♪ Welcome to a This Week in South Carolina special report.

I'm Gavin Jackson here in Clinton, South Carolina, on the campus of Presbyterian College in the upstate region that was hit hard by Tropical Storm Helene, a week ago.

That storm left more than 1.3 million South Carolinians in the dark, damaged 1500 homes and claimed more than 35 lives.

Before we look into those recovery efforts, I spoke with South Carolina Emergency Information Network meteorologist, Tim Miller about why this storm was so impactful.

>> We've seen some just devastating pictures of the flooding in South Carolina, North Carolina and parts of Tennessee.

But for our state, it has been tremendous.

And as well as our friends in North Carolina.

This is a loop that takes us into Thursday when the storm was off the coast of Florida, making landfall in Taylor County, Florida.

This is again Thursday night.

Then by Friday, all of this moisture shifts into Georgia and in Carolina, where it's still, through Georgia, it was a mighty powerful storm.

And then look at all this moisture.

Now, bear in mind we had lots of rain before Helene.

And then Helene comes in, gives us all this moisture as the moisture moves up the mountains, As it moves up to the mountains, it acts like a sponge, and all of the moisture is basically like a rag wringing out of that particular, storm cells that move on through.

And that's what created tremendous amounts of rain, where we received over 20 inches of rain in north of Asheville and several inches of 20 inches of rain gives us literally trillions of gallons of water falling from the sky.

So this is what caused major flooding for parts of the upstate and then certainly into parts of North Carolina.

The problem is also the rain that falls towards the north goes through the watershed through South Carolina.

So everywhere from the Broad River to the Congaree River to the Saluda, to the Wateree all have to take in what, falls from up north, then brings it on down towards the ocean.

But notice the rainfall amounts, known as 12 plus inches of rainfall in certain areas.

But plenty of places towards the east, like Camden, where there really wasn't