Andrew Colley was dog-sitting at a friend’s home in Blowing Rock, N.C. when he noticed the dogs acting strangely on the morning of September 26.
Then he saw the water coming into the corner of the room.
“Within 30 minutes, it was coming in from the foundation,” Colley said. “It was coming up pretty quick. I threw all his stuff on his bed and his couch and shut off the power and opened the front door to give the water somewhere to go and I took off with his dogs to my place.”
The three-mile trip back to his apartment in Blowing Rock took an hour. He had to stop and break branches off trees that were on or near the road so he could squeeze his car under them, then he had to navigate a flooded highway. But he made it.
Colley is one of two runners from ZAP Endurance, an elite running team based in Blowing Rock, coming to run the Manchester Road Race Nov. 28. He was one of four who went under the course record in 2022, finishing fourth in 21:07.
Dan Schaffer will also run for the second time at Manchester. He finished 14th in 2022. He, too, had a harrowing flood story.
The flooding that day in the mountains of western North Carolina due to Hurricane Helene was both historic and tragic. Over 100 people died in North Carolina. Downtowns were flooded, major roads were washed out and homes and businesses were swept away.
“There are so many people up here that are displaced,” said Colley, 33. “People died. There are a lot of people living out of their cars still. It’s pretty tragic.
“A lot of news outlets are making it this ‘Mountain Pride’ thing, but nobody got the word out about how bad this was going to be. It was over 10 inches more (rain) than they predicted. I mean, people do have pride, but we didn’t know it was going to be that bad. We didn’t know we should go stock up on groceries. Not at any point were they like, ‘You guys need to leave.’”
Schaffer, 26, lives on the outskirts of Boone, home of Appalachian State University, with two of his ZAP teammates – one of whom is Eric van der Els of Norwalk.
That morning, Schaffer woke up and saw that the creek in front of their house was rising. It had already been raining for a day.
Andrew Colley finished fourth at the 2022 Manchester Road Race, one of four to break the course record that year and he will be back to run Nov. 28. Colley lives in Blowing Rock, N.C., which was impacted the flooding from Hurricane Helene in late September (Photo by Ryan Warrenburg)“I went outside and looked, and I was like, ‘Oh boy,’” he said. “There’s a bridge we take to get to our house, and it was already under water. I couldn’t really move my car. We just had to ride it out.
“It was pretty scary as the hurricane came through. It was probably a matter of 45 minutes, our creek turned into a raging river around our house. It rose about 15 feet. Luckily it stopped right where it did. It was enough to come into our house but not to wash anything away. We were able to save a lot of our belongings, and our vehicles survived.”
At the storm’s peak, the water level in a back sunroom rose to about two feet and the three were trying to hold deluge back by shoving towels under doors.
“We grabbed brooms and mops and tried to do our best to mitigate the damage,” Schaffer said. “At one point, it seemed pretty futile and the rate the water was rising, we thought we were going to have to get up on the roof.
“We were so lucky it stopped where it did. Any higher and we would have been in some serious trouble.”
Somehow, their coach Peter Rea, who grew up in Farmington and ran at UConn, was able to get up their road in his car and collect the three runners later that day.
“If it weren’t for him, we would have been sleeping in the cold wet house that night,” Schaffer said. “Or maybe walking into Boone.”
They haven’t been back since. Two months later, their house is still being repaired.
“The three of us have been kind of making do,” Schaffer said. “Floating around a little bit. no pun intended.”
Their ZAP teammate Josh Izewski, whose dogs Colley was watching that day, still has not been able to go back to his home. Colley’s home was not damaged, although he and his wife lost power for about 10 days and ended up going to Chapel Hill to stay with his wife’s mother until the power came back on.
They all know how lucky they are.
“(Schaffer and his roommates) had to wade out with a bag and leave everything in the house,” Rea said last week. “Their house was destroyed. Josh Izewski was also flooded from his home. None of those four are back in their places – they’re trying to work on getting them fixed.
“(Appalachian State) just went back to school, the public school kids just went back to school – it’s been six weeks. But as bad as we had it, we had no loss of life on our team, and I cannot say the same for other communities. The little communities between here and Asheville were cut off for two weeks with no power and no water and they were inaccessible. They were accessing the towns by Chinook helicopters. Towns like Black Mountain were just destroyed.
“It will be a long time before those communities are right again.”
