Shock of it all

“It is as bad as you can possibly imagine, maybe even worse …”

Those words from Pete Gerdon, coming three weeks after Hurricane Helene wrought havoc on the mountains of western North Carolina, conveyed more than a dozen words should be able to.

You see, Gerdon, from Grandfather Golf and Country Club in Linville, wasn’t talking about his golf course.

Thankfully, most of us will never know just how bad “it” was, and still is, up there. Tragically, the unimaginable is what others, like Gerdon, are dealing with and still will for weeks, months and, yes, even years to come.

As much as golf courses enter the heart and soul of many superintendents who take care of them, in the worst-hit areas post-Helene, they are now only a tiny piece of a massive puzzle ahead, dwarfed by the staggering loss of homes, livelihoods and lives themselves.

“Once the storm ended, I shifted my guys straight into helping the community,” says Bill Daniels of Sugar Mountain Golf Course in Banner Elk. “The golf course just became an afterthought.” It would be two weeks before Daniels would set foot back on a fairway.

Across both Carolinas, at least 150 people perished. Some of those found were buried in several feet of silt blanketing most of the front nine at Asheville Municipal Golf Course. “I know they found a few on the east side of the course,” superintendent Matthew Dierdorff says. “Not sure about the west side yet.”

A month after the storm, dozens were still missing.

A few miles from Asheville Muni, Steve Shand, from The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, drove a rough-hewn track over a ridge to get out of his neighborhood rather than take a shorter, more conventional route. That way he didn’t have to witness cadaver dogs still at work, day after day, across from his neighborhood where nearly 30 houses washed away.

Northwest of Asheville, in a part of the world where communities are so closely tied across generations, as family, neighbors and friends, no one was immune from loss of some kind. For instance, Gerdon has employees who lost relatives. Allen Storie from Hound Ears Club near Boone is another example. He counts himself lucky, though “an old school friend” was not.

“He barely got out with his 7-year-old, but his wife was still in the house when it washed away,” Storie says. “A neighbor to one of the guys I work with was found in a mudslide. He was alive when they found him. But he died that night.”

Sadly, you don’t need to be close to someone to be affected by their hardship, or worse. Shand has neighbors who watched a man pleading for help from the rooftop of his house as it floated by. Daniels’ brother-in-law lost his home “entirely,” as did two cousins. Another superintendent lost neighbors to mudslides. And then, as Shand says, there are some stories that “don’t need to show up in print.”

Too many other Carolinas GCSA members have their own accounts of events that would be shocking enough in isolation. But when those horrors are scaled across the vast swath of the region that was impacted — one roughly half the size of Scotland — it becomes, as Modern Turf’s Buddy Smith says, “hard to even try and wrap your head around.”

In that regard, Jeremy Boone, superintendent and general manager at Springdale Resort in Canton, west of Asheville, was almost grateful for having no power and therefore no eyes on the outside world — at least initially. Springdale lost trees and bridges that kept him busy.

“It was easy when we had tunnel vision for about three days,” Boone says of the immediate aftermath. “But when we got internet back and I opened up my field of vision, I did it for about 30 minutes. Then I thought, ‘That’s enough. I don’t need to see all this. I need to focus on who I can help and what I can do in my little circle.’”

Smith was among the earliest caravans of volunteers looking to help who they could, delivering supplies into the region. “It’s crazy, man. I saw whole hillsides gone. I saw 40-foot steel beams wrapped around rocks in creeks,” he says. “And how do you rebuild when the actual land your house was on is now gone, when it’s now river bottom?”

Fortunately, and almost incredibly, there were no reports of injury among Carolinas GCSA members or their crew members, though a small handful did suffer significant damage to their homes.

Of course, some of the damage is still to come. Post-traumatic stress, depression and other mental health ramifications will be less visible but no less devastating internally. Their incidence is only likely to increase as adrenaline ebbs, along with the attention and help from the rest of the world.

