Tue Oct 01 02:20:28 UTC 2024: ## Historic Rainfall From Hurricane Helene and Preceding Storms Cause Devastating Floods in Southeast US
**Bat Cave, North Carolina, October 1, 2024** – A drone image captures the damage inflicted on a bridge on US Route 64 in Bat Cave, North Carolina, a grim testament to the devastating floods that have ravaged the Southeast US. The floods are the result of unprecedented rainfall from Hurricane Helene and a preceding rainstorm, totaling an astonishing 40 trillion gallons.
Experts are stunned by the sheer volume of water, which is enough to fill Dallas Cowboys Stadium 51,000 times or Lake Tahoe once. If distributed evenly across North Carolina, the water would reach a depth of 3.5 feet.
“This is an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center. “In my 25 years at the weather service, I have never seen anything this geographically extensive and with such a sheer volume of water falling from the sky.”
The floods have left a trail of destruction, claiming over 100 lives and prompting descriptions of “apocalyptic damage” from meteorologists. Private meteorologist Ryan Maue calculated the rainfall, attributing 20 trillion gallons to Hurricane Helene alone.
Experts agree that the flooding was caused by a perfect storm scenario. Days of heavy rain preceding Helene, attributed to a stalled low-pressure system and a storm parked off the North Carolina coast, saturated the ground. Hurricane Helene, a large and fast-moving storm, then brought additional torrential rainfall, especially in the Appalachian Mountains. The mountains, reaching elevations between 3,000 and 6,000 feet, amplified the rainfall, causing the rivers to overflow and leading to widespread flooding.
“It wasn’t just one perfect storm, but a combination of multiple storms that led to the enormous amount of rain,” said Maue. “That collected at high elevation, and when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
While the exact role of climate change in this event is still debated, many experts see it as a significant contributing factor. Warmer temperatures lead to increased moisture in the atmosphere, potentially leading to more intense storms and heavier rainfall.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina,” said state climatologist Kathie Dello. “But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction.”
First Piper 