On the evening of September 26, 2024, Justin James headed home from work, expecting to be back at his Opie Way sneaker factory on Monday. Chris Bower and Rett Murphy were in Turin, Italy, showcasing their Eda Rhyne Distilling Company spirits at an international festival. But that night, Hurricane Helene barreled through the Florida Gulf Coast and made its way up through Georgia into South Carolina and Western North Carolina. The Opie Way shoe factory was about fifteen minutes southeast of downtown Asheville. The Eda Rhyne distillery sat in Biltmore Village. The storm spared neither.
“Walking through that building that first day, about four days after the storm, I probably spent three hours inside,” James says. “Things had already started to mold, because it was a just-under-a-million-square-foot building and had a six-foot river running through it.”
With his only source of light coming from his headlamp, James salvaged about twenty pairs of his bespoke shoes from the wreckage. Everything else—the leather, machines, soles splayed out in the now-muddied parking lot—was gone. Just one month shy of its fifth anniversary, Opie Way as James knew it had been swept away.
Meanwhile, in Italy, Bower and Murphy had no idea a storm was coming to Asheville until after it hit. Unlike those in the hurricane’s path, the two had cell service and could see the damage the storm left behind through photos sent to them of their distillery underwater. “It was very devastating, especially on my end, since my house got hit,” Bower says. “I came back and I had three trees on my house. To see the distillery just totally wrecked—we got five-and-a-half feet of water in there, the place was full of mud. We lost so much inventory.”
But as strong as the storm’s fury had been, the Western North Carolina community’s resilience was stronger. Restaurants gave out free food, neighbors helped clear debris, and those watching the destruction unravel on social media from afar spread the word about donations and fundraising. This spirit of community fostered hope in both James at Opie Way and Bower and Murphy at Eda Rhyne to start the recovery process…