The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994.
It’s a weird story. The first line of the article is: “A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers.” This implies that the attack wasn’t against the broadband providers directly, but against one of the intermediary companies that sit between the government CALEA requests and the broadband providers.
For years, the security community has pushed back against these backdoors, pointing out that the technical capability cannot differentiate between good guys and bad guys. And here is one more example of a backdoor access mechanism being targeted by the “wrong” eavesdroppers.
Cambry and Zack Nelson founded Not a Wheelchair and are on a mission to mass produce a quality, affordable wheelchair. Photos by Kim Raff.
Tanner Green is concerned about the tiny aluminum plugs left behind when you cut 30 holes in the seat rail of a wheelchair. The cutting is done by an enormous robotic laser controlled by a computer model. A tech feeds a 20-foot aluminum tube into the machine, makes a few clicks on the computer, and the machine gets to work, cutting the tube to length, 30 holes for the axle adjustment, two channels for clamping in the footplate tubes and two etchings to help line up the tube on the bending machine. Running at full speed, the cutting takes just a couple of minutes.
It’s mesmerizing to watch. When the laser is done cutting, sometimes the leftover material just falls out, but sometimes it stays in place. “Then, you have to grab a screwdriver or some other tool and get them out yourself,” Green says as he starts whacking and prodding at the just-cut seat rail. Some plugs come out immediately, some are more stubborn. In all, it takes as long to get all the plugs out as it took for the laser to make the cuts.
For Green, the chief engineer at Not a Wheelchair, this is one of the thousand complications standing between his team and a rather lofty goal: upending the manual wheelchair marketplace. If you’ve heard of Not a Wheelchair, it’s likely because of its owners, Zack Nelson, the star of the 8.8-million-subscriber YouTube channel JerryRigEverything, and his wife Cambry, a para and manual wheelchair user. The Nelsons got into the mobility equipment business a few years ago when they released The Rig, an electric, adaptive off-road device with a simple yet robust and functional design priced significantly lower than anything else on the market. Now, they’re bringing that same ethos to manual wheelchairs.
Not a Wheelchair aims to offer a base-model, custom manual wheelchair at a similar or better quality than most of the insurance-approved wheelchairs in the U.S. for $999. Yes, that’s just under $1,000 for everything — wheels, handrims, tires, side guards and rigid, angle-adjustable backrest included. And the company plans to have a turnaround time of weeks, rather than the monthslong slog that it typically takes from order to delivery.
When I first heard about this, it sounded awesome and a bit far-fetched. It’s hard to find a pair of quality wheelchair wheels for less than $500. Same with a rigid backrest. How were they going to offer both, plus a custom wheelchair frame without compromising on quality? I drove to their headquarters in Utah to find out.
Inside the Paradox
When you turn into the neighborhood where Not a Wheelchair’s manufacturing facility is, you’re greeted by about a dozen cows chewing grass in a smallish, triangular field. There’s a busy road to one side and brand new, multistory apartment complexes on the other two sides. There’s no indication of how the cows got there — as if a city suddenly sprung up around them. Past the cows and the apartments are rows of warehouses. Then you turn the corner and the buildings go from huge to enormous. Not a Wheelchair is housed in one of the largest buildings I’ve ever seen.
I roll inside and am greeted by Nelson and Green. Nelson looks familiar because he’s exactly as he appears on YouTube — tall, muscular and shiny bald, with a soft, measured voice. The office space is still spartan — just a row of computers and a kitchen. “None of this was here even a few weeks ago,” Green says. “We took over an empty building about five weeks ago, and it’s been non-stop ever since.”
The Not a Wheelchair name started to differentiate The Rig — an electric offroad vehicle capable of going places that a wheelchair could not. Nelson is famous for building and modifying all sorts of things — from converting a Humvee to electric power to digging an enormous bunker in the couple’s backyard, but Not a Wheelchair has quickly taken on an identity of its own. “We’ve always seen ourselves as an outdoor mobility company,” says Nelson. “We want to make it easier for people to move around outside and in their communities.” Now though, Nelson finds himself about to release a manual wheelchair under the Not a Wheelchair name. “We started calling it The Paradox Project,” he says. “But if you have a better idea for a name, we’re open to suggestions.”
