National Helene Report to have implications for decades across science, rebuilding efforts

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WLOS) — The National Hurricane Center’s final report on tropical storm Helene was released this week, detailing everything from rainfall to landslides and fatalities.

A few items that stood out from the report were the 822,000 acres of damaged timberland, 125,000 destroyed homes and 105 total deaths in Western North Carolina, all from Helene.

Experts say more of the information from the 107-page report will be critical beyond local relevance, extending around the world.

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“There’s going to be dozens of scientific papers written on this storm in future years,” North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies Senior Research Scholar Carl Schreck said. “Events with this much rainfall, flooding and devastation are extraordinarily rare.”

The National Weather Service and NOAA release a report about any hurricane and tropical storm; however, Helene’s document caught the eyes of thousands of scientists.

“Reading this report and others about [Helene], it was truly a historic storm not just for our region, but for our nation and globally,” Schreck told News13. “I was on an email list with scientists all around the world — they’re talking about how big of an event Helene was. I frequently go back to similar reports for other major storms like [Hurricanes] Katrina and Harvey as examples.”

So, with all of this information, how big was the storm?

The three-day rainfall totals in late September had less than a 1 in 1000 chance of occurring in any given year, with those chances having implications that are important in and outside of the world of science.

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“Insurance policies are triggered based on which counties experienced hurricane winds or tropical storm force winds,” the NCICS Scholar said. “A lot of science depends on that really historic, high-quality data.”

Since the majority of the 2,000 landslides occurred in Western North Carolina, damage was done to over 8,000 structures, with regulations relying on the report to restore those structures.

“Having these higher projections and understanding what those events are going to look like in the future will make decisions like that,” Schreck said. “Those are going to have to last for decades. This is their final data and effort on this.”

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