Receding floodwaters began to reveal the extent of damage from Hurricane Helene as states across the Southeast begin to focus on repairs to critical infrastructure.
Major highways remained closed Sept. 30 between Tennessee and North Carolina, where floodwaters have washed away bridges, landslides have blocked key roadways and floodwaters have piled debris on roads. Nearly 2 million people across seven Southern states were still without power Monday as utilities continued efforts to assess damages to transmission and generation infrastructure, forecasting several more days of darkness for the areas that were hardest hit, including the city of Asheville, N.C.
Asheville, N.C., Among Cities Hardest Hit
Hartwell Carson, French Broad Riverkeeper, who has served as an advocate for the river for more than a decade in Asheville, paddled through some of the area’s most impacted neighborhoods, witnessing buildings torn apart and floating down the river.
“I’ve never seen anything as devastating as the flooded areas I’ve seen,” he says.
Structures in low-lying areas of the city, including the River Arts District and Biltmore Village, were completely underwater, he says, including gas stations and a Wendy’s restaurant with only the sign outside visible above the water. Many low-lying roads and bridges have been washed away.
As of Sept. 30 afternoon, most of the city was still without power and water.
The Swannanoa River, a French Broad tributary, returned to its banks Monday afternoon, Carson said, while the river itself slowly did likewise, after reaching a new record high. During the storm, Carson saw the water at 12 in. to 18 in. above a historic plaque on the nonprofit RiverLink building that marked the water level during the historic 1916 flood in Asheville.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, French Broad River water flow peaked at 24.67 ft at Asheville at about 5 p.m. Sept. 27, up from the normal 1.32 ft measured on Sept. 24. The gauge measured 8.09 ft. at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 30. According to the National Weather Service, the previous record, set during the 1916 flood, was 23.1 ft. The service lists 18 ft as "major flooding," the most extreme level of flood stage.
“It’s hard to even fathom how high it got,” Carson says.
Highway Damage Extensive in Tenn., Carolinas
The Tennessee Dept. of Transportation, in a Sept. 29 update, said it had inspected more than 100 bridges in the preceding 36 hours and still had hundreds more to go, with 27 closed sections of roadway, 14 closed bridges and five bridges totally washed away by storm waters.
Will Reid, agency deputy commissioner and chief engineer, said in a press briefing that hundreds of employees are on the ground as well as technical experts to ready contracts for deployment as early as Sept. 30.
The “truly historic” rainfall data coming in from the storm qualifies it as a 500-year event, he added, noting that hydraulic crossings on interstates are designed to withstand a 100-year flood event.
“We are still in the assessment phase,” Reid said. “Although we are getting some contracts ready for repair, we are still in the debris removal and assessment phase.”
The department is taking a prioritized approach to repair contracts, with a main focus on reconnecting communities that have been severed by closed roads, starting with closed interstates though there was no timeframe for when those interstates may be back open.
“The priority is really driven by the connectivity,” Reid said. That may not be an interstate if a fix to a local road is an easy one and the interstate fix a complex one. “It really is on a case-by-case basis.”
Mark Nagi, agency regional communications officer for east Tennessee, reports that Interstate 40 remained closed in Cocke County, eastbound at mile marker 440 and westbound at mile marker 443.
On the North Carolina side, Interstate 40 and virtually all western state roads remained closed Sept. 30 as North Carolina Dept. of Transportation officials began to assess the full extent of damages.
Agency spokesperson David Uchiyama says it is still too early for repair contracts, while the department’s website lists around 390 roads still closed due to flooding, downed trees, landslides or other damage.
I-40, which connects Asheville to Knoxville, Tenn., through Pisgah and Cherokee National Forests, suffered catastrophic failure in the Pigeon River Gorge, where the flood-swollen river undercut and washed out eastbound lanes of the interstate.
“NCDOT engineers visited the sites Monday morning to physically inspect the damage that is able to be seen,” Uchiyama says of I-40. “[They] will continue working with local, regional, state and federal authorities in the coming weeks of this long process.”
More than 60 of the closed roads are primary routes, including U.S. Highways 64 and 74, the agency says, many due to high water, failed pipes, debris-covered bridges, rock slides and downed power lines. More than 1,600 employees are at work clearing roads and determining how to repair or replace those that are seriously damaged in what the agency expects to be a months-long recovery effort.
Interstate 26, which runs south from Asheville toward Spartanburg, S.C., has been reopened to traffic, though it’s still unclear what damage was done to the agency's I-26 widening project.
In South Carolina, state Dept. of Transportation officials continue to work to clear roadways, saying Monday on X, formerly Twitter, that road and bridge inspection teams are at work assessing highways, while crews worked overnight to clear debris from roadways.
In Florida, more than 2,100 Florida Dept. of Transportation crew members have been assessing damage and clearing roadways, including 61 cut-and-toss crews who cleared Interstate 10 in six hours following Helene’s landfall. Almost 130 bridge inspectors reviewed and cleared 1,400 bridges in Florida, while a 16-mile stretch of State Road 789 in Sarasota and Manatee counties remains inaccessible due to “extreme damage.”
All three causeways in the greater Tampa Bay region were repaired and cleared within 24 hours of landfall, while crews continue to clear and repair other smaller roads across the state’s affected areas.
As of Sept. 30, the agency expected to continue work on all construction projects except in eight of the hardest-hit counties where multiple roads remained closed.
