According to recent reports, Hurricane Helene dumped approximately 40 trillion gallons of water along its path of devastation.
That is enough water to fill 60 million Olympic-sized pools or the entire Dallas Cowboys stadium 51,000 times.
One east Tennessee farmer told Successful Farming that the water came so fast and no one anticipated it to be this bad. Water on his own farms rose a foot and a half every hour. With 5-10% of Tennessee’s cropland flooded, the farmer says the worst flood he has ever witnessed took place back in 1977. He said it was a creek flood compared to this one.
Helene’s impact interrupted and in some cases even cut short the harvesting of many crop areas.
According to the USDA’s final Crop Progress Report before the storm’s impact, approximately 70% of Tennessee’s corn and only 42% of the state’s soybeans had been harvested. Both of which are well ahead of their respective five-year average.
