I'm sick to my stomach over this. I live 90 minutes from the damage zone. I have had multiple conversations with friends and friends of friends who have been up in the carnage helping.
NC says 94 dead. This is 100% BS.
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9 Reefer trucks at Hickory airport with bodies stacked like cordwood - that could be several thousand bodies alone.
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Report that one coroner has 1,200 bodies in one county alone.
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Radio calls overheard one for 800 bags and the other at an airport for 1000 lbs of bags (payload quantity).
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Some may have seen the story of one woman who lost her whole family of 11. What the article didn't say, was that there were 40 other homes in her holler. She was the only survivor.
These stories could go on and on. The real number is 10,000-20,000. Gov. Cooper controls the information which gets released. He's keeping a lid on the disaster.
I just want to keep this on the top of people's minds as we go through daily life.
#WNCSTRONG #ETNSTRONG
"Which is entirely true, propane smells just like a rotting corpse": Propane smells nothing like a rotting body/animal.
"since most of the mud has been removed at this point": hardly any of the mud has been removed, except on some roads. You had entire mountainsides collapse and sweep hollers into the river or the tributary creeks which are now re-routed thanks to new banks of 30' of sludge.
"somewhere, would have broken protocol, and leaked videos": Don't bank on that. Look at Harvest Festival. The lid has been kept on those videos. And most of these folks don't have cell/internet. I will incorporate that factor into my analysis, however.
"First of all the military isn't involved at all.": I'm seeing reports of 82nd ABN being deployed. I think there is a limited number of Marines being deployed too. I've also read numerous reports of them not dropping supplies or doing S&R. For the most part, the NCNG is doing most of the work.
"I doubt the people threatening to arrest the feds, would comply with some kind of conspiracy to hide tens of thousands of dead bodies." All of their information is mostly local. I'd guess by this point most LE are up and running on Starlink and/or satphone. We're not privy to the chatter, so that remains open to debate. They are still in a recovery position, exiting the rescue phase. They may not have even had time to confab and compare notes.
"Just people who keep repeating stories from unnamed third party sources with zero proof other than "trust me bro".": As a former analyst I keep an eye out for "circular reporting". All the 1st hand info I'm receiving is matching up with random, non-repeating accounts from what I see online. A lot of my intel is coming in via firsthand accounts. One of my friends was the security detail for Sara Carter on her videos and he was boots on the ground 4-12 days after impact. I don't do "trust me bro". I'm fusing credible sources with HUMINT and comparing to OSINT. None of the firsthand accounts are people who have a reason to lie and the YT sources from people running missions don't seem to have a motivation to misinform.
"every hospital in Western NC and East TN being filled to the brim with bodies": I didn't make that claim either. What I am saying is that when you look at the magnitude of the event, and pair it with the processed information, it's easy to quantify that number of deaths. A 53' reefer can hold about 1,500 bodies alone. Even if I'm 80% wrong, we could be looking at 2-4,000 souls lost. Yet state of NC says 94 or whatever.
Don't under estimate the magnitude of what happened in a 1,000 year event. Since you're familiar with the AO, you know how many hollers there are with 50-200 people all over the region. No time to evacuate. Landslides of 20' wall of mud and debris with no warning, working it's way down 4-6,000' mountains with tremendous velocity.
I'm waiting to see satellite imagery of it. You should be able to see the slide paths and overlay the .KML onto a map and that will give you an idea of how many hollers were disappeared.