Calling it unthinkable is really overselling it though. Mountain towns and roads flood when it rains a lot. If you search past years google search results for Chimney Rock, it floods with 3" to 5" inches of rain. The town is just a few feet above water level - I've walked along the river.
> Chimney Rock, it floods with 3" to 5" inches of rain.
This was no ordinary flood - Chimney Rock was basically wiped off the map. This isn't a "dry it out and replace the sheetrock" situation, most of the town is gone.
That's not to say building several feet above a mountain river is a smart idea (or any river, for that matter), but this level of destruction hasn't been seen since the 1916 flood.
> Meteorologist Ben Noll said that the level of moisture transported to western North Carolina is more than 1.5 times greater than any event in the historical record for the region.
This is a little more than "mountains flood when it rains" it seems.
https://climate.ncsu.edu/blog/2024/09/rapid-reaction-histori...
Perhaps the only local event in the same ballpark as this one for the southern Mountains is the flood of July 1916, when a remnant tropical storm caused rivers to swell and inundate Asheville and other mountain towns. For more than a century, that event has loomed large as the area’s flood of record.
At the few river gauges in the region that observed both Helene and the 1916 storm, the crests since Helene have broken those long-standing records. The French Broad River and Swannanoa River – which collided at high speeds and high volumes in 1916 to overtake Biltmore Village – both saw new record crests during and after Helene.
The French Broad River in Asheville rose 1.5 feet above its previous highest crest, and downstream at Blantyre, the river surpassed its 1916 crest and was still rising when the gauge stopped reporting on Friday afternoon.
The Swannanoa River at Biltmore crested at 26.1 feet, more than five feet above its 1916 maximum and slightly above the apparent 26-foot crest in April 1791, making this effectively the worst flood along the river since North Carolina became a state.
And I agree that it will become more common with climate change.
Perhaps the only comparable event, in which a storm struck the Gulf of Mexico coast and dropped incredible amounts of rainfall hundreds of miles away, came in 1969 with Hurricane Camille. After making landfall in extreme southeastern Louisiana, Camille tracked over Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia before combining with a frontal boundary over Virginia and producing epic rains of up to 25 inches.
Hurricanes never hit Western NC
> Perhaps the only comparable event, in which a storm struck the Gulf of Mexico coast and dropped incredible amounts of rainfall hundreds of miles away, came in 1969 with Hurricane Camille. After making landfall in extreme southeastern Louisiana, Camille tracked over Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia before combining with a frontal boundary over Virginia and producing epic rains of up to 25 inches.
I bet there have been some hurricanes whose edges have grazed central NC, but the most intense weather (heavy, sideways rain, storm surges, and 200mph+ gusts) are experienced at the edge of the eye. It's rare that hurricanes are so big and intense that land far away from water experiences the worst of it.
Source: grew up in south Florida.