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    • Why did the flood warnings for East Tennessee seem late during Helene?
    Duluth

    Why did the flood warnings for East Tennessee seem late during Helene?

    Eira Gwyneth Posted on

    When Kriston Hicks first received the flash flood warning at 9:20 a.m. on Sept. 27, the home she shared with her 78-year-old grandfather in Hampton, Tennessee, was already doomed.

    “I waded through the water to get my disabled grandfather into the van because it was my own decision that we needed to evacuate,” Hicks told Knox News in a text message on Oct. 3, the day after her home was demolished . “No one came to tell me. There are no sirens in Hampton.

    The Doe River watershed in Carter County was one of several watersheds in East Tennessee that swelled to historic levels as remnants of Hurricane Helene flooded the southern Appalachians in a once-in-a-millennium rainfall event, according to the National Weather Service.

    At the National Weather Service office in Morristown, which covers East Tennessee, meteorologists coordinated with local emergency management officials in several counties to issue warnings.

    Why did the warnings seem to come too late for many people in the region?

    The answer lies in part in how the National Weather Service issues flash flood warnings, with emergency and wireless text alerts reserved for “imminent or ongoing” severe flooding, said Morristown meteorologist Brandon Wasilewski.

    Three levels of flash flood warnings in East Tennessee

    People reading NWS updates on social media in the days before the generational flood that killed at least 12 people in Tennessee got a sense of the impending danger.

    On September 25, the NWS office in Morristown was already warning of the “extreme risk of life-threatening flooding” along the Tennessee-North Carolina border as Helene passed through. At that time, the office had only issued a flood warning.

    Residents of the border counties did not receive a wireless flash flood warning until the morning of September 27, when flooding was already underway.

    The National Weather Service must have confirmation of life-threatening flooding and “catastrophic damage” before declaring a rare flash flood emergency, Wasilewski told Knox News.

    Text alerts will be sent out whenever the Office adds the “significant” or “catastrophic” flag to the flood warning, triggered by reports that “flash flooding with unusual severity of impacts is imminent or ongoing,” Wasilewski said.

    One trigger for the highest “catastrophic” rating is that multiple water rescues have occurred. The service relies on local emergency managers to handle evacuation orders.

    “We always want to try to be proactive,” Wasilewski said. “We’re the ones sending it out, but we want to make sure it’s elevated to that level.”

    While the National Weather Service issues flood warnings for specific rivers, it does not have a mechanism to alert specific communities at particular risk of flooding. That’s something the service would like to add in the future, Wasilewski said.

    “We currently do not have the necessary capacity and that is why we are relying more on local officials,” said Wasilewski. “Whenever we have an event of this magnitude, we try to review it and learn from it.”

    The week leading up to the storm was already unusual for weather in East Tennessee. On September 24, East Tennessee recorded its first-ever September tornado, an EF-1 twister in Hancock County with winds of 110 mph.

    The region already received 5 to 10 centimeters of rain before Helene even arrived as a tropical storm, soaking the ground and later causing heavier runoff.

    Some residents were not particularly impressed by the flood warnings

    Three rivers in particular carried a wave of flooding from western North Carolina to eastern Tennessee – the French Broad, Nolichucky and Pigeon rivers. The hardest-hit town, Erwin, is located on the Nolichucky in Unicoi County.

    Zully Manzanares, a Head Start program coordinator in Erwin, saw the flash flood warnings that began the night of Sept. 26 but didn’t realize the danger.

    “We’ve gotten them before, but I don’t think the warnings were enough to make us realize that it was going to happen on the scale that it did,” Manzanares told Knox News. “The warnings came, but I don’t think they were so extreme that they were necessary for people to take it more seriously.”

    Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focusing on technology and energy. Phone 423-637-0878. Email [email protected].

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    Eira Gwyneth
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