When I roll out to the manufacturing floor, there are huge machines scattered across the 26,000-square-foot space. There’s an apartment-sized laser cutter that looks like it should be stationed on a spaceship, a computer-controlled tubing bender, a welding station, powder coating and curing cabinets, an assembly area and a half dozen other prototyping and testing machines scattered along the perimeter. The machines are set up as a series of production pods that snake in a sequential line from start (cutting tubes) to the end (assembly) of the wheelchair-making process.
“The culture I grew up in in terms of my career was very much around process improvement,” says Green, who’s worked with semi-conductors at Intel, missiles at Raytheon and medical devices at a smaller consulting firm. He first connected with Nelson after watching a YouTube video about The Rig and thinking it was a cool project. He cold-emailed Nelson, volunteering his engineering services for anything Nelson needed help with. Just a year or so later, Nelson convinced Green to move to Utah and work full time with Not a Wheelchair. Green has been working on the manual wheelchair project for almost two years and for him, having a good design is only the first stage in the process. Turning that design into a quality product, quickly, inexpensively and consistently takes a dozen interdependent steps.
The first step in the manufacturing process is to cut the frame tubing, and you can’t move to the next step without removing those annoying aluminum plugs. Green says they’ve been messing with the settings on the cutter to get more of the plugs to release on their own. It might only save a minute per chair — but when you’re trying to change the wheelchair industry, every minute counts.
At the next stage of the process — bending — Nelson is watching the process as a tech slowly puts the machine through its process at about 10% of its capability. “Are we running at 100%? Why is this so slow?” Nelson asks. “Come on, let’s get it moving. We can go faster than this.”
Speed is part of the culture at Not a Wheelchair. “The whole goal is to get from idea to drawing to actual physical product that we can test as fast as possible,” Nelson says. With their current setup, the team can build an entire chair in a few hours, and that time is coming down quickly as the company’s 15 employees get more comfortable with the process.
Everybody I talked to was on the same page. Why go fast? Because it matters how long it takes for someone to get a new wheelchair. “The time it takes means that somebody is being impacted by not being able to get that chair sooner,” says Green. “If they’re waiting six, eight, 12 months for a chair, that’s six, eight, 12 months that they’re going without. They’re having to make do with what they have, whether it’s something that doesn’t fit them, it’s broken, or some other issue. I don’t want to make anybody wait that long for something that’s an important part of their life.”
YouTube $
If you’re looking at the reasons that Not a Wheelchair is able to make a $1,000 wheelchair, hyper-efficient manufacturing techniques and state-of-the-art equipment are near the top of the list. But factories and enormous fancy machines cost a lot of money, and in any normal business model, those costs are passed on to the consumer. But what if the owners aren’t dependent on — or even interested in — making money from the business? Meet Zack and Cambry, YouTube stars.
Nelson started his YouTube channel 12 years ago. He was in college and had no career path. He just knew he wanted to be his own boss. He had a jeep with a busted gear inside the transfer case. “Instead of taking it to the shop and fixing it for $1,000, I followed this YouTube video and fixed it for like 60 bucks instead,” he says. “So I emailed the guy who made the video and I was like, ‘Why did you make this video for people? It’s such a nice thing to do.’ He said, ‘To decrease world suck, to make the world a better place, and also I make money for the ads that appear when the videos are playing.’ That was an epiphany for me, like, ‘Oh, I could be my own boss. I could do the projects that I’m already doing anyway, film them and make money on the internet.’ That satisfied every little box I was looking for in a career.”
Nelson started with videos of himself repairing his jeep and quickly moved onto durability and repair videos for smart phones, which turned into the bread and butter of his growing YouTube presence. Nelson didn’t have any knowledge of mobility products, or any personal experience with disability, until he met Cambry.
Zack and Cambry Nelson, who were married in 2019, now have two children and a busy family life in Utah.
Cambry is slight and blond. She got hurt doing equestrian vaulting — basically gymnastics on horseback and yes, it’s as wild as it sounds. Zack and Cambry met via an online dating app and Cambry was upfront about her disability. “Before our first date, Zack asked me if there was anything he needed to do to pick me up,” Cambry says. “I really wanted to make up a big story about how he would have to go to DMV to get a special license to be able to take me anywhere, but I chickened out and told him, ‘You know, usually I just meet someone at a restaurant.’”
