George Real Estate Group Radio Broadcast

Bat Cave Fire Chief's Survival Story: A Testament to Faith and Resilience

• George Real Estate Group

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Fire Chief Steve Freeman's voice carries the weight of both trauma and triumph as he recounts the devastating impact of Hurricane Helene on Bat Cave, North Carolina. Nine months after the catastrophic flooding that destroyed homes, roads, and lives, his community continues the long process of rebuilding.

"We've made a lot of progress," Freeman shares, "but the biggest challenge is still the infrastructure." Unlike nearby areas, Bat Cave's narrow geography prevented temporary roadways from being built, leaving residents dependent on precarious one-lane access routes without guardrails. This isolation defined their experience during and after the storm.

When emergency management warned that Helene would rival the historic 1916 flood—a disaster Freeman had heard about from his grandparents throughout his life—the all-volunteer fire department took extraordinary measures. They went door-to-door asking residents to write their names and emergency contacts on their arms with black Sharpies. "Nobody did that," Freeman explains, "but I think it helped in the fact that when the river started getting up and the flooding started in, that was in their mind." This sobering approach likely contributed to the relatively low casualty rate.

Freeman's own survival story stands as a testament to faith and purpose. Pinned against a backhoe by debris from a landslide that destroyed his garage, he describes his escape as divine intervention: "God pushed that back just enough so I could get my head out." Within minutes, he was back on duty, working with fellow volunteers to establish evacuation routes and coordinate helicopter rescues that eventually airlifted 80-85% of Bat Cave's residents to safety.

The recovery continues with help from organizations like Spokes of Hope, who have brought in Amish volunteers committed to rebuilding efforts for the next 18 months. As Freeman reflects on a captain's words spoken amid the destruction—"For those that believe, when God takes one thing away he gives back twice as much"—his unwavering faith illuminates the resilience that has carried Bat Cave through its darkest hours. Want to support their ongoing recovery? Contact Chief Freeman directly at 828-776-1345 or connect with Spokes of Hope to volunteer your time and resources. Learn more about Steve's story here: https://www.samaritanspurse.org/article/fire-chief-reflects-on-gods-work-in-his-community-after-helene/

Speaker 1:

The George Real Estate Group radio broadcast is celebrating 10 years on WHKP. The George Real Estate Group is celebrating 10 years on the radio, live every Thursday morning at 10.05 on WHKP 107.7 FM and AM 1450 and streaming online at WHkpcom. Each Friday morning at 845,. The George Real Estate Group presents the Hometown Hero Award to someone in our community who goes above and beyond to make our hometown a better place to live. Here's this week's Hometown Hero Show. It's 845 and time now for our George Real Estate Group Hometown Hero Show. It's 845 and time now for our George Real Estate Group Hometown Hero Series. Friday mornings always bring about our George Real Estate Group's Hometown Hero Series and it always brings Noah into the studios and I'm glad. Happy Friday, sir, happy Friday.

Speaker 2:

Happy Friday, there we go, good morning and just so thankful and grateful to be here sponsoring the Hometown Heroes series.

Speaker 1:

How's the summer going for the George Real Estate Group?

Speaker 2:

We are so grateful. Not only are we, but also the county. We've helped more people this year than the year before, but that's also the market's doing that well, if you can believe it. There's been more homes sold this year, year to date, than last year. Prices have come down a little bit. The market's softening in the sense that days on market takes a little bit longer to sell your home, so the buyers have a little bit more options because there's more inventory. But the market's still very healthy.

Speaker 2:

Be careful when you listen to the news. The sky is not falling, uh, the market's still moving and we're so grateful. We've had the privilege to help uh in my career, over 1500 families, quickly approaching 1600 families uh, with their real estate needs. We have incredible group of agents. We have incredible staff. We're we're located in flat rock. We serve all of western north carolina and upstate south carolina, but we're so grateful. This is my 20th year with my broker's license and my joke is, you know I'm an overnight success. That took 20 years of showing up every day. But grateful to serve the community and it's an honor and privilege to sponsor the Hometown Heroes series.

Speaker 1:

And I always have to know is there an open house scheduled over the weekend?

Speaker 2:

Actually at the moment, no, have we've had, because we had a number of homes go under contract that we had, uh, on the market in those open houses. We've had a few price reductions. We also have a lot of new inventory hitting the market. You can go to our website, realestatebygregcom. You can also follow us on social media. We also podcast all of our radio shows. We can see all of our inventory. But I mean mean the average price in Henderson County is in the 530s. We're averaging 126 single family homes a month selling. About a third of the homes sold in Henderson County are purchased with cash. I mean, so it's a very you know it's not what it was a couple years ago, but the market is absolutely holding.

