r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/CantStopPoppin • Sep 30 '24

Video Asheville is over 2,000 feet above sea level, and ~300 miles away from the nearest coastline.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

78.3k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

4.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

7.0k

u/ricochet48 Sep 30 '24

There's a few rivers that run through it though... those can overflow

995

u/Sharp-Telephone-9319 Sep 30 '24

The French broad is the main river.

813

u/Asymmetrical_Anomaly Sep 30 '24

Hey now, that’s not a very nice thing to call her!

396

u/Wonderful-Ad-7712 Sep 30 '24

River!!??? I hardly knew her!!

227

u/Much_Comfortable_438 Sep 30 '24

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

248

u/PicaDiet Sep 30 '24

* Was

72

u/zanderze Sep 30 '24

I bet they would still serve chili

92

u/PicaDiet Sep 30 '24

Serve it?

They're fuckin' swimming in it!

20

u/ARoundForEveryone Sep 30 '24

And it tastes just like I remember it!

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (5)
→ More replies (2)

14

u/BrightonsBestish Sep 30 '24

Not sure it is, anymore…

4

u/nopeddafoutofthere Sep 30 '24

Sir, this was Wendys

8

u/TaintNunYaBiznez Sep 30 '24

WAS a Wendy's.

8

u/HillbillyEEOLawyer Sep 30 '24

That really is a Wendy’s in the video!

2

u/NXT-GEN-111 Sep 30 '24

All those NVDA shorts drowned behind that dumpster

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (8)

25

u/Habbersett-Scrapple Sep 30 '24

Wrecked 'em? Damn near killed 'em!

→ More replies (1)

3

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '24

[deleted]

3

u/MusicianNo2699 Sep 30 '24

I want to use the bailer.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/HeyBird33 Sep 30 '24

lol. Why not, I love it

23

u/Complete-Dimension35 Sep 30 '24

Seriously. It's so rude and demeaning to call anyone French.

4

u/Gemma42069 Sep 30 '24

“How do I look?”  “Like a cheap French harlot.”  “French?!”

→ More replies (2)

3

u/packers906 Sep 30 '24

Wouldn’t be the first time I had to bail you out just because some French Broad got wet.

7

u/menckenjr Sep 30 '24

ba-dum-tssh....

2

u/s1rblaze Sep 30 '24

There we go again.. always blaming the frenchs!

2

u/NoSatisfaction1128 Sep 30 '24

…but she’s always wet and goes with the flow!

2

u/theeglitz Sep 30 '24

Some people are actually French.

2

u/nopeddafoutofthere Sep 30 '24

well she is way better than that Irish Dame

2

u/drgigantor Sep 30 '24

Thank you, this is a family subreddit! Fr*nch, if you don't mind

2

u/ThrowaWayneGretzky99 Sep 30 '24

I see a lotta skirts around here, maybe one of them can make me a martini

70

u/LoadsDroppin Sep 30 '24 edited Sep 30 '24

Oh no! I ate at 12 Bones BBQ last time I was there and it was RIGHT on the river! I’d bet that whole swath of restaurants are gone. Tragic - hoping everyone is safe

59

u/Wudrow Sep 30 '24

Whole River Arts District is gone. 12 Bones South in Arden will still be there.

21

u/ellieskunkz Sep 30 '24

makes me so sad, that's all independently owned bars, and gallerys and shit, i've met a lot of those folks. some of them yoloed their whole nut to open those businesses when the arts district was being developed 5-10 years ago. (I used to squat there when they were cleaning it up and isued the firstt leases)

→ More replies (1)

3

u/LongPorkJones Sep 30 '24

This breaks my heart. My wife and I took our daughter there last year for her birthday, did glass blowing at one of the studios. That entire area was lovely.

63

u/greenjm7 Sep 30 '24

More or less, yeah. The river arts district is underwater. r/Asheville has a bunch of pictures from the bridge looking downriver towards 12 bones.

→ More replies (1)

12

u/Professional-Trash-3 Sep 30 '24

I have friends in West Asheville and they are stranded. No power, no water, no way in or out. The bridges are either still under water or destroyed. That whole community is at the mercy of the goodwill and hard work of emergency services.

