by Jennifer Berry Hawes, with additional reporting by Cassandra Garibay

In their last phone call before bed, Janicke Glynn tries to reassure her husband. He is away visiting a sick relative, and a Weather Channel forecast of Hurricane Helene’s imminent collision with the North Carolina mountains is leaving him uneasy. The storm, more than 400 miles wide, is expected to strike their small community the next morning, Sept. 27.

Janicke encourages him to focus on his family up in Boston. That is more important. She is fine. It’s been raining a lot, but the house is fine. Everything is fine. He’ll fly home tomorrow. She will see him then.

“Love you.”

Janicke, a 46-year-old French Canadian, isn’t worried. She feels a deep spiritual connection to their home in Yancey County, a remote and ruggedly sublime expanse in the shadow of trendier Asheville. Nestled on a mountainside draped in maple and birch, perfumed by mountain laurel, their property is surrounded by the Black Mountains, ancient protectors of this magical place. Mount Mitchell, the tallest among them — the tallest in the eastern U.S. — is their backyard.

When the power goes out, Janicke lights candles and opens a door. She loves to hear the creek just beyond, a normally burbling carrier of rainfall down the mountain. But after two days of rain, it is starting to roar even before Helene’s arrival. She settles onto a living room couch with a little rat terrier, Troopie, one of their two rescue dogs.

Seven years have passed since she and John first looked at this property. He was thinking about retirement spots by the time they married in 2016 after keeping up a long-distance relationship for nearly a decade. Both were sick of the harsh Northern winters, and Janicke longed to rekindle the bond she’d felt with the natural world growing up in rural Canada. When she got out of the car to look at the property, she heard the creek and felt an instant harmony with the place. It had a 1940s stone house up on a hill, two wood-paneled cottages tucked along the creek and five acres where she envisioned tending lush gardens.

When she wondered if it cost too much, John argued that wasn’t the right question.

“Do you want to live here?” he asked.

“I want to die here, Johnny.”

After John falls asleep in his hotel, Helene makes landfall on the Florida panhandle about 500 miles south of the Black Mountains. As its massive bands close in, Janicke stays up listening to the storm and texting a tenant who rents one of their cottages, about 40 yards away right on the creek.

He types, “This shits crazy over here.”

Janicke knows he is anxious. Hours earlier, he sent her a screenshot of a National Weather Service post on Facebook that warned Helene could become one of the region’s worst events “in the modern era.” He worried about what the forecasted 9 to 14 inches of rain, expected to fall onto the high peaks in the morning, would do to the already swollen rivers.

The post described “catastrophic, life-threatening flooding.” Her response was typically upbeat: “Thanks, Mother Nature is powerful!”

He’d been thinking he might drive to his brother’s place in Charlotte, but Janicke offered up her house if the cottage flooded. They hadn’t heard of evacuation orders or seen other signs to indicate anyone else seemed terribly concerned.

Inland vs. Coastal Responses

The response to Helene was far different on the Florida coast. Evacuation orders were swift and targeted, the routes to safety clearly conveyed. Had Helene hit North Carolina’s coast, the same likely would have happened. But as coastal areas have become far better at warning and evacuating people, inland communities too often remain ill prepared, with devastating results: In recent years, five times as many people died in freshwater drownings due to hurricanes’ extreme rainfall than from coastal storm surges in the continental U.S. — a dramatic reversal from a decade earlier.

As the hours pass and Helene closes in, Janicke’s tenant texts her, “My nerves are shot.”

He soon shows up at her door with a bag and his 15-year-old cat, Mama Kitty. The creek is pounding the foundation of his cottage and seeping inside. Its increasingly violent flow fills the air with a searing white noise as it races down the mountain past houses, horse pastures and barns. Cattail Creek Road, the main way in and out of the area, winds right alongside it.

Few people along Cattail fully realize the looming danger. Some of them sleep. One man laments that he will miss his flight in the morning. A woman downloads ebooks to have something to occupy her time if the internet goes out. Another assures a loved one that the storm will quickly pass before dawn.

Like Janicke Glynn, Brian Hill lives close to Cattail Creek. Closer, even. His century-old farmhouse sits about 15 yards from the banks. Unlike Janicke, he is starting to worry. Late the night of Sept. 26, he peers outside and is caught off guard by the creek’s fast-rising water.

