🌧️ SMOKIES.LIVE STORM CENTER: HELENE BY THE NUMBERS

Two years later, the rainfall totals and flood records from Hurricane Helene continue to show just how extraordinary the storm was across the southern Appalachians.

🌊 Historic flooding

• 60+ USGS river gauges recorded their highest flood peaks on record.
• The French Broad River climbed above its historic 1916 flood mark.
• More than 2,000 high-water marks were documented across North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
• 34 flash flood emergencies were issued on the morning of Sept. 27, 2024, affecting millions of people.
• About 2,500 square miles experienced rainfall considered typical of a 1-in-1,000-year event.

🌧️ The rain started before Helene

Helene wasn’t the only reason the southern Appalachians flooded.

A Predecessor Rainfall Event, or P.R.E., soaked the region Sept. 25-26, 2024 — before Helene moved inland.

• 6 to 8 inches of rain fell across portions of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
• The Weather Prediction Center issued a rare High Risk for excessive rainfall.
• Soils were already saturated when Helene’s outer bands arrived.

That left the mountains primed for catastrophic flooding.

🌀 Then Helene arrived

Helene made landfall near Perry, Florida, at 11:10 p.m. EDT on Sept. 26, 2024, as the strongest hurricane to strike Florida’s Big Bend since reliable records began in 1900.

The storm then raced north through Georgia and the Carolinas, dropping another 8 to 10 inches of rain on top of the rainfall that had already fallen.

One weather station in Busick, North Carolina, recorded 30.78 inches of rain over four days.

That’s more than five and a half times the typical September rainfall for the area.

📍 THE BOTTOM LINE

Helene wasn’t simply one round of heavy rain.

The southern Appalachians were already saturated by the time the hurricane arrived, and Helene added another several inches of rainfall on top of that.

The result was historic river flooding, catastrophic flash flooding and some of the most significant high-water marks ever documented across the region.

Two years later, the numbers still tell the story.