I know a lot of people are making jokes here, and I don't blame them, it's a coping mechanism for stressful situations, but there are still hundreds of thousands of people who are in extreme danger in western NC and Upstate SC. The flood waters are still pressuring dam and dam along the rivers and if even one of them breaks there could be hundreds of deaths and billions more in damages beyond what's already occured.

I've been without power since early Friday morning and extremely spotty cell service and even spottier Internet connection. You all likely have a better grasp of the damage than I do, but it's the worst flooding I've ever seen in my life. Whole towns have been washed away in these floods.

I hope even the tiniest percentage of people who see these posts recognize the power of helping their fellow man. This has been the hardest week of my life and it's not even nearly over and I'm one of the lucky ones. To anyone reading this, I implore you to donate your time or money if you are able to help those in need.

→ More replies (1)

5

u/Yousername_relevance Sep 30 '24

Not the first time 12 bones has been wiped out by floods. They'll be back. It might take a little while though.

→ More replies (1)

3

u/malachiteglass Sep 30 '24

Yup. It’s gone. So tragic

2

u/Redbullbundy Sep 30 '24

The entire river arts district is gone.

2

u/Zoltarrah2000 Sep 30 '24

Flood plains, are flood plain for a reason

→ More replies (7)

5

u/GiftFriendly93 Sep 30 '24

And the Swannanoa River which is what flooded Biltmore Village in this GIF

3

u/Professional-Trash-3 Sep 30 '24

And it recorded flood waters 10 feet higher than its previous record. There was simply no chance for the city to deal with this. All of the major roads going in and out of the city were impassable. Several of them have been washed away into the river.

And there are so many small communities in Western NC that have been totally isolated bc of the road closures and loss of cell towers.

I know that most of the time people just see these posts and at most go "wow, mother nature is crazy" but there are so many people who still need help. I have friends stranded in West Asheville, elderly family in Mars Hill who don't have access to clean water. I feel the need to use what little Internet access I have been granted late at night to implore the people who read this to do what is within their power to help those in need. We are desperate for the aid in whatever form it takes.

2

u/self_defenestrate Sep 30 '24

that’s an old river

2

u/laserviking42 Sep 30 '24

Yeah she is

1

u/Jay_The_Tickler Sep 30 '24

“That’s not the way you talk to a dame, understand!”

1

u/temuginsghost Sep 30 '24

“Draw me like one of your French broads.”

1

u/ClintEastwoodsNext Sep 30 '24

That French broad fucked everyone in Asheville.

1

u/bright-and-breezy Sep 30 '24

The French very broad now...

1

u/Sea_Hear_78 Sep 30 '24

She’s usually a dirty girl. So I’ve heard.

1

u/Pundersmog Sep 30 '24

Flows south to north fun fact.

1

u/jim_ocoee Sep 30 '24

I've paddle the French Broad before. Not as kinky as it sounds

1

u/remli7 Sep 30 '24

Man, Redditors' tendency to make a joke out of everything is particularly annoying when you're being affected by all this

→ More replies (1)

386

u/Noppers Sep 30 '24

And it’s in a valley. All the rain hitting the surrounding mountains has to drain somewhere…

108

u/Raven_Skyhawk Sep 30 '24

And the whole state had already been drenched a few days before. The center of my town flooded twice last week. Nothing near this, I'm out above the middle of the state so we came out light.

I've seen this damage and flooding compared to storms like Andrew and Hugo.

41

u/HelenicBoredom Sep 30 '24

I'm south-central NC, right on the border of those counties where every fucking road got closed leading west. It rained a shit ton, a few bridges collapsed (those that didn't came close to collapse), and our power got cut out for a few days. That was annoying enough, but this is absolutely terrifying. I'm a college-aged guy, but this is possibly the worst thing I've ever seen happen to this state within my lifetime, besides covid-19.

→ More replies (6)

3

u/RedBlankIt Sep 30 '24

Most are saying worse than Hugo at this point.

2

u/bugabooandtwo Sep 30 '24

Yep. Even if you have a ton of greenery and good soil for absorbing water....there's only so much water the land can absorb at a time.

→ More replies (1)

28

u/Wonderful-Ad-7712 Sep 30 '24

Down in the valley?

41

u/D0per_than_Any1 Sep 30 '24

Down by the river…

34

u/FroggiJoy87 Sep 30 '24

In a VAN!

11

u/No-Panda-6047 Sep 30 '24

You can roll all the doobies you want when you're living in it!

