Helene fallout continues; hundreds still missing; at least 60 dead in NC; flooding and wind damage still widespread in Southern Appalachians; National Guard in action; land access, supplies, communications, water and power still spotty

This story will be updated.
The original story and updates continue below.
We have been adding more images, videos, links, live or interactive graphs and specifics to earlier updates, too. So, keep scrolling to glean them after touching the More… button. You may want to bookmark some of the interactive features for your own present and future use.

Demolished vehicles are seen in the area of what used to be Red Banks Campground in the Chestoa area of Unicoi County.  Thomas Fraser/Hellbender Press

ERWIN — The death toll from Hurricane Helene climbed to at least 180 people on Wednesday, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States in 50 years with the exception of Hurricane Katrina, which claimed over 1,800 lives in 2005 in what was also a largely impoverished area.

In one-hard hit community in the mountains of northeast Tennessee, emotions grew high as Spanish-speaking family of missing loved ones accused first responders through an interpreter of showboating, classism and preferential rescues during a tense press conference broadcast live on X.

The mounting death toll and increasingly fruitless searches came as millions of people spent their sixth day without running water or power and an ad hoc army of first responders, volunteers and National Guard troops struggled to deliver life-saving supplies to communities throughout the Southern Appalachians that were cut off by the record breaking flash floods spawned by the storm.

In Erwin, a town of 6,000 in Unicoi County, officials confirmed that a criminal investigation had been launched into the conduct of a manufacturing company that was accused of forcing employees to keep working even as floodwaters rose to dangerous levels.

Toxic smoke from the Sept. 30 BioLab fire pours across Interstate 20 just east of Atlanta, shutting down the vital artery for hours and complicating evacuation efforts during the chemical fire.  YouTube

Fourth chemical fire at pool-chemical plant since 2004 prompts widespread evacuations

ATLANTA — The eastern side of the Atlanta metropolitan area was blanketed the morning of Sept. 30 with a fog of smoke and chlorine-scented gases, surprising residents already rattled by Hurricane Helene and an unrelated failure at the Adamsville Pumping Station. 

The heavy, blue-green mist was coming from BioLab, a pool chemical manufacturing facility in Rockdale County, 23 miles southeast of downtown.

City officials were taken by surprise. This was at least the fourth time BioLab had caught fire since 2004, but prevailing winds usually carry the toxic plume across rural counties and into the Georgia mountains. Hurricane Helene had scrambled wind patterns, however, and pushed it into wealthy, suburban DeKalb and Gwinnet counties and parts of Fulton County.

Rockdale County had begun evacuating 19,000 Conyers residents early Sunday morning, when the fire began. Another 90,000 residents were told to shelter in place, with windows sealed shut and ventilation systems turned off.

The fire itself was extinguished by late afternoon, but the sprinkler system had soaked mountains of reactive pool and spa chemicals with water. The resulting plumes of chlorine, particulates and other chemicals spread across Rockdale, prompting the county to close schools and businesses for the following day.

Debris hangs from trees on the banks of the French Broad River near the main building of Hot Springs Resort and Spa. The river gauge at Hot Springs was offline during the main rain events immediately preceding the Sept. 27 floods but registered a peak just under 21 feet. The record stage is 22 feet, but that record will likely fall after review of provisional weather-gauge data by the National Weather Service.  Thomas Fraser/Hellbender Press

Two weeks after epic floods, a far cry from normalcy; utility repairs continue; Del Rio still reels; Hot Springs limps; outpouring of help and mountain grit as battered communities take stock

This story will be updated.
The original story and updates continue below. We have been adding more images, videos, links, live or interactive graphs and specifics to our earlier reporting and updates.

GATLINBURG — Great Smoky Mountains National Park staff continue to assess the damage sustained by the country’s most-visited national park during Tropical Storm Helene. (The storm was at tropical storm strength when it struck the mountains Sept. 26-27, prompting a rare tropical-storm warning for Western North Carolina).

The Cataloochee and Big Creek areas on the North Carolina side in Haywood County were particularly hard-hit, and significant damage was reported to park cultural resources and road and bridge infrastructure. Those areas remain closed. Most roads and trails on the Tennessee side of the national park are open. Cataloochee is a valuable tourist draw during the fall rutting season of elk populations successfully reintroduced to the park in the 1990s.

 Tropical Storm Helene destroyed Upper Cataloochee Road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and damaged other park infrastructure and historical resources.  National Park Service

Here’s an update from the National Park Service:

“The park experienced substantial damage, particularly in North Carolina, including Balsam Mountain, Big Creek and Cataloochee Valley.