Like all wheelchair users on a first date, Cambry was worried Zack was going to be weird about her disability. “But his first disability-related question was to ask if I’d done any cool upgrades to my wheelchair.” She had not. But this was someone she could hang out with.
Not long after they started dating, Nelson surprised her with a DIY off-road wheelchair — two electric bikes with a welded seat in the middle, “chariot-style” as Nelson puts it in the video where Cambry tries it out for the first time. That video was also Cambry’s first appearance on the YouTube channel. She’s clearly nervous about being on camera and freezes for a second when Zack asks her a question. Once she’s on the bike, she quickly settles in, blasting around grassy fields and almost flipping herself as she climbs a curb at full speed.
That video has 11 million views and counting. A year later, when Zack and Cambry released a video debuting The Rig, Cambry looks like a pro. Zack and Cambry got married in 2019 and now have two kids. Cambry remains a regular presence on the YouTube channel. She explains the challenges of living with a disability in a straightforward, relatable way and is fun and adventurous when trying out the new gear. It’s a hard needle to thread when you’re living off YouTube views, but Cambry passes the realness test and does a good job of normalizing disability for the channel’s audience, the vast majority of whom aren’t disabled.
Videos with Cambry and accessibility projects consistently get millions of views. “The internet loves Cambry,” Zack says. “I’ve tested videos where I’ll do two versions of the exact same video, one with a photo of me as the thumbnail and the other with Cambry, and the one with Cambry will get like twice as many views.”
In the world of YouTube, putting out multimillion-view videos translates to millions in revenue in the form of ads, partnerships and affiliate sales. It’s that income stream that has allowed the Nelsons to fund a wheelchair production factory, along with the staff to go along with it, without incurring massive amounts of debt.
Not a Wheelchair is also developing more affordable wheelchair components like these wooden handrims.
While I’m rolling around the Not a Wheelchair facility, marveling at the scale of it, I can’t help but wonder why they decided to do it. I mean, it’s one thing to build cool, one-off mobility devices. It’s another thing entirely to self-fund and spend years developing the capacity to mass produce affordable wheelchairs. For Zack and Cambry, it was pretty simple: There is clearly a need. And with Zack’s background and connections, combined with the income from JerryRigEverything, they were in a unique position to do something about it.
“Jumping through many levels worth of hoops just to get a wheelchair was incredibly frustrating for me,” says Cambry. “I got engaged to Zack in 2019 and wanted to buy a new wheelchair before my wedding, which was six months away at the time, and my new chair almost didn’t even arrive in time for our wedding day. It was stressful knowing that my current wheelchair could break at any time and leave me stranded for weeks or months. I know I’m not the only one who had that stress in the back of my mind. So hopefully, now with our own wheelchair factory, we are able to fix some of those problems.”
The Wheelchair Business
Not a Wheelchair will sell its manual wheelchairs directly to consumers. That means if you want a wheelchair, you can go to the website, click through to an online configurator and spec out your wheelchair in real time. You enter your measurements, and a 3D model of your chair adjusts to your tweaks. You can see the difference that seat depths, backrest heights and frame angles make on the finished product.
Once the company opens to the public, Not a Wheelchair expects to have a custom, manual wheelchair shipped four weeks after you hit the order button. Ramped up to full speed, they hope to have that time down to two weeks. Compared to the typical wheelchair buying process, that is — to borrow a phrase from Space Balls — ludicrous speed. Not a Wheelchair aims to do it not only by automating as much of the process as possible, but also by eliminating the middlemen. That means no seating clinic, no insurance company, no DME supplier. This has pros and cons.
Let’s start with the seating clinic. The main purpose of the seating clinic or a physical therapist wheelchair evaluation is to provide you with expert advice about what equipment — from wheelchair type to components and wheelchair measurements — is best for your body and for your needs, and to make sure, using pressure mapping, that the equipment you ordered fits you properly and protects you from pressure sores. I’ll let you judge how often that process results in perfectly fitting equipment. Not a Wheelchair is making consumers supply their own measurements. That can be from the chair you’re already sitting in, from a seating clinic or conjured up after comparing specs from your friends at happy hour. That gives you the power to order what you want. But it also means that if the chair doesn’t fit, it’s on you.
