News from the South - North Carolina News Feed
Falls of Neuse Road closing Monday for several weeks for bridge repairs
SUMMARY: Drivers in Wake County should prepare for lane closures on Falls of Neuse Road as bridge repair work begins this morning. The closure will impact the northbound lanes first, from Old Falls of Neuse Road to Wakefield Pines Drive, lasting approximately one month. Following that, southbound lane closures will commence, also expected to last several weeks. The original repair date was pushed from Friday to today, starting at 9:00 AM. Signs are currently warning motorists about the upcoming changes, which may affect the morning commute. Kelsey Coffey reports live from Raleigh.
Bridge repairs along Falls of Neuse Road in Raleigh will block lanes for several weeks beginning Monday.
News from the South - North Carolina News Feed
Amid all the doom and gloom in the wake of Helene, we should celebrate the good stuff weโve seen โข Asheville Watchdog
It’s hard to deny the past month has been pretty daggone dark.
As in outer space dark. Like a coal mine dark.
Our uninvited mountain guest, Helene, blew into town, wrought destruction, claimed dozens of lives and destroyed so many treasured homes and buildings that our region is forever changed.ย
We now live in a pre-Helene/post-Helene world.
I’ve found myself obsessively doom scrolling on social media, waiting for the next mind-blowing flooding video to pop up. I’m exhausted by it, and yes, depressed.
I can’t tell you how many people have shared that they’ve just broken down and had a huge cry.
It’s not a matter of if you’re going to break, but when. I barely held on last Tuesday when Jesse Craig, an incredibly gracious young man, took two of my Asheville Watchdog colleagues and me through the remains of a landslide-battered holler called Craigtown, where 11 members of his family died.ย
The once peaceful area looks like planes from hell went on a two-mile bombing run down the mountain. Craig, 35, acknowledged that all the surviving family members, including him, have their moments when it all hits again.
โThere’s something that hits at the most unexpected time โ it’s something so small and it just is the straw that breaks the camel’s back,โ Craig said. โAnd you have a moment, and then you try to get up and pick yourself up and talk to your family and, you know, figure out what’s next.โ
He couldn’t have been kinder, or more complimentary of our community, western North Carolina and numerous other states that have sent so many helpers.
โIt has been overwhelming, and I cannot say enough about the people of western North Carolina coming together,โ Craig said. โIt needs to be studied, because from day one people were out here, and everybody’s been affected by this somehow. And even the people that were out here helping us get roads (cleared) and clear things and run machines, they were out here on their own time.โ
People have donated food, supplies and their time, and yes, it’s overwhelming to Craig.
Resilience and grace
โI mean, it’s unbelievable โ the spirit โ and that’s why I say there’s beauty in this,โ Craig said, pausing to carefully choose his words. โThere’s been a uniting of people. What’s the word I’m looking forโฆdespite race, religion, creed, color, political views, everybody has came together as one to help their neighbors.โ
โAnd, you know, that’s as it should be,โ Craig continued, standing among the desolation. โThat’s what the silver lining in this is for me โย to see how that’s happened.โ
That is a remarkable attitude. It’s resilience and grace personified.
One thing that continues to strike me about this catastrophe is the cognitive dissonance of it all. The day we spoke with Craig was one of those postcard-gorgeous late October days โ crisp blue sky, leaves ablaze on the hillsides, the temperature hovering in the 70s. Just perfection.
But you could turn around and see a swath of devastation that’s hard to fathom. You knew many people died here, among this ruin and beauty.
I struggle to understand how God could let this happen.
The Craigs are all strong in their faith, Jesse said, and he actually sees God’s hand at work in those who survived, in the support that’s flowed into the holler.
โYou know, I don’t have an answer for why things like this happen,โ Craig said. โBut as far as my faith is concerned, as Christians, we don’t understand. His will is not our will, and it’s not meant to be that way.โ
Craig says this was God’s plan from the dawn of time.
โWhy? We don’t know, but it’s going to be used for the better good,โ Craig said. โAnd there’s a plan in it, and there’s beauty in it somewhere. Our minds can’t conceive it sometimes, but I do know that there is a greater good that will come out of this.โ
Yeah, that got me.
โThe darkest valley in the pit of hell
Later in the week, I talked to an old friend, Kent Wolff, a mortgage broker who grew up in this area. Full disclosure, he handled two refinancings for my wife, Grace, and me.
Over the phone I could tell he was hurting from all he’s seen and experienced over the past month โ the friends in Swannanoa who were trapped in their attic while they narrowly avoided drowning, the destruction of his beloved Lake Lure, the loss of so many lives.
