As search and rescue missions and a yearslong cleanup of the catastrophic Hurricane Helene are only beginning in East Tennessee, water continues to pour into reservoirs and flood communities downstream of dams.
There is no clear end in sight.
Though dams helped slow the flow of water, preventing the kind of destruction caused upstream, they cannot stop it entirely. In Carter County near Elizabethton, houses were surrounded by water from the overflowing Watauga River as the Tennessee Valley Authority released record flows through the Watauga Dam.
By Oct. 1, the only National Weather Service flood warning in East Tennessee was for areas of Sevier and Knox counties below Douglas Dam. Douglas Lake rose nearly 22 feet in three days between Sept. 26-29, equal to 182 billion gallons of water. TVA continues to release more than 440,000 gallons a second into the French Broad River.
TVA, the federal utility that owns and operates Douglas and Watauga dams, relied on the reservoirs behind the dams to store historic amounts of water from Helene and prevent further flooding. The utility does not know exactly when the high flows of the French Broad and Watauga rivers will end, spokesperson Scott Brooks said.