Jewel Warrick has lived in Relief, North Carolina, for 55 years. More than three weeks ago, Helene tore through her small community and buried her home in mud. 

She and her son James evacuated days before the storm and said they urged their neighbors to leave as well. But by the time they tried, it was too late. Six residents of Relief, including two young boys, died. 

The family, like many in the state, wants to rebuild in the wake of the monster storm. Jewel said she’s still in shock but carrying on with the help of a strong family and community.

“We’ll survive,” she said. “It’s not giving up. We can’t. There’s hope. And when you have hope, you move on.”

The deadliest storm on U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina

Helene was the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It carved a 500-mile path of destruction across six states, killing more than 240 people. 

The devastation of Helene caught most western North Carolina residents by surprise. The region hadn’t experienced anything like it since the Great Flood of 1916, when two storms converged and pushed rivers over their banks. 

Forecasters say that this time, the stage was set for disaster before Helene roared in. Days earlier, a weather front stalled over the Appalachian Mountains. Some areas got more than a foot of rain and were already saturated by the time the storm arrived. The mountain range acted like a funnel for the remnants of Helene, devastating the communities below. Asheville, which sits in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, became a catch basin for the water. 

In Relief, located alongside the North Toe River, James Warrick described a wall of water engulfing the area.

“And it’s probably the same wall of water that took our neighbors with it,” he said.

In North Carolina, at least 125 people were killed by Helene and more than 50 are still missing. 

Determination to stay

In Green Mountain, a community tucked above the North Toe River, the remnants of Helene came roaring down the mountain with enough power to snap their concrete bridge in half. 

Jane Whitson Peterson said she saw a house float down the river as water ripped through the town. She, her husband and her 96-year-old mother were trapped inside the general store the family has run for more than 60 years. They tried to stop the water from coming in, but as Peterson said, “You don’t stop water.”

“It busted through the back door,” she said. “And then it started coming in the front door.”

As the water came up to the seventh step on the stairs, Peterson and her family watched and prayed it wouldn’t go higher. 

The family store was wrecked. Peterson’s father’s old cash register is clogged with mud and her mother’s home was destroyed.

“She’s raised seven kids and worked 16, 18 hours a day,” Peterson said. “It’s really hard for her. But my mom got up the next morning singing.”

She sang “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” a hymn about the expectations of a home in heaven. 

Despite the destruction, Green Mountain is still home.

“I’ve not been a whole lot of places. But I would never go nowhere else to live,” Peterson said. “Everybody knows everybody. And if you need a hand, we’re there. We’ll do anything we can to help you.”

Workers search for survivors, bring help to communities

Jeff Howell is the emergency management director for Yancey County. His family has lived in the area for seven generations. When Helene hit, Howell was inside the emergency operations center as 911 calls started to come in. 

Then suddenly, silence. Radios, cellphones and the internet were knocked out and the calls stopped. 

“We basically just abandoned the emergency operations center. The sheriff’s department, they were already out doing rescues,” Howell said. “But we would just go in. ‘Give me another name.’ And we’d take off and try to find these people and get them.”

One of the rescues that night was a local firefighter and his wife, who hung onto a tree for hours after floodwaters flung them from their home.

More than 70 search and rescue teams from across the country were dispatched along rivers and streams in western North Carolina. Locals helped guide searchers up the treacherous mountain terrain to look for survivors.  

In the week after the storm, hundreds of people were reported missing. Dozens are still missing. 

Donations and relief workers have poured into the area. FEMA set up more than 40 processing centers and says so far it has distributed more than $100 million to North Carolina victims.

Now Howell, who spent more than 30 years in the Army Reserve and fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, is trying to get his neighbors the help they need.

Helicopters and mules have been deployed to deliver aid to places trucks can’t reach. Over 500 roads remain closed and more than 100 bridges need to be replaced. A patchwork of dusty routes now holds the region together.

His time in the Reserves helped prepare him for this, Howell said. 

“It’s unlike combat stress because in combat, you can shoot back. I can’t do anything. And that’s — that is very, very, very frustrating…,” he said. “Keep the miscommunications down is the best thing I can do right now, but that’s a struggle in itself.”   

Fighting to help while fighting against disinformation

Conspiracy theories and false claims about the government response to the flood have made their way through the mountain communities where Howell works. 

The day after 60 Minutes spoke with Howell, a neighboring county was investigating reports of an armed militia “hunting FEMA.” One arrest was made and FEMA suspended door-to-door operations for all of western North Carolina for 48 hours. FEMA operations have since resumed. 

The disinformation has been a problem for workers on the ground.

