Haywood County looks back at Helene, Fred to plan for the next disaster
Canton aftermath-county (Main image): Following Helene, many Western North Carolina communities looked more like bombed-out warzones.
Haywood County photo
Hurricane Helene may not have been so devastating for Western North Carolina were it not for the half foot of rain that dumped on the region just ahead of Sept. 27, 2024. Getting ahead of what promised to be a monumental disaster, on the afternoon of Sept. 26, only about 12 hours before flooding began in some WNC communities, the National Weather Service office in upstate South Carolina issued the following statement:
“CATASTROPHIC FLOODING AND LANDSLIDES FOR THE MOUNTAINS AND FOOTHILLS FROM HURRICANE HELENE … This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era.”
Zack Koonce clocked in the night of Wednesday, Sept. 25, and monitored the ongoing heavy rainfall, thinking about how soggy the ground would be ahead of Helene. Koonce is Haywood County’s Emergency Management Officer. Having been through Tropical Storm Fred, which tore through the county and claimed six lives in Cruso, east of Canton, he thought he had some idea of what may lie ahead.
The next day, Haywood County’s Emergency Operations Center was established at the sheriff’s office. Koonce served as the nighttime manager for the EOC, working 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. throughout the initial search, rescue and recovery operations.
Leading up to the storm, Koonce and others worked to stage personnel and resources, anticipating that parts of the county may be cut off from responders once flooding begins, such as Cruso and Bethel in Eastern Haywood County. While those early plans assumed that flooding would begin in that area based on what happened during Fred, before dawn on Friday, the first creeks to slip their banks were Richland Creek and Browning Branch in Waynesville, and evacuations and rescues began in those areas a few hours before dawn.
The predecessor rain event set the region up for Helene to cause catastrophic flooding. NOAA.gov/CW3E graphic
While Haywood County’s plan was indeed solid, no battle plan survives contact with enemy.
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“It’s like Mike Tyson said,” Koonce stated with an ironic chuckle, “‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’”
Calling in the cavalry
As forecasts painted an increasingly grim picture of what Helene would do to WNC, the state sent out a notice seeking emergency responders to deploy to the region. Tommy Batson happily put his name on the list and got the green light. Wednesday night, Batson and his team rolled into the Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center, his home for the next two weeks.
Batson, 44, is Pender County’s Emergency Management Director. He also serves as an incident commander, meaning he deploys to disaster areas and takes over certain logistical operations. He told The Smoky Mountain News that he’s likely deployed over a hundred times for everything from floods to wildfires to search and rescue operations.
His 16-person team was one of the first groups to arrive in Haywood County ahead of Helene. His job was to work with County Manager Bryant Morehead — who told SMN that Batson went above and beyond throughout the deployment — and local emergency management personnel to organize resources and stay on top of the paperwork that proves so valuable once it comes time for things like reimbursements.
Each morning, Batson’s team mustered around 6 a.m., ahead of the 7 o’clock brief at Lake Junaluska, where hundreds of responders got a hot breakfast, loaded up on coffee and grabbed bagged lunches before heading out for a long day. Around dusk, the team would return and set plan of action for the next day. The final task, before turning in around 10 p.m., was to button up the last of the paperwork to ensure the team didn’t fall behind.
As difficult as the operational tempo was for the two weeks Batson was in Haywood, he said that Lake Junaluska’s hospitality made things easier. Each person on the incident management team had a golf cart to get around the lake, so they didn’t have to worry about parking or access during those busy days. But that wasn’t all.
“The staff at Lake Junaluska made it the best,” he said. “It was like going to Disney World.”
“There’s no place in the country that I deployed that had better hospitality,” he added.
Hundreds of responders mustered for several mornings in a row to eat breakfast and receive their briefings. Kyle Perrotti photo
Those who worked with Batson all had praise for him and his team. Part of that success may go back to the strength of relationships he has with Haywood County’s emergency responders. In 2016, 2019 and 2022, he helped host incident management team academies at Lake Junaluska alongside Koonce and others. He said that well before Helene, he had strong bonds with Koonce and several other Haywood emergency responders.
Koonce said Batson and his team provided invaluable support throughout the storm response and considers that one of the greatest lessons other governments and agencies can take away is how vital those teams are. With those teams focusing on logistics and certain elements of the response, the EOC can focus on communication and supporting immediate community needs.
Looking back to Fred
Like Batson, Koonce has deployed to disasters around the state, including during Florence in 2018. However, his experience with severe storms goes back even further. Growing up in Jones County, his family endured Hurricanes Bertha and Fran in 1996.
“During Fran, the roof came off of our house while we were in it,” Koonce said.
This experience helped inspire Koonce to become a first responder. He knows the feeling of desperation one feels when a disaster upends their life, and he wants to be part of a team that begins to set things right.
During Florence in 2018, Koonce said he learned what coordination should look like between an Emergency Operations Center, other agencies and local fire departments. While those experiences have all informed his response to hurricanes, it was 2021 with Tropical Storm Fred where the hardest and most valuable lessons were learned.
