Residents of Newport, Tennessee, were ordered to evacuate immediately on Friday as heavy rainfall and flash flooding from Hurricane Helene moved north, causing widespread devastation.
Cocke County Mayor Rob Mathis announced on Facebook just before 3 p.m. EST that the Waterville Dam had suffered a “CATASTROPHIC FAILURE,” prompting the evacuation of all downtown Newport.
The dam’s failure followed warnings of severe flooding across eastern Tennessee, where emergency teams were fully engaged in water rescues and evacuations.
Mathis declared a state of emergency for Cocke County shortly after the evacuation order, advising residents to act quickly. “If water is rising near you, PLEASE DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE WATER REACHES YOU,” he urged in a message earlier in the day.
Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 storm, has left a trail of destruction across the Southeastern United States. As of Friday afternoon, over 1.2 million people in South Carolina and 900,000 in Georgia were without power, with Tennessee also experiencing significant outages.
Officials have confirmed at least 35 storm-related deaths across four states. Dom Lucre shared shocking footage of floodwaters engulfing homes in eastern Tennessee, underscoring the region’s dire situation following the dam’s collapse.
🔥🚨BREAKING NEWS: A flash flood emergency has been declared in Eastern Tennessee, water is filling homes an hour after the reports of the Waterville Dam failing. pic.twitter.com/qBrsg5Yz2t
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) September 27, 2024
This is what happens when you give billions upon billions of U.S. Taxpayer Dollars to genocidal, criminal Nation/States such as Israel and Ukraine…while ignoring your own infrastructure, homeless Veterans and disabled people!
Another weaponized weather warfare event carried out by the US corporate state.
Not sure how hurricane Helene became such a gigantium wrecker upon leaving Cancún and traveling directly up to Florida, (as the crow flies), to become a devastating category 4, I think. In Cancún it was but a whisper passing through the night. Sure, a solid day of rain the next day but we’ve all seen that in NZ every other week in the winter time. There were some broken branches.