I remember the Before Times. It’s different now. On September 27, the remnants of Hurricane Helene turned Asheville, N.C., into a post-apocalyptic landscape: fallen trees blocking streets; roads turned into creek beds; power lines down everywhere; city water lines destroyed; bridges torn apart. The region’s two rivers carried whole houses downstream. What buildings that remain in the lower areas of Buncombe County are larded with a foot-deep layer of toxic mud. People died. 

It has been a month since the storm, and there are still many roads closed and homes without power. The city water is unfit to drink; we have to boil it even to wash dishes, and what flows from the tap is a cloudy, rust-colored fluid. It has been so bad and left so many people stranded or homeless that Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen has come to feed those in need. 

At our house, we were otherwise lucky. Our neighborhood had fewer fallen trees than others, and we were high enough in elevation that we avoided the flooding. Beyond our little neighborhood, though, it looked very, very much like the devastation of Katrina. 

The first week after the storm was hellacious. No power; no water; no phone; no wifi; no cable; no air conditioning. Dark at 7:00 p.m., and no lights anywhere. The fridge and freezer sat silent. On the fourth day, we had to throw out all the food in both and scrub the interiors with bleach to kill the faint smell of mold. With no water, we could not flush the toilets and, being unable to stop the physiology of the human body, we had to go somewhere. The commodes were becoming rank. 

This was a problem that everyone shared, and so, by the second full day, neighbors had pulled together and set up a tent on a street corner where we could go to share stories, rumors, and advice; by the third day, they had food and bottled water to hand out to those who needed it. One neighbor had a swimming pool, and if you had a bucket, you could dip it in the pool for water to flush your toilets. 

Across the street from us, Dorothy, a retiree like us, and her grown son, Anthony, brought us a bucket so we could go down the street and dip it in the pool. Because we are old and five gallons of water is heavy, Anthony carried the water himself. That afforded us one flush a day. By the fourth day, Anthony had found a children’s wagon and was delivering flushing water around the neighborhood. It was still just once a day, though. 

Neighbors helped neighbors. Some went house to house to check on people. Two fresh-faced young women knocked on our door. They had weak cell-phone coverage and had received a text message from my granddaughter in New York, a former schoolmate, asking them to check on grandpa. They sent a text back telling her that we were OK. 

The street-corner tent set up a message board where people could ask for supplies or offer what they had to share. Our next-door neighbor, who had just moved in, had no food, and we collected a few nonperishables and brought them over. Others came to us and gave us boxes of cereal or, in one case, an entire box of cellophane-wrapped brownies. 

But it seemed as if we survived that first week eating little more than apples and Fritos. I had a case of bottled water and some soft drinks. “This is how our ancestors must have lived,” Anne said. “Except they had water.” Dark all night, light for reading in the daytime. With little else to do but sit and wait, we read an average of a book a day during that first week. At night, we had candles burning on the piano—but not like Liberace; they were squat votive candles. And we would continue to read in the dark with flashlights.

There was a constant whirr and buzz, even through the night, of workmen chainsawing fallen trees and crews trying to reattach downed power lines. We saw trucks from out of state driving in caravans through the neighborhood, cleaning up and repairing, 24 hours a day. Overhead, there were helicopters and airplanes; hardly 10 minutes would go by before another one or two flitted across the sky. It reminded me of films from Vietnam, except there were also drones. 

And it was a huge military operation: National Guard and Marines; search-and-rescue operations looking for people cut off from roads or stranded on roofs; dog teams looking for bodies in the debris. I have since heard ignorant people spout conspiracy theories about the failures of FEMA or the government in general, but those trolls weren’t there. I have never been so impressed at the seriousness and effectiveness of everyone, government or civilian working, to recover. The lies being spouted are reprehensible. Evil, actually. 

The Asheville airport was covered with military planes and scores of copters. The only way into the area for the first days was by air. I-40, the main highway, was cut off on both ends by landslides. The bridges along I-26 were washed out. All roads in and out of Buncombe County were blocked and closed. If we had wanted to leave, we couldn’t. 

By Day 6, the mudslides blocking I-40 East had been provisionally cleared, road traffic could be resumed, and trucks with relief provisions could climb up the Blue Ridge into Asheville. Power had come back to our neighborhood, although many others remained dark. There was still no running water, and all of our food had been ruined, except for some canned goods. We hadn’t had a shower in a week.

