Batcave

I've had the chance to visit Asheville, which feels largely like it's bounced back from the storm in many places.

And yet there are some places I recently drove through Batcave, and there's still a lot of unfinished work there.

It was a little staggering and surprising for me to see as we came down there.

What is needed to close those gaps, and how might $18 million in grant money from the U.S. EPA help clear some of those lingering backlogs?

However, recovery is not equal across the area.

Take Batcave, for example.

And Batcave paints a very different picture from the rest of Western North Carolina, where if you didn't know, you may think that Helene had just hit.

And that's what that second picture shows there.

We just dug it wide enough to get the sick and the elderly out down to the landing zones and get them out of here.

And the people that are putting it all together is a legion of Pennsylvania Amish volunteers from the Great Needs Trust.

Amos Stolitzfuss, I love that name, Stolitzfuss, he said, we come out here every morning, and we work mostly in Chimney Rock and in Batcave.

And in their frocks and bonnets, the women are screwing panels of drywall into the timbers just as deftly and surely as the men in the straw hats.

And the famous carpentry expertise of the Amish will do the old town well and maybe even help to add a little bit of the rustic charm back to where the floods destroyed.