HAYWOOD COUNTY, N.C. — Standing along Dix Creek Road, even five months after Helene’s wrath, the storm’s left a lasting scar on the mountainside. Uprooted trees, boulders scoured from the bedrock and debris from whatever may have been uphill fan out at the bottom of the slope.
The remnants of a damaged garage sit beside the road still waiting to be cleaned up while a damaged barn on the other side of the debris field still stands, despite the wood embedded into its side.
According to Tim Surrett with Haywood County Development Services, this is one of the most dramatic landslides to impact the county, but the storm caused plenty of others. Based on local reports, aerial reconnaissance and field visits from geologists, Haywood County alone saw more than 160 landslides.
The U.S. Geological Survey dashboard has tracked more than 2,000 across the entire region. Hundreds impacted rivers, roads and structures. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has attributed 23 of the state’s 106 storm-related deaths to landslides.
What we can learn from the ground
Jennifer Bauer with Appalachian Landslide Consultants has spent decades tracking landslides in the Blue Ridge. She said Helene had nearly all the ingredients of a massive landslide-maker, heavy rains, a major predecessor rain event that left the soil already saturated and heavy winds exacerbating erosion.
“Debris flows, sometimes referred to as mudslides, happen when up on these steep mountain slopes where water is converging or coming together the soil just can’t hold that amount of water,” she said. “And it lets loose and as it lets loose, it slides down and then starts picking up more mud and rocks and trees as it’s going down and starts scouring down into the drainages all the way down to bedrock.”
In contract with the North Carolina DEQ, she’s working to survey dozens of landslide sites, gathering data about where exactly they started and how well their paths track with existing risk maps.
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The state last did a comprehensive landslide survey using LiDAR to accurately map the slopes of the Blue Ridge in 2017. This shows historic landslide sites, which Bauer said can be used to predict where future slope failures might occur.
“If we know where they’ve happened before, they can happen again,” she said.
Looking at the Dix Creek Road site, Bauer said the landslide started from an area researchers had flagged as a potential starting landslide starting point. From there, they plotted an anticipated path for the debris flow. In the aftermath of Helene, Bauer plotted the path of the new landslide in comparison to the model.
“It did pretty well but it didn’t track how much it would spread out,” Bauer said.
She said that’s likely because it’s difficult to predict how fast moving some of these landslides can be, but their starting points have been fairly consistent.
“There are a few that have taken different pathways because things have gotten blocked and then they will shift but they’ve all been within these old landslide deposits that have been mapped before,” she said.
Predicting future disasters
In addition to these ground surveys, David Korte, a geologist with the North Carolina Geological Survey, said the state will conduct new LiDAR flights and analysis to get a comprehensive view of how the slopes in the Blue Ridge have changed.
“We can compare it to the previous LiDAR, which was 2017 and that will tell us areas of erosion and deposition and allow us to quickly map landslides that we can’t see in these aerial photographs because of all the tree cover,” he said.
Korte expects that to begin in the spring and summer, then geologists will work to remap the Blue Ridge and create new slope-risk assessments over the next few years. With this data, Korte hopes public and private developers will rethink where and how to rebuild safely.
“Some of the counties out here have steep slope ordinances, meaning, if you’re going to build something, you need to have an end and it’s above a certain angle of slope, you need to have an engineered plan stamped and filed with the county before you can build,” he said. “I think we need to expand on that.”
Preventing future disasters
Korte believes builders and planners should take into account stream channels, as that’s where most debris flows go once a landslide starts.
“Where the 23 fatalities happened is you have this little stream channel running, running through the yard, and it’s pretty, and it’s beautiful,” he said. “But if there’s a mountain behind it, that can be very dangerous when you get a tropical storm that comes in, and that’s exactly what happened.”
Surrett believes the information should be as accessible as possible so builders and locals can make their own choices about where to develop and where to stay during a potential disaster.
“A lot of this is family land that people lived here for generations,” he said. “They’ve seen stuff happen but nothing of this size so it’s just shocking.”
Korte said Helene isn’t exactly unprecedented, there’s a risk for landslides in the Blue Ridge anytime there’s around 5 inches of rain in a short timeframe, but the scope of the disaster is something the region hasn’t seen since maybe 1916.
“Hardly anybody alive has seen this twice,” he said.
According to North Carolina’s Climate Science Report, the number of heavy rainfall events across the state has been increasing, so the state’s climate resilience plan recommends prioritizing mountain infrastructure that could be at risk of failing due to increased landslides.
Though the mountains haven’t seen a storm like Helene in a century, geologists agree, landslides will happen again and likely in similar areas. As the western region continues to recover, the rebuilding process should take into account the risks of the next big storm.
“Human memories are pretty short and if it didn’t happen on your land, then maybe you don’t think about it happening there,” Bauer said. “These are old landslide deposits that have come down over probably hundreds of thousands of years and these landslides keep happening in these same locations.”
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