40 Trillion Liters of Water / CNF / SQNS

John Kitsteiner’s note to friends outside the South:

We live in Greene County, East Tennessee.Our state’s southern border is the Tennessee-North Carolina state line that runs through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. We are in the hardest hit region of the US

The questions I’ve been hearing over and over are why it was so bad, and why people weren’t prepared. I will try to answer those questions in the next post.

Hurricane Helene was the most powerful hurricane (in recorded history) to hit the Florida panhandle (on the eastern edge of the panhandle). CornerIt is the deadliest hurricane in the United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The death toll is over 160 so far. We are still finding bodies, and many, many people are still missing as I write this today six days after the storm hit the world.

I work in the emergency department at Greeneville Community Hospital.The hospital itself has been evacuated because there is no water in most of the district. We still operate our emergency department as an important point of access to our community. Luckily, I have a source and I didn’t lose power for a long time. I was able to haul water in a 300 liter tote in the back of my truck to the hospital for the first few days so we could flush the toilets and wash our hands. It took a few days, but now we have porta tanks and water in trucks to keep the emergency department running.

Less than an hour from our hospital to the east, the Unicoi Regional Hospital was flooded requiring patients and providers to be rescued from the roof by helicopter.

Less than an hour from our hospital to the south, over the mountains, Asheville, NC has been hit hard.

But why was this region hit so hard?

First, we had a lot of rain before Hurricane Helene came. Depending on the location, we had 7-11 inches of rain in the week before the first storm clouds arrived. This rain saturated the ground and filled the lakes and streams.

Then came the typhoon. He blocked his way up the Florida panhandle, shot quickly through Georgia, then slowed and stopped in North Carolina and East Tennessee. And that’s where we live.

The reason it stopped involved atmospheric pressure conditions that I don’t fully understand, but the result was that this storm dropped 20 to over 30 inches of rain in some areas… that’s 40 billion gallons of rain.

How much is 40 trillion liters of water?

40 trillion gallons of water is enough to cover the entire state of North Carolina with 3.5 FEET of water.

40 billion liters of water is enough to fill 60 MILLION Olympic sized swimming pools.

40 billion gallons of water 619 DAYS of water flow over Niagara Falls.

So this is an unprecedented amount of rain already falling in an area that has just received a heavy downpour.

But it wasn’t just the amount of rain, it was where that rain fell.

The southeastern (western North Carolina) and northwestern (eastern Tennessee) slopes acted as funnels or rainwater catchments that directed all of this water downhill and concentrated it in the rivers and streams that flowed through the valleys. These streams and rivers overflowed causing huge floods.

How big are the floods?

The French Broad River normally crests at 1.5 feet… but reached 24.6 feet during the storm.

The Nolichuckey River rose to about 22 feet. The Nolichuckey River Dam in Greene County, during the flood, took 1.2 MILLION gallons of water per SECOND. Compare that to Niagara Falls which reaches a peak of 700,000 gallons per second. Fortunately, the dam held… but a little, and the damage.

Results.

The flood, and all the things that the flood brought with it (big trees, cars, buildings, etc.) caused a lot of damage. It destroyed homes and businesses. It destroyed roads and bridges. Power came out.

This isolated many areas for days on end from normal rescue efforts and evacuation plans.

Here in Greene County, flooding has destroyed the primary water pump. We’re hoping they’ll be able to bring in a temporary pump to bypass the damaged system, but that could take a few weeks. Currently,many people in the region do not have clean water to drink, wash their hands, or bathe, nor do they have access to sanitation.

I have taken care of people in the emergency department who literally had their homes blown away. Everything they have, except the clothes on their backs, is lost. Many friends had their homes almost destroyed by the floods and their houses are full of mud and debris.

And this is in my neighborhood. Some areas around us have unfortunately been hit hard.

Why were people not prepared?

No one in the mountains of North Carolina or East Tennessee is preparing for a storm.

It’s like asking why someone in Iowa doesn’t prepare for big waves or why someone in Florida doesn’t prepare for a tropical storm. It’s not happening, like before.

This was a combination of the land already being saturated with rain before the storm, the typhoon/tornado that was involved in this region dumping unprecedented rainfall on a small area, and the nature of the mountains moving and concentrating all of this water in the lower valleys. the perfect storm, so to speak, of the circumstances that led to this disaster.

It could not be prevented or prepared.

Please feel free to share this. Hopefully it will answer some questions and provide a better understanding of what happened and why it was so devastating.

Pride goes before a fall, so I don’t want to shout this too much. . . but of15 stocksI have commented in the last six weeks, only one is very low (OPRTfrom $3.13 to $2.82, making it, I hope, an even better monthly picture) . . . most are up 10% or 20% (vs. 3% for the overall market) . . . and three did very well:

>PRKR– up to 150%. I haven’t sold yet.

>CNF– and it increased by 150% – in the last few days, not less, with a huge volume, I don’t know why. Yesterday, I sold some to take a tax loss, holding on to all that I had a profit on.

>SQNS– up 100%. That $200 million they werewhat i should get. . .they found.So with something like $1 per share of credit balance, and a profitable business, I bet it goes up.