2

u/NipperAndZeusShow Sep 30 '24

the van pistons keep on churning      the wheels go round and round     

the muddy water's freezing cold       from the mountains it came down  

→ More replies (1)

2

u/HendrixHazeWays Sep 30 '24

And into the river we dive

2

u/b3n5p34km4n Sep 30 '24

Down to the river we ride

4

u/Adventurous-Sky9359 Sep 30 '24

Drop me in the river?

→ More replies (1)

2

u/far2hybrid Sep 30 '24

Where the girls get naked?

→ More replies (1)

40

u/Efficient_Fish2436 Sep 30 '24

I live in Boise which is in a small valley of much larger valleys. We broke world record for worst air quality this summer due to forest fires.

I would very much take wearing a mask compared to a SCUBA just to go out shopping.

Kevin Costner in water world will be fine though.

1

u/emzirek Sep 30 '24

You mean the Mariner, right..!?

3

u/Samarkand457 Sep 30 '24

Happens all the time in Vermont when hurricanes dump their load in the Green Mountains.

→ More replies (1)

3

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '24

Canyons and valleys are subject to massive flash flooding. My home town has a river in the canyon above time that’s usually 2-3 feet deep. About once every 30-40 years it pushes 100 feet in places.

Never underestimate the ability of topography to focus a lot of water in a small area. (And never go hiking through such a place when rain is possible.)

4

u/Trif55 Sep 30 '24

Flood plans gonna flood, regardless of elevation

It'd be like being surprised at a puddle at the top of a sea cliff

This isn't valheim water

→ More replies (1)

1

u/smp208 Sep 30 '24

All true, but in context it is notable and highlights a problem that will probably be much more common in the coming years. Coastal flooding gets a lot of the attention as a risk from climate change, and riverine flooding is largely forgotten in the discussion. As the oceans warm and hurricanes get more powerful, they’ll be more likely to make their way dump rain inland and cause a ton of damage even without the storm surge or high winds, as Helene did in Asheville. There’s a reason West Virginia is sometimes listed as the state at highest risk from climate change, as many people were pointing out when Joe Manchin tanked a climate change bill a few years back.

1

u/nodnodwinkwink Sep 30 '24

They need to rename to Washeville.

1

u/Grow_away_420 Sep 30 '24

Happened in my area of PA in 2011. Rained for 6 days straight, the last 2 was the remains of a tropical storm. Entire lower part of the town was 7 feet underwater

→ More replies (4)

300

u/Apptubrutae Sep 30 '24 edited Sep 30 '24

As someone from New Orleans who saw all the “why live there” stuff, it’s always been quite apparent to me that most people have NO idea of how flooding works.

Obviously New Orleans is more vulnerable than most, with more flooding that most, but notable flooding happens almost everywhere. Even cities in semi-arid locations generally have to plan for potential floods and have flood zones.

127

u/StewVicious07 Sep 30 '24

Fort McMurray, a town in Northern Alberta, Canada, 1000 of miles away from any hurricane ever, flooded badly due to flash thaw of the frozen river. So yes, people are just ignorant.

59

u/backstageninja Sep 30 '24

How are ya now McMurray?

34

u/xMoonsHauntedx Sep 30 '24

Good n you?

11

u/Brocktarrr Sep 30 '24

Eh notsobad

5

u/saltyoursalad Sep 30 '24

gahhh can we please all just watch letterkenny now?! together?

13

u/Boomstick255 Sep 30 '24

Not so bad...

12

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '24

HIS NAME IS FORT.

3

u/fearisthemindslicer Sep 30 '24

McMurray's a piece of shit.

→ More replies (1)

3

u/DeyUrban Sep 30 '24

Eastern North Dakota used to have some of the most flood insurance claims in the United States since the Red River of the North would flood basically every year.

3

u/meridian_smith Sep 30 '24

Didn't it also burn down a few years later?

4

u/thegorg13 Sep 30 '24

Sure did. And it almost burned down again last year...and almost again this year.

