Transylvania County

So the Chihuahua bald is an example of one of those.

South Mills River is one that people in definitely Transylvania, Henderson and Buncombe County should know about.

Not only is it consistently listed as one of Trout Unlimited's top 100 trout streams in the country, but it provides drinking water along with the Laurel Mountain roadless area to Henderson and Buncombe County through an intake on the Mills River.

Other ones that people are probably familiar with, the Mount Mitchell area is covered by a roadless area called Balsam Cone.

This was not Brinson Bell's first rodeo.

Before rising to the state board, She spent years in the mountains, first as a field technician serving the 12 westernmost counties, then as elections director in Transylvania County, not far from the areas that Helene would hardest.

When the storm came, that history stopped being a line on a resume, and it became something closer to muscle memory.

I knew the ridgelines.

me a message about it last week.

I was out in Transylvania County and you were like, that's where I saw a thing.

Yeah.

And you were like literally in the place where I saw the footprints as a teenager.

We got rain ongoing right now in the mountains and parts of the foothills.

We actually have some thunderstorms that have moved in the southwest mountains, especially Transylvania County.

That area, looking at the radar, you can see on the map, got some storms across the mountains.

These will continue on and off for the rest of the morning and some heavy rain in spots.

But when you get up there, you start getting up in elevation.

You start getting near Transylvania County, North Carolina.

The foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains is a good description.

Now, the town of Easley was originally called Rockville and the town was actually renamed Pickensville in 1792.

But count is also the title of Count Dracula.

Well, Sapphire Valley is in Transylvania County.

So count is a real nice kind of use of that word that people wouldn't initially think of.

And there'll be two or three more vampire references we'll go through in a little bit to kind of lead you to that area.

I like

it.

Transylvania County is right next to where I'm at.

I can't remember the mind.

And then just one after another, they kept coming.

The flash flood warnings were issued prior to that in some of the counties like Transylvania County, Haywood County.

I believe Jackson County had a flash flood warning out early in the day.

Keep in mind, we had a couple of heavy rain events leading up to this.

The East Fork Pigeon River is the headwaters of the Pigeon River.

There's a West Fork and an East Fork and they come off the Continental Divide.

And essentially so much rain fell in a concentrated area of Transylvania and Southern Haywood County that it just saturated the ground, inundated that river and overwhelmed it quickly.

So the theory is that there was debris, so much debris getting into the river that it just clogged it up and the pressure of the water just kept building.