An avalanche of water, mud, boulders and uprooted trees swept through the small community of Peeks Creek outside Franklin last Thursday night, killing five people and injuring about two dozen who were trapped or crushed in their homes.

The landslide, triggered by heavy rains from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan, left a swath of destruction a half-mile long and 20- feet wide. Fifteen homes were ripped in half, smashed into splinters, or swept away completely.

The only road into the cove was impassable and phone service knocked out, further isolating the already remote community. A woman at the foot of the cove managed to flee and drove to the Cullasaja fire station where volunteer rescue workers were on storm watch. It was nearly 9:30 p.m. and pitch dark, but she described hearing a terrible roar, like a train screaming down the mountain.

When rescue workers arrived at the foot of Peeks Creek, their truck headlights revealed a terrible scene. The cove was a jumbled mass of boulders, vehicles and busted houses pushed into piles along a freshly-cut gorge, stripped bare down the middle. The creek — just four-feet-across under normal conditions — was torrential river.

“Boulders were rolling down through there like bowling balls. It was like dominos all the way down,” said Cullasaja Fire Chief Johnny Teem. “You never knew if there would be another cloud burst and here come another wall down through there.”

Armed with nothing but flashlights, the rescuers headed into the mountain avalanche. Expecting a basic evacuation from a flashflood event, they lacked essential excavation equipment like axes and crowbars and ropes. But faced with hollering, crying victims pinned under piles of rubble, they couldn’t spare the time it would take to go back to the fire station for tools. They began digging people out with their bare hands.

“It’s one of those things where you just can’t believe what you’re seeing,” said Mike Bryson, 59, a volunteer with the Cullasaja Fire Department. “You never thought that it could happen — something like that in a place like this.”

More rescuers arrived soon, some 30 in all, equipped with chainsaws and ropes and backboards and stockbaskets. They moved from house to house, wading through knee-deep mud and cutting fallen trees as they went.

At one point, rescue workers strung a rope across the creek to get a chainsaw to the other side, Teem said. But communication between rescue parties was cut off part way through the night when batteries in their soaked radios quit working.

Some survivors had to be carted nearly a half-mile through the still raging storm to medical crews waiting at the foot of the cove.

Meanwhile, water in the Cullasaja River below Peeks Creek continued to rise, swamping bridges leading back to the main road and cutting-off exit routes for ambulances.

Among the rescue workers that night was Ryan McCollum, a resident of the Peeks Creek community. Anticipating flooding along the Cullasaja River, McCollum and the other volunteer firemen had been on flood watch all evening — alternately reviewing evacuation plans at the fire station, monitoring the river and warning residents in flood-prone areas to be on alert. McCollum’s 3-year-old son, his wife who was seven months pregnant and his mother were all at home.

McCollum was with the first team to arrive at Peek’s Creek. Witnessing the devastation, he jumped out of his truck and ran up the cove. McCollum’s house was on the other side of the swollen creek, still raging with rock and debris, and he couldn’t get across.

He later learned that his entire family had been trapped in their collapsed home. His son and mother were killed. His wife, Christy, survived but was in critical condition at Mission Hospital as of press time. Her unborn child was lost during the storm.

A long night and day

By 1 a.m., officials at Angel Hospital in Franklin launched their disaster plan, rousing nurses and other staff into work.

“We were notified sometime before midnight that an incident had occurred in Peeks Creek. We implemented code black,” said Martin Wadewitz, associate administrator of the hospital.

The medical helicopter from Asheville was not flying Thursday night due to 60 mph winds. Instead, Mission Hospital dispatched a team of ambulances to make the 75-mile trip to Franklin, where they waited at Angel Hospital to transport critical patients as they arrived.

Angel Hospital ultimately treated 24 injured flood victims, Wadewitz said. Another four patients were sent on to Mission Hospital in Asheville.

By dawn, rescue teams from Charlotte had bolstered the effort. Search and rescue continued through mid-day Friday, and by afternoon a mandatory evacuation of the entire community was completed.

Brendan Drohan with a National Guard unit from Winston-Salem was among the rescuers. All the way down the mountain, victims would beg for information about neighbors and relatives who lived along Peeks Creek.

“They kept asking, ‘Have you seen a trailer? Do you know if they found people in a trailer?’ That’s when it hit me, this is as real as it’s going to get,” Drohan said.