NCEI’s Physical Archive in Asheville, N.C. contains historical environmental data on paper and film. The Physical Archive remains safe and secure following Hurricane Helene and catastrophic flooding in the Southern Appalachians.  NOAA

Staff and data holdings safe; webpages, products and services in the process of coming back online

John Bateman is a public affairs officer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

ASHEVILLE — NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), headquartered in Asheville, is recovering from the impacts of Hurricane Helene. NCEI has confirmed that all of its employees and staff are safe, and is continuing to support them through the storm recovery. NCEI data holdings — including its paper and film records — are safe. 

NCEI’s broadband internet provider is now fully operational. In addition to the recently reestablished connectivity, NCEI is leveraging facilities and staff in Colorado, Mississippi and Maryland to bring some system and data “ingest” capabilities back into operation. NCEI has resumed the majority of its data ingest streams and can confirm that data are being securely archived. We expect all ingest data pathways to be fully operational in the next two weeks.

NCEI continues to work with data providers to recoup data that were not ingested while systems were down. This work will take up to three months to be completed. NCEI will recover as much data as possible, however, some observations might eventually be unrecoverable. 

The CSX rail line through the Nolichucky River Gorge near Erwin, Tennessee was one of many transportation and vital commerce links destroyed by epic river flooding spawned by Tropical Storm Helene Sept. 26-27, 2024.  Jonathan Mitchell for Hellbender Press

ORNL Climate Change Institute: Weirdly warm water that spawned and fed Hurricane Helene was 500 times more likely due to climate change

OAK RIDGE — Hellbender Press spoke with Oak Ridge National Laboratory Climate Change Science Institute Director Peter Thornton about whether Hurricane Helene and its subsequent and disastrous impact on the Southern Appalachians was made worse by climate change. Citing an increasing scientific ability to link climate change to specific weather events, he said in a very matter-of-fact manner that yes, Helene was fueled by the symptoms and consequences of global warming caused by human emissions of carbon and other pollutants.

Thornton cited a World Weather Attribution report as a main source for his data and commentary, and summarized its research on Helene for Hellbender Press. Here is the interview, edited for clarity and brevity:

“I am the director of the Climate Change ScienceInstitute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I am a corporate fellow researchstaff at the laboratory in the area of earth system modeling and coupled carbon-cycle climatefeedbacks at the global scale all the way down to local scales.” 

HP: The effects of Hurricane Helene were worsened by preceding rain events, correct?

“The event as it played out along the sort of the eastern flankof the Southern Appalachians was influenced strongly by precipitation that came beforethe storm even made landfall. There was what’s referred to as a stalled cold front, which was sitting over that SouthernAppalachian region and the front, kind of a linear element, stretched from Atlanta up along the flankof the Southern Appalachians.

“There were river stages that were already approaching record levels in some areasof that region before the storm arrived. There was probably moisture being pulled in from theouter bands of the storm into that stalled cold front, which was making that precipitation eventslightly bigger than it would have been otherwise. But it was an independentsynoptic-scale meteorological event.

(That could be linked to increased moisture, a hallmark of climate change, on the fringes of the tropical system, but there’s no data on that yet).

Peter Thornton, director of the Climate Change Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is shown here doing climate-research field work in 2015. ORNL

The Hiram Caldwell House looks out over a road rendered impassable following major flooding on Rough Fork Creek. Cataloochee Valley is closed until further notice.  National Park Service

Damage to park infrastructure widespread on North Carolina side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Holly Kays is the lead writer for Smokies Life. 

GATLINBURG — As Hurricane Helene gathered strength in the southern Gulf of Mexico, it seemed likely Great Smoky Mountains National Park would take a direct hit. The storm was a category 4 before slamming Florida’s Gulf Coast; then it headed north toward the Smokies.

But its course shifted east. Helene and its predecessor storm dropped unfathomable amounts of rain across Southern Appalachia — many places received well over a dozen inches in a matter of days, with some locations recording two dozen or more. The storm’s severity was unprecedented in the region, causing flash floods and landslides that have so far claimed at least 95 lives in North Carolina alone. Asheville, where extreme flooding destroyed entire neighborhoods and decimated the water system, logged more than 14 inches between September 24 and September 28.

Most of the park fell far enough west of Helene’s path to escape with only minor flooding, but its extreme eastern region — Cataloochee, Balsam Mountain, Big Creek — was inundated. Record-setting rains tore out trails and roads and damaged historic buildings, leading the park to close these areas until further notice.

Cataloochee Valley is closed until further notice after flooding from Rough Creek Fork rendered Upper Cataloochee Valley Road impassable.  National Park Service

In East Tennessee on Tuesday, Gov. Bill Lee viewed a buckled road damaged by the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.  Brandon Hull/Office of the Governor via Tennessee Lookout

National health care groups warned in 2022 that the unusual Tenncare fund now being used for disaster relief would redirect dollars away from low-income enrollees

Anita Wadhwani is a senior reporter for Tennessee Lookout.