One of the company’s goals is to cut through the red tape associated with buying a wheelchair.
Next up, insurance companies. They’re supposed to pay for your equipment. But they also require you to use other middlemen, which increases costs. In today’s broken system of U.S. healthcare, most insurance, even private, will pay a bare minimum for manual wheelchairs and components. Copays for that basic equipment often cost more than $1,000. For wheelchair users with specific needs (most of us) who go through the runaround of denials, only to be “approved” and still owe four figures, it can feel like a shell game.
Lastly, DME suppliers. Two helpful services that DME suppliers are supposed to provide are wheelchair setup and repair. In Not a Wheelchair’s model, you do the adjustment and repair yourself, get a friend or family member to help, or find a local bike shop willing to work on your chair.
“The whole point of my YouTube channel is durability and repairability. I’ve been preaching that for 12 years, so we’re bringing that into the chair as well. We’re using standard hardware, and we’re consolidating as many of the bolts as possible to as few sizes as possible so that there are fewer tools needed. We want to be able to make it simple enough that people can do the adjustments and the repairs by themselves, and if they need a caster replaced, something binds up or the bearing inside the caster seizes, they can pop the caster off and put a new one on and we’ll sell those replacement parts. Or, if they’re under warranty, we’ll just give them those replacement parts.”
Nelson says that they’re pitching the chair as a secondary option for wheelchairs users, something to have around for traveling or getting dirty or as a backup chair. For $1,000, that seems reasonable. But for that price and ease of ordering, it’s reasonable to assume that no matter how the chairs are being pitched, a lot of wheelchair users will choose to order one as their primary chair. How the easy order process and results will work at scale is a big unknown. Another big question: How exactly are they going to make a profit charging that little for a wheelchair?
They’re not. Same as with The Rig and any other products they develop, Zack and Cambry won’t be taking any profit from Not a Wheelchair, and they aren’t taking any salary from the company, which operates separately from the YouTube channel. “It’s a passion project for us,” says Nelson. To be clear, Not a Wheelchair isn’t a nonprofit — it’s currently licensed as a benefit company, a newer designation of a for-profit company that provides a public service. “Once it’s established, it’s going to become an employee-owned company. I want my employees to be extremely well taken care of, but as owners, we have other ways of making money,” says Nelson.
Second, they’re offering the base model chair at low margins. If you order a chair with no upgrades from Not a Wheelchair, your costs won’t be much more than it costs the company to get it to you. Margins are higher for upgrades — things like a carbon fiber seat pan, wooden handrims and more complicated frame bends. “As people change the options on their wheelchair and get a more premium version, we make more profit on that,” says Nelson. “We’ll happily take money from people who want to upgrade their machines, but we don’t want to take money from people who just need the basics.”
Testing, Testing
So how does Not a Wheelchair’s base model chair stack up to other options on the market? I hate to sound like a preacher, but … it’s totally reasonable! It hits the mark of being at least as good, if not better, than the majority of insurance-approved wheelchairs in the U.S.
Not a Wheelchair made me a base model chair to try for this article. They didn’t ask me to write good things about it, and they’re not paying for advertising. (The other benefit of having a huge YouTube channel, is you also have a built-in marketing channel with a worldwide reach.) The chair they gave me is basic. I’ve been using it on and off for a couple of weeks since I visited the factory. It rolls straight and smooth. It doesn’t weigh that much more than my fully-fixed, titanium-framed chair. Its backrest is comfortable and angle-adjustable. The rear seat height is adjustable, along with the front caster height and angle, and the center of gravity. It feels solid, not all janky and rattly, like old-school adjustable chairs did.
The Nelsons keep miniature horses on their property, and Cambry wanted a wheelchair that could handle the rigors of an active lifestyle.
