As the stunning scope of widespread damage across Florida and Georgia becomes clear, extreme rain from Helene continued to unleash catastrophic flooding in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia throughout the weekend.
Helene’s death toll has passed 130, with deaths reported in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. At least 56 people are dead in North Carolina, according to county and state officials, and 30 deaths have been reported in South Carolina, including two firefighters, authorities said.
At least 25 people have died in Georgia with two killed by a tornado in Alamo, according to a spokesperson for Gov. Brian Kemp. In Florida, at least 11 people have died including several people who drowned in Pinellas County. Four deaths have been reported in Tennessee, and two people have died in Virginia, officials said Sunday.
In North Carolina, Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder said officials have received about 600 missing persons reports through an online form. Supplies are being airlifted to the region around the isolated city of Asheville Pinder said, telling The Associated Press she would have food and water to the city by Monday.
“We hear you. We need food and we need water. My staff has been making every request possible to the state for support and we’ve been working with every single organization that has reached out. What I promise you is that we are very close.”
AccuWeather warned the public and officials of the catastrophic risk to lives and property in the southern Appalachians on Sept. 24,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist John Porter, adding that the scale of this historic flooding disaster in the southern Appalachians cannot be understated.
“The majority of homes and businesses in some communities are destroyed and some have been washed away. Bridges, roadways and other expensive and critical infrastructure have been heavily damaged or destroyed.
Pictures and video from the scene, as limited as those reports have been due to ongoing major communication infrastructure damage, suggest one of the worst flooding disasters in United States history, with tragically striking similarities in damage to other catastrophic floods such as flooding associated with Hurricane Katrina, the flooding from Hurricane Harvey and the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Floods of 1889 and 1977.”
According to the NYP, The death toll from catastrophic flooding in the Asheville area of western North Carolina more than tripled on Monday to at least 40 — as survivors in remote mountain towns described seeing the bodies of victims stuck in trees.
Nationwide, there have been at least 133 fatalities from Hurricane Helene, which has cut a path of death and destruction across the Southeast since making landfall last Thursday.
“There were bodies in trees. They were finding bodies under rubble,” said Alyssa Hudson, whose home of Black Mountain — a village of 8,400 people about 12 miles from Asheville — was all but destroyed.
The rains smashed the mountains of Buncombe County, which contains Asheville, washing away whole communities in floodwaters and mudslides. Roadways were buried or dissolved altogether, leaving victims cut off from rescue crews.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
“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.’’
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations.
He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
