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Hurricane Category 4 Hurricane Helene

TornadoFan17 said:
I think the RI from Cat 1 to Cat 4 in less than a day as it was nearing landfall along with davastating impacts well inland caused a lot of people to keep up with it. I also think storms in the Gulf are for some reason more popular to keep up with than Atlantic storms.

I also don't have the numbers, but I assume this site is a lot bigger now than it was in 2019.
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I mean it definitely makes sense for the main attention to be on Gulf tropical systems because it's going to impact Mexico or the U.S. coastline within a few days time unlike a Atlantic system that takes a week or more to track over to the U.S. if it doesn't head out to sea.
 
An underappreciated impact in the Tampa area has been sand inundation that came with the surge. It's a widespread problem in Tampa, sometimes up to 6 feet deep. Very surreal to look at.
 
The footage coming out of Western NC is shocking, even moreso than anything from Florida.

The maps of certain areas NC will quite literally have to be redrawn.

The water was so intense in some areas, deep canyons now exist where gentle riverbanks used to be.

- check out around 6:02 in this video.
 
More photos of Keaton beach, classic total wipe out, makes me cringe imagining had this hit Tampa directly.


Also, this storm chaser took some pics near Day FL, which got more of the eastern eyewall and the tree damage seems to be in the cat3 range, pretty impressive since this is more than 10miles inland.

No doubt cat4 level winds occurred right on the coast in unpopulated areas I dare say thankfully, although with how horrific the surge was I don’t think it would’ve made the damage to much worse.
 
Not to detract from the horror of the flooding and the impact zone in the Big Bend, but the west coast of Florida's Peninsula has been dealt a crushing blow as well. My boss, for instance, lost her house in the storm surge, and many places near Tampa Bay recorded all-time record high surge. This storm is going to have a string of billion-dollar damage all the way from Florida's Peninsula up through the Southeast. It's very, very bad.
 
Going back to the wind perspective of Helene, I believe I’ve found the locality of the cat4 sustained winds with help of the
NOAA damage assessment imagery.
1727556704087.jpegRain
The area inside the red outline you will notice an area of particular devastated slash pines, some rowed down here and there, partially stripped.

Even though this isn’t the classic pure browning effect we see after a cat4 landfall, keep in mind this is a forest completely made out of slash pine, which are very resilient to even cat5 hurricanes.

These three photos show the aftermath of Andrew, Dorian, and Michael, homestead, Marsh Habor and Mexico Beach, as you can see, the slash pines did well for the most part in keeping their foliage and not getting snapped in half.

If they hold up that well against upper echelon storms then it makes sense to me that they would be more often than not unaffected by this storm. So the fact that the outlined area at least has appreciable slash pine damage makes me confident that the 120knot winds did indeed occur in a small area on the coast.
 

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Aerials of flooding in Asheville.


More footage from Keaton Beach, with the majority of structures obliterated completely.
 
This is like the tornado question -- should the landslides have their own thread and perhaps in the Geology Forum?

This sort of weather-caused big slide event seems to tie in to hurricanes: mention Nelson County here, for instance, and everyone thinks of Camille.

Another example: Not all of that sediment that has buried homes and communities comes from the riverbed and its shores. Landslides dump massive amounts of dirt into the raging water (got that from Dave Petley's Eos post on Myanmar).

Will go on posting landslide stuff here but will be glad to change threads/forum, if people prefer that.

Just a couple of big-headline news stories at first search:

Parts of I-40, I-26 to remain closed for days, according to NCDOT​

by Justin Berger and Kelly Doty
Sat, September 28th 2024 at 2:46 PM

UserWay icon for accessibility widget

SEPT. 27, 2024 - Drone photos of I-40 of a landslide near Old Fort, N.C. (Photo: Joshua Pile)
https://wlos.com/news/local/gallery...conditions-asheville-buncombe-haywood?photo=1

-- Story
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New York Times -- the interviews with local officials give some idea of the size of this facet of the Helene calamity:

Power and Communication Outages Hamper Assessment of Landslides​

With communication lines down in the mountains amid Helene, early reports were unclear about how many landslides had occurred and the extent of damage from the storm.

-- Story
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BTW, from his tweets and blog posts, Dave Petley strikes this layperson as not particularly single-minded on "climate change -- the issue." He talks sense about this very complex Earth process, taking no sides, and appears to have an open, curious mind -- I wish the Gray Lady had brought him in on a more specifically landslide-related topic.

The closing quote in that story from an Asheville-area geologist:

“I would like to be wrong,” Mr. Prince said, “but I anticipate some hard days ahead for western North Carolina.”
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