Hurricane Helene has become the fourth deadliest US storm in the past 20 years — after a devastating 40 trillion gallons of water were dumped across the south in a matter of days.
At least 152 people have been confirmed dead across six states as of Tuesday, with Helene’s death toll inching closer to the 156 killed during Hurricane Ian in 2022, according to National Hurricane Center statistics.
The only storm with a higher death toll in recent memory was Hurricane Katrina, when at least 1,392 died after the New Orleans levees failed.
Just days after the Category 4 storm made landfall Thursday, hundreds of people are still missing across the south — suggesting the death toll could continue to rise as rescuers search through the mud with cadaver dogs, helicopters, and hike by foot to remote mountain homes.
And the devastation wrought across the region has been unlike anything seen in recent memory.
Torrents of floodwaters have all but destroyed several communities across the Blue Ridge Mountains, with flash floods pouring down from mountain peaks to drown entire towns, swollen rivers turning thoroughfares into muddy messes and entire valleys becoming lakes with the floating remains of destroyed homes.
The area around Asheville, North Carolina, was hit particularly hard, with at least 50 people confirmed dead. As of Monday evening, there were about 600 people unaccounted for in the surrounding Buncombe County.
“Communities were wiped off the map,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said Tuesday.
While the sustained Category 4 winds of at least 130 mph slammed into Floridians, it was mostly the “apocalyptic” amounts of water dropped from the storm that caused much of the devastation across the south.
Helene, coupled with an ancillary rainstorm in the days preceding its landfall, dumped over 40 trillion gallons of water across the south in just five days, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Water Center director Ed Clark.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” Clark said.
Forty trillion gallons is enough water to fill both Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the reservoirs which supply much of the southwest — twice over, or equates to 619 days worth of constant water flow over Niagara Falls. If poured directly into North Carolina, the state would be covered by 3.5 feet of water.
“I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky,” Clark said.
That near-biblical inundation has devastated infrastructure, cut off power in swaths of the region and left water systems and supplies compromised.
In Asheville, officials warned that it could take weeks to get the water running again.
“And I’m not talking about days,” Mayor Esther Manheimer told the Citizen Times. “We want them to plan for longer than that.”
As the floodwaters begin their slow recession, the cleanup is following the destruction — sometimes turning up grisly discoveries.
In Erwin, Tennessee, a debris field coalesced around the Unicoi Hospital, where 50 people were evacuated from the rooftop during the thick of the flooding.
As crews cleaned up the area, caskets believed to be uprooted from a nearby cemetery littered the carnage surrounding the building, according WeatherNation reporter Will Nunley.
Though the number of missing remains high, many people across the region may simply be trapped in communities that are inaccessible thanks to washed out roads or bridges, and unable to communicate with the outside world due to downed power lines.
“We’ve been going door to door, making sure that we can put eyes on people and see if they’re safe,” said Buncombe County manager Avril Pinder.
“We know that there are places that are still hard to access.”
With Post wires
