Luke Etchison couldn’t do anything for the fish, mussels, and other river critters that he dedicated his professional life to saving. Not with the remnants of a killer hurricane bearing down, a wife and 3-year-old daughter to protect, and a river rampaging below his Western North Carolina home.
The conservation biologist woke early that September morning in 2024 as Tropical Storm Helene’s fury reached the southern Appalachians. Heavy rains and high winds rolled across his Botany Woods neighborhood just outside of Asheville on the Swannanoa River. Once the sky lightened, the devastation became clear: Trees toppled onto homes; power lines crisscrossed roads; and houses washed away at the bottom of the hill where the bloated river U-turned around the neighborhood.
“We really didn’t know how extreme all the damage was going to be,” Etchison said. “But then as we walked down to the river, it was like, ‘Holy crap.’ This was worse and worse than we thought.”…