One superintendent in the area admits to grappling with “survivor guilt.” He declined a phone interview but was poignant in a text: “A golf course and its infrastructure can be replaced — lives and generational property cannot. In this grand scheme of chaos, so many people lost things more precious and valuable ...”

At one point in western North Carolina, as many as 1,200 roads were closed, some because they simply no longer existed. The count of bridges lost might never be known but their disappearance left many people stranded in place, cut off from help unless it was dropped from the air.

In a single phone call, Carolinas GCSA executive director Tim Kreger learned of one small community that lost 19 bridges with anything from one to 25 homes on the other side. “They couldn’t even run cables to these people,” Kreger says.

Storie literally spent weeks running his own small excavator far and wide, helping recover bridges and creating paths in and out for people otherwise stuck on the wrong side of a waterway. He would work a full shift at his badly damaged golf course, then head home at 4 p.m. and crank up his machine to help others in his community.

“You don’t have time to think about being tired,” Storie says. “You really don’t, because there are so many people who can’t get in and out of their house. The primary thing is to help them be able to do that. Then we won’t have the need for all these volunteers because people can then provide for themselves.”

Most hurricanes affect coastal areas, which are typically flat. The danger and damage stem mostly from winds, storm surge and rising waters. Those impacts are often more predictable than in the mountains, where winds funnel between ranges, rains loosen earth creating landslides and floodwaters gather like a wall of bowling balls that race through the valleys below.

The worst damage ran in a band roughly 100 miles wide from west of Asheville to east of Rutherfordton and up into the mountains, where centers like Boone and Blowing Rock were on the cusp of the fall leaf season.

At Linville Ridge Golf Club, the highest course east of the Mississippi, it wasn’t just the leaves that were gone. “Across the whole development, if there is one tree down there are 10,000 trees down,” Linville Ridge development and operations director Steve Sheets says. “Some houses had so many trees on them, you couldn’t even see there was a house there.”

It took eight people with chainsaws and a backhoe four hours to clear a narrow, single lane from Sheets’ maintenance facility down to the nearest gate on Highway 105 — a drive that normally takes three minutes.

Of course, many other parts of the Carolinas were also affected, from Aiken through the Midlands to the South Carolina Upstate, where 21 people were killed across Anderson, Greenville and Spartanburg counties.

Near Clinton, just off I-26 south of Spartanburg, floodwaters from the Enoree River rose to within feet of the clubhouse at Musgrove Mill Golf Club. The view from the back porch normally takes in as many as six holes, but all were under water.

Across the state line, foothills towns like Hendersonville and Morganton also took it hard.

In mid-October, one of Boone’s employees at Springdale asked to reschedule his hours so he could volunteer during daylight in Asheville where he lives. After the recovery team he was working with found two bodies in as many days, he told Boone he wasn’t sure he could keep doing it.

Asheville served as the drain for so much of what fell, in unfathomable amounts, on the mountains north of the city. About 60 miles away as the crow flies and 2,000 feet higher, Daniels measured 37.74 inches over three days. Sheets recorded 20 inches on the night of the storm itself.

Other than the clubhouse, not one inch of the course at Broadmoor Golf Links near Asheville Regional Airport was visible above water.

“They might even be worse than us,” says Dierdorff at Asheville Muni, where he saw water nearly reaching transformers on power poles. A city surveyor told him that, judging by the debris line, water was 35 feet deep by the ninth tee. “We had white caps coming down the fairways,” he says.

Only partly as a result of that torrent, it could be as late as “2026, maybe even 2027” before the front nine is rebuilt and reopen. The bigger factor now and for the foreseeable future is that the city is reserving that acreage as a secondary dump site for storm debris. And if you’ve seen even a glimpse of news coverage of the city or videos on social media, you’ll get an idea of why Dierdorff’s timeline is so far out.

“The words you read and the videos you see can’t describe the devastation,” Sheets says. “You have to see how it is in person. Without that, you can’t grasp the enormity of it.”

