Folks in western North Carolina could be forgiven if time has become a blur. After all, they’ve endured a lifetime of pain and problems in the past five years.

Perhaps nowhere has endured more devastating events in that time than Haywood County, a vibrant corner of the state dotted with mile-high mountains, winding rivers, and towns like Waynesville and Maggie Valley that dot the landscape.

In this lookback to the first of those events surrounding Tropical Storm Fred in August 2021, we’ll review the local vulnerability to flooding, the weather patterns at play that led to rapidly escalating impacts, the additional tragedies that followed, and how these events have helped Haywood County prepare for whatever comes next.

Haywood’s Flooding History

While tropical storms aren’t as common in the Mountains as along our coastline, the interplay of tropical moisture with the region’s high terrain has produced extreme flooding in several major events – including in July 1916, August 1940, and more recently, in September 2004 after back-to-back hits from the remnants of hurricanes Frances and Ivan.

Haywood County was hit hard by those 2004 storms. Ivan’s maximum rainfall total of 17.00 inches was measured in Cruso, and significant flooding occurred in Canton and Clyde.

All three towns sit along the banks of the Pigeon River, which originates in dozens of small streams in the southern part of the county. They aggregate into the East Fork – along which Cruso is located – and the West Fork, then merge into the main branch near Canton before continuing through Clyde and into Waterville Lake.

When heavy rain falls in those higher-elevation upstream areas, it all funnels down into one rushing river. Both 2004 storms crested the Pigeon River near Canton at more than 20 feet, above its major flood stage, for the first time since 1940.

While these extreme rain events are historically rare, their severity means folks across the region can’t let their guard down. That includes forecasters at the local National Weather Service office in Greenville-Spartanburg (GSP), South Carolina.

“Tropical cyclones don’t impact the western Carolinas without consequences,” said Joshua Palmer, the Senior Service Hydrologist at NWS GSP, which covers a region spanning from the Great Smokies through Grandfather Mountain. “And it’s important to mention that the western Carolinas can have significant flooding from non-tropical systems. Therefore, in some respects, we are always on alert.”

He noted a slow-moving frontal system in February 2020 that produced significant flooding and warranted multiple water rescues. At the time, that was the most significant flood event for parts of western North Carolina since Ivan more than 15 years earlier. That long gap led to another realization.

“In the few years leading up to Fred, we had the mindset we were ‘due’,” added Palmer. “We didn’t know how or where significant impacts were going to occur, but we understood the law of averages was going to catch up with us.”

After the 2004 storms, a federal, state, and local response addressed some of Haywood County’s vulnerabilities. In the town of Clyde, FEMA-backed buyouts removed 45 homes in the floodplain, and River’s Edge Park was built as a buffer for flood water. The Haywood Alerts system was also established to provide countywide weather and emergency notifications.

But given the area’s history as a hotspot for flooding, the potential for a high-impact event was still present. That was proven back in 2021, when stubborn heavy rain fell in all the wrong places.

When It Rained, It Poured

An active start to that summer’s Atlantic hurricane season included drought-relieving rainfall in central and eastern North Carolina from Tropical Storm Claudette in June and Elsa in July.

By mid-August, the National Weather Service had its sights on the next storm before it even had a name. On Tuesday, August 10 – one week before Fred impacted the Carolinas – the forecast discussion noted potential heavy rain and flooding impacts from the system, which was then called Potential Tropical Cyclone 6.

“We were confident in the overall forecasts and impacts, and knew that somewhere in our area would be severely impacted,” said Trisha Palmer, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist at NWS GSP. “The lower confidence was where, due to the nature of the storm and interactions with terrain.”

The events over the three days before Fred arrived would help focus those threats. First, in the previous weekend, showers and storms popped up across our mountain region. On their own, they were fairly unremarkable and typical for the summer season, but in tandem, they helped saturate the soils and increase the landslide potential, as noted in Sunday’s forecast discussion.

Another, more surprising, rain event hit in the early hours of Monday morning. As moisture fed in along a stalled cold front to the north, upslope areas in Transylvania and Haywood counties saw rainfall totals of up to 10.60 inches in Lake Toxaway, which led to flash flooding.

It was a phenomenon that we now call a Predecessor Rainfall Event, or PRE. The term itself is relatively new – coined in a 2007 Masters thesis – but as Trisha Palmer noted, “the meteorological pattern of rainfall ahead of a tropical cyclone has been a concern for enhanced rainfall and flash flooding impacts for as long as forecasters have been around.”