โIt felt like we walked through the darkest valley in the pit of hell,โ Wolff said.
Wolff didn’t want to talk about the bad stuff anymore โ he couldn’t really. He just wanted to tell me about an organization he and others are involved in called โWARM Project,โ under the umbrella of a national organization called Plain Compassion Crisis Response.
As of Friday, they’d raised $284,439 toward a goal of $325,000 to help an estimated 1,000 โvulnerable households in the greater Mitchell County area and beyond with a source of heat.โ Wolff lives in Buncombe but was moved by Mitchell and Yancey counties’ plight and has spent a lot of time there since the storm.ย
Working with local churches to find those in need, WARM Project gathers the supplies needed to keep families warm through the coming winter. That includes propane heaters and tanks, new electric infrared heaters and new gas generators.
โI have never felt such a sense of purpose,โ Wolff told me. โI have seen so many just Herculean efforts from so many people. Having seen so much of this sense of doom, seeing so many wonderful efforts from so many people, I think that’s somethingโฆwe’re all looking for that.โ
Yes, we are.
โThere’s a million people doing great things,โ Wolff said.
He also had some good advice on how to keep the conversations heading in a more positive direction when you encounter people who very likely have been through trauma.
โStop asking how people are,โ he said, noting that many, many people are hurting. โDon’t say, โHow are you doing?’ Say, โI hope you are better today than you were yesterday.’โย
A โschool’ rises amid the devastationย
One of the coworkers I traveled with to Craigtown is our photographer, Starr Sariego. She’s been politely nagging me for two weeks โ Starr is a delightful human and would never actually nag someone, I’m quite sure โ to do a story on parents in her neighborhood, Kenilworth, who started up a school of sorts for young children after the storm hit and closed down all the schools.
On Thursday, we talked with one of her neighbors, Erin Hallagan Clare, who with a group of other parents, founded โLittle Twisters.โ Yes, it’s a nodding reference to the horrific weather we all endured.
Oh, and it wasn’t a certified, licensed school or anything like that.
โI’d like to use quotation marks around the word โschool,’โ Clare said with a laugh.
She explained that Kenilworth is close to Mission Hospital, and there are a lot of first responders in the neighborhood. A bit of parental panic spread as they didn’t know when public school was starting back. (It starts back today in Asheville.)
Clare’s business in West Asheville, Story Parlor, a narrative art space, was closed indefinitely, so she had time on her hands.
โI’m not good at being idle, especially amidst trauma, where there’s the possibility of steeping into deep depression,โ Clare said.
She has a master’s degree in creative facilitation โ with adults.
โNever worked with kids, but I know all the neighborhood kids really well, and so we kind of just threw together a potential schedule,โ Clare said.
The parents decided to use the backdrop of the storm โ the flooding, the power outages โ as a sort of curriculum, a way to explore with the little ones what happened in โa safe and accessible and understandableโ way appropriate for their cognitive level, Clare said.
So for the past month, three days a week, parents have dropped off as many as 18 kids at a donated room at Kenilworth Presbyterian Church to learn and play.
Each day has had a theme:ย
A parent who’s a water conservationist talked about reusable bottles and how it’s OK that they’re using disposable bottles right now because the water is out and they have to stay safe. A firefighter came in and talked about his job fighting fire, showing some of the equipment used every day.
An employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration brought kid-friendly meteorology packets on clouds and storm formation and talked about how Helene was probably a 500-year event.
โAnd we made little rainbows and umbrellas and sunshines out of plates,โ Clare said.
A yoga teacher did a lesson on mindfulness and how to cope with trauma, geared toward very young kids. The youngest child in the school is 2 1/2, the oldest kids in second grade, although they had a few third-graders contribute as โhelpers.โ
On Wednesday, a parent who works at Asheville Community Theater came in to do some theater games, because they were prepping for the final day of โschoolโ โ a Halloween parade through Kenilworth Oct. 25 where the kids would drop off pumpkins โthat say really cheesy things like, โYou’re Kenilworth it!โ Things like that for the neighbors, to just boost morale,โ Clare said.
Replacement trees at a Halloween parade
The parents also worked to secure a bunch of young trees. Kenilworth, an older neighborhood full of mature trees, took a serious beatdown from Helene’s winds, with hundreds of trees blown over or snapped. The idea was that any house they passed on their Halloween parade that had an uprooted tree would get a free replacement.
