Helene’s Numbers are Grim, and Spectacular

Accuweather:

As the scope of catastrophic infrastructure damage, loss of life, business disruptions and other economic impacts becomes clearer in the wake of Hurricane Helene, AccuWeather has increased its estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Hurricane Helene in the United States to between $225 billion and $250 billion.  

The latest death toll makes Helene the U.S. mainland’s second-deadliest tropical storm since Hurricane Camille in 1969, behind only Hurricane Katrina, which killed at least 1,200 people. Only three other storms have been as deadly since 1950, including hurricanes Diane, Camille, and Audrey. Helene’s ranking falls one notch when Including Hurricane Maria, which killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico in 2017.

Helene’s grim death toll passed 213 people one week after the storm, with deaths reported in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. Hundreds may still be missing.

Associated Press:

More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.’’

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.