McCaysville's flooding wasn't as bad as it could have been, Ellijay dodged a bullet

Well, over the past week, it's no secret, we were dealing with a serious situation up in McKaysville. This is the flooding that we saw. This side of the screen, this is McKaysville here. The state line runs about like that. And so this is Copper Hill, Tennessee. And believe it or not, what you see here, it could have been. Worse. Yes, you heard me correctly. It could have been worse because the heaviest rain was actually split among two river basins. This is the Toccoa River, becomes the Ocoee River, but the Ellijay River was also in play. The heaviest of the rain was split between the Toccoa and technically the Coosawattee, right? The Ellijay and the Cartecay come together in Ellijay, becomes the Coosawattee River and goes towards Carter's Lake. But if the heaviest of ...of the rain was just two or five miles to the south, that would have flooded... Ellijay instead of McKaysville. Let's take a look at some of the details here. You can see the bullseye from northern Gilmer County, really the mountain town area, off towards Blue Ridge. That 11.19, that is a measured rain total at Mercier Orchards. That's on Highway 5 headed up towards McKaysville. What I'm going to do now is turn on the Toccoa River Basin and really highlight it. Notice it only grabs, we'll say about 70 percent, 60 to 70 percent of that pink shaded area. So So think about it this way. If that pink shaded area had been just two to five miles to the north, that would have added a lot more water in McKaysville with nothing stopping it. Likewise, if that pink area had just been a little further south, A whole lot of water would have been added into the Ellijay River Basin. In fact, even with the Mountaintown Creek Basin catching just part of that pink shaded area, it entered moderate flood stage. So the fact that this was split between a couple of different basins saved McKaysville in a sense of the water not going any higher. Likewise, it saved Ellijay from dealing with a catastrophic flooding situation down there.