As the Swannanoa River swelled and overflowed from heavy rains brought by Helene, residents of Asheville, N.C., described moments of fear and anxiety amid dangerous flooding in their region.
On Friday morning, Janetta Barfield, a 58-year-old nurse at a hospital in Asheville, managed to drive across a high bridge over the river after working a night shift. But then she was met with deep water on the other side of the bridge.
She tried to drive through the road that had turned into a lake after seeing another car pass. “If he could do it, I could too,” she remembered thinking at the time.
Instead, “I almost drowned,” she said in an interview on Friday — her S.U.V. stalled out, and water quickly seeped into her car and rose to her chest.
“I’m in trouble now,” Mrs. Barfield thought to herself in the moment.
As she sat in her car, a police officer “got me and pulled me across the water,” she said.
After Mrs. Barfield was rescued, she walked down to the river’s edge three times to look for her car and saw box trucks, propane tanks and islands of trash floating in the water. But her S.U.V. was nowhere in sight.
Across North Carolina, about 800,000 customers were without power Friday night, with the outages concentrated in western parts of the state. The Asheville Police Department put in place an overnight curfew until 7:30 a.m. on Saturday. The police did not immediately respond to requests for updates on damages and possible injuries or deaths.
Asheville, a city of about 94,600, became something of a black hole for cell service on Friday. In the afternoon, about 50 people gathered by Buncombe County Public Library’s main branch in the city’s downtown to use its Wi-Fi.
Miranda Escalante, a 38-year-old bartender, was there, trying to reach her family. She knew her sister in nearby Waynesville was safe, but couldn’t get in touch with her father in the community of Swannanoa, which also suffered from powerful floods.
Not knowing how her father was faring was “very scary,” Ms. Escalante said.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
