North Carolina’s Forests Face a Long Road to Recovery

Prior to Hurricane Helene, April Wilson had removed a large tree from someone’s house about four times in one decade. After the Category 4 storm hit Western North Carolina in September, Wilson, who is a certified master arborist, was lifting large trees multiple times a day. “[It was] the craziest, most dangerous job you’ve ever done in your career, over and over and over again,” she said. 

The region is still recovering from the event, which state climatologist Kathie Dello called one of the deadliest storms in North Carolina’s history. Helene took lives, wiped out tens of thousands of homes, and downed entire forests. “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Wilson, who is based in Sandy Mush, said.”It was like wartime.” Now houses are being rebuilt, highways are being repaired, and businesses are beginning to reopen. 

Meanwhile, there’s still a lot of work to be done in Western North Carolina to restore forests. Over 800,000 acres of woodlands were damaged by Helene, according to a report from the North Carolina Forest Service. Although impacts will linger for years to come, forest experts say the region’s woods are resilient and with time will heal alongside its community. 

Ecosystem impacts

Residents of Western North Carolina were shocked by Helene’s brutality, including many who moved to the area in search of a climate haven. However, Dello said there was always a risk of intense hurricanes hitting the region. “Helene had the perfect conditions to form,” she said, in part because of climbing atmospheric temperatures that create larger, stronger hurricanes. 

Heavy rains before the storm meant the ground was already saturated. Then came the record-breaking winds, flash flooding, and additional rainfall. All these factors combined to create perfect conditions for trees to topple over, Dello said. 

The Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests, eight of North Carolina’s 12 state forests, and private land were all impacted. In Mitchell County, one of the state’s most severely affected areas, half of the area’s trees were damaged or destroyed. 

Damage to upper layers of forests can cause rapid shifts in forest composition—changes that would otherwise occur over decades, said Jeffery Cannon, a landscape ecologist at the Georgia’s Jones Center at Ichauway who focuses on forest disturbance. Soil disturbance caused by debris removal can also open the door for invasive species, he added. 

More pressing, though, is how hurricanes can make forests more vulnerable to fire, as downed trees and debris provide fuel, more sun creates dryness, and invasive and flammable grasses can grow, he said. 

Debris and wildfire risk

The region has seen more wildfires this year than normal, said the North Carolina Forest Service’s Jim Slye, who acted as the forest health branch head during Hurricane Helene. He also said that downed trees make it more logistically difficult to implement wildfire control measures. “It’s been extremely dry in the western part of the state,” he said. “We’ve had several significant wildfires up there.” 

While a major Helene recovery focus has been on extracting fallen waste from private properties, roads, and waterways, Slye said it’s often not possible to remove debris from wooded areas. Several groups have stepped in. The US Army Corps of Engineers has removed debris from public parks like the North Carolina Arboretum, located on 434 acres of Pisgah National Forest land. Fallen trees from the arboretum were processed into firewood, and high-value woods were donated to local vendors for furniture materials and given to local artists, said Drake Fowler, the executive director at the arboretum. The US Forest Service is offering salvage timber contracts to remove downed trees in several Western North Carolina counties, including those near the Appalachian Trail, to help clear pathways. 

Slye said the NC Forest Service is also utilizing prescribed fires to remove debris and help with the regeneration of forests. But he cautioned that the agency is struggling to provide emergency services like wildfire control and forest management with low staffing levels. “We’ve got over 100 vacancies statewide,” he said. 

The agency has applied for grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and financial support from the state legislature to maintain personnel and adequate equipment. In April, FEMA denied North Carolina’s request for an extension of full reimbursement of debris removal. Governor Josh Stein estimated that removing the remaining debris, which could take years to fully clear, will cost the state over $1 billion. 

Dello warned that while the focus is on recovery right now, it’s also important to prepare for future storms. “We’ll see another Helene, and it could be worse in the next few decades,” she said. “A long time could pass before the next one, but there will be a next one.”

Resilience  

Cannon, who is researching whether forest ecosystems have built-in resilience to hurricanes, said while storms as catastrophic as Helene get lots of attention, the southeastern US is regularly impacted by lower intensity hurricanes. 

According to Slye, the last large-scale wind event to cause extensive damage to Western North Carolina was Hurricane Hugo in 1989. “We’ve always had wind events like this through the course of history, and we’ll continue to have them,” he said. "They’re part of the natural forces that shape our forests.”               

Wilson the arborist conducted a survey of fallen trees post-Helene and found that red oaks, white oaks, and hickory trees fared worse than other native species like maples, black gums, and tulip trees. She encourages community members to support local nurseries and plant native species on their land. 

Trees are vital to local ecosystems, Wilson said. They purify air, prevent flooding along stream banks, and provide habitat for wildlife. “If you’re talking about an oak tree that’s three feet in diameter, it’s 150 years old,” she said. “We’ve lost all this overnight, and it’s going to be our grandchildren that can finally get close to having the canopy that we had before the storm.” 

According to the arboretum, at least 10,000 of its trees were damaged by Helene. Now, with the park’s roads and 80 percent of its trails clear, the focus is on getting as many trees as possible in contact with the ground so they will start to decompose. That could take at least three years. 

The arboretum is also working with the state forest service and local nonprofits to come up with a revegetation plan that municipalities and large landowners can use as a model. So far, foresters have recommended waiting and seeing what grows from the mass of natural seed sources in the soil, and then stewarding that along. 

Flower pointed out that in the 1850s and 1860s, mass logging decimated the same forests harmed by Helene. “A long time ago, we cut down almost every tree in these mountains, and we have a beautiful forest now,” he said. “The forest will heal itself. This does help promote diversity within our forests here in Western North Carolina. It’s not all bad.”