Teem said the rescuers who worked that night will carry a heavy burden for years.

“They might not be affected right now, but in a couple of days when they get to thinking about what they saw it will really affect them,” Teem said.

Victims of the Peeks Creek mudslide were too shaken to speak about their experience.

“The only word I got is ‘horrible,’” said one man who lost two family members in the disaster.

The man was one of 14 people crowded into the Dills’ house on Peeks Creek Thursday night. The house was typically home to a family of four, Allen and Debbie Dills, their 14-year old son and 11-year-old daughter.

Tonight, the Dills were harboring relatives from Florida. Seeking refuge from Hurricane Ivan, three generations of one family had come home to Peeks Creek for the week. They were camping at a summer trailer down the hill from the Dills’ house.

The passel of children were bored and restless from the rain, so Debbie invited the whole family to her house to watch movies. The grandparents opted to turn in early at the trailer, but the rest headed up the hill to the house.

Sometime after 9 p.m., the power went out and a deafening racket tore down the mountain past their home.

“It was like an explosion,” Dills said.

Their neighbor’s house crashed into their yard. They found their neighbor in the wreckage, pinned under debris with both legs broken. They pulled him into their house and tried to stop the bleeding. They moved all the children into a bathroom at the back of the house and kept them there all night.

Meanwhile, Debbie set up her ham radio to make contact with the outside world. She reached another ham radio operator in Nantahala shortly after 11 p.m. and told her to call 911, that there was a medical emergency on Peeks Creek.

“I didn’t think we would make it through the night,” said Dill’s 14-year-old son, James.

While the house held up, the trailer where the grandparetns were sleeping was swept away and they were killed. The body of Katie Watts was recovered early in the search. But her husband was officially considered missing for three days until cadaver dogs were called in and his remains uncovered.

As word spread through the region Friday morning of a catastrophe in Peeks Creek, those with friends and family in the community were desperate. Residents were frantically calling county dispatch wanting to know who was rescued, who was still up there and, God forbid, was anyone dead? Many of these questions couldn’t be answered, as search and rescue was still under way. Law enforcement barricades blocked family members trying to reach the community.

That forced Kenneth Carver to hike through the woods to check on his frail, elderly mother who lived alone and was on oxygen. Carver was hopeful when he set out, however. His cousin hiked in earlier that morning to check on other family members and saw that Carver’s mother’s house was at least still standing.

But there was bad news, too. Two family members who had come up from Florida were missing and presumed dead.

“What’s really sad is they came up here to get away from it,” said Kenneth Carver, kin to the Florida couple.

Like most, Carver said he had “no idea what happened up there.”

“It’s real bad. That’s all I know,” Carver said before setting out through the woods for his momma.

What happened

Victims who lived through the disaster and rescue workers who witnessed the aftermath were hard pressed to figure out what had befallen Peeks Creek.

It was improbable that a flash flood could cause such destruction. Granted, the Peeks Creek cove is surrounded on three sides by a bowl-like mountian that funnels surface water from a massive area into one primary creek. But it seemed improbable that a four-foot-wide creek could swell to a width of 150 .

Given the denuded landscape, many initially surmised a tornado had swept through. But none of the debris was severely twisted, the telltale sign of a twister.

“I don’t know what it was. A tornado, a flashflood, just Mother Nature,” said Teem. Rescue workers described an unusual feature at the head of the cove. It looked like the side of the mountain had busted open, Teem said.

Larry Estes, a 67-year-old volunteer with the Cullasaja Fire Department, didn’t see the disaster. From the descriptions of fellow rescuers, though, he said it sounded like a mudslide.

“When that water builds up, sort of ponds up under there, it’ll break lose. The soil liquefies is what it does,” said Estes, a gem miner and rock hound familiar with the geology in Macon County. Estes has come across such landslides during forays into the mountains. To a trained eye, the scars remain visible for years, Estes said. The early prospectors in Macon sought out these slides for easy mining.

“I’ve told people it’s not the floods they need to worry about. It’s these mudslides,” Estes said.

According to experts, Estes is right. Only the technical term is a “debris flow.”

Gerald Wieczorek, a research civil engineer with the United States Geological Service in West Virginia, said the Peeks Creek catastrophe fits the a textbook description of a “debris flow.”

