Driving into town from the west on winding US 64, signs appear in Chimney Rock Village that read “Raise the Rock,” then, around the bend when the road reaches Lake Lure, the lake is full for the first time since Tropical Storm Helene, nearly two years ago. Businesses have signs inviting visitors in and families sprawl out across the beach and boats sit in the water, though the original marina remains under repair.
Helene’s mark is still imprinted on the Hickory Nut Gorge, the 14-mile-long canyon across the Blue Ridge Mountains that encompasses the communities of Lake Lure and Chimney Rock in western Rutherford County and Bat Cave and Gerton in northeastern Henderson County. Communities in the gorge were devastated by the September 2024 storm.
Lake Lure, with a population estimated at just below 1,400, is the largest incorporated municipality in the area. Many of the surrounding communities relied on the town’s governmental resources after the flood.
The lake began quietly refilling in February of this year and wrapped up in May in time to open for Memorial Day weekend. While the boating marina is still under repair, last weekend was the first time the town of Lake Lure had a full celebration for the Fourth of July since the storm. It was a full house.
On May 26, heavy rains damaged and washed out portions of roads that had been affected by Helene in Bat Cave and other parts of the gorge. The NC Department of Transportation worked on those damaged roads after the storm and was done within the week, according to David Uchiyama, the agency’s public information officer for the region. Blue Ridge Public Radio recently reported on long-term recovery troubles in the area after the storm.
The storm’s wrath
When Helene hit, the bridge on Memorial Highway between Lake Lure and Chimney Rock was blocked off by about 20 feet of debris from flooding. The lake was filled with debris from the storm and the dam received 22.5 inches of rainfall.
“It was completely impassable,” Lake Lure Mayor Carol Pritchett said. “That meant that no one could get food or emergency services or anything.”
Dustin Waycaster is the emergency services director for Lake Lure. He remembers doing a tabletop exercise, which is when every local agency simulates how they would respond in a specific disaster, for extreme flooding. During the storm, he said, the nearly century-old dam in Lake Lure did not fail, but emergency services were preparing for imminent failure, because the lake was 10 feet above normal levels.
Waycaster had to make what he said was the hardest call of his life, which was declaring imminent failure for the dam. Flooding was so extreme that all residents in the gorge and those downstream of the dam in Rutherford County were told to evacuate. But, this was difficult to disseminate because the storm wiped out cell service and emergency services could only communicate on handheld radios.
“I didn’t know if we were just at the beginning of it, or we were in the middle of it, or if we were at the end of it,” he said.
Lake Lure provides sewer services to Chimney Rock Village, but during the storm the wastewater lines connecting the village to the sewer plant washed out and the area was left without water.
All power in Lake Lure had to be cut off, because the town’s hydroelectric plant feeds a Duke Power substation. The town itself did not have water either, so immediate focus was on restoring utilities, not rebuilding. Cutting off power was an especially difficult decision for Waycaster, because of residents who depended on electricity for specific medications.
Fire departments and law enforcement began going door-to-door, evacuating residents and telling them to get to higher ground. There were no fatalities in the area from Helene, but it was impossible to get residents out of town.
The Ingles supermarket in Lake Lure became a hub for residents, and in the days following the storm, StarLinks were set up in the parking lot and the town provided emergency updates. Aid groups and local contractors began working the weekend after the storm, and soon, state and national authorities came to the gorge for emergency efforts. It was a round-the-clock effort.
“We were basically an island for a little while,” Waycaster said. .
In the first year after the storm, the National Guard came into town, US Army Corps of Engineers removed tons of sediment from the area, the state Department of Transportation began rebuilding roads and local contractors removed debris. Local nonprofits like Hickory Nut Gorge Outreach kept providing essential food and supplies to the community and groups like the Mennonite Disaster Services came to help with recovery and haven’t left since.
The Lake Lure dam
Helene was not, by any means, the first flooding that the area has faced, but it was by far the most devastating. Tropical Storm Alberto affected the area in 2018 and propelled the town to begin necessary but overdue repair work on the dam, which CPP reported on.
Waycaster said working in the town is a “different animal,” because of the amount of land his department covers and age of the dam. Much of Chimney Rock State Park is actually in the municipality of Lake Lure, so the fire department in Chimney Rock has contacts with the larger town. Because Lake Lure is still such a small town, Waycaster said that the scope of his emergency services department is widened. His department is a mix of paid and volunteer firefighters.
“Everything that we send downstream, affects a good portion of the rest of the (Rutherford County) all the way into South Carolina,” he said.
The US Army Corps of Engineers removed massive sediment deposits out of Lake Lure and spent roughly a year in town removing debris from the lake. The Lake Lure dam is one of the last large flood control measures on the Broad River until South Carolina, Pritchett said.
“Our dam is 100 years old and so is our infrastructure,” she said.
Originally from Houston, she grew up seeing blue FEMA tarps around her Texas neighborhood, she said. When she became mayor of Lake Lure in 2019, it wasn’t a matter of whether the dam needed to be repaired, but when.
Lots of the areas along the river are home to older structures, so she said that the area should include measures for zoning and regional planning as a part of long term resilience for the area. The town hall, for example, was in a flood plain. Since the storm, the town government has worked out of makeshift spaces and has now moved into The Landings of Lake Lure, which was previously a senior living community.