“I got to see what [disaster response] looks like on a larger scale, where we see how resources are ordered, how to manage them, how to track them and how to coordinate information,” Koonce said.
Morehead, Haywood’s county manager, considered what was learned from the experience with Fred in August 2021. Wise advice for any government body regardless of the impending crisis is to maintain financial preparedness, he posited.
“Recovery takes months and years, and as a county government, we have to maintain a healthy fund balance,” he said. “That ‘savings account’ allows us to sustain recovery operations while still meeting the day-to-day needs of our residents. Without that foundation, our ability to respond and rebuild would be severely limited.”
Along with feeling like he had a better grasp on what to do, Morehead was happy to see other county staffers more confident in their response. Several responders from outside the county took note. Even Batson considered that Haywood was more prepared to respond than surrounding counties, likely due to that experience in 2021.
“Overall, Fred taught us where the gaps were, and Helene showed how much stronger we had become by applying those lessons,” Morehead said.
Haywood County began holding daily meetings the Monday before the storm, during which they’d receive briefings from the National Weather Service, which proved to be accurate even early on. The outlook was grim, and the counties across the region began requesting assistance. Teams came into Haywood from around the state and beyond, including Washington, D.C., Kentucky, Texas and Wisconsin.
While the extreme flooding in Cruso following Fred was the result of an unexpected cloud burst, there was time to think about Helene before it arrived. Koonce said that a lesson applied from Fred, thanks to the lead time before Helene hit the area, was calling in some of those resources like Batson’s team and others days ahead of time.
“We focused specifically on bringing outside resources, knowing that we were most likely going to have our capabilities exceeded here in the county,” Koonce said.
The importance of communications
Anyone who’s been to the annual county clash football game between Pisgah and Tuscola high schools knows that the crowd is so large that cell phone signals become unreliable. Following the 2023 rivalry game, emergency management leadership thought responding to an incident at the stadium could be tricky due to that cell tower overload, so they purchased a Starlink, thinking it could also be used for search and rescue operations in areas with poor cell signals.
Little did they know, Starlink would be crucial once the mobile service providers, one by one, failed across Haywood County, less than a year later during Helene. The night before Helene, they drug the Starlink out of storage and made sure it was updated and ready to go. It proved crucial to maintaining an internet connection at the EOC.
“That was a lifesaver,” Koonce said.
Losing mobile communication was also a unique challenge for Batson. Where messages could normally be shared with the click of a button, his team had to leave sticky notes at fire departments for emergency responders, and municipal and community buildings for residents.
“I think anyone that responded to Western North Carolina learned that you need to be prepared to not have cell phone, not to have running water, not to have sewer,” he said.
As Helene neared, the public information officers for Haywood County EMS, Allison Richmond; Haywood County Government, Dillon Huffman and the sheriff’s office, Gina Zachary, considered how best to maintain communications with the public. The trio worked together, considering the whole time how to optimize their individual strengths and determine who should take which tasks.
While Richmond had been through Fred in her current role, Huffman and Zachary hadn’t. Although Huffman has experience with crisis communications, he said he’d never seen anything like an EOC, through which all the information flows — lives saved, lives lost, successes, failures and miracles. While Huffman had been told what to expect and how an EOC operates, seeing the real thing was simply different. He said he was most impressed by the hive-like nature. Everyone knew their job and did it, working tirelessly to keep the EOC humming.
Richmond said that Helene was, in many senses, déjà vu. However, amid all the differences in size and scope and scale, one thing really sticks out — losing those mobile communications. However, though she hadn’t experienced such a challenge on a wide scale during Fred, some people in Cruso had lost cell signal, so she knew she should come up with a plan for the worst-case communications scenario.
Haywood County Emergency Services Public Information Officer Allison Richmond hits the airwaves. Kyle Perrotti photo
“That was the whole reason why we had that conversation with the radio stations and had kind of a plan for establishing that as a backup option before the storm,” she said.
About a year after Fred, Richmond approached Terryll Evans, who owns the Canton radio station WPTL. They came up with a plan where the radio station could broadcast messages to anyone with a working radio in the event of a disaster that renders landlines and cell phones moot.
That time came during Helene.
Although the plan required some quick work to get a propane generator up to WPTL’s FM repeater on Chambers Mountain, once that was done, the Canton station provided information to residents desperate for a reliable source.
But more methods of communication were needed. When internet services went down, there was fear that Facebook posts wouldn’t reach their intended audience, so Huffman, Zachary and Richmond printed newsletters and had runners take them to different communities.
“You just have to realize, this may not be working in the moment, so let’s pivot to something else,” Huffman said. “Let’s put it on Facebook, but not everybody is on Facebook, so let’s put it on a billboard. Not everyone can go see that billboard? Let’s pass out flyers. Do one in English, one in Spanish.”
