4 ms·

"mountain towns and roads flood when it rains a lot" Hurricanes never hit Western NC

• thehappypm 2y ago
  How is that even possible? The Southeast gets slammed by hurricanes constantly, and it's not like these mountains are a thousand miles inland.
  • ppseafield 2y ago
    A couple of factors keep most hurricanes away from the mountains. There's a strong gulf stream current that tends to lead hurricanes up along the east coast, sometimes as far north as NYC. And also the Gulf of Mexico can draw hurricanes away. Hurricanes dump so much rain on land that they have to be constantly replenished by water sources, otherwise they'll peter out pretty quickly. Land also exhibits something like drag on hurricanes and tends to slow them down. I bet there have been some hurricanes whose edges have grazed central NC, but the most intense weather (heavy, sideways rain, storm surges, and 200mph+ gusts) are experienced at the edge of the eye. It's rare that hurricanes are so big and intense that land far away from water experiences the worst of it. Source: grew up in south Florida.
• paganel 2y ago
  From the article, this might be rare but it has happened before: > Perhaps the only comparable event, in which a storm struck the Gulf of Mexico coast and dropped incredible amounts of rainfall hundreds of miles away, came in 1969 with Hurricane Camille. After making landfall in extreme southeastern Louisiana, Camille tracked over Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia before combining with a frontal boundary over Virginia and producing epic rains of up to 25 inches.
• dripton 2y ago
  Sure they do. Agnes and Hugo both tracked quite a bit west, for example.