Hurricane Helene live updates: 132 dead, including 40 in hard-hit county...Hurricane Helene's inland flooding has been catastrophic.

ABC News ^ | September 30, 2024 | Emily Shapiro, David Brennan, Leah Sarnoff, Julia Reinstein, and Meredith Deliso

[Red Badger]

The storm surge, wind damage and inland flooding from Hurricane Helene have been catastrophic, flooding neighborhoods, stranding residents and destroying homes in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.

More than 130 people have been killed, according to The Associated Press.

Helene, which made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region Thursday night as a massive Category 4 hurricane, was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the Big Bend on record.

[FamiliarFace]

How terrible!

RIP, little one!

[Boomer]

I keep looking for info on how many inches of rain dumped on these places. I get that some of it came off the mountains. Has anyone heard? I guess it’s a moot point but I’m still curious.

[RaceBannon]

these are hollers, not flood plains, you dont know what your talking about.
.....

Hurricane Helene: A note to friends outside of the South.
We live in Greene County, East Tennessee. Our county's southern border is the Tennessee-North Carolina state line that runs along the heights of the Appalachian Mountains. We are within the hardest hit region of the U.S.

The questions I have been hearing a lot is why was this so bad, and why weren't people prepared. I'll try to answer those questions in the following post.

Hurricane Helene was the strongest hurricane (in recorded history) to hit the Florida panhandle region. It is the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The death toll is over 160 so far. We are still finding bodies, and there are still many, many people missing as I write this today six days after the hurricane hit land.
I work in the emergency department at Greeneville Community Hospital. The hospital itself has been evacuated because we have no water in the majority of the county. We are still running our emergency department as a critical access site for our community. Fortunately, I have a well and didn't lose electricity for long. I was able to haul water in a 300 gallon tote in the back of my truck to the hospital for the first few days so we could flush toilets and wash hands. It took a few days, but we now have porta-potties and water tanks on trucks to keep the emergency department running.
Under an hour from our hospital to the east, Unicoi County Hospital was flooded requiring patients and providers to be rescued from the roof via helicopter.

Under an hour from our hospital to the south, over the mountains, Asheville, NC has been hit particularly hard.
But why was this region hit so hard?

First, we had a lot of rain before Hurricane Helene even showed up. Depending on the area, we had 7-11 inches of rain in the week before the first storm clouds of the hurricane arrived. This rain saturated the ground and filled ponds and streams.

Then the hurricane arrived. She barreled her way up through the panhandle of Florida, quickly shot through Georgia, and then slowed down and stalled over North Carolina and East Tennessee. And that's right where we live.