Basically, it boils down to trying as many different methods as possible to create the widest most diverse reach.
“Helene showed us just how important it is to have backup systems when modern communication fails,” Morehead said.
Hard work rewarded
Richmond, Huffman and Zachary brought home a statewide award for their use of Facebook to get crucial information out during a disaster, something that prompts an ironic grin from Richmond, who said she was thrilled to get the award but also remarked that Facebook was ultimately a small part of a much larger communications strategy. The award was given by NC3C, the state association of city and county communications professionals.
“To have your peers … acknowledge that you did a good job is pretty cool,” Huffman said.
For his efforts, Koonce was a 2025 recipient of the Heroic Hands Award, presented by the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners. The award recognizes outstanding public servants who, according to a press release issued at the time, “exemplify dedication, courage and commitment to their communities.”
Koonce’s award was not only a reflection of commitment to the Hurricane Helene recovery effort but also his larger role in Haywood County over his years of service. In the release, he said he was honored to receive the award but added that it is really the result of a team effort.
Koonce receives his citation from Haywood County Commissioner Tommy Long. Haywood County photo
“I’m proud to serve alongside such dedicated professionals — not only within Haywood County Emergency Services but also across all departments in Haywood County Government like Facilities and Maintenance, Information Technology, Development Services, the Library, Health and Human Services and County Administration — who all care deeply about the safety, well-being, and quality of life in our community,” he said at the time.
“Zack Koonce exemplifies what public service is all about,” Morehead said in the release. “His impact can’t be measured by a single event — he is constantly working behind the scenes to make sure Haywood County is safe, prepared and supported. We are grateful to have him on our team, and I’m proud to see his contributions recognized at the state level.”
Furthermore, Morehead told SMN that he had high praise for all county EMS, an agency that managed a surge of 911 calls and maintained “clear triage and rapid deployment,” all while also supporting shelter operations and conducting welfare checks. He added that the Sheriff’s Office provided “the backbone of public safety in the field” by managing road closures and traffic control and assisting with evacuations and welfare checks.
“In short, both agencies delivered calm, disciplined and compassionate service under intense conditions. Their coordination, readiness, and steady presence made a measurable difference in those critical hours and the first days of recovery,” Morehead said.
Likewise, Batson had high praise for the men and women he worked with during his two weeks in Haywood County.
“They put their personal lives to the side, and they go to work to get the things done that need to be done,” he said. “They plan ahead, but they’re not scared to pick up the phone and call for help if they think they need it.”
The next storm
A key element of the response that everyone interviewed for this story eagerly discussed was the importance of community relationships, including those with municipal officials, faith-based organizations and nonprofits. Morehead said that when it came to Helene, there were too many to name them all, but a couple of specific ones still came to mind.
“Mountain Projects and United Way were able to keep their operations going — doing payroll from our facility — because we had Starlink in place,” he said, adding that those organizations played key roles in meeting immediate community needs. “That experience showed us how vital it is to not just respond in the moment but to build those connections and systems during blue-sky days, when there’s time to plan, coordinate and strengthen partnerships.”
Those relationships will again make the difference when the next crisis comes, Morehead said.
“When you combine financial readiness with strong community relationships — whether with churches, schools, nonprofits or local media — you build a system that can weather even the hardest days,” he said.
There are other proactive measures being taken in Haywood County to enhance preparedness next time there’s catastrophic flooding. Following Fred, Haywood County received state grant funding to install 18 warning sirens across vulnerable parts of the county that will sound ahead of imminent flooding.
Having those sirens can make all the difference. As reported by national media outlets, during the devastating flooding of Guadalupe River in Texas, some areas saw lives saved due to sirens while others without ample warning systems suffered heartbreaking losses of life.
The siren arrays in Haywood will sit atop poles and will feature multiple speakers configured specifically for each site to maximize range. They will be placed in areas prone to serious flooding where cell signals may be spottier and people may not receive warnings on their phones, such as Lake Logan and Cruso.
Initially, the sirens will be controlled manually, but the goal is that they will be tied into nearby river gauges.
“Especially in an event like Fred where we didn’t have as much warning time, they could have made a difference for people who were outside of good cell coverage,” Richmond said.
If a person hears a siren, Richmond said their only action should be to seek higher ground immediately.
“It isn’t the time to get into the car or pack bags,” Richmond said. “Move yourself physically to safe ground.”
The poles for the sirens are now in the ground, but the county is waiting for the arrays to be built, tested and installed. Once the sirens are functional, Richmond said the county plans to host community events and small town halls to let people know what to do if they hear the siren.
Earlier this month, Haywood was also awarded $10,000 to procure several hundred emergency weather radios, which can be distributed to residents around the county. If even one person in a neighborhood or community has a weather radio, they can spread verified information. Richmond recommended that those with the means purchase one of their own as soon as they can.
“If there’s one thing you can do to improve your preparedness,” she said, “go buy a weather radio if you can afford it.”
