The US National Weather Service and other weather experts recently released final data on how strong, fast and destructive Hurricane Helene was.
The Orlando Sentinel also compiled some shocking, heartbreaking numbers about Hurricane Helene's destructive path.
Hurricane Helene moved across the Gulf of Mexico, expanding to a whopping 700 miles (1,110 kilometers) wide and moving at high speeds. Both are deadly.
In Florida's Big Bend region — where the storm made landfall, past Tallahassee — five people died from direct impacts and two from indirect impacts of Hurricane Helene.
The massive waves that hit Helene's hardest hit area - the Apalachee Bay area - pushed more than 15 feet of water into normally dry areas.
350mm of rain fell on Sumatra, just north of Apalachicola Bay - an area on the weaker left edge of the storm.
Hurricane Helene moved so quickly that it created a large area of wind damage that penetrated deep inland, downing large trees and causing widespread power outages.
The Suwannee Valley, north of Gainesville, Florida, saw winds of 75 to 90 mph (160 km/h), with maximum gusts of 90 mph (160 km/h) measured further north, at Alma, Georgia, 130 miles (215 km) from landfall.
Hurricane Helene caused major flooding in the southern Appalachians. The highest rainfall total was 30 inches (762 mm) in Busick, North Carolina, atop the Blue Ridge Parkway northeast of Asheville.
To put that in perspective, Fort Lauderdale received 610mm of rain in April 2023, leaving cars stranded and residents wading waist-deep in water. But Fort Lauderdale is flat land.
Busick is 2,800 feet high. Nearby is Mount Mitchell, which is 6,300 feet high. Asheville is downstream at 2,100 feet. All the rain that falls will flow into the lowlands and valleys. From there, the water will rush downhill, wiping out villages along the way, flooding Asheville.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Water Center estimates that rainfall across Appalachia makes Hurricane Helene a once-in-a-millennium storm.
Meteorologist Ben Noll said that Hurricane Helene's moisture plume "was the strongest moisture plume ever recorded in parts of six states: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia."
He measured the storm's IVT, or the amount of water vapor that moves through a given square meter in one second. The results showed that Helene's IVT was "about 1.5 times higher than any previous system in this region since 1940."
According to AccuWeather, Hurricane Helene dumped a whopping 42 trillion gallons of rain on the southeastern United States. That's enough water to fill Lake Tahoe once, enough to pour over 51,000 Dallas Cowboys stadiums, and enough to flow over Niagara Falls for nearly two years.
Moody's Analytics' preliminary estimate puts Helene's damage at $34 billion in the southeastern United States. Other estimates are much higher.
According to the Orlando Sentinel's hurricane report, experts believe climate change is making storms like Helene more intense, faster and carrying more moisture.
