Mariel Williams
editor@mitchellnews.com
Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina wasn’t just destructive to man-made property, it made permanent changes to the mountains and streams themselves.
A particularly prominent change is a rockslide in Yancey County, revealing thousands of feet of bedrock on the side of Celo Knob at the end of the Black Mountains. The new rock face can be seen from the community of Bowditch on N.C. Hwy. 80 South.
“It changed the landscape, which made it a geological event,” local geologist Alex Glover said. “There are rivers that have taken new courses.”
A number of area residents have been sharing their own photos and videos of how nearby rivers and streams have changed on social media, and the North Carolina Geological Survey is counting the landslides caused by the storm. It currently lists more than 2,000.
Glover said that if the slide on Celo Knob has stripped away the mountainside down to the bedrock (this appears to have happened — the Mitchell News-Journal is not aware of anyone having hiked up there to check), it will probably be a permanent feature on the Blacks.
“If it slid off and is that big then yes, it will be a permanent scar,” Glover said. “When those things slide, they slide to bedrock.”
Glover said that there is also an especially big slide on Buck Creek Gap that has caused a lot of comment among those who have seen it. Most of the largest new rockslides, he said, have exposed bedrock and will probably not be covered over with dirt again.
“There are hundreds [of slides] around us — hundreds,” Glover said. “Where I live in Little Switzerland they’re all over the place, and all up and down South Toe and Pensacola and Buck Creek, and 226 A — they’re just everywhere.”
The Blue Ridge Parkway, Glover said, has an especially high number of slides.
Glover said that it is hard, even now, to truly imagine how much rainwater fell in this area during Helene. The Busick Community, in the southern end of the South Toe Valley, got the most rain in Western North Carolina during Helene, with a record-breaking 30 inches. Glover calculates the 20 miles between Mt. Mitchell and Grandfather Mountain as having the bulk of the rainfall, split between two watersheds along each side of what is known as the Eastern Continental Divide, a watershed division that mostly runs along the parkway in this area.
“In Little Switzerland we got 20 inches,” Glover said. “If you use 20 inches of rain … a length of 20 miles, and a width of two miles, I calculated the weight of that rain and it was 80 million tons, on each side of the Continental Divide. So total it would have been 160 million tons of water — not gallons, tons. And that’s just unbelievable.”
Glover said a concrete block 1,000 feet long, 1,000 feet high and 1,000 feet wide would weigh around 80 million tons.
“One average railroad car holds 100 tons,” Glover said. “So divide 80 million by a hundred, and that’s how many railroad cars it was on one side.”
Glover said the weight of the water was behind much of the devastation.
“Then you get that much weight and you get a two foot, two-and-a-half foot diameter poplar tree floating down the river, it’s like a battering ram,” Glover said. “Anything it hits, there’s not much that can withstand that.”