The water thundered in and doused the land without mercy. It muddied every lawn, and it blunted the tree bark, and it drizzled off the shingles and into the driveways and gathered speed into the streets, where the currents found the drains and cascaded away. Nothing new in these mountains surrounding Asheville, North Carolina. Nothing worth noticing. Not until the early hours of Friday, September 27, 2024, in the dim light of the waning crescent moon, when a new kind of storm cloud arrived. It stirred Matthew Templeton in the night, its winds stretching and snapping branches of hemlock and oak. He watched the trunks sway and the limbs creak in the shadows outside his bedroom window, stuck somewhere between a typical nightmare and something more real.
He awoke again sometime between 6 and 7 a.m. The wind still howled, and now the water pelted the family’s five living room windows at a perpendicular angle. His wife, Heather, was already up, chatting on the phone with their oldest daughter in South Carolina. Now Matthew joined her marveling at the storm outside. Their younger daughter Jocelyn, a high school freshman, had planned to watch a Hallmark movie — a weather advisory had closed schools — but instead she, too, watched the windows. The pelting rain hosed the glass like a carwash jet. Meanwhile Titus, a redheaded high school senior, slept down the hall. A hunting rifle and a signed photograph of actor Mark Hamill decorated the walls around his bed.
Jocelyn and Titus’s father was many things. He worked in construction during the day, and as a Baptist pastor at night. But Matthew Templeton also had a hobby: an autograph collection that held thousands of pieces valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. It had become something he and Titus worked on together — something lighthearted and fun that doubled as a source of secondary income. Matthew kept the artifacts in a rented storage unit two minutes down the mountain, near the banks of the swollen Swannanoa River.
He’d been down to check on the storage unit just the day before. The building manager was in the parking lot, working to fortify the drain. Forecasts had warned about the approach of Hurricane Helene. No forecast, however, could have conveyed the scale of devastation that would come with it, with over 200 killed throughout the South and over 1,000 homes destroyed in western North Carolina alone. Helene swept 30-foot walls of moisture into mountain valleys far from the coasts where hurricanes tend to do their worst damage. It would leave Asheville without running water, working electricity and cell service for weeks and caused an estimated $53 billion in damage to key infrastructure. Its aftermath was downright apocalyptic, on a scale and of a severity rarely seen in the modern United States. Yet at the time, watching the storage unit building manager prepare the parking lot for the worst, Matthew didn’t think much of it. The next morning, still watching rain pelt the windows, an emergency alert flashed on his phone. It warned residents throughout the community of a nearby dam at capacity. It warned of catastrophic flooding. Matthew decided to make one more trip to the storage unit, to move what he could to higher shelves. Most of the collection was paper — posters and photographs and cards. Water would destroy it. If he acted quickly, he thought, a small flood wouldn’t mean the end of a 30-year project…