The wheels, which Not a Wheelchair commissioned from Vapors Wheels, are great. I liked them so much that I stole them to replace the $900, fiber-spoked wheels that keep going out of true on my titanium chair. I put the old wheels with some fatter tires on the Not a Wheelchair and lowered the rear seat height so I could use it as an off-road chair for pushing around the dirt and grass around my house. I’ll keep pushing my titanium chair for everyday life because I like how titanium rides, and my chair is fitted with ergo seating and other frame customizations that Not a Wheelchair isn’t yet offering.
But the Not a Wheelchair won’t sit in my garage getting dusty. It’ll be getting dirty in the summer and snowy in the winter. And if my other chair breaks, I know I have a comfy, perfectly acceptable option to use while I’m fixing it. And that’s kind of the point: Wheelchairs shouldn’t be so expensive that you can’t afford to have a backup or one with an alternate seating position for specific activities. Not a Wheelchair might finally be the company with the means and the will to change that.
Touring the factory, I saw other prototypes scattered all around the facility. There’s a beefier, four-wheel drive version of The Rig that the company just launched. There’s a track wheelchair that’s still in development. It’s clear that Not a Wheelchair doesn’t intend to stop at a simple, manual wheelchair. Inexpensive components, more advanced electric off-road devices, power assist, it’s all on the table. “We’re just really excited to see where this leads,” says Green.
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Torrential rainfall from the remnants of Hurricane Helene capped off three days of extreme, unrelenting precipitation, which left catastrophic flooding and unimaginable damage in our Mountains and southern Foothills.
It was close to a worst-case scenario for western North Carolina as seemingly limitless tropical moisture, enhanced by interactions with the high terrain, yielded some of the highest rainfall totals – followed by some of the highest river levels, and the most severe flooding – ever observed across the region.
It’s no exaggeration to liken this to a Florence-level disaster for the Mountains, since the apparent rarity of the rainfall amounts and the impacts they produced – including large stretches of highways underwater and a plea from the NC Department of Transportation that “all roads in western NC should be considered closed” – were on par with eastern North Carolina’s worst hurricane from six years ago.
Flooding in downtown Marshall during the weekend after Helene. (Photo courtesy Old Marshall Jail Hotel)
The Setup for Relentless Rain
At 5 pm on Wednesday, September 25, Hurricane Helene was at Category-1 strength with its center just north of Cancun, Mexico, more than 500 miles and 30 hours away from its eventual landfall along the coast of Florida.
But it was already raining in Asheville by then, as a line of slow-moving showers along a stalled cold front – fed by tropical moisture from the fringes of Helene to the south – had set up from Atlanta through the southern Appalachians.
By midnight on Thursday, the Asheville Airport totaled 4.09 inches, and streamflows were already running at daily record high levels in upstream, upslope parts of the French Broad River basin.
The rain continued all day on Thursday as the frontal boundary had barely moved and Helene’s outer rain bands were closing in, adding even more moisture to the mix. More than nine inches fell that day across southern Yancey County.
Satellite imagery of Tropical Storm Helene over the Carolinas on Friday, September 27 at 8:00 am. (Image by NOAA/GOES East)
As mountain streams became overrun with moisture, that water rushed down the rivers and into towns such as Asheville, all while the heaviest rain from Helene was just beginning to fall.
The storm’s impacts were especially long-lasting because of its massive size. It developed in a high-humidity environment over the warm Gulf of Mexico, which let it grow and strengthen unimpeded.
That also created a broad southeasterly circulation – with tropical storm-force winds extending more than 300 miles from the center as it impacted Florida – that pushed even more moisture up the saturated mountain slopes.
From the start of the precursor frontal showers on Wednesday evening to the heart of Helene moving through on Friday morning, it was one of the most incredible and impactful weather events our state has ever seen.
Total precipitation from the precursor frontal event and Hurricane Helene from September 25 to 27, 2024.
Extreme Totals and Flooding
Over that three-day window from Wednesday, September 25 through Friday, September 27, rainfall totals exceeded eight inches across our Mountain region, with a foot or more falling in parts of Alleghany County and in a swath from Boone through Brevard.
More than 18 inches fell across southern Yancey County, western McDowell County, southeastern Buncombe County, and northwestern Rutherford County. That included 24.41 inches at our ECONet station on Mount Mitchell and 19.99 inches at our station on Bearwallow Mountain.
