Hurricane Helene

[3767]

Governor cooper has issue a warning that only emergency personal will be allowed in the western part of the state. Local roads remain closed. I 40 and I 26 in Asheville will remain closed to travel. They are diverting traffic to I 81 to Virginia. So..if someone was thinking of looking at all this damage, save yourself the time as you won’t get close.

[zicc1835]

prayers to you all that have been impacted

[custom10nut]

Originally Posted by A1971Blazer

We are fine here, the closest major damage was in Newport, about an hour and a half east of my location and Erwin TN about 3 hrs away.
East of there, in upper ET and over into NC is the worst of it. The mountains often protect us here, in the valley on this side, from bad weather events.
All the dams are spilling at record levels. Ft Loudon Dam, just 3 miles from me, is spilling half a million gallons per second on the Tennesse River system.

(I’m just south of Newport)
Yep, downtown Newport had water, but no buildings washed away.
Hartford (10 miles south on the Pigeon River) suffered major damage, and Del Rio (on the French Broad) had many buildings swept away by the water.
Asheville NC was stranded, with all roads in/out impassable, but now have limited accessibility.
Both I-40 and I-26 are shut down until further notice.
It’s going to a long while for things to get back to normal

[Andy4639]

Hey everyone, yes we are fine on the SC coast. We had a little rain and some wind but nothing major. In fact we had our screened in porch redone last week while this storm passed through. Once the porch was done they put up another section on my shop as well. I spent today making tire racks and cleaning up the yard.
Thanks for asking.
Ashville and surrounding area's are bad though. I-40 is closed until next year some time to fix the east bound lanes that got washed out. Several mud slides also. Chimney Rock,is no long with us as a town. It is all but in the lake now. Lots of destruction but people are pulling together and making things happen.My brother just returned to his house in Ashville today and I'm waiting on him to figure out if I need to go up and help him get things back in order, he is gonna let me know later this week.

[Getter-Done]

Originally Posted by Andy4639

Hey everyone, yes we are fine on the SC coast. We had a little rain and some wind but nothing major. In fact we had our screened in porch redone last week while this storm passed through. Once the porch was done they put up another section on my shop as well. I spent today making tire racks and cleaning up the yard.
Thanks for asking.
Ashville and surrounding area's are bad though. I-40 is closed until next year some time to fix the east bound lanes that got washed out. Several mud slides also. Chimney Rock,is no long with us as a town. It is all but in the lake now. Lots of destruction but people are pulling together and making things happen.My brother just returned to his house in Ashville today and I'm waiting on him to figure out if I need to go up and help him get things back in order, he is gonna let me know later this week.

Glad to hear this.

Maybe the Ferry Boat Business will start back up .

They have that Years ago in my Area.

[Andy4639]

My wifes cousin house is gone. Lucky for them it's a weekend getaway house for them. It's totaly gone along with several others along the creek they had lived on which now is a river. They said it 3 times wider than before and everything on both sides is gone.
We were lucky this storm didn't effect us much.

[Boog]

You were very fortunate Andy. Glad to hear y'all are good.

[DPowers]

Im in Parrottsville TN which borders Newport to the north. Other than no running water from Sunday until Wednesday; we have no damage at my place, so we are blessed. I was at C10s in the Valley in Maggie Valley NC last weekend. Its 44 miles away from home so drive back and forth across I40 each day and actually crossed the area on I40 that collapsed about an hour before it went. No cell service or internet and no way out as I40 was closed, I26 was closed as well as the Parkway through Cherokee NC. Hot Springs was flooded also. I was able to get home on Saturday but took 6 hours. Traveled southwest on 74 to Murphy NC across Hiawasee through Tellico Plains, Maryville etc.
The devastation is sobering to say the least. I 40 will be closed for at least two years and I26 a year at least.
The following is from a FB post from a John Kitsteiner

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 Florida’s big bend region (on the eastern edge of the panhandle). 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.