Flooded farms, fouled rivers, dozens dead: Helene's rising toll

As historic floodwaters unleashed by Hurricane Helene recede across the U.S. Southeast, the region faces a humanitarian, economic and ecological crisis of staggering scope, with effects likely to last years.

Cotton crops on the verge of harvest have been flattened. Sewage and industrial chemicals have poured into swollen rivers. Key pieces of the power grid have been destroyed. Chicken flocks in some of the country’s largest poultry-producing states have drowned. Mines that produce high-quality quartz for computer chips remain closed.

And the toll in human lives keeps rising, with more than 150 confirmed dead across six states and countless others displaced. The federal government reported 29 shelters open, with more than 1,000 occupants.

The region has experienced devastating hurricanes before. But the sweep of Helene’s damage — much of it occurring far from shore, in mountain towns and inland fields — took many by surprise. The crop losses alone could trigger $7 billion in insurance payouts, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official estimated Tuesday.

“The future of hundreds of agricultural operations across Georgia is uncertain,” the state’s Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper said in a letter to its Congressional delegation. The storm “could not have come at a worse time for our farmers and producers, who are already faced with record-setting drops in net farm income caused by inflation, high input costs, labor shortages, global competition and low commodity prices.”

As climate change roils weather patterns around the world, exceptionally hot ocean temperatures are unleashing powerful, deadly hurricanes. Helene followed the destruction from Hurricanes Beryl and Debby earlier this year.

Helene crashed ashore late Thursday in Florida with 140 mile-per-hour winds before plowing a path north into the Appalachian Mountains. Even before it reached shore, moisture from the storm soaked the region, saturating the earth and priming several states for flooding.

Every regional commodity market was impacted, with cotton, pecans, poultry and timber the hardest hit, according to Matthew Agvent, communications director for the Georgia Department of Agriculture. While it’s still early in the assessment stage, the state expects Helene to be more costly than Hurricane Michael in 2018, which caused $2.5 billion in agricultural damage.

Between 400,000 to 800,000 cotton bales may be lost due to the hurricane, though it will take at least four to six weeks to get more clarity, said Peter Egli, an independent consultant to the industry. That would represent as much as 5.5% of total U.S. production for this season, according to a calculation based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Some 107 poultry facilities had been “damaged or totally destroyed by the storm,” Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said in a press conference Saturday.

Helene also halted North Carolina mining operations producing high-purity quartz used to make silicon wafers for semiconductor manufacturing. Operators Sibelco and Quartz Corp. shut their facilities on Sept. 26, the companies said in separate statements, without suggesting a date to restart.

A broken grid

Parts of the region are still struggling to reopen roads and reconnect power. At its peak, the storm knocked out electricity to more than 4 million homes and businesses, and while utilities were able to restore service to many customers quickly, progress has been painfully slow in the hard-hit mountains and foothills. Georgia Power, a unit of Southern Co., called Helene the most destructive hurricane in the company’s history, damaging 1,200 of its transformers — devices that convert the high-voltage power flowing across transmission lines into the lower voltage used in homes. Duke Energy Corp., which operates in the Carolinas, hasn’t released specific numbers but said some of its electric substations were completely flooded. About 1.4 million customers were without power across the three states on Tuesday afternoon.

Waiting times for new transformers have increased over the past two years, with the large transformers used in electric substations ranging from 1.5 to more than four years, according to an April report from energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Transformer prices have also risen 60% to 80% since 2020. But Scott Aaronson, senior vice president of security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute trade group, said the region’s utilities keep spare transformers in reserve in advance of hurricane season and have agreements to supply each other as needed.

Even as they race to reconnect communities and house the displaced, states are tallying up Helen’s environmental damage. Inundated waste water systems released millions of gallons of sewage, while a Florida phosphate plant on the banks of Tampa Bay released hundreds of pounds of ammonia. Hundreds of spills have been reported to state environmental officials from Florida to North Carolina in the wake of the storm, which dumped more than a foot of rain over industrial areas, paper mills and factories.

Sewage and chemicals taint rivers

“We are seeing just catastrophic flooding,” said Gray Jernigan, general counsel for environmental group MountainTrue, who watched the devastation firsthand as the French Broad River in Asheville, North Carolina, spilled its banks, flooding the city’s River Arts District. “We are seeing chemicals, gas and oil spill and fuel tanks flowing into the river. Industrial sites are spilling into the river.”

The site of a coal-fired power plant and retired nuclear plant owned by Duke was also swamped with floodwaters after experiencing storm surge of as much as 12 feet, the company reported in a Sept. 27 filing with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. A wastewater pond at the facility “was observed overflowing to the ground due to the surge,” according to the report. The city of Tampa, meanwhile, released 8.5 million gallons of sewage alone after storm surges overwhelmed the system, said Kathlyn Fitzpatrick, a spokeswoman for the city.

“Most of it went into the bay,” Fitzpatrick said. “There is really nothing we can do about that.”

Flooding across the region has started to recede. As of Tuesday afternoon, the French Broad River in Asheville was no longer at flood stage. The river crested at 24.67 feet in the city, a full 18 inches higher than the previous record set in 1916.

“Unfortunately, this one is going to be the new big one,” said Clay Chaney, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Greer, South Carolina.

_____

(With assistance from Lauren Rosenthal, Naureen S Malik and Dave Merrill.)

_____