Utilities Continue Work to Restore Electricity
Online tracker poweroutage.us reported more than 724,000 customers without power in South Carolina as of 2 p.m. Sept. 30, as well as 563,000 in Georgia, 416,000 in North Carolina, 111,000 in Florida, with more outages in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio for a total of nearly 2 million customers without power three days after the storm made landfall.
In a Sept. 30 update, Duke Energy announced $1 million to provide assistance to affected communities as it continued to work to restore power in Florida and the Carolinas.
To date, Duke had restored power to more than 1 million customers, with more than 904,000, mainly in upstate South Carolina and western North Carolina, were still without power late on Sept. 29, including 508,000 in South Carolina and 396,000 in North Carolina.
Transmission infrastructure in South Carolina has been heavily damaged or destroyed by wind, flooding and fallen trees, Duke reports, although grid integrity remained stable throughout the storm. Crews are using helicopters, drones and track vehicles to assess damage and continue restoration.
In North Carolina, Duke says damages to infrastructure have been severe, including submerged substations, thousands of downed utility poles and downed transmission towers. Many areas are still unreachable due to mudslides, flooding and blocked roads, with crews continuing to assess and repair infrastructure as quickly as possible.
The storm destroyed numerous electric transmission and distribution facilities, Duke says, including substations, poles, power lines and other system components, all of which must be replaced, repaired or rebuilt before power can be restored.
It will be another several days until the hardest-hit areas have their power restored, it projects, with many areas still inaccessible by utility crews.
TVA Dams Hold; Assessments Continue
In Greene County, Tenn., the Tennessee Valley Authority's Nolichucky Dam was considered at risk of failure before being inspected by its dam safety personnel and cleared as stable and secure on Sept. 28.
The 94-ft-high, 482-ft-long dam was completed in 1913. Not an electricity generating facility, it creates Davy Crockett Reservoir that stretches six miles upstream. The area received more than 19 in. of rain from Helene.
Peak water elevation hit 1,266 ft above sea level at the dam, according to TVA, 9.5 ft higher than the previous record elevation of 1256.6 ft, set on Nov. 6, 1977. At 11 p.m. Sept. 27, the flow rate at the dam reached 1.3 million gallons per second, doubling the flow rate of 613,000 gps from the previous regulated release in 1977.
About 30 minutes after that flow rate was measured on Sept. 27, TVA issued a Condition Red alert, warning of an imminent breach, due to a lack of visibility at the dam and high water levels that at the time were rising 2 ft every hour.
In his update, Reid reported that at the peak, 1.2 million gps were flowing over Nolichucky Dam. For comparison, he added, peak daily flow over Niagara Falls is around 700,000 gps.
Across its entire network of 29 power-generating dams and 19 recreation and flood control dams, TVA says it is continuing to manage high water levels, spilling or sluicing water across the system, including on the mainstem of the Tennessee River.
On X, formerly Twitter, Sept. 28 afternoon, TVA said it is managing record amounts of rainfall from the French Broad, Nolichucky and Pigeon Rivers where all three flow into Douglas Dam near Sevierville and Knoxville in east Tennessee. Controlled releases on Sept. 29 were moving 450,000 gallons of water per second through the dam, using both generating turbines and spill way gates. One of TVA’s largest tributary dams, the 201-ft-high, 1,705-ft-long Douglas Dam on the French Broad River in east Tennessee was completed in 1942, creating a reservoir with a flood-storage capacity of more than 1 million acre-ft.
Biden Commits ‘Every Available Resource’
In an address Sept. 30, President Joe Biden said emergency declarations were approved for Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama, while disaster declarations were approved for North Carolina, Florida and South Carolina, enabling federal funding for debris removal and similar work, as well as providing assistance directly to individuals.
In addition to FEMA personnel, Biden said his team has directed others from the U.S. Dept. of Defense, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Guard, with a total of 3,600 people deployed to help.
“It’s not just a catastrophic storm, it’s historic; a history-making storm for the entire Southeast and Appalachia,” Biden said. “Damage from the hurricane stretches across at least 10 states, winds over 100 miles per hour. In some places storm surges up to 15 ft and record flooding.”
At least 50,000 personnel from 31 states and the District of Columbia and Canada are responding to power outages in the South, a White House press release says, while the Corps is moving generators and additional power generation assets to the hardest hit areas in the Carolinas.
FEMA is also working with the Federal Communications Commission to deploy emergency mobile communications assets, according to the release, with U.S. Coast Guard personnel working on response efforts via post-storm assessments to support reopening of affected ports. The U.S. Dept. of Energy is deploying across the region to monitor power, fuel and supply chain interruptions.
Gulf Coast ABC Pushes for Streamlined Recovery
The Florida Gulf Coast chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors is urging local governments to help streamline the recovery and rebuilding process via waived permit fees for essential repairs, private inspections to alleviate backlogs, expanded access to online permitting and creation of a pre-approved contractor list.
Chapter President and CEO Steve Cona III said the main impact in Tampa, about 100 miles from the center of the hurricane, was damaging storm surge, more than he has seen in 50 years of residence there.
“The major impact, I think, is going to be how we rebuild and what are we going to put into effect that’s going to help with storm surge,” he said. “What we’re going to do is make sure that people are at least a little more prepared.”
