Flooded farms, dammed rivers, dozens dead: Helene’s growing toll

As historic flooding from Hurricane Helene recedes across the southeastern US, the region is facing a humanitarian, economic and environmental crisis of staggering magnitude, with effects likely to last for years.

Cotton crops on the brink of harvest were flattened. Sewage and industrial chemicals overflowed into the swollen rivers. Key parts of the power grid were destroyed. Chicken flocks in some of the nation’s largest poultry-producing states have drowned. Mines producing high-quality quartz for computer chips remain closed.

And the toll continues to rise, with at least 166 confirmed dead in six states and countless others displaced. The federal government reported 29 shelters open, with more than 1,000 occupants.

The region has been through devastating hurricanes before. But the extent of Helene’s damage — much of it far from shore, in mountain towns and inland plains — took many by surprise. Crop losses alone could generate $7 billion in insurance payouts, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official estimated Tuesday.

“The future of hundreds of agricultural operations in Georgia is uncertain,” Tyler Harper, the state’s agriculture commissioner, said in a letter to the congressional delegation. The storm “could not have come at a worse time for our farmers and producers, who are already facing record declines in net farm income caused by inflation, high input costs, labor shortages, global competition and low prices of the goods”.

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

Helene made landfall in Florida late Thursday with winds of 145 miles per hour before showing a path north into the Appalachian Mountains. Even before it made landfall, moisture from the storm soaked the region, saturating the ground and preparing several states for flooding.

Every regional commodity market was affected, with cotton, pecans, poultry and lumber being the hardest hit, according to Matthew Agvent, director of communications for the Georgia Department of Agriculture. Although still in the early stages of assessment, the state expects Helene to be more costly than Hurricane Michael in 2018, which caused $2.5 billion in agricultural damage.

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

About 107 poultry facilities were “damaged or completely destroyed by the storm,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said at a news conference Saturday.

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

A broken grid

Parts of the region are still struggling to reopen roads and reconnect power. At its peak, the storm knocked out power to more than 4 million homes and businesses, and while utilities were able to quickly restore service to many customers, progress was 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 high-voltage power flowing through transmission lines into lower voltage used in homes. Duke Energy Corp., which operates in the Carolinas, did not release specific numbers but said some of its electrical substations were completely flooded. About 1.4 million customers were without power in the three states Tuesday afternoon.

Waiting times for new transformers have increased over the past two years, with large transformers used in power stations ranging from 1.5 to more than four years, according to an April report by energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Transformer prices have also risen 60 percent to 80 percent since 2020. But Scott Aaronson, senior vice president for security and preparedness at trade group Edison Electric Institute, said utilities across the region are keeping spare transformers in reserve ahead of the season hurricanes and have agreements to provide each other as needed.

Even as they race to reconnect communities and house those displaced, states are highlighting the environmental damage Helene caused. Flooded wastewater systems released millions of gallons of sewage, while a Florida phosphate plant on the shores of Tampa Bay released hundreds of pounds of ammonia. Hundreds of spills were reported to state environmental officials from Florida to North Carolina in the wake of the storm, which dumped more than a foot of rain on industrial areas, paper mills and factories.

Taint Rivers Sewage and Chemicals

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

The site of a coal-fired power plant and a decommissioned nuclear power plant owned by Duke was also inundated by floodwaters after facing a storm surge of up to 12 feet, the company reported in a filing in Sept. 27 at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. According to the report, a sewage pond at the facility “was observed overflowing onto the ground due to the surge. Meanwhile, the city of Tampa released 8.5 million gallons of sewage alone after the storms overwhelmed the system, said Kathlyn Fitzpatrick, a city spokeswoman.

“Most of it went to golf,” Fitzpatrick said. “There’s really nothing we can do about it.”

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

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

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– Produced by Ilena Peng, Gerson Freitas Jr, Ari Natter and Josh Saul with assistance from Lauren Rosenthal, Naureen S. Malik and Dave Merrill.

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