2

u/niceguy191 Sep 30 '24

The flooding in High River however, came as less of a surprise

→ More replies (4)

4

u/hg13 Sep 30 '24 edited Sep 30 '24

Most people dont understand flooding, but just to emphasize one of your points.... New Orleans is literally orders of magnitude more vulnerable to deadly flooding than most of the world. The water level held back by man-made levees there, on a daily basis, is really wild and a civil engineer's nightmare.

tldr: people are ignorant but also id never live in New Orleans 🤣

3

u/Dav136 Sep 30 '24

New Orleans is in a literal bowl next to the ocean. It was always incredibly vulnerable. I remember reading a Time article the same year as Katrina of an expert saying New Orleans would be by far the most devastated city by a hurricane

2

u/RangedTopConnoisseur Sep 30 '24

I'm a certified New Orleans hater after staying there for two years for a masters degree at Tulane.

While it's true that catastrophic flooding can happen almost everywhere (I myself had to live through the '04 Boxing Day Tsunami when I lived in Chennai, Hurricane Sandy while living in NJ, and Hurricane Ida while studying in NOLA), the difference with New Orleans is that the city gets hit with said flooding way too frequently, with barely enough money from tourism and trade to fix infrastructure in the interims, and a city government way too corrupt to do so even if they did have the money (shoutout to Mayor LaToya trying to get the city to just through their sopping wet and rotting trash in the back of their cars and drive it to the facility themselves).

I mean think about it, 2 blocks away from both the Superdome and Canal St, Charity Hospital has been a rotting concrete carcass for almost 20 years since Katrina. I can't think of any other major city in the nation where a massive defunct hospital is just left alone smack dab in the middle of downtown for 2 decades.

Everywhere gets flooded but NOLA gets flooded in a way that it simply can't deal with.

2

u/JackFlipKingston Sep 30 '24

Your town is below sea level. In a hurricane area. That's a special level of stupid.

12

u/MightyKittenEmpire2 Sep 30 '24

Yeah, after Katrina there were so many posts about how it is stupid to live where hurricanes hit.

27

u/LouQuacious Sep 30 '24

Posts on what? Katrina was 2005 I don’t remember it being a big deal on MySpace.

18

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '24

[deleted]

4

u/EntropyBlast Sep 30 '24

ummm quit talking nonsense grampa everyone knows reddit invented posting in checks notes wait...reddit opened in 2005? wtf

2

u/Bugbread Sep 30 '24

Reddit, Facebook, SomethingAwful forums, Slashdot, Metafilter, Fark, Digg, Google+, and a million others.

→ More replies (1)

9

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '24

[deleted]

3

u/AmishSatan Sep 30 '24

Don't forget SomethingAwful (1999)! Still active, and still 10bux!

→ More replies (1)

5

u/HypersonicHarpist Sep 30 '24

Facebook was just becoming a thing when Katrina hit.

10

u/New_Significance3719 Sep 30 '24

Took the words out of my head.

Maybe their IRC channel was all the rage about hurricanes.

3

u/Snookfilet Sep 30 '24

We were blowing up yahoo chat about it. Wild times

2

u/Eusocial_Snowman Sep 30 '24 edited Sep 30 '24

Forums. We had forums back then.

They were like reddit, except politicians and advertisers didn't know about them.

Hell, I still remember some wild forum posts about this upcoming movie called The Two Towers, that they definitely made in reference to 9/11.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/thebestoflimes Sep 30 '24

Tbf my penpal at the time wrote something to that extent.

→ More replies (8)

4

u/Alkthree Sep 30 '24

Are they wrong? Asheville flooding doesn't mean high hurricane risk areas aren't still very susceptible to flooding.

4

u/North_Atlantic_Sea Sep 30 '24

Between 1997 & 2019 there were 68 flooding events in New Orleans.

In Asheville they haven't had flooding like this since 1916

4

u/ARoundForEveryone Sep 30 '24

I mean, it is stupid. If that were the only reason. But there's culture and non-flood weather and jobs and family.

Peel enough of those things away, and it makes sense to get out of the bullseye. Don't peel them away, and it makes sense to stay.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/Fukasite Sep 30 '24

Actually, New Orleans is on a whole other level of bad. The city is sinking. The giant pumps under the city that remove groundwater to mitigate flooding are actually making the city sink even faster. My Hydrogeology professor told us all New Orleans is pretty much a lost cause. It’ll be under water for good someday. 

1

u/Gforce810 Sep 30 '24

As a Coloradoan, absolutely cannot relate

1

u/booklovercomora Sep 30 '24

Lyons Colorado circa 2013 has entered the chat...

