Last week, warning about the imminent arrival of Hurricane Helene, the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Fla., used the word “unsurvivable.”
And yet the storm seemed to take much of the country by surprise. You might have thought, not that long ago, that the arrival of extreme weather could wake us up, belatedly, from climate complacency. But the dull drumbeat of disaster seems almost to be putting us to sleep instead. Even the imminent arrival of a cataclysm like Helene, a Category 4 storm that spanned more than 400 miles across the Gulf Coast and threatened communities as far north as Appalachia, was not enough to generate all that much attention ahead of time, when more might have been done to limit the devastation. The storm has so far produced at least 100 deaths and perhaps $160 billion in damages (according to early estimates).
In Florida’s Big Bend region, Helene was the third hurricane to make landfall in barely a year, flattening beach towns and barrier islands and sending water into the attics of homes as far away as Tampa Bay. In several states to the north, locals from dozens of communities hundreds of miles from one another were calling the storm “our Katrina,” some of them watching whole homes or shiny caskets carried downstream, others clinging to tree branches for hours on end waiting for the floodwaters to recede or help to arrive. In Tennessee, there was no emergency declared before hospital patients were evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter, and as of Saturday, across western North Carolina, hundreds of vulnerable power substations were still down, along with the infrastructure and power lines meant to actually deliver electricity and the vast majority of the world’s supply of high purity quartz, a necessary input for the production of semiconductors. Dozens of coal ash ponds holding billions of tons of toxic coal ash have likely been flooded, as well. Cars and trucks “were tossed around like toys.”
Forty trillion gallons of rain fell in total, the equivalent of one-third of the total volume of Lake Erie, enough to cover the entire state of Massachusetts in 23 feet of water. The intense rainfall was made, over the last week, perhaps 50 percent more intense over parts of Georgia and the Carolinas by global warming. (Other rapid assessments suggested it was perhaps only 20 percent more intense.) Entire towns appear to have been turned into flotsam or pulverized into splinters, and few of those living in the hardest-hit areas even carried flood insurance. In Asheville, N.C., which sits hundreds of miles from the coastline and thousands of feet above sea level and is now the drowned ground zero of the storm, the National Flood Insurance Program coverage rate was under 1 percent.
Across the country, as many as six million more homes are at severe risk of flooding than are even included on the federal government’s flood risk maps, Michael Thomas pointed out in the aftermath of the storm. Across Asheville’s Buncombe County, 17 times as many homes had been judged at risk in a 100-year flood event as carried insurance against that risk; Helene was called a “thousand-year” flood for certain parts of the Southeast, though those terms grow less meaningful almost by the day. Another ostensible thousand-year storm had hit the coastal Carolinas just one week before. “Sometimes ‘worst case’ scenarios really do come to pass,” the climate scientist Daniel Swain wrote over the weekend on Sunday, “and I think we often lack the collective imagination to fully envision what that looks like.”
Americans watching disaster footage from a distance — collapsed bridges and disappeared roads, Asheville submerged by sludgy brown floodwater — wondered how hurricanes might produce such devastation, so far from shore and so high up in the mountains. They used the words “unprecedented” and “unthinkable” and grimly recalled silly rankings of so-called climate havens, often produced in partnership with real estate brokers, which named Asheville as a top choice destination for those seeking safety from extreme weather. In conversation and on social media they suggested, as they had with floods in Vermont and orange skies in New York last summer, that the lesson of Helene is that nowhere is safe from climate disaster; an essay bearing that headline, published in Politico, was presented by Chevron. The real lesson may not be quite so grim, though it also demands more of us: To the extent we might enjoy safety and stability in a world evermore pockmarked by climate impacts, it won’t be because we casually circled havens on maps but because we built and designed them ourselves.
Helene gives one vision of the future, with the storm scarring a whole region and imposing perhaps a decade of recovery. But, in truth, as extraordinary as its devastation might seem, this kind of flooding in this kind of setting was not unthinkable, or for that matter even unprecedented — indeed, it happened in western North Carolina in 1916, and Hurricanes Camille (1969) and Agnes (1972) offered additional cautionary tales. For those with foreshortened memories there was similarly spectacular flooding, nearly simultaneously, in Kathmandu, Nepal, on the other side of the planet, where nearly 150 have died and landslides have flattened whole neighborhood after half a year’s rain fell in two days in a city twice as high up in the mountains and twice as far from the coast as Asheville.
These days, even the most ubiquitous news stories produce some amount of lamentation that “nobody is covering this,” since everyone loves to post media criticism and in an endless scroll it’s easy enough to find sufficient straw men. (We hear a lot about social media’s echo chamber, but its greatest trick is showing you stuff to get outraged about, including the apparent indifference or disinterest of others.)
At first, over the weekend, word of Helene’s devastation crisscrossed the country almost by whisper, in part because the few in position to observe the greatest damage firsthand lacked cellular and internet connections with which to transmit their pictures, and in part because national media hadn’t quite anticipated the scale of destruction and local media, though heroic, was only capable of so much.
Soon enough, the storm claimed a foothold on the country’s front pages and in the national consciousness. But by then it was hard to escape the impression that as natural disasters and extreme weather events pile up in our feeds they are somewhat losing their salience as a cultural force, producing less a sense of ruptured reality than more quotidian disruption, even receding from view as a perverse consequence of ubiquitousness. Back to back hurricanes, thousand-year flooding events, the return of the urban firestorm — many of these grim disasters seemed to loom larger as horrifying long-term predictions than they do as actual weather events that are presently leaving whole populations devastated in their wake.
As Helene’s floodwaters retreated, liberals pointed to the threats to advance warning and disaster relief posed by Project 2025, emphasizing how uninterested in relief Donald Trump had been as president. After Hurricane Matthew hit North Carolina, when he was president he released only 1 percent of the state’s requested relief, and he had hoped to cut the federal disaster response budget aggressively, proposing cuts to FEMA of more than 60 percent. Trump himself faulted President Biden for supposedly ignoring calls from Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia last week, though Kemp had in fact praised the president for his responsiveness, and across the political spectrum came criticism of state leaders and federal authorities, from those watching the humanitarian disaster in person or through their phones and wanting to pin responsibility for it on emergency response in action.
The thing is, there was action. Disaster response is a jury-rigged patchwork, imperfect at best and deeply in need of reform, as the “disasterologist” Samantha Montano, among others, has emphasized. But the tragedy of Helene is not that nobody arrived in its wake to help, because they have. The tragedy is that the storm did more, and got there first. The pattern is by now familiar, but the country has seemingly chosen not to be prepared as much as grow inured.
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