As Florida continues to prepare for Hurricane Helene, the storm continues to strengthen. Helene is expected to make landfall as a Category 3 storm, bringing flooding rain and storm surge.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Dan, you were part of the decision that occurred later on, earlier today, late this morning,
00:08that for the AccuWeather Real Impact Scale, we were going to bump this up from a three
00:14to a four.
00:15We'll get into that in a second, but let's take a look at the impacts here, and you can
00:19see it's a very large area of high and a couple areas of extreme impacts.
00:24Yeah, Bernie, and one of the reasons that we made that decision, our forecasting team
00:28here at AccuWeather made the decision to go with a real impact of four for Helene is not
00:33just for the significant impacts at landfall, which can range from the 15 to 20 foot storm
00:39surge, obviously the 130 mile an hour winds, but also the inland risks with Helene that
00:44are pretty unusual for, and don't occur with most tropical systems.
00:49In this case, we're talking about the potential for widespread, significant, and in some places
00:53catastrophic flooding, and inland wind damage that can cause power outages across a lot
00:58of Georgia and Western South Carolina and North Carolina that could last for days or
01:02even perhaps weeks in a few spots.
01:04Yeah, and it's that word, catastrophic damage and long-lasting damage.
01:10That was the reason that we decided to go in that direction.
01:14You can see all of the bullet points here that you had just mentioned from catastrophic
01:18flooding and also the widespread long-lasting power outages.
01:22All right, Dan, let's break it down.
01:24Let's get to the rain first because even tonight, well in advance of Helene, we've been talking
01:31about this heavy rain band setting up since yesterday afternoon from North Carolina in
01:37the North Georgia.
01:38Yeah, this rain is going to occur ahead of the main circulation of Helene and obviously
01:42Helene is going to bring about eight inches of rain in many places, but anytime you get
01:46several inches of rain, in this case could be four, five, six inches of rain tonight
01:49in parts of the Southern Appalachians, you've already wet the ground there and you may have
01:53some flooding tonight, so that's something to be concerned of.
01:56And then there may be a brief break where the rain lets up a bit tomorrow, Thursday
01:59during the day, then it will return with a vengeance on Thursday night as the circulation
02:04for Helene makes landfall and throws all of that tropical moisture, in some cases record
02:08moisture levels here for September, being thrown up against the mountains and anytime
02:12you have moisture being forced upward, you squeeze out a lot of that moisture really
02:16rapidly and that's why we expect two to three inch per hour rain rates and that's going
02:20to cause widespread flooding.
02:22That could be a flooding disaster for some communities in the Southern Appalachians on
02:25Thursday night into early Friday.
02:27And then I found it kind of frightening here, we have just as much rain predicted with landfall
02:33in the Big Bend of Florida, just as much as what we're looking at here from Western North
02:38Carolina to North Georgia.
02:40We do, and anytime, especially in the mountains, it only takes four inches of rain in some
02:45places to fall in a short amount of time, in this case we're talking double that or
02:49even triple that.
02:50It could be up to a foot of rain and that's going to cause significant flooding that could
02:54cause roads to wash out and some communities to be inaccessible for several days.
02:59The other concern we have is the wind, there's that extreme flood risk that you were just
03:03talking about, that is an area that we could see life-threatening flash flooding, also
03:08power outages as well.
03:10Most intense rainfall, although there will be some tonight, will be tomorrow as well.
03:15This is the other thing we want to get across down here quickly.
03:18Look at these winds, 60 to 80 mile per hour winds across much of eastern parts of Georgia.
03:24Yeah, it's the combination here of the wind risk along with the flood risk that in parts
03:29of eastern northern Georgia as well as western north and south Carolina that in some of those
03:32areas this could be really remembered as a once in a generation storm.