John Kitsteiner Note for friends outside the South:
We live in Greene County, East Tennessee. Our county’s southern border is the Tennessee-North Carolina state line, which runs along the heights of the Appalachian Mountains. We are in the toughest hit region of the United States
The questions I’ve heard rather a lot are why this was so bad and why people weren’t prepared. I’ll try to reply these questions in the next post.
Hurricane Helene was the strongest hurricane (in history) to hit Florida’s Big Bend region (on the eastern fringe of the panhandle). It is the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The death toll up to now is over 160. We are still finding bodies and lots of, many individuals are still missing as I write this today, six days after the hurricane hit the country.
I work within the emergency room at Greeneville Community Hospital. The hospital itself was evacuated as we have now no water in many of the county. We proceed to operate our emergency department as a crucial resource for our community. Luckily I actually have a well and the ability wasn’t out for long. For the primary few days, I used to be in a position to transport water to the hospital in a 300-gallon container at the back of my truck so we could flush the toilets and wash our hands. It took a number of days, but now we have now porta-potties and water tanks on trucks to maintain the emergency room running.
Less than an hour east of our hospital, Unicoi County Hospital was flooded, requiring patients and doctors to be rescued from the roof by helicopter.
Asheville, NC, lower than an hour from our hospital to the south, over the mountains, was hit particularly hard.
But why was this region hit so hard?
First, we had numerous rain before Hurricane Helene even hit. Depending on the world, we had 7 to 11 inches of rain the week before the hurricane’s first storm clouds arrived. This rain soaked the bottom and filled ponds and streams.
Then the hurricane got here. It raced up through the Florida panhandle, shot quickly through Georgia, then slowed and got here to a stop over North Carolina and East Tennessee. And that is exactly where we live.
The reason it stalled is on account of atmospheric pressure conditions that I do not fully understand, however the result was that this hurricane dropped 20 to over 30 inches of rain in some areas… that is an estimated 40 trillion gallons of rain.
How much is 40 trillion gallons of water?
40 trillion gallons of water is sufficient to cover the complete state of North Carolina with 3.5 feet of water.
40 trillion gallons of water is sufficient to fill 60 MILLION Olympic-sized swimming pools.
40 trillion gallons of water is 619 DAYS of water flowing over Niagara Falls.
So it’s an unprecedented amount of rain already falling on an area that had just received ground-saturated rain.
But it wasn’t just the quantity of rain that mattered, but in addition the geography where the rain fell.
The southeastern slopes (western North Carolina) and northwestern slopes (eastern Tennessee) acted as funnels or rainwater catchments, directing all water downhill and concentrating it in streams and rivers that flowed into the valleys. These streams and rivers overflowed their banks, causing massive flooding.
How many floods?
The French Broad River normally peaks at 1.5 feet, but through the storm it reached 24.6 feet.
The Nolichuckey River rose to almost 22 feet. The Nolichuckey River Dam in Greene County absorbed 1.2 MILLION gallons of water per SECOND through the peak of flooding. Compare that to Niagara Falls, which peaks at 700,000 gallons per second. Fortunately, this dam held, but only just, with damage.
Consequences.
The flooding and every little thing the flooding brought with it (large trees, vehicles, buildings, etc.) caused widespread damage. It destroyed homes and businesses. It destroyed roads and bridges. It turned off the ability.
This left many locations isolated from normal rescue efforts and evacuation plans for days.
Here in Greene County, flooding destroyed the priming pump for the county’s primary water supply. We hope they will install a brief pump to work across the damaged system, but which will take a number of weeks. In the meantime, Most people within the district haven’t any clean water for drinking, washing hands or bathing and no water for sanitation.
I actually have cared for people within the emergency room whose homes were literally washed away. Everything they own, except the garments they wear, is lost. Many friends’ homes have been almost destroyed by flooding and their homes are stuffed with mud and debris.
And that is just in my immediate area. Unfortunately, other places around us were hit harder.
Why weren’t people prepared?
No one within the mountains of North Carolina or East Tennessee prepares for a hurricane.
It’s like asking why someone in Iowa doesn’t prepare for a tidal wave or why someone in Florida doesn’t prepare for a snowstorm. As at all times, it doesn’t rely upon what happens.
This was a mixture of already rain-saturated ground prior to the hurricane, the hurricane/storm settling over this region and dumping unprecedented amounts of rainfall in a small area, and the geography of the mountains channeling and concentrating all of the water into the valleys below an ideal storm, so to talk, of the conditions that caused this disaster.
It could neither have been prevented nor prepared for.
Feel free to share this. Hopefully it answers some questions and provides a greater understanding of what happened and why it’s so devastating.
Pride goes before a fall, so I don’t need to shout that too loudly. . . but from the 15 shares I made a comment six weeks ago, just one could be very down (SUPPORTfrom $3.13 to $2.82, which I hope makes it an excellent higher moonshot). . . Most are up 10% or 20% (versus 3% for the general market). . . and three did very well:
> PRKR – increased by 150%. I didn’t sell.
> CNF – also up 150% – in the previous few days alone, no less, on huge volume, I don’t know why. Yesterday I sold some at a tax loss and kept all of the ones where I made a profit.
> SQNS – increased by 100%. That was $200 million should get . . . they’ve. So at about $1 a share in money minus debt and a profitable company, I’m betting it would proceed to rise.
