Gatlinburg residents return home to see wildfire destruction

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Nellie Gauvreau, cries upon seeing her burned home in Gatlinburg, Tenn., where wildfires have caused extensive damages and at least 13 deaths, Dec. 2, 2016. Residents of this tourism-dependent mountain town were allowed to return to their homes — or what was left of them — on Friday. (Mike Belleme/The New York Times)

GATLINBURG, Tenn. — The annual Fantasy of Lights Christmas Parade had been canceled — the wildfire saw to that — and the procession that replaced it Friday was long and grim.

The residents of Gatlinburg sat idling in their cars and trucks in the chill of a mountain morning, waiting to return to the little tourist city they had been forced to evacuate Monday night. For most of them, it would be their first time back since the fire in the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park roared through, whipped into a rage by an uncommonly strong wind.

Now, four days later, government crews were still up on the winding streets looking for survivors and bodies. The authorities said that nearly 1,000 buildings had been damaged or destroyed in Sevier County, which includes Gatlinburg, a city of about 4,000. Thirteen people were confirmed dead.

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Nellie Gauvreau, 47, was behind the wheel of an old Dodge van, smoking. She had already heard that her home had burned down, but she wanted to see it for herself. Her friend Sherry Angel, 44, was in the passenger seat. Angel had heard that her aunt had died in the blaze, although other family members said Friday that the woman was only missing.

The line of cars crept toward town.

"What happens now," Gauvreau said, "is that we just pick up our pieces and move on."

There were moments this week in Gatlinburg when crying seemed like the only reasonable response. The police chief choked back tears at a news conference. Katrina Bogle, 41, a worker at a Subway restaurant near the perimeter of the evacuation zone, cried Friday while assembling a sandwich.

"This is incredible, what Jesus is doing, isn't it?" she said.

It was particularly painful that the fire, a disaster of a magnitude modern Gatlinburg had never seen, would come at the onset of the Christmas season. This dramatically beautiful pocket of Appalachian East Tennessee is a place of tiny country churches and a big, homegrown — and homespun — entertainment business, and Christmas is a crucial time for both.

Dolly Parton's Dollywood theme park is a few miles away in Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg's gaudier sister city. Southern families flock to the area just before Christmas to shop at outlet malls and fill up the holiday attractions. In Gatlinburg, it is the small-town charm of the Fantasy of Lights parade. In Pigeon Forge, it is the live Nativity show at the horse-themed Dixie Stampede dinner theater and the seasonal "Christmas Disaster" version of the comic Hatfield & McCoy Dinner Show.

By Friday, the dawning scope of the economic damage had begun to mingle with the more pressing grief and shock. Rumors of the victims' identities trickled through the emergency shelters; the authorities had publicly named only five of them as of Friday afternoon. Survivors traded their stories of narrow escape through the smoke and racing flames Monday night. But many had also begun to wonder what they would do next.

"If the tourists don't come back, there's no work," Silvestre Trinidad, 25, a restaurant employee, said in Spanish as he waited around with a large group of men who shared similar stories at Rocky Top Sports World, a big athletic complex that turned into the main shelter.

The return procession to Gatlinburg on Friday was only temporary: Residents, and even tourists, who had been forced to leave town at a moment's notice, were given little time to assess, grab essentials and leave.

A number of the burned buildings were vacation rentals. But a bigger worry was the international news of the disaster, and the fact that it was difficult to discern, from a distance, what had not been ruined. Mark Adams, chief executive and president of the Gatlinburg Chamber of Commerce, posted a video on Facebook showing off the relatively unmolested main commercial strip.

"Everything is here," he said. "All the shops that you're accustomed to seeing here."

But some were hesitant to visit what they thought might be a disaster zone. The problem was even afflicting Pigeon Forge, which was largely unscathed. Kelly Johnson and her family operate a number of restaurants in the area. One of them, a Gatlinburg steakhouse, burned down. But she said that big parties — family reunions and rehearsal dinners — had been canceling at her Pigeon Forge business.

"It did not burn the city to the ground," she said. "And if people think that happened, we are in big, big trouble."

David Fee, president of the company that owns the 800-seat Hatfield & McCoy Dinner Show, said the fire had cost the company at least $300,000 in the past three days. That included some 2,000 donated meals and lost ticket revenues, he said.

"We're not going to lay anybody off as long as we're able," he said. But, "a quarter of a million dollars in three days is nothing you can sustain for long."

Parton announced Thursday that she would donate $1,000 a month for as long as six months to county residents who had lost their homes. A native of Sevier County, Parton has become one of the area's most prominent benefactors, and the gesture burnished a reputation that needs no burnishing. At the shelter, Nancy Garner, 54, said Parton used to regularly give her cash decades ago, when Garner was working as a housekeeper for minimum wage and trying to raise her children. Parton, she said, is distant kin.

"She's got a big heart, I'll tell you that," she said.

Those family and community ties remain in Sevier County, even as Dollywood has given the place a corporate makeover, and people were relying on those ties this week. Gauvreau, a rental property manager, drove into town past burned-out buildings next to perfectly fine ones: the fire, it seemed, had hopscotched around.

She teared up at the sight of her house. She looked for a cat but had no luck. Then she screwed up some courage and drove on through the half-charred ghost town to survey the properties she is charged with overseeing.

"My heart is not hurting because of me," she had said earlier. "I'm hurting for the tenants of mine that I saw every day."