The reason she stalled involves atmospheric pressure conditions that I don't fully understand, but the result was that this hurricane dropped 20 inches to over 30 inches of rain in some areas… that's an estimated 40 trillion gallons of rain.
How much is 40 trillion gallons of water?
40 trillion gallons of water is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboy's stadium 51,000 times.
40 trillion gallons of water is enough to cover the entire state of North Carolina with 3.5 FEET of water.
40 trillion gallons of water is enough to fill 60 MILLION Olympic-sized swimming pools.
40 trillion gallons of water is 619 DAYS of water flowing over Niagara Falls.
So this is an unprecedented amount of rain already falling on an area that had just received ground-saturated rain.
But it wasn't just the amount of rain, it was the geography of where that rain fell.
The southeastern slopes (of western North Carolina) and the northwestern slopes (of East Tennessee) acted as funnels or rain catchments that directed all this water downhill and concentrated it into streams and rivers running into the valleys. It overflowed these streams and rivers causing massive flooding.
How much flooding?
The French Broad River usually crests at 1.5 feet… but it reached 24.6 feet during the storm.
The Nolichuckey River rose to almost 22 feet. The Nolichuckey River Dam in Greene County, during the peak of the flooding, took on 1.2 MILLION gallons of water per SECOND. Compare that to Niagara Falls which peaks at 700,000 gallons per second. Fortunately, this dam held… but barely, with damage.
Consequences.
The flooding, and all the things the flooding carried with it (large trees, vehicles, buildings, etc.) caused widespread damage. It destroyed homes and businesses. It destroyed roads and bridges. It knocked out power.
This isolated many places for days and days from normal rescue efforts and evacuation plans.
Here in Greene County, the flooding destroyed the intake pump for the county's primary water supply. We hope they will be able to bring in a temporary pump to bypass the damaged system, but that still may take a couple weeks. In the meantime, most people in the county have no clean water for drinking, washing hands, or bathing, and no water for sanitation.
I have taken care of people in the emergency department who had their homes literally washed away. Everything they own, other than the clothes on their back, has been lost. Many friends have had their homes almost destroyed by flooding and their houses are filled with mud and debris.
And this is just in my immediate area. Other places around us have unfortunately been hit harder.
Why weren't people prepared?
No one in the mountains of North Carolina or East Tennessee prepares for a hurricane.
It's kind of like asking why someone in Iowa doesn't prepare for a tidal wave or why someone in Florida doesn't prepare for a blizzard. It's not what happens, like ever.
This was a combination of already rain-saturated ground before the hurricane hit, the hurricane/storm stalling over this region dumping unprecedented amounts of rainfall in a small area, and the geography of mountains channeling and concentrating all this water into the valleys below that created a perfect storm, so to speak, of conditions that caused this disaster.

It couldn't have been prevented or prepared for.
Please feel free to share this. Hopefully it answers some questions and provides a better understanding of what has happened and why it is so devastating.

Hurricane Helene: A note to friends outside of the South.
We live in Greene County, East Tennessee. Our county's southern border is the Tennessee-North Carolina state line that runs along the heights of the Appalachian Mountains. We are within the hardest hit region of the U.S.

The questions I have been hearing a lot is why was this so bad, and why weren't people prepared. I'll try to answer those questions in the following post.

Hurricane Helene was the strongest hurricane (in recorded history) to hit the Florida panhandle region. It is the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The death toll is over 160 so far. We are still finding bodies, and there are still many, many people missing as I write this today six days after the hurricane hit land.
I work in the emergency department at Greeneville Community Hospital. The hospital itself has been evacuated because we have no water in the majority of the county. We are still running our emergency department as a critical access site for our community. Fortunately, I have a well and didn't lose electricity for long. I was able to haul water in a 300 gallon tote in the back of my truck to the hospital for the first few days so we could flush toilets and wash hands. It took a few days, but we now have porta-potties and water tanks on trucks to keep the emergency department running.
Under an hour from our hospital to the east, Unicoi County Hospital was flooded requiring patients and providers to be rescued from the roof via helicopter.

Under an hour from our hospital to the south, over the mountains, Asheville, NC has been hit particularly hard.
But why was this region hit so hard?

First, we had a lot of rain before Hurricane Helene even showed up. Depending on the area, we had 7-11 inches of rain in the week before the first storm clouds of the hurricane arrived. This rain saturated the ground and filled ponds and streams.

Then the hurricane arrived. She barreled her way up through the panhandle of Florida, quickly shot through Georgia, and then slowed down and stalled over North Carolina and East Tennessee. And that's right where we live.

The reason she stalled involves atmospheric pressure conditions that I don't fully understand, but the result was that this hurricane dropped 20 inches to over 30 inches of rain in some areas… that's an estimated 40 trillion gallons of rain.

How much is 40 trillion gallons of water?
40 trillion gallons of water is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboy's stadium 51,000 times.
40 trillion gallons of water is enough to cover the entire state of North Carolina with 3.5 FEET of water.
40 trillion gallons of water is enough to fill 60 MILLION Olympic-sized swimming pools.

40 trillion gallons of water is 619 DAYS of water flowing over Niagara Falls.

