Liz Schlemmer/WUNC Radio On the day before Helene hit, the last thing McDowell County Schools’ Superintendent Tracy Grit did was visit Old Fort Elementary. He walked the perimeter in the rain and stood outside where it overlooks Mill Creek. The school was built only five years ago, on a berm...

Steve Harrison/WFAE Radio I watch a lot of football. Which means I have seen — on a seemingly endless loop — Donald Trump’s new commercials that mock Kamala Harris for supporting in 2019 health care and surgeries for inmates who want to transition to a different gender. That includes migrants...

Becky Johnson/The (Waynesville) Mountaineer The Pigeon River scoured away the mountainside that held up the roadbed. Now that roadbed is gone, collapsing out from under the interstate. Enormous sections of asphalt lie in pieces in the river at the bottom of a near-vertical escarpment. In essence, I-40 is gone. “You...

Morgan Casey/CityView “You’re gonna need these,” says a soldier as she tosses a pair of hand warmers to anyone ready to catch them. It’s about 8 a.m. on Thursday, two weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. The steam from everyone’s coffee cups is visible. So is their breath....

Kelly Kenoyer/WHQR Highlands Village Apartments in New Bern, NC, was developed by Norco Management, but rising interest rates and insurance costs are making this kind of affordable housing complex very difficult to build. Climate change has driven rising insurance rates for all kinds of real estate, but especially in the...

Tyler Davis/The (Henderson) Daily Dispatch Kerr Lake Solar, a nearly 600-acre installation planned for White Farm Lane near Bullocksville, has drawn fierce opposition from homeowners in the area. Over the course of the nearly three-hour Oct. 10 meeting, the Vance County Board of Adjustment heard both sides. The eight-member board,...

Kevin Crowe, Shannon Osaka & John Muyskens/The Washington Post The federal government’s flood maps, which are used nationwide to signal areas vulnerable to inundation, vastly underestimated the flood risk faced by properties in the parts of North Carolina devastated by Hurricane Helene, according to data analyzed by The Washington Post....

Carolina Public Press For much of Western North Carolina, there was everything that happened before Sept. 27 when Helene swept through the region. And then there is everything that happened since Helene produced floods, landslides and fallen trees that brought destruction, danger, death and despair. It’s been just over two...

Peter Castagno/Port City Daily Rep. David Rouzer and Sen. Thom Tillis are seeking to restructure federal aid for catastrophic storms like Hurricane Helene, but critics argue their voting records on climate change and infrastructure are exacerbating storm costs and risks in North Carolina. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee advanced...

Joel Rose & Rolando Arrieta/WFAE Radio At a public housing complex, volunteers knock on apartment doors offering assistance with an activity most of us take for granted. They carry 5-gallon buckets of water to flush the toilets of grateful residents like John Brown. “I appreciate the fantastic work you guys...

Becky Johnson/The (Waynesville) Mountaineer The tourism industry that relies on the fall leaf season to sustain it through the leaner months of winter was panicked by the official message pushed out to tourists last week: ‘It’s too dangerous to travel to Haywood County.’ The message was crafted at a time...

Dave DeWitt/WUNC Radio Mark Robinson’s campaign for governor used images captured by freelancer Lynn Hey, originally published by WUNC, on his website without permission or compensation. It may not be the most damaging or inflammatory scandal in the past month for Mark Robinson’s campaign for governor, but a WUNC analysis...

Renuka Rayasam & Fred Clasen-Kelly/KFF Health News It’s been 35 years since John Parker died after a pickup collided with the bike he was riding on Cheek Road in east Durham before school. He was 6. His mother, Deborah Melvin-Muse, doesn’t display photos of him, the second-youngest of six children....

The (Southern Pines) Pilot The Moore County Democratic Party chairman, who is also a candidate for a N.C. House race, was charged Friday in connection with the theft of political signs in Seven Lakes. Lowell Evan Simon, 68, of West End was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of...

The Associated Press One of the two companies that manufacture high-purity quartz used for making semiconductors and other high-tech products from mines in a western North Carolina community severely damaged by Hurricane Helene is operating again. Sibelco announced on Thursday that production has restarted at its mining and processing operations...