Most residents were left without cellphone service and most utilities in the immediate three to four weeks after the storm, but Duke Energy has replaced older cables that may be able to restore power quicker. This is just one of the measures that the town has taken to mitigate future extreme weather events.
“It’s hard to keep reminding people all the time that another flood will come, you need to be careful about that, because you’re trying to get people in a recovery mode mentally,” Pritchett said.
Funding for recovery in Lake Lure
Lake Lure spent $2.5 million in the first month following Helene, which was about half of the town’s revenue for the year. Pritchett said that the town paid this money out of its general fund and applied for reimbursement from FEMA at the end of October. They received their reimbursements, which were for debris removal, road repairs, utilities and more in the late spring. The town has pending reimbursements for repairs and replacements of the marina dock.
Additional FEMA funds for Lake Lure, along with areas in nearby Polk and Burke counties, were announced in late February of this year, but the town has not seen those funds yet.
Pritchett said it was difficult because many towns that are the same size as Lake Lure cannot afford to utilize their own funds for natural disasters and then wait for reimbursements from the government. All contractors who came in to help with recovery had to be approved by FEMA as well, Waycaster said.
When municipalities seek disaster reimbursements from FEMA, they must go through specific processes of documenting damages and specific expenses caused by extreme weather. Pritchett is glad that officials knew of the rigid processes for documentation that the agency requires, she said.
“You have to take a picture of the truck empty,” Pritchett said. “You have to take a picture of the truck with the debris in it. You have to take the debris where it’s going. You have to wait. You have to take the truck to where it is. You take a picture of it to where it’s going to be deposited.”
Laura Krejci is the communications director for the Town of Lake Lure. She said the storm brought disaster tourists, or people who wanted to speculate at the ruin, when all of Western North Carolina was essentially closed because of Helene. It brought a swarm of rumors about the lake and the damaged communities in the gorge online.
After Helene, conspiracy theorists spread misinformation that there were bodies buried underneath Lake Lure. CPP previously reported on false theories that there were bodies being hidden under the lake. US Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-Hendersonville, had to issue a press release after the storm that it was not engineered by the government to “seize and access” lithium deposits in Chimney Rock.
Waycaster said he and his team were receiving death threats online, which he attributed to social media. He remembered a situation where a man at a local gas station threatened the Army Airborne Division, who were retrieving fuel for firetrucks and ambulances.
“It wasn’t like we were just getting the fuel for normal operation, we were doing it for life safety measures,” he said.
The road forward
Tourism is the main economic activity in the gorge, particularly in Lake Lure where a large amount of the population are retirees and vacation homeowners. The season is typically Memorial Day through Labor Day, according to Pritchett.
Chimney Rock State Park re-opened in late June of last year, but guests had to make reservations to visit the area for climbing and hiking. Last year, Lake Lure was barren and crews were still working on gathering debris from the lake. Now, it’s filled with swimmers and the trees are lush, though the Flowering Bridge was damaged beyond repair and some rocks remain exposed, along with other damage near town. The Public Works department built a new gazebo by the water and did more landscaping in the affected area.
Pritchett said some families came into town last year and some folks came into town for the Rumbling Bald golf course to support the local economy. Some tourists who usually come during the summer seasons rented homes just to support the community, even if they couldn’t actually come into Lake Lure.
This summer, they are gearing up for a closer-to-normal season, though revenue is not expected to return to normal until next summer.
“We felt it was absolutely critical that the lake be open for this summer season,” she said.
The damage, though, is still strikingly visible in Chimney Rock and Bat Cave. A number of the businesses in Chimney Rock, with shops situated along US 64, were destroyed by Helene and have yet to reopen or come into new ownership. Just west of Lake Lure along the Broad River, Chimney Rock is the area’s only other incorporated community, with about 125 residents.
Community ties
Maxwell Brown works at RiverWatch Coffeehouse & Giftshop, one of the storefronts that overlooks the Broad River in the village. He grew up in Chimney Rock, but was in Greensboro during the storm. He came home to be there for the rebuilding process and has stayed in town since.
“It was really dystopian to see, it was really unrecognizable,” he said. “It’s almost like somebody made a very dystopian copy of the town.”
US 64, which runs into the gorge from Hendersonville into Bat Cave and then east through the other gorge communities, reopened in late March 2026. Access was previously only allowed for local traffic. Brown said this opening led to more foot traffic with businesses in the area. Business owners in the village contributed significantly to recovery efforts, he said.
In Gerton, a small unincorporated community near the western end of the gorge, almost all of the homes in the town survived the storm, but part of the foundation of the building was washed away. Chuck Mallory is the president of the board of the Upper Hickory Nut Gorge Community Center.
“It really is the heart and soul of Gerton,” he said. The building had an extensive history of being a meeting space in the community — it was a restaurant and a dance hall in the 1940s until the center was incorporated in 1969.
The center is planning a rebuild, but in the meantime, community members have met on the slab where the building used to be. It is still a hub for members of the Hickory Nut Gorge community, and though they are ineligible for FEMA funds, volunteers have sought grants for rebuilding.
On July 1, the village of Chimney Rock had a community-wide event to celebrate the village’s incorporation in 1991. It is Lake Lure’s centennial this year, too; the town is planning a celebration on the water in September.
While the damage from Helene is still very much tangible, the gorge has turned a corner in terms of recovery, though things may never be exactly how they once were.
“Nobody really knows what a long time means till you’ve gone through a hurricane,” Pritchett said.
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