title: So Great the Devastation: The 1916 Flood in Western North Carolina
author: Jessica A. Bandel
description: Jessica A. Bandel has been a research historian with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History since 2013. She is a co-author of <i>The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas</i> (2015).
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  http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html **Prologue**
  
  
  
  
  
  It would later be called one of the most violent storms in North Carolina
  history. Because it occurred in 1999, some of the most superstitious citizens
  considered it an omen, the first step toward the end of time. Others simply
  shook their heads and said that they knew something like that would happen
  sooner or later. In all, nine documented tornadoes would touch down that
  evening in the eastern part of the state, destroying nearly thirty homes in
  the process. Telephone lines lay strewn across roads, transformers blazed
  without anyone to stop them. Thousands of trees were felled, flash floods
  swe