Family members rescued a Burnsville couple and their dog after Helene’s floods trapped them for four days.
Olivia Cooner, her boyfriend Eli Shipman and their Corgi terrier dog are now staying with family on Topsail Island.
“We are in indefinite displacement and figuring it out day by day,” Cooner said.
Cooner said they got no notices to evacuate last week before the storm. They bought enough food, water and dog food to get them through a couple of days without power. She said the highest the Cane River, which runs on the other side of the street from their home, had only flooded 10 feet higher than its regular height during the historic 1916 flood.
“In our minds, there was no way. The facts were proving that we were not going to get flooded. The water won’t reach us,” Cooner said.
Cooner said the only warning they got, came in at 5 a.m. Friday and it told people to shelter in place unless they had been told to evacuate.
Two hours later, the Cane River started to overflow its banks and onto the road. She began recording videos on her phone of the water level, thinking that was the worst of it.
“We weren’t scared until about an hour in when we realized the water rose 10 feet in an hour,” Cooner said. “We saw a storage container float by and realized it was not a normal storm.”
She said the water rose 30 feet in about three hours.
“We started to see a couple of houses go by and we were just completely in shock,” Cooner said. “We watched someone get swept away in their truck and that was the hardest thing to watch because we could not help this person.”
Between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., she and her boyfriend began packing go bags in case they needed to seek higher ground by hiking the mountain behind their house.
“Our basement was flooding, a power line fell into our house. The water had risen so much in our driveway that it was flooding our cars,” Cooner said. “We really thought we were going to lose the whole house.”
They never had to leave the house. By 3 p.m., the water began to recede off of the road. Then they realized, they were alone.
“We were completely trapped. There was no way out. [The] driveway [was] a cliff [with the] road destroyed on both ends and the bridge to cross the river collapsed,” Cooner said.
It wasn’t until Saturday that they saw a neighbor. Someone came to see if the corner store by their house had supplies. It had been washed away.
As neighbors continued to slowly show up, they learned bits and pieces of the destruction to other parts of western North Carolina.
“We started to get scared and then from there, every day was just surviving. Luckily, one of our neighbors gave us water,” Cooner said. “We were just talking to our community, which really we pulled through for each other, we gave each other information. we passed along information that we heard to everyone we saw.”
Cooner said Sunday night, National Guard members came in for about 30 minutes. They did not bring supplies or give information. Cooner said at that time, they were checking to see if people had water.
On Monday, the National Guard returned for three hours starting at lunchtime to hand out supplies.
Then, strangers started showing up on the other side of the broken bridge, trying to reach stranded loved ones. A group that Cooner’s boyfriend helped cross the river had a message for her–her family was on the way to find her.
“I couldn’t even believe the information I was being given,” Cooner said.
It turned out that the couple had been posted in a Facebook group for families of people unaccounted for.
“My brother, his girlfriend, my dad and Eli’s dad were prepared to hike how ever long to get to us,” Cooner said. “We were ecstatic and started packing.”
Their rescuers arrived late that day and they all spent one final night in the couple’s home. A video recorded Tuesday shows Cooner and her Corgi being pulled across the river in a canoe to the other side of the broken bridge.
On the other side, she learned about how bad conditions were in the rest of the region. She also learned that her friends had attempted to find her sooner, but a law enforcement officer turned them around three hours into their hike.
“With no evidence, he just told my friends that we were dead and that they shouldn’t even try to come to us,” Cooner said. “I’m so glad they didn’t tell our families that because that would have been devastating for them, but I don’t know how much longer we would have been waiting for someone to come for us.”
Cooner hopes that sharing her story on social media will get more attention for the people she believes are still stranded like she was.
“I’m very concerned about the little towns,” Cooner said. “I think people are still stuck there, I think there are people still running out of supplies.
“We need people who are able to locate those people who need help and we are going to need an immeasurable amount of people to rebuild Asheville.”
Cooner said she does not expect to be able to return to her home for six months to a year. They hope to return to Asheville, where they both work service jobs, sooner and stay with friends. She’s grateful to have a home to go back to at all.
“We were so lucky,” she said. “If anything was a little bit different, if that water had risen another foot we would have lost our whole house. We’ve lost a lot. We’ve lost jobs, we have friends that have lost everything but considering we are super lucky.”
They have started a GoFundMe to put towards repairing their home when the time comes.
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