The scenes from North Carolina are shocking: roads and bridges washed away. Houses ripped from their foundations. Entire towns reduced to mud and debris.
On Thursday night, Hurricane Helene slammed Florida as a Category 4 storm with winds reaching 140 miles per hour. In coastal communities, Helene knocked down trees and power lines, and caused record storm surge.
Yet some of its most devastating impacts were farther inland as the storm moved across the Southeast. Even before the bulk of the storm arrived in North Carolina, Helene started dumping rain in southern Appalachia — and loads of it. Over the last several days some regions in western North Carolina recorded more than 2.5 feet.
“We have biblical devastation through the county,” Ryan Cole, the assistant director of Buncombe County Emergency Services, said in a press briefing Saturday afternoon. “We’ve had biblical flooding here.”
Government officials have so far attributed 100 deaths to Helene across six states, including Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. That number is almost certain to rise. Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, in part because millions of households have lost power and there are still widespread cell outages. Many roads are also inaccessible, making rescue operations challenging.
Stunned by the devastation, some residents have compared flooding in parts of North Carolina to the impacts from Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana in 2005. Katrina claimed more than 1,800 lives. The weeks to come may indeed reveal Helene as one of the deadliest US hurricanes in recent history.
Helene is also a brutal reminder that climate change — which can intensify hurricanes and flooding — costs human lives. Record-warm water in the Gulf of Mexico supercharged the storm and filled it with moisture. Plus, hot air in general holds more water. These dynamics provided the fuel that enabled Helene to become a deadly, super-wet storm.
And as Helene reveals, it’s not just coastal communities that are vulnerable. Asheville, North Carolina has been dubbed a climate haven — a refuge from the impacts of warming and its consequences. But in reality, few places are completely safe.
1) How bad is the damage?
After developing in the Caribbean early last week, Helene strengthened quickly into a Category 4 storm by late Thursday, when it slammed into the Big Bend region of Florida. That’s the area where the panhandle meets the peninsula.
Helene broke storm surge records along Florida’s Gulf Coast, inundating coastal towns like Cedar Key with sand and seawater. It left homes in ruins.
Much of the worst damage was farther inland, in mountain regions of Georgia, Tennessee, and especially North Carolina, all of which are far less familiar with the threat of tropical storms than the Florida coast. The main problem was abundant, unceasing rain, which caused rivers to balloon in populated areas like Asheville.
Videos and images over the weekend showed much of Asheville’s River Arts District — which hugs the French Broad River, southwest of downtown — inundated with water.
State officials said all roads in western North Carolina, including parts of Interstate 40, were closed and should only be used by emergency vehicles. In nearby Tennessee, meanwhile, more than a dozen bridges are closed and five of them “are completely gone,” the state’s Department of Transportation said Sunday.
Power outages and water shortages are also rampant across the Southeast. As of late Monday morning, more than 2 million people were without electricity across South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia, according to PowerOutage.us. Parts of western North Carolina are under a boil water advisory, due to a disruption in the public water supply. Emergency workers are planning to deliver bottled water.
In the last day or so water has receded in southern Appalachia, though the risk of landslides remains.
2) How much will the storm cost?
It will take weeks to get a full tally of all the damage, but Helene’s expansive swath of destruction has already put initial estimates in the billions of dollars. CoreLogic, an analytics firm, put its initial damage tally between $3 and $5 billion in insured losses. Moody’s Analytics expects a toll from $20 billion to $34 billion. AccuWeather is setting the price tag between $145 billion and $160 billion.
These are all coarse initial estimates, but they give an indication of the magnitude of the devastation. The higher projections would put Helene in the top tier of costliest storms in the US. Hurricane Katrina, currently the most expensive weather disaster in US history, extracted about $170 billion from the economy. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 wreaked $125 billion in havoc.
The dollar value, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. Damage estimates are typically based on insurance claims, but with rising premiums across the country, more homes and businesses are going without financial protection. The insured value of a property doesn’t directly translate into suffering, either. A multi-million dollar coastal vacation home getting swept down a hillside will register as a higher loss on an insurance company’s balance sheet than a destroyed mobile home that’s the sole residence and store of wealth for a family.
3) Why was flooding in North Carolina so extreme?
For one, Helene was gigantic — stretching more than 400 miles wide — which means its impacts were felt far from the eye of the storm. Most hurricanes are around 300 miles in diameter. Plus, it traveled over an exceptionally hot Gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes are fueled by evaporating hot water that sends columns of moisture up into the storm, so the unusual heat in the Gulf only further charged the storm.