The problem for us was that the car had almost no gas left, and no gas stations were open. But on Day 6, we got word from Anthony that a station in Fairmont—about six miles away—had reopened. We drove and, miraculously, there was no line. We tanked up. We could finally leave. 

Our first thought was to take some clothes and head to a motel in the flatlands, where the storm damage was less, and spend a couple of days getting cleaned up and eating hot food. We drove to Hickory, about an hour away, but all the motels were full. Outside Hickory, we found one that had a single opening—the Presidential Suite, for $180 a night, which we took. The motels were not full of tourists; they were full of construction crews and aid workers: wiry, grizzled men with hard hats and leather-tanned faces who were commuting to Asheville to restore power or dig out debris. Their trucks filled the parking lot. 

But we did get a hot shower, and across the street there was a Mexican restaurant where we enjoyed a hot meal. For the next two and a half weeks, we stayed with my brother- and sister-in-law in Reidsville, N.C., where they fed us and caught us up on all the events of the outside world that we had missed. It would have felt like a vacation except for the hollow knot of anxiety in my gut. We drove home on Monday to find the house had not burned down, been burglarized, or taken over by raccoons.

But there is still the problem of water. We remain under a boil-water notice, which mandates—not suggests—that we boil tap water for 1 minute before using it. It is still so cloudy that even after disinfecting it it is undrinkable. 

The storm was prodigious. Official reports note that 2,300 structures were destroyed completely or made uninhabitable. That’s homes, stores, and other businesses. The Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina was closed along its entire length, and its director said that some 10,000 trees had fallen into the roadway. Parts of the parkway were covered in landslide mud, while in other places the pavement had washed away entirely. In several locations, the North Fork Swannanoa River carved new courses, leaving at least one bridge over dry land and the water flowing a hundred yards to the west. 

The official death count for Western North Carolina totaled 96 (subject to revision as new data arrives), with 42 of them in Buncombe County alone. The North Carolina total was nearly half of all deaths from Helene in the U.S. 

There are reasons Western North Carolina was so hard hit. While the storm made landfall in Florida and traveled north across Georgia and South Carolina before tailing out in Tennessee, those states suffered from hurricane and tropical storm damage alone. Bad enough. But in Western North Carolina, the meteorological and geological circumstances doubled down on the effects. 

 First, the area had already experienced several days of ground-soaking rain before Helene arrived. Second, the storm brought an enormous amount of water vapor—twice as much as the previous record from 2004’s double whammy of hurricanes Frances and Ivan. Third, the counterclockwise spin of the storm meant that its high winds struck the Blue Ridge escarpment head on, forcing the water-soaked air upward, with both the Venturi effect speeding up the winds and the adiabatic cooling squeezing all that water out of the clouds; Mt. Mitchell recorded 24 inches, and the Asheville airport reported 20 inches. One Forest Service weather station measured 31.33 inches of rain from September 25 to 27, piling Ossa on Pelion. 

That’s bad enough. In flatter terrain, that would account for 2 feet of water over a wide landscape. But in the mountains, all that water gets funneled down into the valleys, where it collects in raging torrents, wiping away whole towns. Consider, say, 5 square miles of land, hit with 2 feet of water and condensing that water into a hundred-yard-wide channel. 

That’s what happened along the Swannanoa River in the community of Swannanoa, along U.S. 70, where mountains both north and south dumped their drainage. Or along the French Broad River south of downtown Asheville, where the old industrial district, turned into the River Arts District, was wiped out. Or the narrow, 14-mile long Hickory Nut Gorge, which drops about 1,800 feet between the town of Gerton and Lake Lure, where much of the road is now reduced to a rocky creek bed.

Estimates for the damage are currently set at $53 billion, although that is subject to revision. This is a state record. I have concentrated on Asheville and Buncombe County because that is where I live. And I can see the destruction first-hand as I drive around. But it is much of Western North Carolina that shares the calamity.

There is no guess as to when this part of the country will return to normal—although it will be an entirely new normal. Probably a year, at least. But people are all working hard to get there: individuals, civic officials, volunteer workers, and the federal government. Some things have come back sooner than expected. But we are still using paper plates and disposable cups and eating frozen dinners and hoping, with crossed fingers, that our tap water will one day run clear again. 

This essay originally appeared on the author’s website. Featured image of Asheville, via CNN.