So this is an unprecedented amount of rain already falling on an area that had just received ground-saturated rain.
But it wasn't just the amount of rain, it was the geography of where that rain fell.

The southeastern slopes (of western North Carolina) and the northwestern slopes (of East Tennessee) acted as funnels or rain catchments that directed all this water downhill and concentrated it into streams and rivers running into the valleys. It overflowed these streams and rivers causing massive flooding.
How much flooding?

The French Broad River usually crests at 1.5 feet… but it reached 24.6 feet during the storm.
The Nolichuckey River rose to almost 22 feet. The Nolichuckey River Dam in Greene County, during the peak of the flooding, took on 1.2 MILLION gallons of water per SECOND. Compare that to Niagara Falls which peaks at 700,000 gallons per second. Fortunately, this dam held… but barely, with damage.
Consequences.
The flooding, and all the things the flooding carried with it (large trees, vehicles, buildings, etc.) caused widespread damage. It destroyed homes and businesses. It destroyed roads and bridges. It knocked out power.
This isolated many places for days and days from normal rescue efforts and evacuation plans.

Here in Greene County, the flooding destroyed the intake pump for the county's primary water supply. We hope they will be able to bring in a temporary pump to bypass the damaged system, but that still may take a couple weeks. In the meantime, most people in the county have no clean water for drinking, washing hands, or bathing, and no water for sanitation.
I have taken care of people in the emergency department who had their homes literally washed away. Everything they own, other than the clothes on their back, has been lost. Many friends have had their homes almost destroyed by flooding and their houses are filled with mud and debris.
And this is just in my immediate area. Other places around us have unfortunately been hit harder.
Why weren't people prepared?

No one in the mountains of North Carolina or East Tennessee prepares for a hurricane.

It's kind of like asking why someone in Iowa doesn't

This was a combination of already rain-saturated ground before the hurricane hit, the hurricane/storm stalling over this region dumping unprecedented amounts of rainfall in a small area, and the geography of mountains channeling and concentrating all this water into the valleys below that created a perfect storm, so to speak, of conditions that caused this disaster.

It couldn't have been prevented or prepared for.
Please feel free to share this. Hopefully it answers some questions and provides a better understanding of what has happened and why it is so devastating.

[RaceBannon]

Beth Trigg

This post contains traumatic content. Stop reading if you need to.

I am not even close to being able to tell the story of the last 5 days in Swannanoa.

What I will say to people who are not in the hardest hit areas of WNC is that there are still huge gaps in communication and many of the worst things that happened have probably not been reported or even understood yet. People are sharing first hand accounts in person or by text that make it clear to me that there are still many, many fatalities that have not yet been discovered or confirmed.

I have personally spoken to people who have dug living and dead people out of a mudslide, seen their neighbors swept away by water, and seen bodies that haven't been able to be recovered. We have heard stories from Montreat, Grovemont, Beacon Village, Botany Woods - these areas are miles apart from each other and each place really different from the others. A child told me he saw three houses slide down a slope into his neighborhood. Friends had to claw their way to safety with their 7 year old while their neighbors died in the river below them.

And that's only what we've managed to glean about places here in the Swannanoa Valley from communicating with people we know and are directly encountering. It looks like there are multiple other parts of the region horribly hard hit - Marshall, Chimney Rock (”there's nothing there”), Celo, maybe? Places they haven't yet reached in Transylvania County? Haywood? So many roads blown out and who knows what's on the other side. My sister and I each heard from nurse friends who have been working in different hospitals 50 miles apart that it is like a war zone.

As internet connections have returned we are seeing pictures of whole neighborhoods submerged, no doubt with residents in their homes. We don't even begin to know the full extent of this yet.

Western North Carolina is full of creeks, rivers, gulleys, and all manner of flowing water. Roads and neighborhoods are often called “___ Creek” - Haw Creek, Bent Creek, Garren Creek, Gap Creek to name a few in Buncombe County. Communities are often named after the river that flows through them like South Toe in Yancey or Tuckaseigee in Jackson County. We have hollers and steep coves. We have steep terrain and windy 2-lane or 1-lane roads.

