MARSHALL, N.C. – Everything in this riverside town is still covered in mud.
Lots of mud.
It slops from either side of the road graders trying to scrape it off Main Street. It fills homes, the church and storefronts. The floor of an untouched art studio looks like a rippled riverbed, which – like everything else in downtown Marshall – it was.
Bryson Effler took a break from shoveling mud out the broken window of a natural foods grocery store to sum up the collective feeling of many in western North Carolina in a single word: “Damn.”
The remnants of Hurricane Helene tore across the southeast U.S. with a fury. Four to five months worth of rain fell on western North Carolina in less than three days, cascading down the normally idyllic mountains of Southern Appalachia, killing dozens of people and flooding entire towns. Many of the hardest-hit communities, like Marshall, built along railroad tracks on the banks of the French Broad River, are rural with fewer than 1,000 residents.
