- The water was rising, so we were seeing things floating.

And then I was like, what is that floating there?

It looks like the top of a boathouse.

And then it would go right over the dam.

And then that's when we were all like, oh my goodness, this isn't good, something's not right.

Like there's no way a whole home should be going over the dam in the waters.

- Ashton Bowles' mind still reels from experiencing Hurricane Helene tearing through Lake Lure in September, 2024.

- So then you would see a boat or a tractor and a trailer or, and it just got very overwhelming after a while, after seeing thing after thing.

- Life is slowly returning to normal at Bowles' Lake Lure Pottery Studio.

Online orders saved her business the first few months after the storm.

The studio has reopened for customers, but memories of the storm are haunting.

- Even the wind right now, with it being, is it still gives me, I get tight chested.

I don't like strong winds.

I don't like seeing the signs swaying.

I don't like hearing sirens go by.

I don't like hearing a helicopter above.

I think everyone's still on edge.

- Miraculously, the dam that was built in 1926 and created Lake Lure held.

This is the Lake Lure Dam.

The lake's on that side.

- Yes.

- We're on this side.

- Yes.

- When Helene hit, we would be, would we be underwater?

- Underwater.

Underwater.

- How far underwater?

- About 20 feet underwater at this point right here.

- Wow.

- Think of it as Niagara Falls coming over the dam.

As you look at the dam, the powerhouse is in the middle.

The dam, when it was built, is designed to have sequential areas where the water, as it was rising, would go along the sides and come over the sides.

- Water did pour over the dam.

The power plant was flooded.

The centuries-old generators are being repaired.

But there was so much water, the earthen banks on both sides of the dam gave way.

The crushed stone you can see on the edges of the dam filled those breaks in.

Lake Lure officials believe those breaches helped ease pressure on the dam and kept it from failing.

That's the road, right?

That's the roadbed.

- Yes.

- So is that an example of how much dirt was washed out of here?

- Absolutely.

You can see the original bedrock, which hasn't been visible to anybody in Lake Lure since 1926.

- This was all covered.

- This was all covered up.

- Oh my gosh.

- All the way up to the dam.

When the water broke through and came down the side, it washed all that sedimentation with it.

And you can see that it's about eight or nine feet thick, uncovering the bedrock.

And that gave us a sense of security 'cause we knew that the dam was stable, sitting on rock-solid stone that had been here for time immemorial.

And that dam was not gonna go anywhere.

- What debris didn't go over Lake Lure's dam covered the lake surface.

- The debris that came into the lake was probably 30 acres of solid debris.

Now the whole lake was full of debris, but there was solid debris.

They know from doing sonar, some of that was 50 feet deep.

So it was a debris pile, unlike anything Lake Lure's ever seen.

And of course, hopefully we'll never see it again.

We pulled vegetation debris out, construction debris from businesses and homes.

We pulled propane tanks out.

Even the propane tanks that were below ground, they got eroded out during the storm as the water's coming down the valley and they ended up in our lake.

- What were you thinking when you pull that out?

I mean.

- You don't know what, I mean, it's just, I still have problems like grasping, you know, the magnitude of it, how big it was and what we're still finding in here.

- Most of the debris floating atop the lake has been removed.

It took almost four months to clear it out.

All that debris ends up here.

Look closely and you'll discover images of life frozen in time.

You're looking at just a portion of the almost 26,000 cubic yards of debris pulled from the lake.

That's about 3,000 dump truck loads.

And that's not counting what was removed from roadways and property.

The debris that can't be recycled will be trucked to hazardous waste landfills.

It's what is still in the water and under the water that is concerning.

- What you can't see is so much of the damage that was done to our infrastructure.

And that's because we have a sub-aqueous sewer system.

So if the water's in the lake, you can't see the sewer system, right?

You can't see all the subsurface debris and sedimentation that's underneath the lake.

Those are things that it looked, the optics are great and that's both good and bad, isn't it?

It's good because it certainly looks better here.

But the downside is people feel like, all right, you're okay, we need to move on to something else now.

- So with the lake lowered by almost 30 feet, exposing debris that sank close to shore, the US Army Corps of Engineers is entering the next phase of its Lake Lure mission, dig out the lake itself.

- So our scope here within Lake Lure is to clean, or to remove the debris, the storm-related debris, back to preexisting condition or up to 20 feet deep, whichever we come to first.

We've got sand, we've got silt, we've got sediment, and this is the remains of a car that came from upstream.

As you can see, it's been tumbled, it's been rolled.

Just the awesome force of mother nature as this thing came down the river.

- The Corps estimates almost 1 1/2 million cubic yards of sand, silt and debris fill the lake that washed down from the Rocky Broad River watershed and through the Hickory Nut Gorge.

That's enough material to fill almost four NFL stadiums.

- We hit a little bit of everything out here in the lake.

As the storm worked its way through or down the French Broad River, it picked up rocks, silt, sediment, and then as it hit those towns, it pulled everything in from those.

So you have everything you can imagine to build a house with, everything that's in your garage.

- Lake Lure has a maximum depth of 104 feet.

Hurricane Helene's flood waters filled in almost half of that depth with silt.

In some more shallow areas, the lake is almost completely filled.

Sonar readings taken for routine lake maintenance before the storm hit are being compared to readings taken after the storm.

The findings will guide the big dig out.

So I'm looking here, so the river's out there, but if you look at the map, we're standing in what was the river at one point.

How far is the river gonna go?

How far are you guys gonna dig out?

- So in the current scope of our contract, it is to restore the lake to that preexisting condition, remove the event-related debris.

So off to our left, you can see where the boathouses were, where we're standing, this is all gonna come out.

- This is all gonna come out?

- Oh yeah, every bit of this.

- So water will be flowing here?

- Yeah, the idea is to get the water back to where it was in the bottom of the lake, back to that similar contour.

- In areas where the lake is still filled with water, sonar readings will indicate high concentrations of debris and silt on the lake bottom.

Cranes on barges will be utilized in those places to lift out whatever is found.

- You're seeing how the water moved, the river moved, the bank moved, the debris that we're seeing.

It's quite amazing the magnitude of the storm that took place in this area.

I think the reason this mission is so much harder than other missions that we've had is just the terrain, the roads to get in and out, but you also have the community here that still needs to live and move around and get in and out.

And being cognizant of that as we are doing the mission to clean and reopen up stuff, but also there are people here and they also are very important on making sure that they're able to continue rebuilding as well.

Our motto is essence, we try, we'll knock it out, we will complete the mission, so we figure out a way.

- The Hickory Nut Gorge in particular has been scoured back to the time of the ice age when the glaciers came through.

The scar that was placed in Hickory Nut Gorge will be lasting for time immemorial.

We're saying that we are open with restricted access to the lake until we can get the lake safe and clean enough to make sure there won't be a long-term environmental impact.

The wildlife, as I mentioned, is still here.

The people that lost property along the shore or had damage to their homes, all that's recoverable in a short period of time.

We were most worried about the environmental impact and we're pretty confident now that we're going to emerge from this even better than we were before.

- Thanks for watching.

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