Fox 5 Meteorologist Forbes speaks at chamber luncheon

First, Forbes took the audience on a virtual tour of Fox 5, including the newsroom and the weather station. Along with that, he offered some brief background on the media organization, including its affiliated stations and coverage area.

To start his storm discussion, Forbes pulled up Hurricane Helene’s trajectory. Two years ago, Helene was projected to make landfall as a Category Four in Florida, and Forbes can recall accounting for “the worst-case scenario” for Metro Atlanta.

“An intensifying, major hurricane making landfall on the Gulf Coast with Metro Atlanta on the right side of the storm – that is the ‘dirty side,’ as people sometimes refer to it,” Forbes said, adding that while the goal is never to sow panic, Fox 5 reported the storm with “a serious tone.”

Despite that forecast, the hurricane followed a different path as it made its way north. Helene instead took a slightly wider arc, and though the more easterly movement looks small on official maps, the reach of the storm turned out vastly different than expected.

“The difference is just a decimal point of a degree, but that has impacts of tens of thousands of miles, and that makes all the difference in the world,” Forbes explained. “Blairsville is literally dead middle of what was supposed to happen the day before and what ended up happening that night and into the next morning.”

As Forbes noted and many will likely recall, Union County did not fully avoid the storm. Rather, Blairsville was spared the worst of the winds and flooding. If Helene had followed the projected path, the hurricane’s local legacy would have been considerably more dire.

“If you take anything away from today, it’s this – Blairsville, and more broadly speaking, Union County, dodged a huge bullet from the storm,” Forbes said.

Blairsville is unique due to its location and geography. It sits in a “bowl,” surrounded on all sides by elevation. Rain drains from the mountains to the lake via downhill streams like creeks, and Forbes shared a drainage map of Union County’s water.

“If you get a lot of rain in that area very fast, that fills up the bowl which Blairsville sits in,” explained Forbes before posing the $64,000 question of the presentation: “If the impacts were the same as the North Carolina mountains, what would Blairsville look like?”

The biggest issue in North Carolina was not wind, but flooding. Certain areas of the state saw 30 inches of rain in two and a half days. If, for example, Union County had experienced 30 inches of rain, that amount would look different due to the elevation. On the mountainsides, physics dictates it would drain down. In flatter areas, it would accumulate.

Reviewing photos from North Carolina, Forbes expected that flooding here would have caused problems like collapsed roads and structural damage if not landslides that blocked people from leaving their homes.

Most of Helene’s deaths occurred in North Carolina, within 100 miles of Blairsville. And most storm victims lost their lives due to the kind of flooding Forbes described. Some, categorized as indirect deaths, lost their lives in car accidents or medical emergencies, which Union County could have also faced during a difficult cleanup.

Using Google Maps, Forbes identified some “problem areas” to be aware of. US 76 running east out of Blairsville could become flooded due to its proximity to Butternut Creek. Multiple areas along Murphy Highway face similar threats. Gumlog Road may also deal with washouts, as well as Gainesville Highway.

Forbes reiterated that his goal was not to frighten members of the audience but to “make them think” and prepare them for emergency weather situations like hurricanes and tropical storms.

Union County Fire Chief David Dyer took the opportunity to ask folks to look into the new emergency notification system, RAVE Alert. Residents can register with the new system at tinyurl.com/UnionRave.