Just wondering about the nearly 100 people killed in the recent hurricane and am hearing most people drown in their house or cars and curious if its because they don't understand the level of danger or just ignore the warnings. It seems like with several days warning notice everyone would jump in their car and leave or get in tall building or something to reduce the risk?
In 1989 Hurricane Hugo came through much of the same area that Helene just hit. Hugo was still a Category 1 hurricane when it came through Hickory NC, where I live now. I was living in Raleigh back then but my parents were here. It's the storm everyone around here still talked about, 35 years later......until this past weekend. Hugo was mainly wind and there are places in the woods still clogged with rotting trees blown over 35 years ago, and homeowners point out the trees they replaced and what parts of their home had to be rebuilt after Hugo passed.
Helene was a totally different animal, partly because of its track, compared to Hugo's track. Hugo came in from Charleston, from the southeast, and the eye passed over west-central NC, so the rain event was to the north, but it wasn't as much rain as Helene brought from the Gulf. Helene's eye passed west of Asheville, it was moving faster, and even though Helene had dropped to tropical storm strength, there were still hurricane strength gusts, and the northeast quadrant of the storm crossed the western portion of NC and the NC mountains. Mountains tend to pull the moisture out of a storm such as this and we had been in a stalled front dumping heavy thunderstorms for the four days before Helene reached us. I measured 6 inches of rain from Monday afternoon to Thursday night at midnight, about the time Helene made landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida. From Midnight Thursday until noon Friday , just 12 hours I thought might never end, I got another 8 inches of rain. It only took Helene those 12 hours to travel from the Gulf to the western Appalachians, and everyone along the way got flooded. We had a lot of trees that fell over instead of broken off, because the ground was so saturated. A 50 mph gust was all it took. I had two large pines along my property line that were blown over, the roots sticking out of the ground. Nothing hit my house, but my chain link fence was flattened in two places plus a drive through gate destroyed. I never lost power or cell service, internet was down from late Thursday until this morning. I was one of the lucky ones.
I'm glad we live at about3,000 Ft. elevation. We do not need flood insurance. Wind, snow and earthquakes are another thing.
Boone NC is at 3300 feet and was almost washed away. The main street was a river a foot deep.
Actually, the NHC did forecast this event. Either nobody got the memo or nobody wanted to believe it.
From
Hurricane HELENE issued 0700 CDT Thursday, 26 September, 2024
For once, NWS was close in its estimate, but they usually overestimate what we get. In this case they underestimated the rainfall. Some isolated areas of western NC got over 20 inches of rain in about 24 hours. The eastern slopes of the Appalachians has three major rivers (Yadkin, Catawba and Broad) to drain the entire eastern mountainside from Georgia to Virginia and I'm not sure about what drains the western side, it's under TVA control. Those rivers were all out of their banks before reaching the foothills and they drain into the Atlantic at the SC coast. The New River has its own drainage system into the Ohio and drains the far northwest corner of NC. Everything else goes into the Tennessee River system managed by TVA. All the Catawba River lakes were already full to capacity from the several days of thunderstorms prior to Helene. Lake James, the first lake in the Catawba system reached its highest-ever level since it was first filled in 1919. Of the seven lakes on the Catawba River from Lake James to Lake Wylie just southwest of Charlotte, only Lake Hickory, Lake Norman and Lake Wylie can regulate the river flow to any extent, the rest only have overflow spillways and a single hydropower chase inside the dam. At Lake Hickory, where I live, five of the ten flood gates were fully open on Saturday afternoon. The highway bridge in front of the dam (about 150 yards downstream) was closed due to the volume of water running under it, for fear of a possible collapse. I've only seen that much water come over that dam once, over 50 years ago, and the bridge in front was flooded, damaged and replaced a few years later.
Why don't people pack up and leave when warned? Home is all they have, and I suppose they feel better about being lost with it than to leave and come back to nothing.
Need I say more? 