Enormity is defined as an extremely evil act or the quality of being extremely evil, according to the Cambridge Dictionary.

“Gosh almighty, man. It’s so bad,” says Rob Hamrick, of Golf Agronomics, who lives close to Shand and the neighborhood that lost so many homes. “They were gone. Just gone. But that was just one neighborhood. There were many others.”

For two weeks, Hamrick drove to his mother’s house in Shelby to shower, process work emails, stock up on drinking water and buy gas. “We still don’t have Wi-Fi,” he adds. “Of course, that’s nothing compared to a lot of people who had it a whole lot worse.”

Many of those were at higher elevations, which is why Steve Neuliep, superintendent of Neuliep Golf, who lives in Fairview outside Asheville, counted more than 100 helicopters, many of them U.S. Army Chinooks, pass overhead on day two after the storm alone.

One of those who had it worse was Ryan Wiebe, who has served as a long-term acting superintendent at Mount Mitchell Golf Club outside Burnsville. The golf course itself reportedly lost multiple holes on the back nine along the South Toe River, which Wiebe also lived beside.

“He totally lost everything. He didn’t even have a pair of shoes on when he got out,” says Shannon Peterson, superintendent of Corbin Turf and Ornamental Supply, who lives in the area and has helped Wiebe as a consultant. But Wiebe’s mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, her husband and their middle-school-aged son did not survive.

“Ryan’s wife came out from Ukraine about 10 years ago and she worked hard to get her family here a couple of years ago after the fighting started over there,” Peterson says. “He set them up in a mobile home nearby and all four of them got swept away. It’s so heartbreaking, but it’s true.”

The Weibe family’s story was reported in USA Today and on CNN. At press time, a GoFundMe page established to help them raised more than $40,000. But as Peterson says, there are countless others who need help of all kinds. “There’s people living in tents by the side of the road up here now,” he says. “It’s pretty sad seeing how people are having to live.”

Two of Peterson’s cousins lost their homes. “And there’s nowhere left to build them back,” he says. His in-laws are now living with relatives in Tennessee and expect to be there for months. “They can’t even get to their house because the bridge is gone,” he says. “And they can’t get power back to their home until they build the road back so they can put up new power poles.”

If you were a golf course superintendent in the storm zone, you had storm clean-up. It was just a question of how much and whether any of your repairs rose to the level of reconstruction. Some courses were closed for a few days, some for weeks, others still are aiming at next spring. And Peterson says he has heard of “three or four” that might never reopen.

At Mountain Air Country Club above Burnsville, Scott Bradley lost between 500 and 1,000 trees and counted 11 major landslides, including one that broke away just three feet from the edge of the first green. He counted 16 trees that fell on the 18th green. Miraculously, the first two were giants whose branches suspended the rest of their bulk and together they prevented the other 14 from crashing onto the putting surface.

Far more pressing was the work to open the one steep road winding in and out of the community. Emergency response coordinators soon identified Mountain Air’s own air strip as a site to bring in supplies. But those supplies weren’t going anywhere until the road reopened.

“We got it back in good shape so they could take the supplies down the mountain,” Bradley says. “Well, we got one lane back in good shape. The road is still technically closed except to the workers.”

A month after Helene, the golf course was still without power, like so much of the region. “We got lit up pretty good,” Bradley says. “It’s devastation. You don’t really like to see your town on the national news and we’ve been on a lot of news programs here lately. But we’re hoping people don’t forget that there are a lot of people up here that are going to need help for a long time.”

On Oct. 24, Bradley obtained a generator and was able to “start putting some water out.” That mattered because his turf had seen no irrigation — mechanical or natural — since the storm on Sept. 27. That would normally cause superintendent angst. “But I’m thankful there’s been no rain, because for a lot of people, that’s the last thing they need right now,” Bradley says. “Keeping grass alive is superficial in the scheme of things.”

