Like many North Carolina residents, Landon Chambers never could have anticipated the upheaval that would happen when Hurricane Helene invaded the mountains.
A senior majoring in Christian Ministry at Montreat College and a member of the Cavalier men’s wrestling team, Landon’s college experience was already quite different from the typical student. He and his wife, Jackleen, have been married for more than two years. The high school sweethearts from Marietta, GA, have rented a cozy two-bedroom, two-bath house on North Fork Road about five minutes from Montreat’s campus since Landon’s sophomore year.
On the evening of September 26, 2024, Jackleen left for her job as a nurse at Mission Health in Asheville, leaving Landon with his younger brother who had arrived the previous night, seeking refuge from the storms threatening his own college in Georgia.
“I said he could come up, but I warned him that we were supposed to have a pretty good storm,” Landon recalled. “He got up here the night before the storm happened, but nobody expected it to be the extent that it was.”
On Friday morning, Landon awoke to a loud boom around 5 a.m. The power was out, and as he looked outside, he noticed numerous trees had fallen throughout their neighborhood.
“I went downstairs to check on my little brother and wake him up. When I stepped off that bottom step, I stepped into about eight inches of water,” he said. “Since we were at the bottom of the mountain, all the water that was coming off that mountain was hitting the side of our house. There was so much water that it actually had pushed through the grout in the stone and was pouring through the walls. It also literally ripped the baseboard off the wall.”
Landon and his brother grabbed buckets to begin bailing water on the ground floor, but they quickly realized their efforts were futile.
“Instead, we just had to open the front door and let it pour out,” he remembered. “We considered going outside to try to dig a trench to get the water off the house, but with many trees falling down, it was just not safe to go out there and try to do that, so we just let the house fill up with water, and we sat upstairs waiting it out.”
Despite the dire situation at the house, Landon’s top top concern was Jackleen’s safety at work. With cell towers down, he had no way to communicate with her. Determined to ensure she was safe, he insisted on driving to the hospital to pick her up after her shift. First, he had to cut and clear fallen trees blocking the driveway. Then, what was usually a 15-minute trip to the hospital turned into a grueling hour-and-a-half journey.
“Once I got to Black Mountain, the river was covering everything,” he recalled. “Cars were trying to drive through it, and they were getting waterlogged and started floating down the street, so I threw my truck in four-wheel drive. I probably went five miles per hour just hoping that it didn’t reach my air vents and my truck didn’t get waterlogged. Once I made it onto the highway, trees had fallen everywhere and roads were wiped out. Once I got to Asheville, it was even worse. I was just blown away. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
After returning home safely, they spent hours using hand-siphoning pumps to remove water from the house. Unsure about what to do next, they drove to the information center in Black Mountain, where they found a sign advising residents to leave the area if possible. Unfortunately, leaving town was far from a simple task.
“Everybody had the same idea. When we tried to leave, there were no gas stations working because the power was out. The traffic was so bad, we were actually going to run out of gas before we could make it anywhere, so we just had to turn around and come back home,” he said. “We tried to settle down and make it work for almost a week without power.”
Eventually, Landon’s mom arrived with enough gas to fill their tank halfway, allowing them to reach an operating gas station. However, when they returned, they were met with the full extent of the damage. Black mold had already overtaken the walls, causing them to decay. With their home now unlivable, they were uncertain about what to do next. Although the immediate situation seemed overwhelming, help quickly arrived from the Montreat College community.
“We were looking for a place to live ourselves, but obviously many people were in the same predicament,” he said. “My professor and his wife were really gracious in letting us move into the side apartment of their house.”
In addition, Montreat College offered assistance through a community benevolence fund set up to provide immediate resources to address some of their immediate needs after the storm.
“It definitely helped out a lot,” he remarked. “I lost a good bit of my clothes. All my boots and most of my shoes. Those funds have just helped me get some clothes, so I’m not cold this winter. We were also able to get some appliances for the new place because we lost our crockpots and dishes and things like that. It all adds up.”
For Landon, being embraced by the community during one of the most challenging times of his life served as clear evidence of why he originally picked Montreat College to continue his education.
“It’s a small community, but it’s very tight-knit,” he said. “I think I’ve had dinner or coffee with all of my professors a handful of times, so it’s an extremely personal community, which is part of the reason I chose to come here.”
Overall, the flooding experience from Hurricane Helene has had a profound effect on Landon, reshaping his perspectives on hardship, resilience, and faith.
“I certainly didn’t have perfect faith throughout the entire situation,” he confessed. “I was really worried, and I was honestly kind of angry at God for a bit. My life got flipped upside down, but I’ve just been completely taken care of. I doubted God for a bit. Then I was shown that I shouldn’t have doubted God at all.”
Following his graduation next spring, Landon plans to attend Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Even with the storm still fresh in his memory, he can be grateful that it further revealed Montreat College as more than just a place of study for him, but also as a source of unwavering love and support.
“If nothing else, it’s made me realize what I took for granted,” he summarized. “It’s made me appreciate what we had more than when we actually had it.”