“It takes their focus away from what they’re supposed to be doing when they’re having to debunk this sort of stuff and explain to people, ‘No. That is really not the case.’ We’re not after the lithium deposits at Chimney Rock. You know, it’s just the U.S. government did not geoengineer this storm,” Howell said. “But like I said, some people, they’re going to believe it no matter what.”

Donations to support those affected by Hurricane Helene can be made to:

Yancey County, North Carolina

Mitchell County, North Carolina

The death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison in the Arctic this February sparked an outcry around the world. He was compared to Nelson Mandela as a prisoner of conscience. While behind bars, he completed a memoir, documenting his three-year battle to survive the unspeakable prison conditions. 

This is our third story on Navalny – the first in 2017 when he stood up to Vladimir Putin by running against him for president of Russia. When he was arrested in 2021, Navalny’s popularity as the most prominent leader of the Putin opposition was growing.

Alexei Navalny speaking in Russian (English translation): Putin is a thief and the head of the entire corrupt system!

He was defiant, brave for taking on the all-powerful Vladimir Putin out in the open, denouncing him as a gangster. He refused to back down and paid the ultimate price: three years in Russian prisons and then this year, death at age 47.

His wife Yulia, once her husband’s silent partner, is now the leader of his opposition movement. She says Alexei’s memoir, “Patriot,” represents his final act of defiance.

Yulia Navalnaya: It was his life. It was his every-minute job to fight with Putin’s regime.

Lesley Stahl: And now he’s fighting from the grave.

Yulia Navalnaya: I would prefer he would fight not from the grave. And of course, it’s very tough to– for me to say like this. But we can say so. 

Over the summer, a Russian court issued an arrest warrant for her.

Lesley Stahl: It’s a dangerous place to be.

Yulia Navalnaya: I don’t care at all.

Lesley Stahl: You’re not afraid?

Yulia Navalnaya: No, not really. Why should I be infra– afraid?

Lesley Stahl: They could kidnap you. They could try to poison you.

Yulia Navalnaya: They could. But I don’t want to live my life and to spend my life everyday thinking about if they kidnap me today or tomorrow, if they are going to poison me today or tomorrow. I’m not thinking about poisoning– 

Lesley Stahl: You know who you sound like? You sound like Alexei. (laugh) He would say the same thing.

Yulia Navalnaya: Of course! I’ve been living with him more than 25 years.

In that time, Alexei, trained as a lawyer, became Russia’s most famous anti-corruption activist and investigator, posting his findings online about bribes and kickbacks and evidence of the wealth Putin and his cronies had — as Navalny said — stolen from the Russian people. 

Lesley Stahl (in 2017): I mean, you’re goading them. 

Alexei Navalny (in 2017): These are people who are trying to steal my country and I’m strongly disagree with it. I’m not going to be, you know, a kind of speechless person right now. I’m not going to keep silent.

He called Putin “a madman” who was “sucking the blood out of Russia,” and more insults as he built a pro-democracy movement, opening offices all across Russia. 

It was a time when other Putin opponents were dying in suspicious suicides, a car bombing, dissident Boris Nemtsov was shot out in the open near the Kremlin. And Navalny himself was subjected to multiple arrests and beatings, an attack with green dye laced with a caustic chemical, and in 2020, an assassination attempt that he recounts in the beginning of his book. 

He writes that shortly before he boarded a plane in Siberia, he was poisoned with a Soviet-era, military-grade nerve agent. 

He collapsed, moaning in agony, as his body began to shut down. While he was in a coma at a Russian hospital, Yulia waged a campaign to pressure Putin to release Alexei so he could fly to Germany for treatment. 

We met them in Berlin about two months after the attack.

Lesley Stahl (in 2020): You have said you think that Mr. Putin’s responsible.

Alexei Navalny (in 2020): I don’t think. I’m sure that he is responsible.

He spent five months recovering in Germany — that’s when he started writing the memoir. Then, in January of 2021, the Navalnys returned to Russia. 

When they landed, they were met by Russian police.

He was arrested, said goodbye to his wife, and was led away. 

Lesley Stahl: This is a question you’re going to be asked over and over and over, but it’s, it’s almost the essential question: Why did you decide to go back, the two of you? You knew the danger for sure. And do you regret it now?

Yulia Navalnaya: You ask me about our decision like we were sitting together and discussing if he needs to go back, or he doesn’t need to go back. It, it didn’t work like this. From the first day of when I realized that he could recover after this poisoning, I knew that he would go back as soon as possible.

Lesley Stahl: So, it wasn’t even a debate.

Yulia Navalnaya: No.

Lesley Stahl: It was just “when do we go back?” as opposed to if.