At Sugar Mountain, engineering consultants told Daniels that the repair bill on the course will reach at least $1.5 million. That conversation came weeks after the storm. Until then, Daniels was not only busy with more important things, directing relief in his dual role as works director for the town: he had another reason for staying off the golf course.

“I’ve been the superintendent here for 27 years,” he says. “I just didn’t want to see it. It’s kind of heartbreaking.”

And there was enough heartbreak every else he turned.

“With each passing day, I was watching the weather and becoming more scared about what could happen,” he says of the lead up to the storm. “But no one could ever have imagined what did happen. I clocked in here about 5:30 Thursday morning and finally left for home about 6 o’clock Sunday night. In between, we were just clearing roads and creating access for people trapped in their homes here on the mountain.”

The night he did go home, Daniels had to wade through a creek and hike about half a mile beyond that to get to his house because the road was “completely washed away.” “I was determined I was not going to sleep in my office chair one more night,” he says. “After four days out there, I was going home.”

A son, Austin, who still lives in the area and is a lineman for a power company, didn’t see his own house in daylight for 27 days and counting. “He leaves home at 6:30 a.m. and doesn’t get back until 10 or 11 at night,” Daniels says. “He’s part of the big group of heroes around here that’s doing all they can to try and get everybody back to where we were before the storm, or to what everybody says will be the new normal.

“I don’t know what to think about that, you know. It’s not going to be anything like normal for a long, long time.”

Storie remembers the shock that came with daylight breaking on Hound Ears. He’d actually been on the golf course property since about 4 a.m. Saturday. Not because the golf course was his first priority, but because sleep was impossible. He was so concerned about the welfare of his parents and other family members in neighboring Avery County.

With no phone service and roads blocked or gone, literally everyone in the hardest hit areas spent days worrying and wondering whether loved ones survived. So, with his own driveway “completely gone,” Storie hiked in darkness through woods crossing a big ridge to the golf course, then across the golf course to get to his shop.

“Then it became one of those moments when God was like, ‘You’re not going to Avery County. You’re going to stay right here at Hound Ears where I put you,’” he says. “It became absolutely clear to me that this was the only place I could go. I didn’t have any choice. It was total chaos. I mean, it’s crazy, right. You could not get anywhere. Nothing even looked the same.”

The only other souls on site were a security guard and Hound Ears general manager Joe McGuire, who was recovering from foot surgery. “He was hobbling around. There wasn’t a whole lot he could do,” Storie says. “But one thing he could do was drive an automatic pickup truck.”

So, McGuire got behind the wheel of a vehicle piled with chains, chainsaws, pry bars, water, “everything we could kind of get together,” Storie says. He climbed onto the club’s 420 Caterpillar backhoe, and off they set in the community of more 400 people, cutting away trees and pushing back mudslides.

“Between me and him, within about two days, we got everyone evacuated except for 16 people on top of the mountain,” Storie says. “So the next day, me and a coworker, we backpacked in supplies and water on foot, checking on those people.” Among those supplies were critical medications.

There was no bringing them down at that point. The terrain was too difficult and among the debris was a patchwork of live power lines. “We had to hike the mountain for two or three days to take them everything they needed,” Storie says. Only then did he make his way to Avery County and learn that his family was safe, albeit homebound because of missing bridges.

After recovering and resetting his parents’ bridge, he spent the next two days doing the same for their neighbors up and down Highway 19E near Cranberry.

“I don’t think this part of the country will never look the same, whether it’s 10 years or 20 years,” he says. “There’s going to be remnants of this storm visible probably for our lifetimes.”

And then, as Boone says, there’s the stuff we won’t see. Springdale was not hit as badly as it was three years ago when Biblical flooding raged through the valley it sits in and multiple people were killed. But this flooding brought back that trauma.

“Western North Carolina will never be the same,” he says. “I feel for the kids that went through a flood, went through COVID, and now through another flood. They’re either going to be really tough, or really messed up.”

Trent Bouts is a Greer, South Carolina-based writer and frequent Golf Course Industry contributor. This story first appeared in Carolinas Green.