The devastation following Hurricane Helene in the mountains of North and South Carolina is almost without comparison. Many farms are simply gone after the area received more than 20 inches of rain in less than four days. Linda Pryor is a farmer in Henderson County, North Carolina.
“We’ve had extreme devastation and still very cut off and isolated. We’re trying to get fencing supplies, just very basic stuff, you know, livestock, where people just let them go so they didn’t drown and have caught them in other places and then have no way to contain them. And it’s just unimaginable.”
Many roads are either blocked by fallen trees or simply don’t exist anymore, after being washed away, and power is out across the region.
“Some areas are projected to be on by Friday. US Highway 64 is the main road, the main highway to everywhere, and there’s areas, multiple areas of it looks like you’re walking through a forest. It’s very hard to get resources. We have, you know, a lot of farmers that have equipment and come together and are working to clear even a footpath to get through.”
While Pryor says their house was spared, not everyone was so fortunate.
“There was a couple that my husband, I helped get out yesterday, early 20s. They had each had a backpack on their back, and they had their two cats in a small crate, and we walked three and a half miles to get them out. It took about two and a half hours to get that far, and they were being picked up by family that lived in another area of the state, and you know, having to start completely over. Their house is gone.”
Pryor farms 900 acres of corn, or she did.
“One of the things that has really been mind-blowing is there’s fields, my cornfields or produce fields, and the water changed them in such a way that the field isn’t there anymore. So it’s not a matter of, you know, planting next season, because the field itself is gone.”
Western North and South Carolina is in the Blue Ridge Mountains with flooded rivers and streams prior says they’re cut off from the outside world and each other.
“We’re so cut off. So we have, we farm in Henderson and Transylvania Counties. We cover a large distance. We can’t even get to the majority of our fields. And just like with the apples, we were trying to think of, you know, something we could we could pick that could be salvaged. But the way there’s so much road damage and so many bridges out, we can’t figure out how to get to orchards to pick them and then truck them out.”
She said, while many organizations are starting to bring in water and food by helicopter, farmers need feed and hay desperately.