The Picture Show: NPR

Residents work hard to shovel mud out of the health food store in Marshall, North Carolina. The French Broad River, which flows through the city, crested more than 24 feet during Tropical Storm Helene. The river level has fallen, but is leaving knee-deep sediment in the buildings.

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MARSHALL, N.C. — Everything in this river town is still covered in mud.

Lots of mud.

It falls off either side of the road graders trying to scrape it off the main road. It fills houses, the church and shop windows. The floor of a pristine art studio looks like an undulating riverbed, which, like everything else in downtown Marshall, it was.

Bryson Effler took a break and shoveled mud from the broken window of a health food store to sum up the collective feeling of many in Western North Carolina in a single word: “Damn.”

The remnants of Hurricane Helene raged across the southeastern United States with full force. Western North Carolina received rainfall for four to five months of the year less than three daystumbled down the normally idyllic mountains of the southern Appalachians, killing dozens of people and flooding entire towns. Many of the hardest-hit communities, such as Marshall, which sits along railroad tracks on the banks of the French Broad River, are rural and have fewer than 1,000 residents.

Main Street in Marshall, NC After two days of municipal cleanup, the road is passable, although still covered in slippery mud.

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Sherry Ramsey cleans up a brewery in Hot Springs, North Carolina

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“The people who built these houses, built this town, settled this area, did some pretty tough things,” said Forrest Gilliam, a lifelong Marshall resident and city manager. Now it’s up to the people who live there today to do the same, he said.

“We’ll just keep working on it,” he said with a pause. “Our ‘normal’ will be a little different for a few years.”

About eight buildings collapsed, including part of the town hall. An art gallery and another building upstream in the south of the city were washed away. Just leave. At least 50 buildings would have to be “completely gutted,” Gilliam said.

One resident, a man last seen clinging to a tree, was killed. His body still hasn’t been found. Gilliam said it was possible that recovery efforts would find more victims further upriver in the coming days.

The storm killed more than 160 people in six states, and that number is likely to rise. Authorities were reluctant to give an exact figure on the number of people missing or unaccounted for, citing blocked roads and spotty cell service that could prevent people from checking in. Almost a week after the storm passed, some residents are still completely cut off.

The town’s antique store is named after the river that usually makes this area popular with tourists. During Helene, the French Broad River reached a height of more than 24 feet at its highest point, and the high water mark is still visible on all buildings.

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On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced that he had authorized the deployment of 1,000 active-duty U.S. troops to “support the delivery of food, water and other essential supplies to communities affected by Hurricane Helene.” A massive search and rescue operation is still underway.

“It’s just kind of surreal. “It hasn’t really sunk in yet,” said Rhesa Edwards, taking a quick break from cleaning out the brewery she owns with her husband, Brandon, in Marshall. The pair spent the day rescuing as much heavy equipment as they could. Very few survived unscathed.

“Work a little, cry a little, work a little, cry a little,” Brandon Edwards said. “But we’re holding on.”

Rhesa and Brandon Edwards spent the day recovering as much equipment as they could from the mud at their brewery, Mad Co. Brew House in Marshall.

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Down on Main Street, at an intersection where a dump truck was picking up loads of storm debris, Tom Lillard said the flooding had exceeded all expectations. Many residents followed evacuation orders and left the city before water levels reached their peak. But Lillard, who lives in a second-floor apartment, stayed.

He’s not sure he’ll be able to do this in the long run.

“Given the current climate, people are wondering what is realistic in terms of what needs to be done and what the future holds,” he said.

Fears of mold led the Hoczs to spend many hours tearing out all of the sodden drywall from the first floor of the house they had rented to tenants before the flood.

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Volunteers carry water bottles and supplies to the gym at Hot Springs Elementary School. The system was equipped the day before by helicopter.

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Gilliam, the city manager, said it was too early to know how and where they would rebuild. But he said: “There are certain places that we are unlikely to return to, and we will probably change the use of some public spaces, as we have seen in other places where this has happened before.”

Farther up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Hot Springs, near the Tennessee border, Wayne Crosby tried to salvage what he could from his outfitter shop.

“There is no going back,” he said. Water from nearby Spring Creek flooded the store and everyone else on its block. The store’s floor is torn from its foundation, dented and covered in debris.

The only things left untouched in Crosby’s shop are the photos hanging on a high ceiling beam – a testament to the hundreds of Appalachian Trail hikers who have stopped by in the 27 years he’s been in business. He’s not sure if he’ll reopen.

“There’s not a lot of undamaged property here, so we’ll see,” he says. “It’s going to be a long road.”

“This is just the beginning of a multi-year recovery for the mountains of Western North Carolina, East Tennessee. I mean, it’s going to take two to three years to get things back to normal.”

At 5:00 p.m., cleanup volunteers will gather at the Madison County Courthouse to review the day’s progress and address concerns and needs. Now that the main road is passable, the biggest concern is preventing onlookers from driving in and disrupting the cleanup effort.

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