Speaker 1:

Okay, great to know. Great to know. Well, noah, join me in welcoming steve freeman, who's the chief of the bat cave fire department. Steve, good morning uh, good morning. Thanks for having me well, thank you for coming up. We are uh so excited to get to talk with you about, uh, bat cave and it's a recovery from hurricane helene. Uh, you were right there on the front lines of the whole thing. You were actually in the storm yourself, and so, looking back after nine and a half months or so, how are you feeling?

Speaker 3:

It's getting better every day. It's been a long process, but we've made a lot of progress over the past nine months.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the biggest being getting the infrastructure back.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the roads seem to be the biggest problem and DOT has done a phenomenal job coming in. It's just Batcave. It's so tight down in there we don't have the real estate to actually build another road like they did down toward Chimney Rock in the riverbed, so we've got one-lane roads coming in from Highway 9, 64, and 74. And we still don't have guardrails up and stuff. It's still pretty dangerous down that way and that's the reason we limit access to I understand to just the locals incredible.

Speaker 2:

Uh, you, um and you. How long have you been the fire chief?

Speaker 3:

I've been the fire chief for the, probably the last three to four years, but I've been with the, with the department, for over 35 wow, oh, incredible.

Speaker 2:

And are you originally from Bat Cave?

Speaker 3:

Yes, I'm resident down there full-time. I actually was born over in Asheville and lived in Black Mountain for a little while, but my grandparents were down there so I was down there the whole time and then I moved down there back in probably 1990 from Black Mountain, but I was down there every week, multiple generations, yeah, and I live in my grandparents' house down there.

Speaker 2:

That's incredible. You mentioned and I've seen some stories, but you mentioned that growing up you had heard your grandparents and family members talk about the previous big flood.

Speaker 3:

Yes, talk about the previous big flood. Yes, uh, my whole life, you know, uh, I'd hear my grandparents and my my dad talking about the 1916 flood that actually wiped out bat cave way back. And uh, when, uh, they were doing the the weather reports and and our briefings through the emergency management with Jimmy Brissy and them, they came back a couple of days before and said that it was going to be as bad as the 1916 flood. And after me hearing that my whole life, we got together, batcave and Gert, and we were all down there doing the debriefs Batcave and Gert, and we were all down there doing the debriefs.

Speaker 3:

And after that report came in I had, we got together and decided we'd send everybody out and we would try to get people to evacuate you're going door to door going door to door and I had them take a pad and paper and of course you couldn't make anybody evacuate, it was all voluntary but we asked them to at least write down their name next to Ken, and all that on the paper.

Speaker 3:

And after they said it was going to be catastrophic, I went one step further. I told my people to I give them each a black Sharpie and I told them if they, after asking those questions and writing it down, just pull it out and ask them to write their name and next to Ken on their arm. Nobody did that, but I think it helped in the fact that when the river started getting up and all that the flooding started in, that was in their mind and they knew, and I think that's why we didn't have no, no more loss of life than what we did right, this is, I mean just that, that perspective that you gave them when you were asking them to do that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, right.

Speaker 3:

I mean it puts them. It puts it in their mind that it is a dire situation, especially when the water comes up and stuff like that. We only had two fatalities in the gorge, and I'm just talking henderson county, I can't speak for rutherford county and chimney rock, but we we had two fatalities. One was actually a gentleman up on top of schumann, pretty high up on the mountain. We had a slide come down and it started and it came between his house and he went out to get his tractor and got enveloped.

Speaker 3:

When the rest of the mountain come down, he was the first fatality and then the second one was on Edney Inn Road and the lady survived the first one. It was much like my house. She had a slide come into the back of hers and it just partially hit it at that point and she spent the next night there and the next night the rest of the mountain came down, it collapsed, the house and killed her but we were blessed not to have any drownings in the river and stuff in our district and girton district I mean, this is how real this was you.

Speaker 2:

You personally could have been one of the fatalities. I mean your own experience. Like you, you said god saved your life yes, uh, uh.

Speaker 3:

What we were doing was joyce and I were standing on the porch just filming the the driveway washing away and the house shook and I thought it was a tree coming down on the back of the house. So I went through the house to the back door to go check on that and about the time I got to the back door I had I've got an old 67 Mustang that I had put on high ground up above the house and as I went to open the back door and look out, it parked right in front of the house right there and I just that was just unbelievable it was hard disorienting and disorienting.

Speaker 3:

But when I saw that, I heard what sounded like a freight train and I went on out the door and went around past an old smokehouse that I've got sitting there and I had a pole garage there and I got around to it and I looked back up just in time to see my Ford Ranger flip over on its side, coming down toward me. So I started running back toward the house and I had an old backhoe that didn't run sitting there and the truck hit the garage and pushed it over and it pinned me against the backhoe of my head, against the backhoe with the six-by-six pole that was holding it up and I couldn't get out. But God pushed that back just enough so I could get my head out and fall through the backhoe and yell at Joyce. She saw all this happening and she just knew I was dead.