โAnd all of these things have been donated or thought of by parents in the community,โ Clare said.ย
Clare, who with her husband Matt has two boys, Rye, 5, and Owen, 3, who goes by โOwey,โ says she’s known all these kids most of their lives. But usually they’d see one another at chaotic neighborhood parties.
โSo getting to know them in this more intimate setting has been really lovely,โ Clare said.
She won’t lie, though โ coming to the church classroom where there was power and the internet has been pretty sweet.
โI was joking with parents. I was like, โI’m just in it for the free power,’โ Clare said with a laugh. โBut it’s really been, for somebody who’s not worked with kids, I’ve just fallen in love with them.โ
Clare doesn’t sugarcoat the stress everyone has been under the past few weeks. Kenilworth got the lights back on the weekend before last.
โI’ve become a believer in melatonin throughout all this for the first time in my life,โ Clare said. โWe had a big tree come down on our house, and I still feel it and hear it.โ
Two big white pines fell on their house, damaging the roof and the ceiling in a guest room. Her son’s best friend from preschool has a father who’s in construction, and he fixed the roof, but a lot of work remains.ย
Still, Clare is counting her blessings, and the impromptu school is a big part of that.
โI feel like I live in a Disney movie living in this neighborhood,โ Clare said. โHonestly, it’s pretty surreal just how absolutely incredible everyone is and how they come together and in whatever major or minor crisis happens.โ
The parents are some of Clare’s best friends, and the past month has made her realize Asheville is home now. Clare has moved a lot, and she and Matt moved here from Austin, Texas, five years ago.
โI’ve been a transplant my whole life,โ Clare said. โI feel like there’s always this feeling of being the outsider, especially in towns that are so deeply closely knit, like Asheville. This event has made me feel like a true, true Ashevillian, if that’s the right term. I will not be leaving.โ
Who would want to leave a community with so many good hearts?
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.
Related
The post Amid all the doom and gloom in the wake of Helene, we should celebrate the good stuff we’ve seen โข Asheville Watchdog appeared first on avlwatchdog.org
News from the South - North Carolina News Feed
One month after Helene, hard work continues in WNC
SUMMARY: One month after Hurricane Helen, the physical and economic impacts are still emerging in the affected communities. Charity Honeycut, initially part of a grassroots effort with friends, has helped establish the nonprofit Mountain Strong, raising over $100,000 for residents in Mitchell and Yancey counties. Many locals face transportation issues, exacerbated by lost vehicles, making it difficult to obtain supplies. The Mana Food Bank, despite losing its facility, continues to serve those in need. As the region’s economy struggles, community resilience shines through, with ongoing support and hope for recovery. Monetary donations remain crucial for relief efforts.
It’s been one month since the remnants of Hurricane Helene cut a deadly path through Western North Carolina.
Story: https://abc11.com/post/1-month-after-helene-hard-work-continues-western-north-carolina/15478482/
Watch: https://abc11.com/watch/live/11065013/
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ABC11/
X: https://twitter.com/ABC11_WTVD
TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@abc11_eyewitnessnews
News from the South - North Carolina News Feed
Fire guts home on South Miami Boulevard in Durham
SUMMARY: A house on South Miami Boulevard in Durham caught fire this afternoon, prompting road closures as firefighters tackled the blaze. The fire, visible from miles away, started around 2:30 PM and was extinguished within ten minutes. Fortunately, the man inside escaped uninjured. The home, heavily charred and with exterior walls exposed, has suffered multiple fires; this is the second incident in just a few months, with a previous fire occurring on June 8. The cause is under investigation by the Durham County Fire Marshal’s Office, and the Red Cross is assisting the displaced homeowner.
A house went up in flames in Durham on South Miami Boulevard Sunday afternoon.
-
Our Mississippi Home6 days ago
Snoop Dogg’s Mississippi Roots Run Deep
-
News from the South - Florida News Feed3 days ago
Sarah Boone verdict: Jury makes decision in 60 minutes in Florida suitcase murder trial
-
News from the South - Florida News Feed5 days ago
Sarah Boone Trial: “We've seen 3 Sarah Boones now”
-
News from the South - Missouri News Feed5 days ago
Nephewโs chilling account dominates cold case murder trial
-
News from the South - Georgia News Feed7 days ago
WATCH LIVE: Young Thug/YSL trial continues in Fulton County | FOX 5 News
-
News from the South - Kentucky News Feed6 days ago
Teachers' lounge becomes free barbershop for students
-
Mississippi News Video4 days ago
Investigation underway in Eupora after disturbing video surfaces
-
News from the South - Texas News Feed6 days ago
HCSO, Hedwig Village police trying to identify suspect wanted in at least two sexual assault cases