Tropical Storm Helene is catastrophic for western NC mountains

By Axios | Created at 2024-09-28 22:00:41 | Updated at 2024-09-30 05:22:59 1 day ago

Life won't soon be the same for communities in North Carolina's mountains after Tropical Storm Helene.

Heartbreak in the hills: The French Broad and Swannanoa rivers swept through Asheville's well-known Biltmore Village and River Arts District. King Street in Boone, a postcard-perfect college town, turned into a rushing river. Interstate 40 is a chopped-up chain of closures.

And in one of the more alarming alerts in some time in this state, the National Weather Service issued an all-caps warning just after 11am Friday to say that a Lake Lure Dam failure was "IMMINENT" and that anybody downriver from it should move to higher ground immediately. Nine disconcerting hours later, Rutherford County Emergency Management said engineers had examined the dam and lifted the "imminent" tag, to unanimous exhale.

Why it matters: We won't know for days the extent of the devastation.

Widespread cellphone outages and road closures, combined with the jagged terrain, make the scope impossible to assess.

"We have had some loss of life, and we're working through that," Buncombe County emergency services director Taylor Jones said Saturday morning. "Right now we have to notify loved ones ... and that's a long process when you're stretched so thin on resources."

"Also our challenges with communication are adding to our [inability] to contact loved ones," Buncombe Sheriff Quentin Miller added.

Rescue efforts: Emergency crews in Buncombe County alone responded to more than 5,000 calls and carried out more than 130 swiftwater rescues as of Saturday morning. Officials there called the situation an "active natural disaster."

Just across the state line in Tennessee, 54 people were stranded on the roof of a hospital for about seven hours in Unicoi County, before officials declared them rescued just after 5pm, Axios Nashville's Adam Tamburin reports.

State of play: A never-before-seen expansive set of extensive and life-threatening flash flood emergencies went into effect for Asheville and surrounding areas Friday.

The NC Department of Transportation at 11:15am issued a staggering warning to say "All roads in Western NC should be considered closed. Do not travel unless an emergency or seeking higher ground."
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper warned of landslides, and called the storm the worst in modern history for parts of western North Carolina.
Pieces of the eastbound lanes of 1-40 vanished along the North Carolina-Tennessee border at the Pigeon River Gorge, WBIR in Knoxville confirmed.
More than a foot of rain had fallen across much of the region as of Friday afternoon. Part of Yancey County, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, saw nearly 30 inches of rain, per the governor's office.

The National Weather Service's preliminary rainfall totals from Helene, as of 11am Saturday. The highest totals are in North Carolina in the Pisgah National Forest. Screenshot: National Weather Service

The big picture: Helene, which made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida Thursday night as a Category 4 hurricane, is one of the most expansive and damaging hurricanes on record for the Southeast, owing to its unusual size and rapid intensification.

As of Saturday morning, at least 52 people across Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia had died as a result of the massive storm, AP reports. About 3.7 million customers were without power in states including Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, according to poweroutage.us.
South Carolina, overlooked in most storm coverage because of the dramatic images elsewhere, had the most outages as of Saturday at more than 1 million. The state also had at least 23 reported deaths, the most from a hurricane since Hugo killed 35 people in 1989, AP noted.
Helene's unusual size meant its effects extended across an unimaginably large triangle of the South, from the southern tip of Florida, north to the South Carolina coast, and west to eastern Arkansas.
Helene rapidly intensified over record-hot ocean waters, which added abundant moisture to the storm. In addition, climate change is allowing hurricanes to produce more heavy rains than they did a few decades ago.

What they're saying: It's rare to see Canton mayor Zeb Smathers, a prolific social media user who's been a vocal champion of his town since the closure of its paper mill in 2023, go quiet on social media.

But after Smathers went silent online for more than 24 hours Friday and Saturday, Smoky Mountain News reporter Cory Vaillancourt connected with him. Smathers expressed frustration with cellular providers and residents' inability to communicate during the storm.
"I mean, we're facing a storm, the worst we've ever had, and ... we're facing it with technology from the 1990s," Smathers said, according to a post from Vaillancourt.

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Editor's note: This is a breaking story and continues to be updated.

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