Here many people live in trailers. Houses and trailers are often down at the end of a road or tucked in a cove or in a neighborhood along a creek or river or down at the bottom of a valley or on a slope. Towns were built along rivers and neighborhoods tucked in here and there as towns and communities grew. Realtors highlight “bold creek” in home listings as a selling point. Trailer parks are often near creeks or rivers and many houses and roads are near streams, creeks, and rivers.

Sometimes things flood here. Certainly we had our share of flood struggles during the 15 years I lived on a small farm in a river valley. But this event was nothing we would have ever thought possible.

Our neighborhood and the whole Swannanoa Valley is in the purple zone of this map, where the chance of getting this amount of rainfall in 48 hours was once in 1000 years. Which maybe just means no one's ever seen anything like that and there's no precedent in history. Streets, neighborhoods, places have been wiped off the map. People had no chance to escape.

Schools are closed indefinitely. People are not even close to being able to go to work. We are focused on: Food. Water. Medication. Transportation. Hygiene. Who is alive. Who is missing. Who is dead. I feel like we are very much still in triage and cleanup hasn't even really begun.

Please keep paying attention and drawing attention if you are not from here. This is going to be a long haul.

I am so profoundly grateful for community and the way people are showing up for each other here. How can we find a way through this unfathomable experience?

[bert]

-——these are hollers, not flood plains, you don’t know what your talking about......-———

The person making that statement is the ignorant one. A holller is a water carved path in a maintain side. They can be miles long but are in fact still the remnants of what were once mountain slopes. The base of a holler is a creek or stream. Hollers end up in valleys that contain rivers.

The rivers have vast flat lands on their perimeters that may be very wide. In Erwin Tennessee, the Nolichucky River spills out of a gorge and immediately enters a long and fairly wide section that is the flood plain. That is when there is his high flow, the water spills out over a very wide area.

Further down stream, the area near Chucky where the Davy Crockett state Park and the gone Ernest bridge were is some of the very best farmland in America. That land is flood plain that has built up over eons with material flowing from the mountains before it cot to Erwin, miles and miles up stream.

In Erwin, this wide area along the Nolichucky became the growth area for the town Erwin. A hospital, a Holiday inn, a Walmart and industrial facilities were built there. There was also a fairly large trailer park. Erwin was built up on high grown but grew along the flood plain in recent years. Interstate 81 was built along all of the above. The bridge across the Nolichucky was knocked out making travel to Asheville NC impossible on I 26.

Of interest is the fact that I 40 from Knoxville to ashville is destroyed. The heavily traveled I 40 and I 26 corridors across the mountains are now gone. Interstate travel across the mountain must now travel an additional 100 miles or so up I 81 to I 77 down from Virginia to North Carolina. Bad News, very bad news. I 40 may never go back in service the damage along the pigeon river is so severe.

The hospital was quickly flooded and patients were evacuated from the roof by helicopter. A pant that manufactured plastic pipe was flooded and several dedicated employees died trying to save what they could. The plant had a vast storage yard where the large coils of plastic pipe inventory was stored. That inventory all floated away until it was stopped by I believe trees. The coils came loose and there is a fantastic mess of the uncoiled plastic pipe. Next to the plastic plant was a plyeood didtribution center with lots and lots of plastic plywood bundles. It ia also gone but I haven’t seen any photos of where. There was a ton of stored plywood there.

[RaceBannon]

So, you agree with me?

Cuz Tennessee flooding happened like you said, North Carolina flooding happened like I said.

