As of Wednesday afternoon, the Chattanooga area is not likely to see flooding rains from Hurricane Florence, WRCB-TV Channel 3 Chief Meteorologist Paul Barys said. He suggested a half inch to an inch-and-a-half of rain at most, with the heaviest rain in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Barys said that, although conditions could change, South Carolina and the Savannah, Georgia, area may experience much worse conditions than originally thought, while much of inland North Carolina could be spared the brunt of the storm.
The Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates 49 flood-control dams on the Tennessee River and its tributaries, has been drawing down its reservoirs this week in anticipation of heavy rainfall expected to hit the eastern part of the Valley from the hurricane by Sunday.
“It’s hard to predict exactly where the storm path will go at this point, but our focus for TVA has been to move more water out of our reservoir system to open up more flood storage capacity in anticipation of potentially heavy rains by this weekend,” said James Everett, director of the TVA’s river operations center in Knoxville.
For the first time since 1994, TVA has opened the spillways at the Cherokee Dam near Knoxville and TVA is spilling at many of its other dams, including Chickamauga, Nickajack and Guntersville in the Chattanooga area, to help draw down lake levels for the coming storms. So far this year, Chattanooga rainfall has been 8 inches above normal, and this summer has been the wettest in five years. Everett said parts of the Tennessee Valley could receive 4 to 8 inches of rain, depending upon what path the storm takes.
TVA also is sending 80 of its employees, or about two thirds of its transmission construction staff, to Charlotte, North Carolina, to help assist Duke Power with power outages expected from the coming storm.