With soils and streams in the headwaters of the Pigeon River already saturated, the forecast then took a turn for the worse. The Weather Prediction Center was forecasting a High Risk of Excessive Rainfall for those same parts of the southern Mountains with the impending arrival of Tropical Storm Fred.

At that time on Monday morning, Fred was still hours away from making landfall along the Florida panhandle. From there, the storm tracked northward over Georgia – where it produced flooding on Interstate 85 in Atlanta – and weakened to a tropical depression.

The first raindrops fell in western North Carolina around midnight on Tuesday, and initially, the rain was light and spotty in places like Waynesville, which had received only 0.74 inches by noon.

But at the higher elevations, the totals had been greater – including 3.02 inches at our office’s Frying Pan Mountain ECONet station – and the heaviest rain was still to come.

A Terrifying Timeline

The rain intensified and the water rose rapidly in a few frantic hours that afternoon, which are documented in a story map created by the Land of Sky Council of Governments, Haywood County Emergency Management and Development Services, and Western Carolina University.

Between 2 and 4 pm, Frying Pan Mountain received another 2.86 inches of rain. With no room in the saturated soil, the moisture began an express trip down the Pigeon River tributaries. On the West Fork above Lake Logan, water levels rose by almost eight feet in less than two hours.

By 3 o’clock, 911 calls had come in from a stranded hiker on the Big East Fork Trail and a flooded house in Canton. Zack Koonce, the Haywood County Emergency Management Coordinator, called the Cruso fire chief to alert him to heavy rain and severe weather in the southern part of the county.

“It probably wasn’t a minute later I heard the chief come on the radio and say that he’d come across a landslide that had hit a house just above his station, and then also was reporting that the river was starting to come out of the banks just above the Cruso fire department,” said Koonce in a recorded interview.

That led to two quick calls by county officials. One went to NC Emergency Management requesting more resources, including search and rescue teams, from the Western Branch headquarters in Hickory. Those crews would have to take an indirect route, as landslides closed Interstate 40 and US Highway 19/23 on the eastern side of the county that afternoon.

The other call went to the National Weather Service to help spread the word out about the fast-evolving flooding. That meant issuing a Flash Flood Warning, which was later upgraded to a rare Flash Flood Emergency that warned of “a significant and life-threatening flood wave moving down the Pigeon River” that evening.

For the NWS forecasters on duty that day, Fred produced a number of hazards for them to monitor, including three confirmed tornadoes in the Foothills. But the dire situation developing in Haywood County quickly caught their attention.

“The evolution of impacts was faster than anything I had experienced in my career to date,” recalled Joshua Palmer. “These events reminded all of us that streams can produce significant flooding in a matter of minutes.”

Indeed, at 3:15 pm – only three minutes after the initial Flash Flood Warning was issued – Haywood County 911 had received 20 calls for swift water rescue. And the water was still rising: the East Fork Pigeon River crested at 5:45 pm, having risen more than ten feet in three hours, and the Pigeon River near Canton crested by 8:15 pm in its major flood stage, just shy of the then-record level set during Ivan in 2004.

By the end of the day, Frying Pan Mountain had received 7.45 inches of rain, with storm totals – including Monday’s predecessor event – of 14.12 inches in Cruso and more than 20 inches in northwestern Transylvania County.

Across Haywood County, 80 people were in evacuation shelters, many roads were closed or washed out, and rescue teams were still hard at work. But the tragedy was only beginning.

The Hits Kept Coming

In the wake of the storm, 1,500 first responders from across the region came to Haywood County, assisting with more than 70 rescues. Search and rescue efforts went on for 11 days.

Eventually, six people were confirmed dead. All were elderly residents of Cruso in the riverside Laurel Bank Campground and nearby homes, which were among the first areas overtaken by the rising flood waters.

As the process of rescue shifted to recovery, one group that played an important role was the Southwestern Commission – the Council of Governments (COG) covering far western North Carolina, including Haywood County.

Their mission includes economic and workforce development and services for older adults, but they also step in after disasters to help communities apply for and administer recovery grants.

For Russ Harris, who was appointed Executive Director of the Southwestern Commission shortly before Fred hit, that recovery element was a new responsibility that has since become an important part of the COG’s work.

“One thing we did was train up on the FEMA financial piece, so we were able to help local governments apply for reimbursement for disaster impacts, and that response was directly related to Fred,” said Harris. “That was a change at the COG level that we would start to think like that.”

On the economic front, Harris recalled the resilience of local communities who were eager to clean up and get back in business in the months after the storm.

