Found this on FB. Not mine:

By John Kitsteiner.

Hurricane Helene: A note to friends outside of the South.

We live in Greene County, East Tennessee. Our county’s southern border is the Tennessee-North Carolina state line that runs along the heights of the Appalachian Mountains. We are within the hardest hit region of the U.S.

The questions I have been hearing a lot is why was this so bad, and why weren’t people prepared. I’ll try to answer those questions in the following post.

Hurricane Helene was the strongest hurricane (in recorded history) to hit the Florida panhandle region. It is the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The death toll is over 160 (update 250) so far. We are still finding bodies, and there are still many, many people missing as I write this today six days after the hurricane hit land.

I work in the emergency department at Greeneville Community Hospital. The hospital itself has been evacuated because we have no water in the majority of the county. We are still running our emergency department as a critical access site for our community. Fortunately, I have a well and didn’t lose electricity for long. I was able to haul water in a 300 gallon tote in the back of my truck to the hospital for the first few days so we could flush toilets and wash hands. It took a few days, but we now have porta-potties and water tanks on trucks to keep the emergency department running.

Under an hour from our hospital to the east, Unicoi County Hospital was flooded requiring patients and providers to be rescued from the roof via helicopter.

Under an hour from our hospital to the south, over the mountains, Asheville, NC has been hit particularly hard.

But why was this region hit so hard?

First, we had a lot of rain before Hurricane Helene even showed up. Depending on the area, we had 7-11 inches of rain in the week before the first storm clouds of the hurricane arrived. This rain saturated the ground and filled ponds and streams.

Then the hurricane arrived. She barreled her way up through the panhandle of Florida, quickly shot through Georgia, and then slowed down and stalled over North Carolina and East Tennessee. And that’s right where we live.

The reason she stalled involves atmospheric pressure conditions that I don’t fully understand, but the result was that this hurricane dropped 20 inches to over 30 inches of rain in some areas… that’s an estimated 40 trillion gallons of rain.

How much is 40 trillion gallons of water?

40 trillion gallons of water is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboy’s stadium 51,000 times.

40 trillion gallons of water is enough to cover the entire state of North Carolina with 3.5 FEET of water.

40 trillion gallons of water is enough to fill 60 MILLION Olympic-sized swimming pools.

40 trillion gallons of water is 619 DAYS of water flowing over Niagara Falls.

So this is an unprecedented amount of rain already falling on an area that had just received ground-saturated rain.

But it wasn’t just the amount of rain, it was the geography of where that rain fell.

The southeastern slopes (of western North Carolina) and the northwestern slopes (of East Tennessee) acted as funnels or rain catchments that directed all this water downhill and concentrated it into streams and rivers running into the valleys. It overflowed these streams and rivers causing massive flooding.

How much flooding?

The French Broad River usually crests at 1.5 feet… but it reached 24.6 feet during the storm. The Nolichuckey River rose to almost 22 feet. The Nolichuckey River Dam in Greene County, during the peak of the flooding, took on 1.2 MILLION gallons of water per SECOND. Compare that to Niagara Falls which peaks at 700,000 gallons per second. Fortunately, this dam held… but barely, with damage.

Consequences. The flooding, and all the things the flooding carried with it (large trees, vehicles, buildings, etc.) caused widespread damage. It destroyed homes and businesses. It destroyed roads and bridges. It knocked out power.

This isolated many places for days and days from normal rescue efforts and evacuation plans.

Here in Greene County, the flooding destroyed the intake pump for the county’s primary water supply. We hope they will be able to bring in a temporary pump to bypass the damaged system, but that still may take a couple weeks. In the meantime, most people in the county have no clean water for drinking, washing hands, or bathing, and no water for sanitation.

I have taken care of people in the emergency department who had their homes literally washed away. Everything they own, other than the clothes on their back, has been lost. Many friends have had their homes almost destroyed by flooding and their houses are filled with mud and debris.

And this is just in my immediate area. Other places around us have unfortunately been hit harder.

Why weren’t people prepared?

No one in the mountains of North Carolina or East Tennessee prepares for a hurricane.

It’s kind of like asking why someone in Iowa doesn’t prepare for a tidal wave or why someone in Florida doesn’t prepare for a blizzard.

It’s not what happens, like ever.

This was a combination of already rain-saturated ground before the hurricane hit, the hurricane/storm stalling over this region dumping unprecedented amounts of rainfall in a small area, and the geography of mountains channeling and concentrating all this water into the valleys below that created a perfect storm, so to speak, of conditions that caused this disaster.

It couldn’t have been prevented or prepared for.

Stalling is what made Harvey so hard on the Houston area a few years ago. It just hovers and pours, pours, pours.