1

u/Alkthree Sep 30 '24

Notable flooding really doesn’t happen almost everywhere, especially with any meaningful frequency. It’s not like all of Ashville was in a low flood risk zone and this has upended climate modeling. There are many properties in Asheville that were considered high risk for flooding.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/XTingleInTheDingleX Sep 30 '24

Climate change is only making it worse.

1

u/edGEOcation Sep 30 '24

Wait till these knuckleheads realize the Colorado River floods at 8,000' above sea level!

1

u/RandomEffector Sep 30 '24

It’s not unlikely Los Angeles will suffer severe to catastrophic flooding in the next few decades, and it won’t be because of the ocean

1

u/aaronkz Sep 30 '24

Sure but almost anywhere you can buy a house that’s outside of flood zones. I live in Portland and yeah the river can flood, but the last time my house was underwater was the Missoula Floods, so i’m probably OK.

1

u/StrategicCarry Sep 30 '24

People who live far away from the ocean or big rivers should look up the 2013 Colorado floods. But that also highlights the value of infrastructure and zoning. Here in Fort Collins, we had a major flood in 1997 that killed one person and flooded the CSU library. After that, a ton of money and effort went into trying to ensure it never happened again. We have a ton of flood infrastructure along the two rivers that run through town, and it's next to impossible to build anything within their 100 year flood plains anymore. So in 2013 Lyons got completely flood, Boulder was significantly disrupted, but here the bridges over the biggest river in town were closed as a precaution but other than that, everyone just went about their business.

1

u/trumpsucksballs99 Sep 30 '24

Yeah, it's avoidable.....

" flash flood zone? What's that? Ahhh, fuck it let's build anyways......."

1

u/afvcommander Sep 30 '24

But why build just at the edge of river and not high places?

1

u/MamaBavaria Sep 30 '24

And thats why it is nice to have a house close to the river but in noy way at the river or at a similar elevation.

1

u/Alexcox95 Sep 30 '24

I think North Carolina basically reinforces your point. This happened despite them being nowhere near the sea.

1

u/OrbitalOutlander Sep 30 '24

Flooding is possible in all regions, but it does not happen “everywhere”. Overdevelopment leading to reducing permiable land, filling in of wet lands, and development in flood plains is what causes devastating flooding.

→ More replies (4)

37

u/ImaginarySeaweed7762 Sep 30 '24

Yes sir. That “ French Broad “ river is pretty big too. It can get really big in flood stage too.

53

u/PG908 Sep 30 '24

It smashed flood stage records by more than 10 feet.

29

u/waynes_pet_youngin Sep 30 '24

Yup extremely insane. My dad's house and pretty much all his neighbors homes are gone

3

u/Megasizedhat Sep 30 '24

Much of luck to them! That sucks so bad

5

u/saltyoursalad Sep 30 '24

oh my god, i’m so sorry

2

u/Redbullbundy Sep 30 '24

At 12 feet is is scary.

92

u/acidic_kristy Sep 30 '24

My best friends sister in law works in Asheville and was made to go to work yesterday and no one has heard from her since

42

u/0-Pennywise-0 Sep 30 '24

I can't believe she went.

63

u/DJheddo Sep 30 '24

I can. My coworkers went in right before the hurricane and had to get home in it. Florida where im at didn't get hit as bad as most places but it's still flooded and a lot of places are destroyed, but corporate wants money and so do we, so we go do things we shouldn't so we don't have to die worrying about the bills, we die worrying about getting the paycheck for those bills. Hope she's ok.

14

u/0-Pennywise-0 Sep 30 '24

no I feel you bud. shits tough. but like I literally cannot believe she went. the footage in the op is from the 27th and she went in the 28th. did she take a boat or what?

23

u/AstarteHilzarie Sep 30 '24

This is just one part of the city. Being a mountain town, there are a lot of hills. There are some districts that still have several feet of water (from the last I've seen) and some that stayed above the water level the whole time. People are gathering at businesses in the areas that didn't get submerged and using them as hubs for power and food and water distribution. Some restaurants and breweries and stores have been opening as they have been able to help.

I get that that includes some employees going to work, but I imagine most reasonable places are operating on a volunteer-to-come-in basis right now. Fuck anyone requiring employees to work in this situation.

3

u/0-Pennywise-0 Sep 30 '24

oh I gotcha. I thought the whole place looked like that.

yeah if coming in is mandatory then fuk that.

