Tropical Storm Helene is catastrophic for western NC mountains

• And in one of the more alarming alerts in some time in this state, the National Weather Service issued an all-caps warning Friday morning to say that a Lake Lure Dam failure was "IMMINENT" and that anybody downriver from it should move to higher ground immediately. Nine disconcerting hours later, Rutherford County Emergency Management said engineers had examined the dam and lifted the "imminent" tag, to unanimous exhale.

Why it matters: We won't know for days the extent of the devastation.

• Widespread cellphone outages and road closures, combined with the jagged terrain, make the scope impossible to assess.

Officials on Sunday confirmed 30 deaths in the Buncombe County, where Asheville saw historic water level rises, bringing the number of storm-related deaths across six states to at least 91, per AP.

• Buncombe officials on Saturday asked people who'd like wellness checks on loved ones to submit their names through a Register of Deeds page that reads, "Please complete this form for each missing person."
• More than 1,000 people submitted names. The county said it had cleared it to "well below 600" by later Sunday, the Washington Post reported.

Rescue efforts: Emergency crews in Buncombe County alone responded to more than 5,000 calls and carried out more than 130 swiftwater rescues as of Saturday morning.

• Just across the state line in Tennessee on Friday, 54 people were stranded on the roof of a hospital for about seven hours in Unicoi County, before officials declared them rescued just after 5pm, Axios Nashville's Adam Tamburin reports.

State of play: A never-before-seen expansive set of extensive and life-threatening flash flood emergencies went into effect for Asheville and surrounding areas Friday. Some places in the Blue Ridge Mountains saw more than a foot of rain.

• Pieces of the eastbound lanes of 1-40 vanished along the North Carolina-Tennessee border at the Pigeon River Gorge, WBIR in Knoxville confirmed.
• The NC Department of Transportation said over the weekend that I-26 and I-40 are impassable in several spots. The department issued the dire warning: "We cannot say this enough: DO NOT TRAVEL IN OR TO WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA."

The big picture: Helene, which made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida Thursday night as a Category 4 hurricane, is one of the most expansive and damaging hurricanes on record for the Southeast, owing to its unusual size and rapid intensification.

• Helene rapidly intensified over record-hot ocean waters, which added abundant moisture to the storm. In addition, climate change is allowing hurricanes to produce more heavy rains than they did a few decades ago.
• South Carolina, overlooked in most storm coverage because of the dramatic images elsewhere, had the most outages as of Saturday at more than 1 million. The state also had at least 23 reported deaths, the most from a hurricane since Hugo killed 35 people in 1989, AP noted.

What they're saying: It's rare to see Canton mayor Zeb Smathers, a prolific social media user who's been a vocal champion of his town since the closure of its paper mill in 2023, go quiet on social media.

• But after Smathers went silent online for more than 24 hours Friday and Saturday, Smoky Mountain News reporter Cory Vaillancourt connected with him. Smathers expressed frustration with cellular providers and residents' inability to communicate during the storm.
• "I mean, we're facing a storm, the worst we've ever had, and ... we're facing it with technology from the 1990s," Smathers said, according to a post from Vaillancourt.

The bottom line: Flooding from Helene surpassed that of the Great Flood of 1916, which Asheville's own city government page declares "the flood by which all other floods are measured."

• Now, as local officials struggle to reach people by road or by phone, they're looking elsewhere for comparisons.
• Buncombe County manager Avril Pinder began a Saturday afternoon update by saying, "As we assess the damage, this is looking to be Buncombe County's own Hurricane Katrina."

Keep reading:

• Historic and deadly Hurricane Helene slams Florida to the Carolinas
• Tropical Storm Helene: "Flash flood emergency" explained
• Helene's floodwaters devastate East Tennessee
• 11 dead in Georgia as flooding, power outages persist
• Hurricane Helene could rewrite storm history in the South
• In photos: Tropical Storm Helene in Atlanta
• Photos: Hurricane Helene's destructive march through Florida
• "Heed the warning": Survivors of Helene's flooding reflect as recovery begins
• Hurricane Helene's rapid intensification fits ominous trend

Editor's note: This is a breaking story and continues to be updated.