Jessica Webb
editor@thesmokymountaintimes.com
You can predict the weather but that doesn’t mean storms won’t bring their surprises. Heavy rainfall last week culminated in storms on Thursday night, May 26, and caused local waterways to rise to flood levels. Strong winds also brought down trees in some places and caused power outages.
David Breedlove, Swain County Emergency Management director, said advance preparation and early warnings helped reduce the potential damage of flooding.
“Old River Road was closed early on,” Breedlove said. “We had some heads-up from Duke Energy that the lakes were full in Jackson County and that they would have to release water to hold the expected rainfall. We had a good heads up, and the predictions were good.”
With good warnings in advance, he said, emergency personnel and law enforcement dispatched to riverside campgrounds that are in the floodway in advance of the storm Thursday to move above the flood zone. That effort was well heeded, given the Tuckasegee River reached above flooding totaling over 12 feet during the storm.
There were no calls for injury during the storm. However, an area on Sam David Road in Lower Alarka was closed after half the road fell into the creek. NC Department of Transportation was working on the repairs early this week.
“There was a small apartment building on Green Burch that had a tree fall through it, and two apartments are no longer able to be lived in,” Breedlove said of other storm-related damages. No one was injured in the emergency.
American Red Cross was contacted to help the residents with temporary housing.
Friday outage
A large outage on Friday morning kept some businesses, including Smoky Mountain Times, closed for the day. Swain County Middle School and Bright Adventures Pre-K were also closed Friday due to the outages. Swain County High School and East and West Elementary schools operated on a 2-hour delay due to the weather.
The large outage impacted over 450 customers. Duke Energy, when reached early this week, reported the outage was caused by a tree falling and tearing down three phase power lines. It took about six hours to repair and restore power.
Mostly warm days with highs in the low-80s are in the forecast with scattered thunderstorms tonight (Thursday, June 2) and into Friday morning.