10 still missing in NC’s Buncombe County as searches end

The search for missing Hurricane Helene victims has come to an end in one of the hardest hit areas in North Carolina as new leads have all but dried up a month after the ferocious storm swept through.

Helene left 42 people dead in Buncombe County — which encompasses Asheville and Swannanoa, some of the most devastated areas — and 10 are still considered missing, officials told The Post.

“There are going to be some people that we have lost in this storm that we will never find,” former fire chief-turned-county Emergency Services Assistant Director Ryan Cole told The Post Wednesday.

“And that’s a very hard thing to come to grips with, not only for the families but also for the responders who are dedicated to bringing those families closure.”

Since Helene struck North Carolina exactly one month ago Sunday, Cole’s department has been joined by hundreds of state and federal search and rescue personnel responding to about 600 missing persons cases.

That number has now been reduced to fewer than 10 active cases, according to the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office, while the state and federal staff have left the area as leads have stopped coming in.

“We have conducted all the targeted searches we can based off the information we have,” Cole said. “If we get additional information, we’ll go back to work.”

Among the missing is Matt Darrohn, 40, a homeless man was last seen on Merrimon Avenue in Asheville.

“As the days go on it gets a little harder,” his sister-in-law, 39-year-old Amanda Darrohn, told The Post. 

“Every day that goes on that no one’s seen him, it makes it less likely someone is going to find him,” she added, describing Matt as “good guy” who had fallen on hard times.

“He was never really good at keeping in touch anyway before the storm, so we’re hoping he’s found a place to stay and just hasn’t reached out to anyone yet.”

At least 232 people were killed across six states after the storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend on September 26. The storm quickly traveled north, dropping about 40 trillion gallons of water along the way.

Ninety-five people were killed in North Carolina.

That deluge sparked cataclysmic flooding that devastated the mountainous region and destroyed swaths of Asheville.

Cole said the floodwaters were so ferocious that some bodies were found more than five miles away from the points where they went missing, which he called “very, very unusual” for the mountainous terrain.

“Most of the time somebody is not buried under the mud … they’re buried under piles of debris — trees, houses, cars — all that stuff just piles up somewhere like a bend in a river,” Cole said.

“A mound of debris might be 30 feet high or 50 feet high,” he added. “You pick the debris off one piece at a time.”

And sometimes, those bodies weren’t even found in one piece.

“It could have been multiple things that were found to create a single victim,” he said. “Does that make sense?”

Nearly 30 people remain missing across North Carolina, while hundreds of roads are closed, and thousands of homes remain without power or reliable water, according to USA Today. Asheville, a city of nearly 94,000, remains under a water boil advisory.

After a month of combing through the damaged regions “foot by foot,” Cole expects Buncombe County Emergency Services to resume its normal operations within two weeks — and that it could take the region at least five years to recover from the storm.

And while the search for victims may be ending, Cole vowed to continue the moment a new lead emerges.

“Our number one objective is to find every victim,” he said.