Flash flooding left residents clinging to trees, desperate for help
Mariel Williams
editor@mitchellnews.com
When Brushy Creek began to rise, Keydie Pineda, 18, was in a mobile home with her family in Grindstaff Trailer Park.
“I was told that we need to go to another family member’s home because of the water coming,” Pineda said. “Then the water came into the trailer and every other place there, and it was frightening.”
Like much of Mitchell County, Brushy Creek flooded very quickly when torrential rains from Hurricane Helene (at the time downgraded to tropical storm status) hit on Sept. 27.
Nearby, Pineda’s neighbor, Lucas Guerrero, saw the water flooding into his trailer and also decided to flee. But Guerrero had a trick up his sleeve — a tree-climbing rope that he uses for work.
Speaking through interpreters, Guerrero explained that he tied the rope to his mobile home before wading out into the flood waters. Once outside, he was able to move through the flood and help others out of their mobile homes.
Guerrero ended up with three neighbors clinging to his tree-climbing rope, waiting for help to arrive. Nearby, the Pineda family was also waiting.
“It took one of our cars — it floated away,” Pineda remembered. “We stayed at another family member’s home for a little while — the rain was so bad we were afraid to move. We were all crying.”
Split-second decisions
Brushy Creek rose too quickly for residents to be able to find a quick exit.
“I was very afraid — there was a lot of trees that had fallen, and were falling,” Pineda said. “Some of my family members were crying — they were afraid another tree would fall on us.”
Pineda remembered that when it began to seem like her family needed to evacuate, it was too late.
“We thought about leaving, and when we went outside to see, we saw a car floating away,” she said. “When we thought of going ... the water had washed out a bridge.”
Spruce Pine Fire Department Assistant Chief Bill Hoag said that his team arrived at the trailer park at just the right moment when residents were forced to flee their homes mainly through chance.
“The water came up so quickly there, we could just kind of watch it,” he said. “The other fortunate thing is, we couldn’t have done anything personally, from our perspective, being a small volunteer fire department. We don’t have the ability to do swift-water rescue.”
Help on the way
Oddly enough, when the Spruce Pine Fire Department arrived just in the nick of time, the firefighters came searching for an emergency unrelated to the flooding: Before the creek rose so rapidly, an early-morning 911 caller had reported that their television had fallen on them.
“We were lucky to get that first call,” Hoag said. “That was a very dangerous area … We deployed the swift-water boat, and they never found the [fallen TV] patient.”
But once the boat was in the rising creek there was plenty of work for it to do.
“Brushy Creek … the water level raised rapidly there,” Hoag said. “We rescued two people and a dog right away out of a house that we could get to very easily with ladders, and then they deployed their swift-water boat and we probably rescued another six people — some clinging to trees, some up on their roofs — and most of those were mobile homes in there.”
Hoag said that on Sept. 27, the flash flooding in Brushy Creek was probably one of the worst calls Spruce Pine Fire Department responded to. The firefighters had to go back later in the day to find the person who had originally called 911; the caller had some facial injuries from the fallen TV that required stitches.
Early help from outside
Although the full scope of the damage from Helene was unexpected, local firefighters and other emergency workers had some preparation for the storm, including getting outside help.
“Thursday night [Sept. 26] we went to an emergency operations meeting at the Mitchell County Administration Building and were kind of briefed on what we thought could happen with the storm and everything,” said Hoag. “During that meeting we made an all-call of all of our members to come back to the station and … probably a handful of us spent the night here.”
Because Mitchell County was gearing up for the storm beforehand, a swift-water team had come to help out and was available to deploy to Brushy Creek.
The Knightdale and Wake Forest Swift Water Team is a collaborative project between the Knightdale and Wake Forest fire departments. When volunteer firefighters at the Spruce Pine Fire Department began receiving emergency calls around 4 a.m. the next morning (Sept. 27), the Wake County team was available to tag along.
A devastating loss
Although they survived, the flood in Brushy Creek was traumatic.
“We were very afraid,” Pineda said. “I just kept crying. All the trees were down, water was everywhere, horrible. … The firefighters came and gave us an order to get out of the house and around from the trees. They told us there was homes for us.”
Local business man Chris Nash has since been able to connect the survivors with donated RVs to stay in. Nash has not been able to re-open his downtown Spruce Pine business, Mitchell Lumber Company, owing to landslide damage. While he works toward reopening, he has been traveling around the county looking for ways to help.
“I own a sawmill and have a shop downtown that got devastated,” Nash said. “[Since] my business got pretty bad hit, I’ve had a lot of free time.
Hoag said the rescue and recovery effort began to seem a little bit less bleak once outside agencies were able to get into Mitchell County and begin helping.
“It’s a huge event for such a small government on the city and the county side,” Hoag said. “Within a couple of days, we had a really good incident management team from Louisiana, and that’s when things started to kind of turn around.”
Editor’s note: Some quotes in this story have been translated from the original Spanish.