(WGHP) — When something hasn’t happened in more than a century, you can understand why it’s not top of mind for some folks. And then when it happens, you wonder why you didn’t see it coming.
When Hurricane Helene dropped a couple of feet of water on the North Carolina mountains over a day or so, and then that water ran down the mountainsides and collected as much more than a couple of feet where it aggregated, it created real problems.
Carter Francois knows all about that. Carter owned The Alpine Inn until a majority of it rolled down the mountain because of Helene’s flooding and the landslides. He’d only owned the place a few years.
“I was looking from Maine down to Florida and something that I could afford that makes money, and this seemed to be a pretty good thing,” Carter said.
Nothing like Helene had happened here since well before Carter’s grandparents were born, but the flooding that happened that Thursday and Friday in late September changed everything.
“It was a nightmare,” Carter said. “We also had a tornado that hit us. That’s when I think I knew we were in trouble … It went through my bedroom, and you could feel it … It came through the middle section and blew up the kitchen window.”