Chimney Rock’s gone. Flowering Bridge is gone,” Banff is heard saying while filming the devastation. “I’m not sure what they’re going to do to get us out of here.”

Once a place of both vast and intimate beauty, a lake community is now a repository of wreckage and fading hopes.

Residents below Lake Lure dam have been warned that it could fail this afternoon. The town and dam are between Asheville and Greenville, SC. The Broad River is swollen from the remnants of Hurricane Helene which passed to the south today.