On September 27, 2024, a day that will live in infamy in Asheville, the French Broad River crested at 24.82 feet and tore through the River Arts District (RAD) at a peak of 113,000 cubic feet per second, a record that buried the old Flood of 1916 mark of 23.10 feet and turned familiar storefronts into islands floating in brown water.

RAD businesses Bull and Beggar and Ananda West stood with their first floors swallowed. The iconic RAD gear sculpture was half-drowned and wore a tangle of driftwood like a crown pulled from the flood.

On September 27, 2026 – exactly two years later – the same USGS gauge read a whopping 23 feet lower. The river was moving at roughly 720 cubic feet per second, about six tenths of one percent of Helene’s peak flow. Sunshine now illuminates the brick and painted steel; the old railroad tracks are dry, and the Gear stands proudly in the grass, its shadow long and welcome. The Wilma Dykeman Greenway, then submerged by floodwater that inundated the waterway she so passionately chronicled, now boasts a dry path for pedestrians, runners and bicyclists to enjoy again.

These photographs document the changes more plainly than any Badger Ted Talk. One pair of images shows water up to the awnings of the buildings with the RAD sign snagged in storm wreckage. The other pair shows parked cars, open windows, and a lawn that has remembered how to be a lawn.

Shortly after Helene, I wrote an article for this newspaper titled “Straightening Our Crowns.” Badger opined then that lifting a bent diadem from the mud and proverbially setting it back on his Son of Appalachia head required care as the metal was still wet and the wearer was still shaking.

The French Broad has now dropped back to normal. The crown is not new, but is regaining its shine and, most importantly, is moving much closer to a perfect fit.

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