Tropical Storm Helene is catastrophic for The Appalachian Mountains
Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina have been especially hard hit.
Tropical Storm Helene is catastrophic for western NC mountains
by Michael Graff, Andrew Freedman & Lucille Sherman
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 cell phone outages and road closures, combined with the jagged terrain, made the scope impossible to assess.
Rescue efforts: Emergency crews in Buncombe County alone responded to more than 3,000 calls and carried out more than 130 swiftwater rescues Friday. 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 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 Friday afternoon, at least 40 people across four states had died as a result of the massive storm, AP reports.
More than a million customers were without power across western North Carolina, Upstate South Carolina and eastern Tennessee as of Saturday morning, according to poweroutage.us.
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.
The bottom line: "A historic rainfall event is underway for the southern Appalachians and vicinity with widespread/locally catastrophic flooding expected," a NWS Greenville-Spartanburg forecast discussion stated.
Editor's note: This is a breaking story and continues to be updated.
https://www.axios.com/local/charlotte/2024/09/27/tropical-storm-helene-nc-mountains-appalachian-flooding-asheville