It's been a long time since the flood of 1916--- but I hear Helene is worse. :(

My part of Texas goes through a wet/drought cycle that's (I think) is affected by the El Nino/La Nina systems. But, roughly speaking, you expect 5-7 years of rainfall, followed by 5-7 years of drought, and then back to some nice rainy years. Right now, we're about four years into the dry cycle, so we have a little bit of time before the patterns shift again.

The last time we came out of the drought pattern was May, 2015. Texas received 37 trillion gallons of rainfall that month--- enough to cover all of Texas in a puddle 8 inches deep.

Helene dumped 40 trillion gallons of water in a week.

40 trillion gallons of water is 619 DAYS of water flowing over Niagara Falls.

Plant more trees, shrubs. Anything but lawn grass.

East of the Mississippi used to be Eastern deciduous forest. Now its agriculture and lawn grass. Oh, and a good bit of concrete. Neither one of those is very good at mitigating the effects of rain. But, forests are exactly excellent at intercepting a heavy rain, quickly absorbing water the way a damp sponge quickly picks up a spill, but a dry sponge has to 'get damp' first. Forests have all of those layers and layers of duff, which allows moisture the penetrate. Forests have deep soils, with tiny channels created by old dead roots, channels that direct the water down to the aquifers.

Lawn grass has shallow roots, and offers the soil little protection from nuclear radiation. Ya know, that big ball in the sky? ( Hint: all energy is solar energy, just older and newer and that is a nuclear reaction up there in the sky.) So, lawn grass typically has a bit of crust, hard packed crust. No deep roots to penetrate that crust. Water just can only run off in a sudden, heavy rain in event. So, where the forest captures that water, and allows rain to penetrate deep, deep, down to refill the aquifers, lawn grass can only function as the dry sponge it is, slowly, too slowly, sipping the water. So, the water runs. Off our yards, into the ditches or roadways, into the culverts, the streams, creeks, to the rivers. Quickly, quickly. Nothing slowing it, nothing channelling that water deep into the aquifers.

Sounds overwhelming? How do we fix this NOW? First thing, go raise the height of yer lawnmower. . Taller grass has deeper roots. Not by much, but its a thing you can do this minute. Then add trees, shrubs at all the edges and corners of your properties. Native trees and shrubs are probably best, but for rain mitigation, any tree / shrub you add may help. The native plants help with the loss of insect and bird life we are experiencing, which is also a part of our ecosystem's declining balance.

Aside from Ashville, most of the country and us have never heard of these little towns. This is certainly a terrible and rare event. Like other events in this category there's really not a lot people could do to prevent it.

The government's response is under criticism and rightly so I think. They can send ships and helicopters to Gaza and spend hundreds of millions there but I'm hearing they can't even send helicopters to this area? Really? I know that the people of that region are tough mountain people that will solve the problems themselves. I'm impressed by the regular people that are taking the mules in with supplies and using their own copters, etc The regular people are going to deal with it. I see pictures of cars driving around some and some local agencies like Samaritins Purse (Billy Graham's son I think) ALREADY there.

Hitting my LIKE button for NE's response!

NE, Yes, I agree with that. I think the locals will decide that whatever the problems are in their communities, they will eventually fix it themselves instead of relying on the govt to do it for them. Lately, especially, the govt is the source of many communities problems.

It's not just NC - the disaster stretches from Florida to Virginia, and MAJOR highways are gone - not just damaged but gone. Yes, locals will help locals but when we talk about what the government is really for, we say:

#1 Defense of the populace

#2 Roads

At which they have failed miserably in both categories this time. People said the alert to evacuate came way way way too late - remember these folks had not a CLUE that this was coming, unlike Florida and other places used to paying attention and waiting for the alert - and it simply went unheard by a lot of people, and that the highways will be out of commission until at least 2025 which will make it extremely hard to recover at all.

I wholeheartedly disagree with funding disaster relief agencies. Back to Dr Alan Savory, who was able to train people to transform their desert lands in several African nations, where those people relied on relief food drops for sustenance to returning to being productive farm lands. In LESS time than relief agencies would have gotten funding from donations through procurement and distribution. And through continued regenerative farming practices, those lands have remained productive. Some countries, political forces got involved, and guess what? Desertification returned. Dr Savory is not allowed in some countries. And desertification continues.

Why am I harping on fixing desertification when this is a massive flood event? Because desertification and flooding are NOT opposites. They are a function of the same phenomenon: lack of roots in the soil, cover on the land. Your puny little two and a half inch lawn grass is almost barren. No life, and piddly short roots. Very little to slow a rainfall.