Whoa, it’s really full, he thinks.

But as far as he knows, Cattail Creek has never flooded the house where he lives with his wife, Susie, and 9-year-old daughter, Lucy. Both are asleep. He tries to be quiet, but a sudden noise jolts him — boom, boom boom. It shakes his house like fireworks. He peers outside and realizes that somewhere up the mountain, the water is dislodging boulders. They are crashing down.

Around midnight, someone knocks on their door. It’s a firefighter warning that the creek has risen so high that it blocks the road in one direction. Soon, there could be no way out. “I can’t tell you what to do,” the man says. But he urges them to move to higher ground.

Brian and Susie grab their little girl and their dog, then rush out to their pickup truck. In the darkness, they drive up a hill that overlooks their property.

Up the north fork of Cattail Creek, as the water rises, no first responder knocks on Janicke Glynn’s door.

Overnight, Helene churns across Georgia, then clips the northwest corner of South Carolina. Before sunrise, the storm collides with the Black Mountains, particularly the towering frontal wall called the Blue Ridge Escarpment. The high peaks shove the massive storm up into the cooler atmosphere.

Up in the chillier air, that water condenses. As Helene’s bands lash the Black Mountains, the storm begins to dump enormous amounts of water onto the already saturated peaks. In the morning, from 7 to 10 a.m. alone, about 8 inches of rain will fall atop Mount Mitchell. Because all that water must go somewhere, the deluge creates two critical threats: flash flooding and landslides. Both pose extraordinary danger. But landslides can destroy with far less warning.

The Cane River is about to get pummeled by both. Hemmed in by mountains, it forms the spine of one major valley in Yancey County. One of its tributaries, Cattail Creek, extends off that spine like an arm reaching east. Another, Tudy Creek, reaches west.

Several peaks wrap around Tudy Creek. High atop a particularly craggy one, the rainfall gets a toehold beneath soil clinging to a very steep and slightly concave slope of rock. Soil and rock will begin to slide with the water. Following the creekbed, the flow will gain velocity and weight and hurtle downhill with enough power to uproot trees and dislodge boulders.

In its path, a group of longtime neighbors live in a tranquil enclave of homes.

Among them is Ray Strickland, who retired a decade ago after 37 years as pastor of a local Baptist church. A hardworking man who still helps at the family construction company, Ray lives by the Scripture he often used during his first year at Laurel Branch Baptist, Psalm 66: “Make a joyful noise unto God.” His wife, Susan, a sweet woman with short grey hair, worked as a dental hygienist and performed as a clown named Jubilee at hospitals, nursing homes, parties — even the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Along with several of their neighbors, they raised their children here. Two newer neighbors moved here from Florida, weary of all the hurricane threats.

On Friday morning, the neighbors are all in their homes. Little do they know that the swath of land on which their houses sit was created, at moments back in geological time, by landslides. They had careened down steep slopes, probably following creekbeds, and dumped huge amounts of material here. That created a flatter spot to build houses in this otherwise rugged place.

In a storm like Helene, it’s also a precarious place to be. If the topography enabled a landslide here before, it could do so again.

Unfinished Warning

The neighbors might have been aware of the landslide threat if the state had finished a hazard mapping program that North Carolina legislators created 20 years ago. They acted after storms caused at least 85 landslides that killed five people. But when developers and real estate agents pushed back, lawmakers who didn’t want statewide regulations halted the program for almost a decade.

They restarted it in 2018 — after more landslide deaths. But Yancey County still hasn’t been mapped. Neither have four other counties in Helene’s path.

Given it already has been raining a lot, Ray and Susan worry most about their 43-year-old son, Aaron, who lives on the other side of the mountain with his two young children. In April, water seeped into his basement.

When Ray texts Aaron around 7 a.m., just as Helene is arriving in Yancey, he responds, “flooding.”

The curt tone isn’t like him. He and his parents normally stay in daily contact, so Ray and Susan figure they’ll try him again later.

Then their cell service cuts out. Without it, they’re among those in pockets across the county who don’t get the National Weather Service’s 8:50 a.m. emergency warning for Yancey: “The risk of life-threatening landslide activity continues to increase. … This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION.”

The storm worsens. Wind roars. So much water flows down the........

© ProPublica