The highest apparent total from the event came from the North Carolina Forest Service’s RAWS station in Busick, with a three-day accumulation of 31.33 inches. While unvalidated at this point, radar estimates back up the potential for two feet of rain or more in Yancey County.
In addition to these automated weather stations, four CoCoRaHS observers recorded three-day totals of more than 20 inches: 24.12 inches in Spruce Pine, 22.36 inches in Foscoe, 22.12 inches south of Black Mountain, and 21.96 inches south of Hendersonville.
At least a dozen weather stations had their wettest three-day periods on record during this event, including the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer stations in Celo (19.98 inches), Sparta (17.29 inches), and Boone (16.67 inches).
Notable rainfall totals from September 25 to 27. Bolded text denotes local single-day or three-day records. An asterisk denotes that totals were submitted the following morning.
The weather station at the Asheville Regional Airport lost communications on Friday morning, but up to that point, it had reported 13.98 inches – nearly three months’ worth of precipitation falling in less than three days.
That heavy rain sent the Watauga, Catawba, Swannanoa, and French Broad rivers near or above their major flood stages, and that rising water overwhelmed communities across the region.
Downtown Boone was inundated by several feet of flooding and emergency responders had conducted swift water rescues in Watauga County. Morganton suffered significant flooding as the Catawba River – which hit record levels just upstream – spilled over into the city.
Heavy rain along the Broad River basin sent a destructive wave of water, mud, and debris into the towns of Chimney Rock and Lake Lure, reducing homes and businesses to splinters. As that water crested the top and flowed around the side walls of the Lake Lure Dam, it prompted downstream evacuations in case of a dam failure.
Similar evacuations were requested downstream of the Waterville Dam in northern Haywood County and along parts of Mountain Island Lake as “large amounts of water” moved through the swollen Catawba River system.
And landslides or mudslides were evident on Interstate 40 in McDowell County and along the Tennessee border, as well as in countless rural corners of the Mountains such as the byways near Brevard, where the typical fall sights of scenic waterfalls and colorful foliage have been replaced by total destruction this year.
Flooding and damage in downtown Chimney Rock in the days after Helene. (Photo courtesy Meteorologist Vernon Turner)
Wind and Tornadoes
With the exception of storm surge – and Florida was hit hard by that – Helene brought the full suite of hurricane impacts to North Carolina, and in full force just hours after its landfall at Category-4 strength.
Across the state, the storm whipped up strong winds, with tropical storm-force gusts observed throughout the Mountains, Piedmont, and southern Coastal Plain. The 66 mph gust at the Charlotte Airport was the strongest there since a thunderstorm microburst on August 19, 2019.
On Mount Mitchell, our ECONet station measured a gust of 106 mph at 8:27 am on Friday – the strongest wind observed there since April 2011. Our station on Frying Pan Mountain reported a gust of 87 mph, which is the highest wind it has ever recorded dating back to November 2004.
Those winds produced widespread power outages across western North Carolina. On Friday morning, Duke Energy reported 703,000 customers in North Carolina were without power and 281,000 outages had been restored by then. Since then, those numbers have been slow to decline, with more than half a million outages two days after Helene moved through.
Notable wind gusts and confirmed tornadoes from the precursor frontal event and Hurricane Helene from September 25 to 27, 2024.
The storm also posed a tornado threat across the state, spawning six confirmed tornadoes on Friday in addition to a rare mountain tornado on Wednesday evening near Blowing Rock – the first in Watauga County since 1998.
The strongest of Friday’s tornadoes was classified at EF3 strength as it crossed Highway 301 in Rocky Mount. Although it was on the ground for only a quarter mile, the tornado destroyed several buildings and caused 15 injuries.
That was the third EF3 tornado in the Rocky Mount area within the past 15 months, joining the July 2023 tornado north of the city and an EF3 spawned by Tropical Storm Debby in Wilson County last month.
That means the death toll is likely to climb as hard-hit areas are finally accessed in the coming days. As of Sunday afternoon, the state had officially confirmed 11 fatalities, but local numbers were already surpassing that figure, including 30 fatalities so far in Buncombe County according to the sheriff.
