The only road to Pensacola, in the remote mountains of western North Carolina, is now a muddy path through deep, twisting gorges. Its main bridges were swept away last week in floods fueled by devastating Hurricane Helene — and a cold winter is coming.
“Every major bridge into town is completely gone,” Christy Edwards, a resident of the valley, told AFP. She was speaking near the site of her former craft shop — carried away by the fast-moving floodwaters.
The isolation of this steep-sided valley, where Edwards was born and has spent her life, speaks of the utter ruination inflicted by Helene on some of the more secluded corners of the southeastern United States.
Even a week after the powerful storm’s passage, access to the area is only slowly being restored.
But “winter is coming,” said Edwards, a former teacher, and at an altitude of some 3,000 feet (900 meters), time is running short.
Temperatures are expected to drop sharply next week, and “these people and these homes have no heat source other than power, (though) some of them do have wood-burning stoves.”