Natalie Lamb moved to Fairview nine months before Hurricane Helene. She and her husband came from Dallas with a big, blended family—six children in all, both adopted and biological, as well as her mother. Natalie grew up in Dallas but she says, “I was searching for a place with more nature and more peace.”
When the storm came, her fourteen-year-old daughter Nev says that they were holed up in their house. “We got out a few days later, but we didn’t know what was happening,” she says. “We just thought it was, like, heavy rains. We only had a few fallen trees. Once we got down here, we were in shock because there were parts of the road falling off. One of our neighbor’s yard was totally mud. The road had water all over it.”
Her mother says, “We came down that first day very naive, not understanding the depth. Then we’d run into people and their faces were so serious and panicking.” Right on Garren Creek Road, where they live, people had died. Mudslides had carried homes down the mountain. Piles of logged trees barreled down like battering rams. Broken and covered in trees, their road was cut off from the outside…