Sadly, our state’s long-running benchmark for deaths during a tropical event – approximately 80 during the mountain region’s July 1916 flood – could be in jeopardy from this storm that has already broken plenty of other records.
A fallen tree and power line block a road in the Asheville area after Helene. (Photo by Josh Bell/Asheville Citizen-Times)
The New Flood of Record
The high terrain of western North Carolina has seen its share of heavy rain and flooding over the years. While tropical systems in that region aren’t as common as along our coastline, those events can become super soakers due to the easily exacerbated precipitation potential when moist air rises up the mountain slopes.
Most recently, Tropical Storm Fred – which was also preceded by slow-moving thunderstorms that saturated soils and streams – produced deadly flooding across Haywood County in August 2021.
But Helene exceeded the coverage and calamity, along with the heaviest rainfall totals, from that event. During Fred, the National Weather Service issued one Flash Flood Emergency – used only rarely during life-threatening and catastrophic water rises – along the Pigeon River. By comparison, portions of 21 counties in North Carolina had those Emergency warnings issued during Helene.
Many in the Mountains also remember the floods and landslides in September 2004, which had been the wettest month ever recorded for many western sites thanks to the tropical trio of Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne.
But the totals from September 2024 will be even greater in some areas, making this the new wettest month on record at sites including Asheville, Sparta, and North Wilkesboro. And that’s not just a figurative high-water mark; the French Broad River in Fletcher crested ten feet higher than its previous peak after Frances in 2004.
A landslide covers Interstate 40 near Black Mountain in Buncombe County. (Photo by NC DOT)
Perhaps the only local event in the same ballpark as this one for the southern Mountains is the flood of July 1916, when a remnant tropical storm caused rivers to swell and inundate Asheville and other mountain towns. For more than a century, that event has loomed large as the area’s flood of record.
But that title now belongs to Helene instead, and for good reason. The scale of the impacts was broader and the mountain landscape much more developed now compared to 108 years ago. Because of that, the damage is certain to exceed the inflation-adjusted $641 million from the 1916 storm, likely by an order of magnitude. For reference, Florence caused an estimated $17 billion in damage in the state.
At the few river gauges in the region that observed both Helene and the 1916 storm, the crests since Helene have broken those long-standing records. The French Broad River and Swannanoa River – which collided at high speeds and high volumes in 1916 to overtake Biltmore Village – both saw new record crests during and after Helene.
The French Broad River in Asheville rose 1.5 feet above its previous highest crest, and downstream at Blantyre, the river surpassed its 1916 crest and was still rising when the gauge stopped reporting on Friday afternoon.
The Swannanoa River at Biltmore crested at 26.1 feet, more than five feet above its 1916 maximum and slightly above the apparent 26-foot crest in April 1791, making this effectively the worst flood along the river since North Carolina became a state.
Flooding at The Asheville Cotton Mill in the River Arts District following Helene. (Photo by Jordan Kudisch)
An Historic Storm for the State
By definition, the most extreme events have few comparisons, but it’s hard not to see elements of other notable storms in Helene and its antecedent rainfall.
Just two weeks earlier, a heavy rain event not directly associated with a named tropical system – in that case, Potential Tropical Cyclone Eight – also brought precipitation totals in excess of 20 inches across parts of southeastern North Carolina.
The widespread flooding washing over – and washing out – towns and roadways after Helene was uncomfortably similar to the scenes in eastern North Carolina following Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018. And once again, the major city in the region – Wilmington then, Asheville now – had its interstate connections severed by the flooding.
In addition to those similar impacts, one way of comparing events on opposite ends of the state is using rainfall return intervals, which frame a specific amount over a certain duration as the likelihood of occurring in any given year, such a 1-in-100 year event, with a 1% chance of occurring.
While imperfect due to its lack of recent updates, the most comprehensive return frequency data comes from NOAA’s Atlas 14 product. That showed totals from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Potential Tropical Cyclone Eight earlier this summer as roughly 1-in-500 year events, with the totals in excess of 30 inches during Florence classified as worse than 1-in-1000 year events.