NASHVILLE ­— In the days after Hurricane Helene unleashed catastrophic floods across parts of East Tennessee — killing 17 and inflicting hundreds of millions of dollars in damage — Gov. Bill Lee convened a series of conference calls with his cabinet members to urge his team to “think outside the box” in how to get desperately needed capital to hard-hit rural counties.

TennCare Director Stephen Smith offered up a novel idea: tap into a special savings pool within Tennessee’s Medicaid program, which draws on a combination of state and federal funds to pay the health care bills for 1.5 million Tennesseans living in or near poverty — among them pregnant women, children, seniors and those with disabilities.

Lee, who later recounted the conversation at a news conference, went with it.

The Helene Emergency Assistance Loans (HEAL) program will direct $100 million in no-interest loans from TennCare to 13 disaster-struck Tennessee counties, tapping so-called “shared savings” funds that are unique to the state’s Medicaid program.

The ForWarn vegetation tracking tool shows areas of red where extreme disturbance to the forest canopy occurred in Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and southern Virginia as a result of Hurricane Helene in late September 2024.  Jitendra Kumar/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Information will help timber gleaning, fire-hazard mitigation

Stephanie Seay is a senior science writer and communications specialist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

OAK RIDGE — A visualization tool that tracks changes to the nation’s forests in near-real time is helping resource managers pinpoint areas with the most damage from Hurricane Helene in the Southeast.

The ForWarn visualization tool was co-developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the U.S. Forest Service. The tool captures and analyzes satellite imagery to track impacts such as storms, wildfire and pests on forests across the nation. 

When staff with the Forest Service’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center in Asheville, North Carolina, were unable to work in the immediate aftermath of Helene due to utility outages, the ORNL-hosted ForWarn system continued monitoring the storm’s impact and providing reports. ForWarn indicated areas of severe disturbance to the forest canopy that were later confirmed by aerial photography. 

“ForWarn helps quickly identify areas that may need remediation such as timber harvesting or prescribed burns as piles of felled trees dry out and potentially pose wildfire hazards,” said ORNL’s Jitendra Kumar.

Water rose an estimated 15-18 feet on this side channel of North Fork of the Catawba River near Marion, N.C.  Photos by Mark Barrett

Impromptu backcountry hike reveals extent of remote storm wreckage in WNC

Mark Barrett is an Asheville-based journalist. He reported for the New York Times at the height of Tropical Storm Helene.

MARION — I had a lot of chores to do Saturday but went hiking instead. I had read that the Mountains-to-Sea Trail was open from Woodlawn, N.C., a few miles north of Marion, east to the North Fork of the Catawba River so I decided to see what was left of the pedestrian bridge across the river after Helene.

I took a logging road part of the way there and before I reached the river I managed to make a wrong turn. Once I realized my mistake I decided to go cross country instead of retracing my steps since that would be shorter.

I walked into one of the scenes folks living in Western North Carolina are familiar with: Helene blew down two out of every three trees. Places like this make hiking a contact sport, and a slow and laborious one at that. Still, it was interesting to see.

 After maybe half a mile of walking on, under and over downed trees, I made it into open woods and not far after that, to the spot where the bridge once stood. The only things visible were the abutments on either end and the pier, which had washed 50 to 100 yards downstream. Photos of the pier taken before Helene show it sitting on dry ground with an area behind it where it looks like water washed through during a flood. On my way back toward my car, I saw the main part of the bridge on the opposite side of the river a third of a mile or so downstream. 

Epic flooding from Tropical Storm Helene destroyed the CSX railroad bed along the length of the Nolichucky River Gorge near Erwin. TDEC and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this month ordered the transportation company to stop dredging materials from the river to repair its railroad line.  Jonathan Mitchell for Hellbender Press

Company accused of illegally mining river rocks, sediment to shore up rail lines washed out by Helene

This story was originally published by Tennessee Lookout.

ERWIN — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Tennessee environmental regulators ordered CSX Transportation to stop dredging the Nolichucky River Gorge for rocks and sediment being used to shore up a rail line washed away by Tropical Storm Helene. 

In separate letters issued to the Fortune 500 company this month, the Corps and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) warned, the company’s dredging was unauthorized — and noted CSX had continued dredging activities even after being put on notice last month by both agencies.

The company is prohibited from performing “any excavation or dredging of material from the Nolichucky River or its tributaries in both Tennessee and North Carolina, the Dec. 2 letter from the Corps said. CSX must “immediately cease and desist” its dredging, TDEC’s Dec. 6 letter said. 

Dredging poses serious risks to the river’s aquatic life and increases the potential of downstream flooding in the future for communities that rely on the Nolichucky for outdoor recreation and the tourist dollars it brings in, a lawsuit filed by lawyers with the Southern Environmental Law Center said last month.