(NewsNation) — After Hurricane Helene swept through western North Carolina, the storm left behind a trail of devastation, leaving those in the city of Asheville cut off from the rest of the world and wiping smaller towns off the map almost entirely.
After making landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in Florida, Helene weakened to a tropical storm as it moved through the Southeast. The western North Carolina mountains were hit especially hard, with Buncombe County alone accounting for a third of the total storm-related deaths and hundreds more people still missing as of Monday morning.
Geography and circumstance played a role in how the city was struck so hard, with the storm........