Flooding along Highway 70 near Silver Creek in Burke County after Helene. (Photo by NC DOT)
Last Friday’s daily rainfall total of 11.89 inches in Celo equals the 1-in-500 year total per Atlas 14. In Asheville, the three-day total of almost 14 inches goes well beyond the 1-in-1000 year total for a 72-hour period, which Atlas 14 cites as 11.4 inches. Likewise, the 24.41 inches over three days at Mount Mitchell is off the charts compared to the noted 1-in-1000 year amount of 16.5 inches.
Yet another event of this magnitude within the state offers even more evidence that our climate is changing, and in extreme ways. The rapid intensification of Helene over the Gulf, the amount of moisture available in its surrounding environment, and its manifestation as locally heavy – and in some cases, historically unheard of – rainfall amounts are all known side effects of a warmer atmosphere.
While we can’t say for sure how many more storms like this we’ll face in the future, it’s a near certainty that we won’t see another Helene in the Atlantic, as that name is a safe bet for retirement by the World Meteorological Organization due to its devastation along the Florida coastline and in the North Carolina Mountains.
In a historic coincidence, a previous iteration of Helene was one of our state’s biggest weather what-ifs. The 1958 storm by that name approached our coast at Category-4 strength, only to turn away at the last moment, sparing areas like Wilmington a direct hit just four years after Hazel.
This year, we’ve seen what a different Category-4 Helene did to coastal areas, battering the Big Bend of Florida with a 15-foot storm surge. But 66 years to the day after the first Helene gave us a close call in North Carolina, there was no avoiding the incredible impacts of this modern-day monster storm with the same name.
A note from our director and state climatologist, Dr. Kathie Dello:
The destruction from Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina has been distressing to watch — much more so for those who are waiting to hear from family and friends in the region. As a public service center for the state, our office wants to share not only the story of the storm, but also how to assist in the recovery.
While the desire to lend a hand in person can be compelling, note that officials are turning away individuals who show up to help. The best way to support cleanup and recovery efforts is through the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund, which is accepting donations that go directly to nonprofits working in impacted communities.
I went for a spelunk through an ancient codebase a few weeks ago which contained a curious regex that I just couldn't grok.
{<((https?|ftp|dict|tel):[^\'">\s]+)>}i
I'm familiar with HTTP and FTP. I worked in the mobile industry, so knew that tel:+44... could be used to launch a dialer.
But DICT?!?!?!
It turns out that, lurking on the Internet are Dictionary Servers! They exist to allow you to query dictionaries over a network.
For many years, the Internet community has relied on the "webster" protocol for access to natural language definitions. […] In recent years, the number of publicly available webster servers on the Internet has dramatically decreased. Fortunately, several freely-distributable dictionaries and lexicons have recently become available on the Internet. However, these freely-distributable databases are not accessible via a uniform interface, and are not accessible from a single site.
The (informal) standard was published in 1997 but has kept a relatively low profile since then. You can understand why it was invented - in an age of low-size disk drives and expensive software, looking up data over a dedicated protocol seems like a nifty idea.
Then disk size exploded, databases became cheap, and search engines made it easy to look up words.
You can try it out today!
Run this command in your terminal:
curl dict://dict.org/d:Internet
That will bring back the definition from the server's default dictionary. If you want to look up a word in a specific dictionary - like The Jargon File - you can run:
curl dict://dict.org/d:Internet:jargon
You can even use it for simple translation tasks. For example, to translate English to Japanese:
curl dict://dict.org/d:Internet:fd-eng-jpn
Perhaps the easiest way to explore the protocol and server is to use telnet:
telnet dict.org dict
Type the command HELP and help ye shall receive:
113 help text follows DEFINE database word -- look up word in database MATCH database strategy word -- match word in database using strategy SHOW DB -- list all accessible databases SHOW DATABASES -- list all accessible databases SHOW STRAT -- list available matching strategies SHOW STRATEGIES -- list available matching strategies SHOW INFO database -- provide information about the database SHOW SERVER -- provide site-specific information OPTION MIME -- use MIME headers CLIENT info -- identify client to server AUTH user string -- provide authentication information STATUS -- display timing information HELP -- display this help information QUIT -- terminate connection
250 ok
That will allow you to see all the dictionaries available - in a variety of languages - and the various commands you can use with them.
Are there any other Dictionary Servers still available on the Internet?
Log in