Yulia Navalnaya: We never had any debates and of course, I would love to live all my life with my husband. But at that moment, I knew that there is just one decision which he could take. And it was his decision. And I knew how important it was for him. And I knew that he wouldn’t be happy to live in exile.

His arrest sparked protests across Russia. But far from disappearing in prison, Navalny managed to maintain a presence on social media. How – we’ve been asked not to say – but it enabled him to keep up his attacks on Putin.

Meanwhile, his team of investigators released drone footage of what they said was Putin’s billion dollar palace on the Black Sea. it was viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.

Lesley Stahl: It must’ve driven Putin insane that he, he locked him up and he’s still getting the anti-Putin message out.

Yulia Navalnaya: That’s why he con— his conditions were worse way— from month to month. 

Those conditions, Navalny wrote in his diaries, included “sleep deprivation,” “punitive solitary confinement,” almost no medical care. And when none of that broke him, he was sent repeatedly to “a concrete black hole” called the “punishment cell,” where he would remain for up to 15 days at a time. 

Lesley Stahl: Here’s how he described it: he said it was a doghouse and this is the place where prisoners were sent to be tortured, and raped, and sometimes murdered. I wondered how you read those passages. I was thinking of you when I read it and thought, ‘What is she feeling? What is– how are you reading this?’

Yulia Navalnaya: It’s very tough moment to think about all this torturing place and torturing conditions, and about him, how he was laughing at these people, even while he was there.

Navalny thought of his life in prison as his work, surviving and staying positive, his job.

“I know one thing for sure…” he wrote: “…that I’m among the happiest 1 percent of people on the planet—those who absolutely adore their work… I have enormous support from the people. And I met a woman with whom I share not only love but … [who] is just as opposed as I am to what is going on. Maybe we won’t succeed … But we have to try.”

Lesley Stahl: He wrote much of this book while he was in prison. He was under constant surveillance, cameras on him all the time and he managed to get the pages out.

Yulia Navalnaya: Alexei was very smart– smart, very inventive. (LAUGH) 

Lesley Stahl: Let me read you what he says in the book, okay, about this– 

Yulia Navalnaya: Okay.

Lesley Stahl: He says, “I had to devise a whole clandestine operation to bamboozle the guards, involving the substitution of identical notebooks.” And after that, “[we went to court] where I was able physically to pass items to someone.”

Yulia Navalnaya: It was very difficult. That’s why we have diaries from the first year, much less from the second year, and not from the third year because it wasn’t possible.

These are some of the diaries he smuggled out when he went to court, which was often, as he was tried and convicted several times on various pretexts. After each verdict, he was moved to a different prison with harsher conditions. 

Last December, he was transferred to this penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.

This would be his final court appearance. He looked healthy and in good spirits, sharing a laugh with court officials. The very next day, Feb. 16, 2024, he was dead. Russian officials announced later that the cause was, quote, “not criminal in nature” and due to “combined diseases.” 

Lesley Stahl: It was at the time that, that the negotiations over a prisoner swap were underway and Alexei might be one of the prisoners who was to be released.

Yulia Navalnaya: Putin realized that Alexei is so big that he’s– he could be the new leader of Russia. He could encourage people to stand against Putin. And all the things just brought Putin to this understanding that it’s not possible to let Navalny be, be free.

Lesley Stahl: You posted a message shortly after his death. You said, bravely I thought, “[Vladimir] Putin killed my husband. By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart, and half of my soul.” 

Yulia Navalnaya: That’s true. I can say now the same, nothing has changed.

Lesley Stahl: Here’s something else you said. You posted this on X: “Please do not forget… Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal. His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague in a cozy cell with a TV, but in Russia in the same… two-by-three-meter cell in which he killed Alexei.”

Yulia Navalnaya: For me, it’s very important. I think that for Vladimir Putin, he needs to be in Russian con– prison to feel everything, what not just my husband, but all the prisoners in Russia. 

His political network inside Russia has been crushed. Yulia and their two children have been forced to live in exile. Many of his old team now operate out of here in Vilnius, Lithuania, and three of his lawyers are on trial in Russia. 

And Yulia is constantly on the road, lobbying Western leaders to stand up to Putin. 

Lesley Stahl: So, the question is inevitable. Painful but inevitable. Has Putin won? Has he shut down the opposition to such an extent that it’s over?

Yulia Navalnaya: But it’s not finished. We continue our fight. He still has millions of supporters, we can see it by how many people go still every day to his grave, how many flowers on his grave. 

Produced by Richard Bonin. Associate producer, Mirella Brussani. Broadcast associate, Aria Een. Edited by Matthew Lev.

Lesley Stahl

One of America’s most recognized and experienced broadcast journalists, Lesley Stahl has been a “60 Minutes” correspondent since 1991.