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TVA manages ‘biblical’ rainfall from Hurricane Helene

Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / Chickamauga Dam, seen Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, will be releasing water at a rate of 800,000 gallons per second. Drought conditions meant the utility had plenty of flood storage available going into the storm, but TVA warns against going out on the river or near dams over the next few days.
Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / Chickamauga Dam, seen Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, will be releasing water at a rate of 800,000 gallons per second. Drought conditions meant the utility had plenty of flood storage available going into the storm, but TVA warns against going out on the river or near dams over the next few days. Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / Chickamauga Dam, seen Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, will be releasing water at a rate of 800,000 gallons per second. Drought conditions meant the utility had plenty of flood storage available going into the storm, but TVA warns against going out on the river or near dams over the next few days.

By David Floyd 4 min read

Over the next few days, more than 800,000 gallons of water will flow through the spill gates at Chickamauga Dam per second as TVA responds to “biblical” rainfall caused by Hurricane Helene.

“There’s no other way to describe it,” Tennessee Valley Authority spokesperson Scott Fiedler said in a phone call. “We have set records throughout the Northeast Tennessee region.”

(READ MORE: How Helene became the near-perfect storm to bring widespread destruction across the South)

The remnants of the hurricane whipped through the Southern United States over the weekend, dumping trillions of gallons of water and inundating towns in Northeast Tennessee and North Carolina. TVA controls water levels on the Tennessee River through a series of dams, and Fiedler said the agency had plenty of flood storage available before the storm because of drought conditions.

“We were in excellent shape going in, and then Mother Nature brought us record amounts of rain up in the Northeast,” Fiedler said.