“Some people who have seen these things say they appear to be a huge, rapidly moving wall,” Wieczorek said.

“It initiates with a collapse of soil at a high elevation. It has so much water in it, it changes the earth from a solid to a fluid,” Wieczorek said. “As it continues to travel, it often accelerates because of the steep slope. While it’s traveling down, it picks up more material. It picks up more rock and picks up vegetation and trees with it.”

Two days before the landslide in Peeks Creek, Wieczorek issued a widespread landslide warning for 10 states in the Southern Appalachian mountain chain.

“Given the wet soil conditions we already have in many of these areas due to the heavy rain from recent Hurricane Frances, the risk of numerous, fast-moving landslides is significant,” Wieczorek stated in his warning.

“In many areas, there had been preceding rainfall from Hurricane Frances, so it didn’t take as much rainfall,” Wieczorek said.

The worst documented debris flow in America was in Nelson County, Va., in 1969 as a result of Hurricane Camille. Like Ivan, the hurricane came up from the Gulf of Mexico and crossed the Appalachian range, dumping up to 30 inches of rain on mountainous Virginia.

“It triggered so many debris flows, 150 were killed,” Wieczorek said.

In June 1995, an isolated storm triggered up to 1,000 debris flows in Madison County. In 1940, a hurricane moving across the mountains also caused numerous debris flows in Western North Carolina.

Unfortunately, exact locations of debris flows are hard to predict and often have little warning. Areas with a history of debris flows are likely candidates, Wieczorek said. People should stay awake and alert during storm events, listening and watching for falling earth that would hint at a debris flow on the way, Wieczorek said.

Downstream from Peeks Creek

Many residents with homes along the Cullasaja River downstream from Peeks Creek barely escaped floodwaters that engulfed their homes rapidly around 10 p.m. At least two large campgrounds are located in the floodplain along the Cullasaja River. While permanent structures aren’t allowed in the floodplain, the campgrounds house a community of seasonal residents who live six months of the year in campers, trailers and RVs.

Ed Osborne was working feverishly to tow the campers in Old Conundrum Campground to higher ground when the river engulfed his tractor.

“It’s like a wall of water came down the river,” said Osborne.

“We drove the tractor out of there and next thing you know there were trailers coming down the river.”

Osborne described a trailer smashing into the Nickijack bridge over the Cullasaja and smashing like a tin can. It got sucked under the bridge and spit out on the other side in pieces, he said.

“All of a sudden that water came up like that,” said campground resident Betty Davis, snapping her fingers to emphasize the water’s speed.

Homes along the Cullasaja were devastated as well.

Kim Watkins, who was manning the emergency rescue shelter at the Cullasaja Fire Department all night, relayed the story of one woman whose home lifted off its foundation. She waved a flashlight out the window until rescuers in a boat spotted her.

Meanwhile, the Little Tennessee River flooded homes along N.C. 28 north of Franklin. Bridges spanning the Little Tennessee in downtown Franklin were engulfed by the flood and stayed that way throughout the day Friday, hindering traffic in and out of town.

The Cartoogechaye Creek flooded and wiped out a trailer park and homes along its bank.

Britthaven Nursing Home evacuated all 180 patients from its facility along Cartoogechaye Creek, marking the second flood evacuation in little more than a week for some of the patients. The Pigeon River flooded a Britthaven facility in Clyde during Hurricane Frances a week prior, rendering the facility unusable and uprooting patients. Forty-four were brought to the Britthaven facility in Franklin, and they all had to endure a second round of storm evacuations.

“Some were a little anxious, thinking ‘I just got here and thought I was safe now,’” said Charlotte Young, the administrator. The facility was evacuated at 3:30 a.m. when rising water began to seep across the road, threatening to cut off the nursing home. The entire nursing home was relocated to the Cartoogechaye School until the next evening when water receded.

“We took every piece of equipment, our potty chairs, our charts,” Young said. Staff was called into work despite some having lost their own homes in the flood.

Mini-floods cropped up countywide. What were once small drainage ditches through backyards and along roadsides turned into creeks and ponds, washing out driveways and flooding basements.

In other places, water rushed off slopes and created creeks where before none existed. Four inches of water seeped into the Phillips 66 gas station on U.S. 441 north of town. There’s no creek or ditch around the store; the water simply washed down off the hillside out back.