If the area is going to be uninhabitable for months I think the focus should be on mass evacuations of people out of there to strategic sheltering areas.
if those fuckers stay on strike knowing we're suffering, I would say break that goddamn "strike" by threatening to lock their asses up forever in ADX Florence and Gitmo.
That's not enough, but it'll be useful for a hell of a lot still.
Is there a list of names? I know a few people over there that I haven't been able to contact with and am very worried about them.
People often forget that the Appalachians aren't a "normal" mountain range like what they picture when they think of the Rockies, with very defined sharp jagged rock cliffs. It's a very old mountain chain that has a lot of little pockets and valleys all the way up to the tops of the hills, lots of lakes and large bodies of water at higher than usual elevations due to the terrain. Water always follows the path of least resistance so when it dumps inches upon inches of rain at once and the rivers, lakes etc begin to overflow, it can begin to fuck with the topsoil and cause landslides as well as create issues with dams and normally peaceful rivers. So as that water is going downhill, it's sloshing through all the towns and communities that find themselves in those little pockets and valleys that descend in elevation as you go.
WNC and the entire region also had a huge amount of rainfall prior to hurricane Helene even getting here. People were dumping rain gauges out before the storm even got here so the ground was already saturated with water causing the 30+ inches of record rainfall to collect in rivers/streams that were already full of water. Saturated ground + record rainfall + 60 and up MPH winds means old growth trees get ripped from the ground like saplings and sides of mountains start to slide down into the valleys.
I posted something like in that thread and people shit on it. There doesn’t need to be any strikes for overpaid overstuffed $80-$240k a year workers when a region of the country is in turmoil.
Someone else can explain it more intelligent than me, but the mountains aren’t just a range, it’s more like a huge area of very bumpy elevated land riven with canyons, river valleys, lakes, bowl like areas. Running off is the problem, because it’s collecting into these raging torrents before it can move further out into flatter land. Does that make sense? It’s a ton of ranges laid out like layers.
Couldn't have said it better myself. We are suffering, a lot of people are dying, and they're not putting their own greed aside for a few months to do their jobs?!
Agreed, but presumably this is just to grease the wheels to get things moving. Both houses of Congress have indicated that they intend to release more aid money when there's a better picture of exactly what's needed.
The flooding is in the valleys of those mountains, which is where the towns are. Additionally, once soil is saturated, all of that water just stays there or flows down the path of least resistance. This causes erosion, which is bad because water is heavy, and once soil is saturated, it is significantly heavier than when dry. At some point layers of soil will become so heavy that they overcome the friction keeping them in place and the entire side of the mountain will just give way.
There are valleys in the mountains, obviously. The water runs off the mountains and falls into the valleys. When you have up to four feet of rain, that adds up fast. Many communities are in these valleys and they obviously got fucked over by it. As people already mentioned, there was rain before Helene herself (which is meteorologically defined as a Predecessor Rainfall Event, or PRE) and that saturated the soil, meaning it couldn't absorb much, if any, water/rainfall anymore, which led to even more water trickling down into the valleys and not getting absorbed. This also helped cause landslides.
