Day 6 (Wed, 10/2)
A couple of days ago, we set up Mimi’s Starlink at the community health center where there is a generator running with a couple month’s supply of propane. So that has become the local Wi-Fi hotspot. I try to get there, fleetingly, to check messages once or twice a day. I spend the rest of the day elbow-to-elbow with the rest of the community, clearing trees off of houses and roads, mucking out flooded homes, and participating in and facilitating meetings so that we can organize ourselves and try to help keep each other sane. The rest of the day is spent simply living — feeding ourselves (or being fed by neighbors!!), hauling water, etc. Twelve hours of daylight are not enough to both meet basic needs and tackle the most pressing efforts to recover critical community infrastructure. Meanwhile I had hoped that I’d be able to sleep deeply during the darkness like I often do when backpacking, but sleep has been elusive so far. Fortunately, I have learned over the years that I can function for days at a time with little sleep.
If you read the “pink dot” post that I made last Thursday morning, you’ll know that the NWS and other models predicted a possible 19” of rain for our immediate area, on top of the 7.5” that had already fallen in the previous 18 hrs. Sure enough, over the course of the next 24 hours, we got 19 more inches, for a 44-hr storm total of 26.5”. It’s just an uncanny coincidence that the numbers in my decidedly old-school (8” copper) NWS COOP rain gauge lined up so precisely with the models — there were observers in our valley with up to 30” totals, and strikingly, Mt Mitchell seems to have registered “only” a total of 24.4. I haven’t had enough time online to check with my NWS supervisor if there is a preliminary event summary available yet. But the weather models were insanely accurate. For those who read last week’s FB post or my blog post earlier this past summer, I wrote that in our relatively small headwaters watershed (~30,000 acres upstream from the USGS gauge), the scale of a flood hinges on rainfall rate during the final hours of a storm. The models predicted 7” over the final 6 hrs of this storm, which is exactly what we got (6.95” from 6 am to 1 pm). That by itself would have led to a historic flood, but what really put us over the top were the heaviest rain bands of Helene which came through between 6 and 10 am, when the gauge on Mt Mitchell registered 4.45” in 4 hours. Interestingly, we recorded more rain in the valley than on top of the mountain, where the storm total was 24.4”. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got over 5” during those same 4 hours. Or perhaps the high winds on the mountain (gusted over 100 mph) led to an undercount.
Early Thursday afternoon, about 20 hours before the flood, I sent this email to fellow community members:
If you are anywhere near the river or in a low-lying part of the community, I recommend taking a moment to plug in your address on this map. It is easy to fall into a "recency bias" trap and think that 2004 or 1977 are benchmarks, and that it couldn't get worse than those floods, but in reality there have been floods in this valley much worse than 1977, and there will be again -- perhaps tonight. Due to climate change, if it doesn't happen tonight, it will almost certainly happen in our or our childrens' lifetimes.
In reality, a "much worse" flood of the magnitude that actually occurred was impossible to imagine. The 2024 flood was so far beyond any previous benchmark that even those of us who have long mulled over potential maximum flows of the South Toe River were left aghast.
Estimating from debris lines in the vicinity of the signs we put up earlier this summer next to the USGS river gauge, it seems that the South Toe crested 9’ above the previously highest recorded flood in our valley nearly 50 years ago (26.25’ vs 17.4’ in 1977). I have no idea how to calculate what that means in terms of flow volume, but it must be a mind-boggling amount beyond any previously estimated flow. The creek by our house (which drains a mere 100-acre watershed) became a raging torrent that swept under our house. Fortunately we designed our house to withstand a flood exactly like this, on piers with an open crawl space, so the waters scoured the cat turds and junk that had accumulated over the years and distributed it into our yard and beyond. I have not yet inspected our deep and beefy concrete footers, but I have no reason to believe they’ve been compromised.
The community has come together in an incredible way, and we’ve gotten so much done over the past few days, but there is so, so much more to do (years worth). Nearly all bridges were washed out, many riverside homes swept away, or compromised beyond repair. In Celo Community a few houses flooded, but most are salvageable. The Inn took a huge hit: the cottage is gone, and hard decisions will need to be made about the rest of the structure. At least two households have lost their homes entirely, and three others will need to move out for an undetermined amount of time for extensive repairs.
It’s been 5 days without power, and yesterday we hosted a briefing by South Toe VFD and the county sheriff. They confirmed our hunch that we may be without power for several more weeks — perhaps a month or more. FBEMC, our local electric coop, cannot even try to hazard an estimate. Their crews, along with trucks and linemen from around the nation, are doing the best they can, but there are many roads and bridges that simply no longer exist. Through monumental efforts, and local ingenuity, enough roads and bridges are passable (one lane, with high clearance 4WD) that it is now possible for people and goods to come and go from our community — slowly and carefully.
At the briefing, we learned that the cell towers around our valley, which we initially thought might come back online in a matter of days, will also be out for weeks. We’ve only had cell service in this valley for about 10 years, so you might think it’d be easy to revert, but without power or landlines, our modes of communication have actually lost about a century’s worth of technological progress. Word-of-mouth, bulletin boards, and meetings are how we spread information. It’s like the COVID pandemic flipped on its head: person-to-person communication, unmediated by digital lines, is the only way to converse and connect with one another. Which, of course, is the silver lining to this hurricane-sized cloud.
The incredibly hard-working and compassionate volunteers of South Toe Fire Department, going door to door, tiny community by tiny community, have checked on 85% of the South Toe community. They have not yet reached the very end of the valley, but hope to do so in the next day or two.
The most sobering and downright tearful news we received at the meeting was about the situation in some of the rest of the county. Pensacola and other communities along the Cane River (an even more rugged and isolated valley on the other side of the Black Mts) bore the brunt of the storm — perhaps among the worst in all of WNC. Highway 197 (their equivalent to our NC80) is virtually gone. Only helicopters have been able to get to the upper reaches of the inhabited parts of the Cane River Valley, so local responders have limited knowledge about what is going on there, who has survived and who was lost.
Many people have reached out wondering how they can help. At the moment, you can donate directly to the South Toe VFD, or any of the county fire departments, or to MCHP (our local non-profit health center). I will post links in the comments. Undoubtedly there will be more avenues established over the coming months to donate to relief and recovery efforts. If you live outside of the disaster area and have family or friends here that would benefit from evacuating, you can coordinate to transport those folks out and give them a place to live for the next month. Thanks for all the love and support; it is deeply felt.
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