s way. But not everyone can afford to, or wants to. That’s the case with Kurkendall and her husband in Craigtown. They live on land that’s been in the family for generations.
“We're both old, you know?” Kurkendall said. “This is all we have.”
There are other barriers to keeping people like Kirkendahl safe.
Landslides are hard to predict. According to Henderson County emergency management planner and GIS analyst Katie Scheip, nobody’s really figured out the exact formula for how much rain and water saturation cause a landslide. Scheip is mapping the slides that happened in Henderson County and working on emergency landslide warning systems.
Most homeowner’s insurance doesn't cover landslides, and landslide insurance is very expensive. There are no real rules around living in a landslide zone like there are in a floodplain zone, according Scheip.
Jennifer Bauer, who owns a company called Appalachian Landslide Consultants, is hoping to educate newcomers who don’t yet understand landslide risk. Bauer formerly worked on a state geologists’ team focused on landslide mapping, which was defunded by the state legislature in 2011.
“Because there's so many folks who are building in the mountains now who are not from around here, they don't consider landslides as a hazard,” Bauer said.
Bauer dreams of resident education programs and better warning systems. There are already models for this, such as the national Firewise program, which teaches communities how to live with wildfire. Bauer is teaching people about simple actions that can help mitigate landslide risk, like cleaning ditches, culverts and gutters. Geologists have found storms with intense landslide activity tend to happen in Appalachia about every 25 years — it’s something the region needs to be prepared for.
“Just like folks on the coast, they know about hurricanes, folks in the mountains need to know about landslides,” Bauer said.
With Bauer, Korte, and other emergency managers and geologists mapping slides, officials at least will know what communities are most vulnerable. And with that knowledge, they can keep communicating with leaders and residents — so they can save lives.
