WRAL News Crew Document Being ‘Trapped in the Twilight Zone’ of Flooded Asheville

By Paul Greeley
817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com

A two-man news crew from WRAL, Capitol Broadcasting’s NBC affiliate in Raleigh, were sent to Asheville the day before Tropical Storm Helene ripped through the North Carolina mountains.

They found themselves challenged to cover the storm.

“Landslides, rockslides and flooding devastated the area,” says Curt Tremper, a WRAL photojournalist who along with reporter Shaun Gallagher, were sent to Asheville ahead of Helene to cover the storm. “Dark winding country roads, washed out by floods or mud, blocked by trees, power lines, rocks or other types of debris was a real challenge,” Tremper says.

(I know Tremper from having worked with him years ago at WINK-TV in Fort Myers.)

Few could have anticipated the sudden devastation Helene was to bring to the Asheville area.

“We were dead in the water,” Tremper says. “Once the towers went down, nothing worked.”

Asheville is about three and half-hours west of Raleigh by car, a long way out of WRAL’s coverage area.

“It’s not in our ADI,” Tremper says. But knowing the storm was going to be big event, he and Gallagher were sent to the mountains just like the station would have been sent someone to the beach if the storm was along the coastal communities.

“WRAL gets around,” Tremper says.

Tremper and Gallagher got up at 4 a.m. on Friday morning because “they were anticipating it to really pick up then.”

Tremper says they were live on WRAL throughout Friday morning and were able to send a news package back to the station.

Then the transformer blew, and all power went out to the hotel. Time to hit the road.

Once it became light, when they felt it was safe to travel, the plan was to make their way to Biltmore Village, south of Asheville.

“It’s dark, it’s curvy, it’s mountainous stuff,” Tremper says. “We don’t really know the roadways around here all that well.”

The road they took was already washed out. Another was blocked by a downed tree and still another by a downed power line.

“We’re getting blocked everywhere, and with no GPS, we’re stuck in a mountainous area,” Tremper says.

“This is not going to be good,” Tremper tells Gallagher.

Luckily, Gallagher had visited the area last year and remembers he had downloaded a map that was still on his phone.

“And with that, we were able to navigate our way around.” Tremper says.

In a LinkedIn post, Gallagher says they didn’t have any communication with “the station, or the outside world, for almost 24 hours.”

Tremper says he saw a lot of flooding. “It just kept coming and coming and coming. And whatever got in the way of the water, the water lifted and took.”

Houses, dumpsters, cars, big propane tanks, trucks and trees were swept away.

Tremper and Gallagher kept moving, trying to find a spot where they could set up the camera.

And every time they stopped on a road, the water came up “like a little river,” he says.

Then the wind gusts picked up.

“My reporter was holding me while I was shooting to keep the camera steady,” Tremper says.

That night, after 14 hours, they found a hotel with no power, no water, no restaurant, no coffee.

“Luckily, they did have beef jerky,” Tremper says.

“This was like a Twilight Zone episode,” he says. “We were trapped.”

The next morning, WRAL wanted them to return to Raleigh.

Gallagher says they were “waterlogged and exhausted, running on adrenaline, with no idea how to get out of Asheville.”

Low on gas, roads blocked by trees, rocks, landslides and abandoned cars, the trip home took eight hours.

The station suggested the two document conditions on their way back.

Tremper was hesitant at first.

“The story isn’t about us,” he says. But then the two saw the story as a way to demonstrate what people were experiencing.

“We tried to incorporate people that we met along the way,” Tremper says.

“People who live in these Western North Carolina communities have very difficult times ahead of them,” Tremper says. “Keep them in your thoughts and be thankful it wasn’t you or your family this time.”

NOTE: There are many examples of WRAL’s coverage of Helene on their YouTube page. Here are just a few:

This clip shows two men jump into swift moving flood waters to rescue a woman. Scroll to about the 4 minute to see it:

CLICK HERE to see what some people saw when they opened up their front door.