Thad Johnston: We knew the storm was coming, and we knew it was going to be bad.

Michael Archer: Yeah, that mud line. I mean, even where we were at, like, you’d be driving, and you just see that dirt line, 25 – 30 feet up in the air for miles. And it was just like, how, you know, how much water really was that? 

Tony Gündüz: Like, why is the mud 30 feet above the road? That’s already another 15 feet above the river. And like, oh, that’s not good.

Caroline Parker: Welcome to “Running Towards Disaster,” a series of stories from people who in times of crisis, head towards it to help. I’m Caroline Parker with EdNC. 

You just heard from three forestry management students at Haywood Community College in Clyde, North Carolina. 

And their paths to Haywood and its community college are completely different. Like so many students that find their way back to school, the road map is laid with life experiences. 

Michael used to be in the Marine Corps. He moved to the area from Kansas City two years ago with his partner. They were looking for a change of pace, and neither had ever been to North Carolina. 

Michael Archer: So we were actually waiting for our realtor, and we were in the area, and they’ve got a little four-mile loop around campus. So we just went for a little hike, and I was looking at the place and saw that they had a timber sports shed and a lumberjack team, and they practiced forestry. And I was like, you know what? Might as well use my GI Bill. I never thought I’d be going back to school as a 34 year old. You know, here we are, and it’s been good. 

Caroline Parker: Tony moved to the area 10 years ago from South Florida, and before that, he lived in Turkey. His interest in forestry management blossomed from an unexpected event.

Tony Gündüz: Knee injury and right as COVID hit, my physical therapist kind of told me, ‘like, hey, I don’t know how often I’m going to be able to see you with these, you know, new world that’s happening around us and with the new rules being imposed so just go do some, you know, work on uneven ground.’ Basically, I’m like, okay, I’m going to have some time off from work because seemingly, so I’ll go outside and do some socially responsible work outside and like, that turned into like, I’m kind of good at this. That turned into a few 100 trees. And then that turned into like, let me get a better understanding of what I’m dealing with before I, you know, do this full time. And that’s my kind of goal of becoming a professional in tree care.

Caroline Parker: And Thad grew up in Gaston County, North Carolina. His road to this forestry management program was windy, uphill, included a lot of miles, pit stops, and exposure to the wild. 

Thad Johnston: Once I graduated high school, I moved up to the Sylva area to go to school at Western Carolina University. But just at that age and that period of time, I just wasn’t mature enough to do college. I stopped doing college for a while and just kind of traveled around the nation on a bicycle. When I was planning that trip, I honestly didn’t know a lot about the western states. The biodiversity out there, as far as the different, you know, geological formations, the different habitat types, it’s incredible.

So fast forward a few years later. I applied to all these wildland fire jobs, and then out the blue, I got a call from a fire station in New Mexico, and I jumped on it, and I moved out there. It was a very valuable experience. But it became clear to me that to progress in a way that would be beneficial for my future, I had to get a degree, and one of my neighbors who works in the forest industry, he runs a Christmas tree farm. He told me about Haywood Community College, and it sounded like a wonderful path. So I left New Mexico, moved back to western North Carolina, and now I’m here. 

Caroline Parker: And in late September of 2024, these three students were just starting their second year in forestry management as a storm named Helene made its way up the Appalachian Mountain range. Before Helene arrived, the region had what they call a predecessor rain event. The area was already soaked in water from heavy rainfall. 

With the soil saturated and river levels on the rise, Helene arrived. Less than a week after the storm, 25 out of North Carolina’s 100 counties were declared a federal disaster area. That’s a fourth of our state.

And what does that much water do when it’s dropped in a place where it’s not supposed to be? It moves everything out of its way.

Tony Gündüz: We had one lady we were helping out in Barnardsville. 

Michael Archer: We were at this horse ranch. We were cutting up some walnut trees, because if they’re in the water, they can contaminate it.

Tony Gündüz : You know, her house was fine, but most of her outbuildings were pretty damaged. And she had one large barn that was untouched, seemingly. 

Michael Archer: This lady was showing us around her property

Tony Gündüz: I’m like, you know, this is good news. 

Michael Archer: And she pointed to this big white barn. And she was like, you see that barn? And we were like, yeah.

Tony Gündüz: She’s like, that’s not my barn.

Michael Archer: This massive barn had lifted up and washed down stream and then just sat perfectly in her yard. Nothing had moved, nothing had gotten, like, tipped out of it. It just, like, lifted up and it looked like it was supposed to be there. 

Caroline Parker: Helene tested the foundation of this region — and in the case of this barn, literally. Interstates were washed away, mountain passes were blocked by landslide debris, and massive trees that had rooted for decades toppled over. That’s where Haywood Community College’s forestry management students came in handy. 

You are about to hear from Thad, Michael, and Tony, all in their second year of forestry management at Haywood Community College. We asked about their school, their storm experience, and the help they were able to offer after. We are thankful for their stories and the community college system that trains them. Here they are. 

Thad Johnston: We are at Haywood Community College in Clyde, North Carolina. 

Michael Archer: Class today is our capstone class of forestry management. So we’re learning about how to create a silvicultural prescription for landowners. We basically go out and we survey the property and we give them a standing timber value of what kind of value they have on their property, and then what kind of prescriptions we can make to benefit wildlife or their forests.

Thad Johnston: This community college is known definitely throughout the state, but honestly I’ve heard throughout the country, for being a really good, really competent two-year forestry degree. People who are interested in natural resources and who want to pursue a degree in forestry, a lot of them see this as a quick and very effective way to get into the forest industry. 