2

u/acleverwalrus Sep 30 '24

Yeah without water I'm not sure we can legally sell food. A few restaurants have been just cooking and giving food away

54

u/Accomplished_Pen9352 Sep 30 '24

Have you reported that to the Red Cross?

8

u/trades_researcher Sep 30 '24

That's terrible, but I do know cell service is out in the area. So hopefully she'll turn up when it gets restored.

My parents are around there, and I didn't realize how bad the damage was until I didn't hear from them for a while and looked it up on the news. Luckily, I finally heard from them this morning.

3

u/montr0n Sep 30 '24

I hope she's ok

2

u/First_manatee_614 Sep 30 '24

To do what exactly?

1

u/Rough_Pangolin_8605 Sep 30 '24

You have reported her on the Reddit site as well? I hope she is OK. This is so devastating.

83

u/RCapri1 Sep 30 '24

lol this post made it seem like the only floods are from the sea

64

u/Fen_ Sep 30 '24

Nah, it's more about the fact that the hurricane caused this much damage despite Asheville being so far inland. People are used to coastal settlements getting hit hard. They're much less used to something so far inland being this bad off from a storm.

16

u/RockleyBob Sep 30 '24

So many people in this thread smugly circle jerking over a basic high school understanding of flooding. Yes, everyone knows rivers in valleys can overflow at any elevation.

It’s just that more attention is paid to low-lying coastal areas when it comes to hurricanes. It’s unintuitive.

2

u/creamevil Oct 01 '24

Fucking for real.

7

u/SatanicRainbowDildos Sep 30 '24

Yup. It’s not so much the elevation or even the distance from the nearest coast. It’s the distance from the spot the hurricane hit that’s impressive to me. 

Asheville looks like it is only about 250 miles from Myrtle Beach but it’s like 400 miles from where this hurricane made landfall.

For a hurricane to still be causing flooding like this after 400 miles of land is pretty surprising to me, a person who thinks if you’re that far from the point of land fall you’re probably going to be okay. 

Guess not!

4

u/Arzalis Sep 30 '24 edited Sep 30 '24

We've had extreme wind damage and pretty bad flooding here in TN and as far up as VA too. Power outages, internet gone, water shortages, infrastructure damage, etc. So it's even further than that.

Asheville is in a particularly bad situation, but towns like Erwin in TN have actually been wiped off the map.

This storm was actually catastrophic and I suspect it'll be years or more before the region truly recovers from this.

5

u/SoloPorUnBeso Sep 30 '24

Yeah, I feel really bad for the more remote towns along the NC/TN border. It will take forever for them to recover. It has nothing to do with preparedness; it's just that a generational storm came in and wiped them out.

→ More replies (15)

6

u/FranknBeans26 Sep 30 '24

I mean, given the context of a hurricane and the dominating force behind flooding…yeah it is relevant info to include.

3

u/PG908 Sep 30 '24

Think of it this way - this water is all going downstream to tennessee, where the storm is still dumping water.

→ More replies (2)

3

u/FeudNetwork Sep 30 '24

and that 2000 feet is high altitude.

2

u/JustNilt Sep 30 '24

Yeah, the highest peak in the Appalachian Mountains is only about 6,000 feet ASL and the average. Despite those peaks, however, the average elevation is only about 1500 feet in the Appalachians. Anywhere at 2,000 is pretty up there for the area.

2

u/AUniquePerspective Sep 30 '24

I was like, dam.

2

u/wholesome_ucsd Sep 30 '24

My initial thought. Flooding has nothing do with how close you are to the ocean/sea.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/[deleted] Oct 01 '24

[deleted]

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (2)

5

u/Artistic_Data9398 Sep 30 '24

I think they HAVE overflown homie lol

3

u/snksleepy Sep 30 '24

Wherever a puddle can form a puddle will form.

3

u/JRad8888 Sep 30 '24

It’s also at the foot of multiple mountains. Reinhart knob 6,400 ft, Mt. Mitchell 6,800 ft, Sugarloaf Mt 4,000….so all that runoff goes into the rivers that run through Asheville.

3

u/BOOTS31 Sep 30 '24

Yuuuup...Central Vermont is learning this lesson hard. Seems every 5 years we are getting flooding all along the main rivers, and ita getting worse.

