Hurricane Helene

[Sgt. Dick]

Wow - small towns basically washed away.  Areas of complete devastation from Florida to North Carolina.
The death toll is now over 100, but will most likely go much higher.  IMO - some people may never be found.

I'm on the East Coast of Florida and we got very little from the storm.  I have family in GA, both middle & north GA.  Everyone in my family survived the storm, but are dealing with heavy damage in some cases. 

The scenes from the mountain areas are terrible.  Some people who survived the storm may not survive the days after.  Many people are cut off from assistance, without water, food, power, phone, etc.  Florida sent air rescue resources to NC and other support is coming in from many other areas.  Hopefully, the death toll won't climb to much higher.

Foc - how did you make out?

[|iR|Focalor]

Foc - how did you make out?

Easy-peasy here. The old farm pond next door that usually overflows during heavy rains filled right up to the rim and looked like it was juuuust about to spill over and go through my yard, bypassing the dam like it sometimes does,... but it never quite made it. My Neighbor had a small little tree on the property line that split down the middle, and on his other side, he had a younger oak (maybe 40-50yrs) growing against the bank of a culvert that uprooted. I still have 2 or 3 pretty ancient live oaks (200+ yrs probably) and some southern red oaks, they all made it. We got a good bit of rain, but it only lasted a day or two - I guessed that the storm would halt in place and dump water on us for probably 3 full days nonstop, but it moved on through luckily. Some folks around here might've had the odd tree down, but we never even lost power.

I went to Ingles yesterday to do grocery shopping and had to head into town to hit up a bank first to take out 400 bucks cash because they had a sign at the door saying "we are accepting cash only right now, no credit cards or checks." Ingles is a southeastern only chain with stores in NC, GA, SC, and TN. Their home office is either in Asheville or Black Mountain NC - both are completely underwater.

Looks like the storm held on to crazy amounts of water and waited until it got up to the smokey mountains to drop it all. All that water came washing down off the mountains and into the valley all at once. All the little towns through the main valleys just turned into rivers. Somebody posted before and after pics in discord of Chimney Rock NC. It's 100% gone, the WHOLE TOWN, nothing left. If the news is saying it's really bad... they're still understating how bad it is. The entire smokey mountain tourist area is likely completely gone. Like you said, there's likely a lot of people that are never going to be found. The interstates through there are major trucking arteries too and there are lots of spots destroyed that will take a long time to rebuild, so this is probably gonna effect some shipping around NC SC and northeast TN mostly.