By Brendan Clementz

With the dissipation of Hurricane Helene, its path of devastation through the Southeast states has ended. Its course began at the Florida Gulf Coast, and after tearing its way through the city of Perry, it began its dismantling journey of 500 miles, making landfall as a Category 4 hurricane.

After hitting cities like Tampa Bay and Cedar Key, causing flooding, fires, and power outages all over, Helene made its way north into the state of Georgia, bisecting it through the middle with a near-straight line of torrential rain and high wind speed. At this point, it became a Category 2 hurricane, but was no less deadly for it. The wind speed wasn’t the biggest problem— the pouring rain was the real issue.

Helene made its course through Georgia and crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, leaving wreckage and deep pools of water behind as it went. Its storms affected easterly South Carolina as well, killing an elderly couple as they hugged each other in their home. As it passed into North Carolina, its status became that of a Category 1 tropical storm, but this did not stop it from doing the most damage yet in Asheville, North Carolina. 

It was lightly raining in Asheville as Hurricane Helene approached. As well as the pouring rain covering the town with a thick blanket of moisture, more water came flowing down from the mountains also being rained on nearby, coalescing into an unprecedented amount of flooding for the area— more than 24 feet of water at its peak. 

The hurricane dissipated not long after Asheville, leaving the community still struggling to recover weeks later.