Greenville, SC flooding happened with some lowlands midtown adjacent to the Reedy River.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/VpVmszDgxevdqsmU/?mibextid=qi2Omg

I saw it from the highway, that is the area if old factories, new public parks, unheard of river heights.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/97WiJ7pgGrj2MuB9/?mibextid=qi2Omg
Some rivers and holler drainage wiping out towns might make a land into a plain after, but when a river is normally cresting at 8 feet and rises to over 20, that area that gets flooded ain’t a flood plain.

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/ZJrLHpUB7t4hKfci/?mibextid=D5vuiz

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/jBtkGcvrkxkW7Liy/?mibextid=xfxF2i
Spruce Pine had a wave come through

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/UTVMC7TCa4gFpF9c/?mibextid=xfxF2i
Madison County ain’t no flood plain

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/3gdpQE6FEq9stUTD/?mibextid=D5vuiz
Marshall ain’t no flood plain

The flattest land I can think of near me that flooded was Hendersonville, and that ain’t that flat at all, really, but they had 2 feet in the street the day before the hurricane hit!

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/i8gvH8uq7vwEDHKY/?mibextid=D5vuiz

[mewzilla]

We had around 22” in my Upstate NY neck of the woods from Agnes.

We didn’t have FEMA then.

And right now I’m thanking God for that.

[RaceBannon]

I40 and i26 on the NC side got whacked, too.

My trips to Sevierville area on 26 made me think of landslides taking out the highway, not flooding!

They would need to blast away half the mountains to make either of thosev2 roads viable again for interstate travel.

They’ve been widening 26 for the 7 years I been in greenville from the sc border into asheville...well, that just ended...

I drove through Swanannoa to get to the VA hospital, that town is gone.
That river was wide enough to canoe but rocky, normally.
It crested 20 feet.
Swannanoa is gone I was told.
There was a homeless camp near the river. No one knows who made it, they only know each other.
The people from there who get interviewed on the radio, former GOP people confirm bodies on the river banks, floaters, rumors of dead bodies in trees, rumors of hundreds of unclaimed bodies.
Over 600 missing still in the Asheville area alone.
Trees gone around me, power lines down, traffic lights out, my fridge is empty...
But I got gas, flashlights, some places are open near enough to me. Floods didn’t affect me directly.
I am blessed.

[RaceBannon]

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/YFvNrrDxMphp2umY/?mibextid=D5vuiz

Erwin tn

[RaceBannon]

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/FqvwzVNYtjiVHw2U/?mibextid=D5vuiz

Biltmore Village
2 feet to 3 feet of rain...

[RaceBannon]

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/jtqPnFkuYUq9DYKK/?mibextid=D5vuiz

Marshall nc

[RaceBannon]

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/PjWgfSmXfabutG19/?mibextid=D5vuiz

Chimney rock

[RaceBannon]

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/mnABd5RBUr9bSrFk/?mibextid=D5vuiz

Swannanoa, hwy 70. Wow!

[RaceBannon]

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/pduZjSupTGoUFvnb/?mibextid=xfxF2i

Chimney rock, lake lure

[bert]

I travel several times a year over the mountain via I 26 and on to Greenville SC. The thirty miles of construction out of Asheville is a head ache.

I can’t remember where the river is near that work. Has that work been damaged?

There is a professional engineer with a you tube channel who has an episode on the construction issues in E Ten and W NC. He cited the greatest rainfall in the area resulted from the collisions of two hurricanes in 1922. So, we have experienced the definition of a hundred year flood.

[RaceBannon]

I never saw a river there at all, I think all that was the clay soil, rain since Tuesday last week, then 2 feet of rain a d more Friday and Saturday.

[RaceBannon]

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/YFLK7ZN2ETGeHiDZ/?mibextid=D5vuiz

Bat Cave, NC

[SE Mom]

Thanks for the local update. There are so many rumors it’s hard to know what’s real. I’ve read some reports “rumors” of maybe 1,000 plus deaths, but no media is saying anything except vague “many more missing”...

Like many, I’m praying for the strength and recovery for all of you who have lost so much. God Bless.