(NewsNation) — One couple lost the Asheville, N.C. business they spent ten years building. Another became instantly homeless when part of their apartment complex along the Swannanoa River was swept away. All four are alive and thinking about rebuilding their lives – and processing what happened.
“It was terrifying,” Jacqueline Twohig told “NewsNation Prime” about the flooding river that destroyed two buildings of the riverfront apartment complex in which they lived.
“At first we thought it was going to be just a little flooding in the apartment,” she said. That notion quickly changed when she and her husband, Doug Frieders, saw the water covering the 20-foot stilts on which the complex’s buildings sit.
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“We got out as fast as we could,” which means scaling a cement barrier on the complex and then walking through ankle-deep water to their car.
Todd and Megan Walsh didn’t have to run for their lives, but they quickly realized how different their lives would be when they returned to Asheville to find their business, Atomic Furnishing and Design, destroyed.
“This is our dream business,” said Todd Walsh. “We started from nothing, and we built it to this point, and it’s kind of unreal that it’s gone. It’s hard to look at the pictures of what it was like before, and now seeing what it’s like.”
“The day we saw the river over top of our store, we knew immediately it was gone,” said Megan Walsh.
“We immediately started thinking, okay, we need to secure a new space,” for not just their business but the dozens of vendors who occupied the space, she said.
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“Most of our vendors are week-to-week, month-to-month. We care about them greatly. Their kids come into our stores. They play with our children. And so our main priority and focus right now is to find a new, secure, new place and get back to business as soon as possible,” she added.
Meanwhile, Twohig and Frieders are not only dealing with the loss of their home but the fact that two of their neighbors were killed when two of the apartment complex’s six buildings were washed away.
“The survival guilt is immense,” she said. “It just feels awful. We knew them. We saw them every single day. Had we known that this was going to be the case, that the apartment was going to fully collapse, we would have gone banging on doors.”
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Jacqueline Twohig and Doug Frieders have set up a GoFundMe page and so have the Walshs to help their neighbors, vendors and friends to rebuild and return.
“We are, 100%, going back to Asheville,” said Twohig. “We want to help rebuild. Asheville is a wonderful city. We love it. We love the mountains. We love the art. We love everything there,” she added.