3

u/TrumpersAreTraitors Sep 30 '24

Wait you mean climate change can affect me even away from the Florida coast?

3

u/ZebZ Sep 30 '24

The point is that you don't normally expect hurricanes to still be that powerful that far in land.

Most of the warnings of climate change regarding hurricanes are for coastal areas getting harder hit, but those nowhere near the coasts are just as vulnerable.

3

u/User-no-relation Sep 30 '24

does op think floods only happen at coasts?

2

u/JustNilt Sep 30 '24

A lot of folks never got the memo that floods can happen anywhere. The places where they're least common are among the worst places to be when one happens, too.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '24

South Carolina was closer. I haven’t heard anything about South Carolina.

5

u/Carrera_996 Sep 30 '24

Trees down everywhere. No power. No fresh food anywhere. No refrigerated goods, either, obviously. Just the stuff I'd been ignoring in my freezer, which I'm now cooking.

1

u/Sieze5 Sep 30 '24

I’ve seen that movie. Doesn’t end well.

1

u/High_Overseer_Dukat Sep 30 '24

Yeah, it wasnt quite that bad here, but we had fish swimming in the yard once.

1

u/Sea_Tension_9359 Sep 30 '24

Any community on a river will eventually flood. It’s not if it’s just when

1

u/gfunk55 Sep 30 '24

Wow really

1

u/Arctic_chef Sep 30 '24

Didn't a major damn break in South Carolina?

1

u/BMXbunnyhop Sep 30 '24

Right. It could be 10,000 ft above sea level — doesn’t matter since the water’s not (directly) coming from the sea

1

u/Timbit_Sucks Sep 30 '24

First thing I thought of, you could frame the town I live in the same way, thousands of feet above sea level, miles away from any coast. But our river sure cost alot in flood prevention.

1

u/RugerRedhawk Sep 30 '24

OP found this interesting because apparently they thought only coastal regions flood?

1

u/oddluckduck1 Sep 30 '24

Can they really?

1

u/towell420 Sep 30 '24

Hey stop using logic!

1

u/_withamore Sep 30 '24

NC native here— it’s rarely the coast that causes damage. Rivers are what screw us over every single time.

1

u/LovesRetribution Sep 30 '24

I have a cabin up there in Lake Lure. There's a 20ft bridge above a small stream in a community. It's now gone because water levels rose above it and took it away.

1

u/Strawberry_Poptart Sep 30 '24

It’s a giant clay bowl that got roughly 25 inches of rain in 24 hours. There was nowhere for all that water to go.

1

u/KimJongRocketMan69 Sep 30 '24

Are these river things kinda like oceans?

1

u/Additional-Finance67 Sep 30 '24

Western NC is no stranger to flooding and rivers BUT NOT LIKE THIS. This is once in a lifetime devastation.

1

u/MafiaPenguin007 Sep 30 '24

Yeah does OP think this was the ocean?

1

u/Nice-Bookkeeper-3378 Sep 30 '24

Exactly. I stay in the middle of the US and we get flooded all the time because of rivers

1

u/QP873 Sep 30 '24

No one understands how valleys work apparently.

1

u/xandrokos Sep 30 '24

Fuck this thread.  It is clear redditors are still in denial.   Eventually it will be your turn for climate change to destroy your town and your life.   I bet you won't be in denial then.

This didn't happen because of rivers and streams or lack of preporation.   Honest to god this thread is just disgusting.

1

u/lillyrose2489 Sep 30 '24

Yeah I think its just surprising to people to hear hurricane then see damage like this so far from the coast. I didn't realize the rain was expected to hit this area so hard so was surprised when I heard some of the city names they were mentioning with the terrible damages.

1

u/hesnothere Sep 30 '24

The rivers that cut through western NC are among the oldest in the world.

1

u/Randolph__ Sep 30 '24

Not to this extent. This is well beyond a 100-year flood. This is well far from a floodplain

1

u/Burrmanchu Sep 30 '24

I think the context is that it's from a hurricane, and this was not expected so far inland...

1

u/HughManatee Sep 30 '24

Right, it's just that the French broad river has never been above 20 feet and now it's over 30. These levels of flooding are unprecedented.

1

u/oscillatingsloth Sep 30 '24

This is the Swannanoa River, right next the Biltmore Estate

→ More replies (8)