Speaker 3:

But when I came out the other side I yelled for her to go get in the truck and I pulled in in front of the house because I figured the whole mountain was coming down at that time and I figured our best chance was to get in the truck and maybe we could just roll down through there. But we sat there for about five minutes and about that time it was all over. The eye came over, there was clear sky for a little while and we sat there and that's kind of what the video was about. They actually took footage of what I was filming all that time and Samaritan's Purse came down and did that and it's just a testimony of what God does. That's not about me.

Speaker 2:

That's all, god, absolutely, and your faith how it's carried you through all this.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and at that point I realized, you know, god had saved me for a reason. And once we got our faculties together, I went down. I couldn't go up the mountain because there were slides all around, so I went down and I met Jackie Morgan down at the foot of Possum Hollow.

Speaker 3:

He's a captain. I met him and we looked both ways and we couldn't go down the road because 74 was washed out. So I couldn't get to the station and we knew there was a lot of people up above us toward Middle Fork. So Jackie and I got on his four-wheeler with a chainsaw and everything and started up cutting the road and going past where the road was washed out and stuff like that. To get up there and make sure nobody else was hurt. To get up there and make sure nobody else was hurt. And the thing that really gets me is the first thing Jackie said to me was when I met him down there and I mean destruction was just everywhere. But he said you know, steve said for those that believe, when God takes one thing away he gives back twice as much, twice as better.

Speaker 3:

Wow, and that has rang true through this whole process over the past nine months.

Speaker 2:

And God has showed up through incredible ways.

Speaker 3:

Over and over. I could spend all day just telling things that has happened and all that. But he's right. I mean it gets so much better and so much more and and the more, the more we gave out, the more comes in and the help with all the churches and everybody else that's really got us through all this. Uh, countywide and all the residents in the county, everybody came down there because we were just You're ground zero.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we're ground zero and we couldn't get out. We spent the next two or three days. Well, the first day after we made sure everybody was all right and we're all volunteers. So I had, uh, firemen all spread out through my district down low so we ended up with five different zones because you could only get about a mile around and we got to talking to each other on radio because, 9-1-1, everything had went down. So we were pretty much isolated, just like the rest of the county at that point, even though we didn't know that, isolated, just like the rest of the county at that point, even though we didn't know that. But what we ended up doing is the first day we would just dig out enough trails and we borrowed ATVs, utvs to get the sick and the elderly down to these landing zones and the helicopters would come in and after about three or four days days, we had 80 to 85 percent of the population of bat cave flown out of there. There was really nobody left but the, the firemen and their families.

Speaker 2:

Incredible you said you're the only fully volunteer fire department in the county. Is that right?

Speaker 3:

that's right, we're all 100 volunteer steve.

Speaker 1:

Uh, we're about to run out of time. I wish we could talk further. Uh, you guys still need help and uh give us a contact uh for if someone would like to volunteer or to offer assistance uh, they can actually call my number.

Speaker 3:

Uh, as fire chief down there, it's's 828-776-1345. Or, spokes of Hope has moved up from Chimney Rock into Bat Cave. Okay, and we're going to let them start taking over coordinating, because they're going to be here, for they're bringing the Amish in. They'll be here for the next year and a half commitment.

Speaker 1:

And we're going to be talking with someone from the Spokes of Hope. I've been hearing that name around a whole lot. Like I said, Steve, I'd love to talk further but we've got to run. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all you've done and all you've been through and continue to go through. We just wanted to get you here and say thank you, that's it.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for having us and keep us in your prayers.

Speaker 1:

Noah's got a certificate for you and we invite you to join us again next week at 845 for the George Real Estate Group Hometown Hero Show.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Again. We're here every Friday morning and thank you again, steve. So much for everything you've done Thinking about estate planning for your real estate. Without a smart approach, the property you leave behind could become an unwelcome burden for your kids. Many children simply don't want to co-manage an inherited house or deal with the tenants. Fortunately, you can prevent that with the right plan. The George Real Estate Group specializes in tax-efficient strategies like 1031 exchanges and Delaware Statutory Trust to simplify inheritance and income planning. A 1031 exchange can defer your capital gain taxes now and help your kids avoid a big tax bill later, and a DST lets you continue earning rental income without landlord headache. Plus, it can be split among your children, making inheritance easier. Planning ahead is one of the kindest gifts you can give your family. Let us help you secure your legacy. Call the George Real Estate Group at 828-393-0134 today. You've worked hard to build your legacy. Now let us help you protect it for your loved ones.

Speaker 1:

The George Real Estate Group is located in Flat Rock, north Carolina, near Hendersonville in Henderson County. You can find them online at realestatebygregcom. The George Real Estate Group can be reached at 828-393-0134 or stop by their office at 2720 Greenville Highway, flat Rock, north Carolina. Tune in live each week on Thursdays at 10.05 am on WHKP 107.7 FM and 14.50 am AM, or stream online at whkpcom or download these podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. The George Real Estate Group brings you the WHKP Hometown Hero Series every Friday morning at 845.