Michael Archer: The information that they’re teaching is really eye opening. I thought I had a good background in nature and conservancy and whatnot, but the tools that they’re teaching us here, I’m going to be able to take and, you know, hopefully pass on and bring more information to the outside. My favorite thing is now I can go outside and I can understand the world around me in a better sense.

Tony Gündüz:  It’s just been so eye opening. You know, you think the tree is a tree is a tree. And like, you realize you live in a special place because we’re surrounded by so much greenery, but I don’t think we take the time to appreciate the diversity and what not we have in our area. There’s so much to learn, but it’s been eye opening.   

Michael Archer: We have a little creek that you have to drive through to get to our neighborhood, like you actually have to drive through a creek. So that creek got washed out. So it took me and a couple neighbors about a day and a half, two days, to move all that rock by hand just to be able to get out of the area. I didn’t have power or WiFi, or, you know, water, anything at the house. Luckily, we had some food, and I’ve got propane, so we were able to keep the house kind of warm and still cook on the stove. 

But we were washing dishes in the creek. We were getting buckets of water to flush the toilets because, you know, the well didn’t work. But otherwise, we were just trying to reach out. I was texting everybody that I could, reaching out to professors and whatnot, because we were supposed to have some sort of cleanup on the Friday, and I thought I was supposed to be there, but didn’t know what happened. 

And so I was just kind of trying to make sure. I didn’t know what happened. You know, we just knew that the power went out, but we didn’t really realize how bad it was, until I got in contact with Tony really…

Tony Gündüz: I had a few friends that were local that needed some help for their neighbors and whatnot. So they would call me, saying there was a tree down on the ground. And then you get to the property, and there’s 50 trees down on the ground, and you’re like, okay, this may need some backup.

Thad Johnston: Me and a couple friends from Haywood Community College, after everything had settled and we had kind of checked in on each other, we decided that we were going to go out and start doing chainsaw work to, you know, just kind of help free people up if there were trees on their houses, blocking the road, things like that.

Michael Archer: We had gotten in contact with George, who was our timber sports coach, and he gave us the keys to the chainsaw locker. 

We kind of had free game of what tools we needed. And so we grabbed a bunch of saws and whatever axes and anything else we needed. 

And then I actually had some friends back at home who wanted to support, they wanted to donate some money, but they didn’t know where to, or, you know, Red Cross, FEMA, wherever. But they wanted to make an impact. So I told them, I was like, you know, I’m taking some guys out. So we collected a couple grand, so we were able to go for about three weeks straight where we would just go out every day. We had food covered, gas covered.

Thad Johnston: And we went to Barnardsville. I remember that there were the I-beams that were used to build bridges, and they were twisted and contorted in a way that, you know, I couldn’t imagine any other force that would be able to to destroy something that strong, that easily, and the asphalt from the road had been lifted up in one kind of complete piece and transported off into a field. I guess the water had maybe somehow gotten underneath it. I don’t really know how it happened, but it was mind bending. The just sheer power of that water. 

Michael Archer: I haven’t ever seen flooding like that before. Not to that height while I was in the Marines. I was deployed to Afghanistan, and I also went to Thailand when they had their tsunami hit back in 2011. So I was part of that recovery team cleaning stuff up. So I’ve seen it before, but I’ve never, I’ve never seen it, I guess at home really. 

Tony Gündüz: I mean we got hooked up with a crew out of Barnardsville, a tree crew. And they would give us calls like, almost seemingly every other day, like, ‘Hey, can you help us out with this situation? And if you’re in the area, come help us.’ And that was difficult.

Michael Archer: There was this old Vietnam War vet. He had two trees fall straight through his house. So there was just that pink insulation just all over his kitchen, all over his dining room. 

Thad Johnston: Insulation all over the floors. His pictures and books that he had collected throughout his life. They were everywhere on the floor, under cabinets, underneath desks. It was terrible. And the wooden beams from the ceiling, they had cracked, and they had formed like these points that were jutting out, at every angle.

Tony Gündüz: He was in his 80s, maybe 90s, with this tree that had gone through his kitchen and living room, and there was drywall and, you know, insulation everywhere, and…

Michael Archer: He was there, and you know he was just trying to do what he could.

Thad Johnston: When the storm hit, the communities kind of came together and helped him out, you know, called people who had never met him from all over with all different skill sets to help him out in any way we could. And I thought that was kind of a cool part of the storm. I hate to say it, but I don’t really know my neighbors very well, except for a couple of them. I think that in the modern age, that’s a, sadly, a relatively common thing. But I will say that after the storm, that’s no longer the case. 

Michael Archer:  One thing I will say is that the people from Appalachia, from around here, like even seeing them on their worst day, nobody was screaming, nobody was crying, nobody was freaking out. Everybody was, you know, there for each other. You know, like tensions would get high when you’re in the gas line. You know, that’s, that’s gonna happen. But otherwise it was, I don’t know, for as much chaos has happened, it was pretty peaceful.

Caroline Parker: You’ve just listened to Thad, Michael, and Tony — three forestry management students at Haywood Community College who in the immediate aftermath of Helene, with their classmates and friends, used their schooling to help communities in the west. This is the first episode in our series, “Running Towards Disaster,” from EdNC. 

In our next episode, we hear from that profession whose job it is to get the power back on. 

This was a production by me, Caroline Parker, for EdNC. EdNC was established to be an independent source of news — providing data, and analysis about education for the people of North Carolina. In short, we tell the stories happening in our state’s classrooms and involving our state’s students. Music in this series is from the talented locals in Haywood, recorded at their Friday night event, Pickin’ in the Park. For a full bibliography of this episode, and all of our coverage go to EdNC.org.