Once a place of both vast and intimate beauty, a lake community is now a repository of wreckage and fading hopes.

Chimney Rock’s gone. Flowering Bridge is gone,” Banff is heard saying while filming the devastation. “I’m not sure what they’re going to do to get us out of here.”

Search and rescue workers were fanning through the small town of Chimney Rock east of Asheville Monday after it was almost entirely wiped out.