Even before Helene made landfall in Florida, bans of moisture from the hurricane, which was churning in the Gulf, were pulled into Appalachia. Satellite imagery showed almost the entire East Coast shrouded in cloud cover. That means that some regions were already starting to flood even before the bulk of Helene arrived.
“Recent rainfall in these areas, especially the southern Appalachians, have left the grounds saturated and the river tributaries running high,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned last Wednesday. “Additional rainfall from Helene will exacerbate the existing flood risk.”
This storm only added water to an already wet area. The areas surrounding Asheville are temperate rainforests, full of streams and rivers that run alongside human communities.
Though we’re still in the initial phase of the fallout, Hurricane Helene’s destruction underscores that the destruction from a storm is not simply a function of wind speed and rain totals. It’s also influenced by the amount of people and property in harm’s way and how ready they are to face a disaster head-on.
4) How does Helene compare to storms like Katrina and Harvey?
We know that Helene is already on course to join the ranks of the costliest storms in US history. What all those storms have in common is that they made landfall in the continental US at high intensities in populated areas: Harvey struck the Texas coast at Category 4 strength, Katrina rammed into Louisiana and Mississippi as a Category 3 storm, while Helene was a Category 4 when it hammered Florida’s Big Bend region.
But the hurricane category ranking system is mainly based on wind speed, while the most dangerous element of these storms is the sheer quantity of water in the form of rainfall and storm surge. All three of these storms caused extensive flooding.
Their destruction also compounded on top of local vulnerabilities. Houston suffered intense flooding after Harvey because of the inordinate amount of rain it received, but also because the city is densely populated, relatively flat, and close to sea level. Sections of New Orleans sit below sea level and when Katrina struck, the city’s flood control infrastructure catastrophically failed. Helene landed in Florida’s Big Bend region, which is still recovering from the last major hurricane, before moving further inland and dumping rain on regions that have much less experience and infrastructure to cope with extraordinary volumes of water.
A growing number of people are also living in areas most likely to get hammered by hurricanes, and these states are building more property and infrastructure to accommodate them. That means that when a storm does make landfall, it puts more people in danger and damages more homes, offices, roads, and power lines.
5) What is the government doing to help?
Before Helene made landfall, forecasters at NOAA put out a rare news release and blunt warning about the storm’s impending damage. The agency said that the hurricane would cause “catastrophic, life-threatening inland flooding.”
Evacuation orders were issued for parts of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, but some residents didn’t obey them. The governors of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina heeded these alerts and submitted emergency declaration requests to the White House. Disaster declarations allow the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to get involved in the response with emergency shelters, medical aid, and grants for helping people recover. More than 1,270 rescuers were sent to the afflicted areas. States also mobilized National Guard units to assist with rescue and relief efforts. President Joe Biden said he will visit afflicted communities once rescue efforts wind down.
Ad hoc networks of local volunteers have also sprung up to provide assistance and relief, even deploying private airplanes and helicopters to bring supplies to areas now isolated by floods and destroyed roads.
6) What did climate change have to do with it?
Though hurricanes are uncommon in many of the places where Helene tore through, a few have passed directly through inland regions like western North Carolina before.
Tracing out the specific role of climate change in Helene’s destruction will take some time, but there are now some established ways that rising temperatures amplify the harms from hurricanes. Hotter air and water make the strongest hurricanes stronger and fuel rapid intensification, where a storm’s winds pick up by 35 miles per hour or more in less than 24 hours.
Warmer air holds onto more moisture, which means that hurricanes dish out more rain. A hotter climate also makes the ice caps melt and causes the ocean itself to expand, lifting sea levels and expanding the reach of storm surges. Combined, these two factors create more flooding in the wake of a hurricane. Floods are often the deadliest and more destructive aspect of hurricanes.
Helene arose amid one of the hottest years on record, with ocean temperatures near record highs and atmospheric conditions suited for hurricane formation. NOAA anticipated that this year’s hurricane season would be above average.
And risks are mounting. According to the most recent National Climate Assessment, a US government report, the growing population in the region hit by Helene, particularly in cities, has created new vulnerabilities to warming. “Over the last few decades, economic growth in the Southeast has been concentrated in and around urban centers that depend on climate-sensitive infrastructure and regional connections to thrive,” according to the report.
7) How can I help?
To find out where people need the most help, local news outlets have some of the most up-to-date reports of the situation on the ground and where help is needed.
Some state emergency responders have websites set up to collect donations for hurricane relief. Civic groups and food banks in affected communities are also collecting goods and money to help people who were hurt by the storm.
Local emergency managers are also providing guidance for what resources they do and don’t need. Please take this to heart. The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, for instance, specifically asks people not to self-deploy to disaster areas and to only donate things requested by local emergency coordinators.