“I feel like they were starting to come back and kind of getting their feet back under them. We didn’t see a lot of vacancies downtown. It wasn’t like a lot of people said, ‘that’s it, I can’t come back.’ So [the recovery] seemed to be tracking pretty well,” he said.

But in March 2023, more economic hardship hit the area. The Evergreen paper mill in Canton, which had been in operation for 115 years and was the largest local employer with more than 1,000 workers, announced it was closing.

Harris said that news felt like a second wave of disaster on the heels of Tropical Storm Fred. And their rapid response framework from Fred was used again during this event.

“The mill announcement was at 5 o’clock Monday afternoon. Our first meeting was at 8 o’clock the next morning. So we took the structure that was in place from dealing with Fred, and just applied that to an economic disaster as well.”

Another 18 months later in September 2024, the region was hit by Hurricane Helene. That storm was also destructive in Haywood County, causing a new record crest on the Pigeon River and another wave of flooding that washed out a section of Interstate 40 and caused five more fatalities.

Helene easily could have been the knock-out punch for Haywood County. But instead, its towns and residents have learned from the tragedies of the past to build back stronger than ever.

Rebuilding Resiliently

For one, Fred validated the protective measures taken after the 2004 storms. In Canton alone, buyouts along the Pigeon River cost $938,000 in 2006, but that avoided an estimated $1.19 million in potential damage from Fred. And in Clyde, River’s Edge Park was coated with mud, but that was a sign it did its job in keeping flood water out of the town.

Another 40 local homeowners applied for buyouts after Fred, while 11 additional damaged properties in Haywood County were bought out after Helene.

Following Fred, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency received a block grant that provided $11.6 million to Haywood County for homeowner assistance and new affordable housing. And with support from the Southwestern Commission, up to $25,000 in repair assistance was made available for Helene-damaged homes.

The county is also taking proactive steps to reduce future flooding. Through the state’s Flood Resiliency Blueprint, developed by the Department of Environmental Quality, stream stabilization efforts have focused on restoring native plants to reduce erosion along the Pigeon River.

In Canton, federal funds are helping the town relocate its fire station outside the floodplain, and following the lead of nearby Clyde, the town announced earlier this month that it has bought 73 acres of riverside land to use for flood storage.

Of course, these are only mitigation steps, as we know the flood risk can never be reduced to zero. In that sense, the flooding along the Pigeon River during Fred and Helene – along with other recent events, such as the deadly November 2020 floods at the Hiddenite campground – should be a caution about mountain rivers and streams.

“They’re all flashy, most have inhabited floodplains, and many have vulnerable campgrounds,” said Joshua Palmer. “Therefore, we have to have the mindset that all mountain streams can be dangerous; they are all vulnerable.”

In response to the striking speed at which flooding unfolded during Fred, Haywood County has expanded its monitoring capabilities. A grant from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety helped the county install seven new river gauges that feed into the state’s FIMAN tool, which is used to monitor local flooding conditions.

Another state grant helped Haywood County purchase 18 outdoor emergency sirens, which can be activated automatically based on the river gauge data or manually by the 911 call center. Five years after Fred, those sirens are now operational.

Since Fred, forecasters have gained better pattern recognition surrounding PREs, and a better understanding of the predictive power of High-Risk days for extreme rainfall. That’s reflected in the confidence and forcefulness of their messaging, as with the warning of “catastrophic flooding and landslides” issued by NWS GSP during Helene.

“Spelling the threat out more clearly not only for emergency managers, but [also] the public, has been the evolving focus of the NWS especially in the most recent few years, and the improved and very focused messaging during Helene was part of that evolution,” said Trisha Palmer.

That’s not the only lesson learned from Fred that has already been put into practice. As noted in our Helene one-year lookback, removing debris from the Pigeon River ahead of that storm helped avoid some of the same damage, like gouged turf on the local high school football field.

“I feel like Fred was the training run for that. It was the prep, it was earlier warnings, a better job of getting the word out to people ahead of time,” said Harris from the Southwestern Commission.

In working with Haywood County officials and business owners over the past five years, Harris has admired their unique ability to find a silver lining, even amid destructive disasters and economic adversity.

“One week after Helene, I was in downtown Canton, the stores were open again, and most of the people said, ‘you know, we were super lucky, and it could have been worse,’” he observed.

“You look at these people with a foot of mud in their store, but they didn’t lose their lives, and that was their attitude.”

It’s a remarkable case of looking on the bright side after some of the darkest days in Haywood County’s history, which all began on a stormy weekend back in August 2021.