Hurricane Helene made landfall as a category 4 hurricane near Perry, Florida, Thursday night, but some of the worst destruction occurred hours later, in the land-locked mountains of western North Carolina.
How? An unheard of amount of rain. Trillions and trillions of gallons, to be exact.
Weather experts have described the conditions that transpired in and around Asheville as a “worst-case scenario” for the region. While the deadly storm was forming in the Gulf of Mexico, western North Carolina was experiencing a succession of otherwise ordinary rainstorms. Rivers and lakes in some areas were already at flood level when Helene arrived as a Tropical Storm.
According to the North Carolina State Climate Office, the tiny Yancey County town of Busick saw a total of 31.33 inches of rain—more than 2.5 feet—between Wednesday and Friday.
All told, the eastern United States experienced 40 trillion gallons of rain last week, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Florida from Hurricane Helene. It’s an unfathomable amount.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, was the one who made those calculations. For some much-needed perspective, the Associated Press reports points out that 40 trillion gallons of water is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, told the outlet. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.’’
Experts believe that it was as many as three storms that combined to create Helene’s apocalyptic results.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue told the AP. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6,000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
Ryan Cole, assistant director of Buncombe County Emergency Services, described the flooding as “biblical.”
“You’ve heard us say catastrophic devastation within our county,” he told the Citizen-Times. “I would go a little bit further and say we have biblical devastation through the county, we’ve had biblical flooding here and it has been extremely significant.”