How does a city 400 miles from the cost and a couple thousand feet above sea level get destroyed by a tropical storm?
I guess, no place is safe.
There was a water conveyor belt.
It happened to my town in 2011 with Irene. I lived in the Mountains of NJ for 25 years. From my driveway to the grocery store in town, there’s a 770 foot vertical drop. The Appalachian trail runs through my town and goes up the side of the same “range” on a part called “Stairway to Heaven”. Google the views, actually wait, I’ll do it for you; see below.
Anyway, Irene dropped about 9 inches on the top of the mountain we lived at.
It washed out 8 foot diameter culverts and the material to either side of it. One point of breakneck road had 20 foot of asphalt hanging in space from a bit of ledge to another bit of ledge. Our main road to NY state/Warwick was washed out. 515 was washed out in several places, 94 was washed out. All over the area, roads were trashed and not passible.
We had one road in and out of the mountain top(Highland Lakes), instead of the normal 3 and a 1/2.(3 paved, one dirt at the time, which has since been paved)
It was the velocity of the water and how quickly it got there that caused the issue both there and in Ashville. Of course, once it gets down into the bottoms, it floods, and it did.
Granted we were only 60ish miles from the Ocean but the principal is the same. Water gets picked up in the warm bits off the coast…hits the mountainous areas, rises…loses the water.
My back yard, in the video, rises 250 feet over about 1/4 mile to one of the peaks and we got more water than we’d ever had.
2 Likes
A little bit on how and more on why from our friend…
I agree. We didn’t see anything like Florida, Georgia, or North Carolina, but Helene was strong enough to knock down many trees and put me on back-up generator power for a number of hours, and I’m in Ohio.
@gromicko do you recall what happened in our own back yard in 2013??? Put a lot of rain in a small area and…
1 Like