When Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina, federal weather photographers couldn’t reach the region because of destroyed roads, damaged infrastructure and widespread communications outages.
Asheville photographer Michael Freas was already there.
Freas’s images show the devastation from several perspectives, including the flooded French Broad River, a man clinging to an overturned shipping container while awaiting rescue, veterans salvaging belongings from flooded homes on Tunnel Road and artists confronting the destruction of their studios in the River Arts District…