Watching as Hurricane Helene slammed into Tennessee, distant friends kept checking in on us here in Nashville, but we were fine. Better than fine, in truth: After weeks of drought, we were finally getting some desperately needed rain. Helene made landfall on the Big Bend coast of Florida on a Thursday night; by Saturday, Nashville had already gotten enough rain to erase the entire year’s rainfall deficit, and it was still coming down.
But it was impossible to rejoice in the rain when the same weather system that erased Middle Tennessee’s drought was wreaking havoc just east of us. In Appalachia, from East Tennessee all the way up to Virginia and West Virginia, furious rivers were taking out roads — even highways — and washing out bridge after bridge. Massive dams were on the cusp of failing. Mountainsides released their hold on rock, burying entire communities in mud. Whole swaths of forest were tumbling into homes and power lines and cellphone towers.
Western North Carolina seems to have taken the hardest hit, but the destruction was so widespread — covering more than 600 miles — as to be nearly beyond reckoning. Parts of Florida were reduced to rubble. Parts of Georgia and South Carolina were flooded and water treatment plants swamped. Downed trees turned neighborhoods into war zones.
As wrenching as photos of the destruction are, it’s the human losses that tear your heart to bits. The 7-year-old, washed away with his grandparents. The 75-year-old clinging for hours to a tree in a raging river, calling fruitlessly for help. The month-old twins killed with their mother by a falling tree, and the elderly couple who died the same way. There are dozens and dozens of these stories.
In the aftermath of Helene, more than 225 people are confirmed dead, with hundreds still unaccounted for. And new research suggests that the death toll will continue to rise for years, long after the immediate losses have been fully tallied.
Nevertheless, the usual chorus of blame erupted on social media even as the rain was still falling:
Why didn’t those people just leave? Why do they keep living in places where rivers repeatedly flood, or where forests routinely catch fire, or where hurricanes so often make landfall? Why don’t they just leave drought-prone areas where rivers don’t carry enough water for the people who already live there, let alone for those who continue to pour in?
And those are the kinder remarks. The cruel ones go straight to victim-blaming: Why didn’t they evacuate? Or: People who don’t believe in climate change deserve what they get.
Such questions never seem to consider the attachment to home that people feel even when home isn’t safe. How many of us would find it easy to leave behind the place where we’ve built a life — where we have family and friends and longtime neighbors? The place where we have work?
Moving costs money that many people don’t have, and evacuation isn’t cheap, either. It might not even be possible if the roads are already gone, or if there was never much in the way of roads to begin with. Mountain communities are uniquely hard to mobilize in a disaster. “I think in this case it very well could have been more deadly if they had called for widespread evacuations and people were stuck on mountain roads,” Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told The Washington Post.
I understand the impulse to believe that Southerners bring such misfortunes upon themselves by voting for scoundrels who deny the realities of climate change. When Republican officials routinely vote against measures that increase climate resilience, or when they support unchecked development on the very wetlands that protect human communities from storm surges, or when they gut legislation that would require new construction to be storm resistant, and when they then tell outrageous lies about the federal government’s disaster response — it’s very hard not to believe that we deserve what we get down here.
But a hurricane or a flood or a deadly heat wave or a forest fire or a drought can befall anyone. Climate change has stacked the deck against all of us. Even before Helene made landfall, Appalachia was already saturated. Rivers were at record heights, and hot, wet soil could absorb no more water. Worse, such conditions gave the hurricane new fuel.
Take a look at a map of “disaster prone” areas in the United States. It’s a huge chunk of the country. Already there’s no realistic way to crowd everyone into the places that are currently somewhat safe. Even the safe places aren’t really safe, or won’t be safe for long. Last year, Vermont got hammered by catastrophic flooding. Buncombe County, N.C., among the areas hardest hit by Helene, was until very recently considered a “climate haven.”
There’s no such thing as a climate haven anymore. We all live in Florida now.
Even the few remaining Americans who still dismiss climate change outright must surely know this. They simply choose to parrot the talking points of Republican politicians and right-wing media figures who are paid by Big Oil — or Big Construction — to lie to vulnerable Americans and leave them ever more vulnerable.
There’s no denying that we would be in much better shape today if utility companies and the fossil-fuel industry had not launched a huge disinformation campaign to cover up the truth of climate change decades ago, and if the Republican Party and right-wing media had not embraced it.
Yet they continue to embrace it even now. Climate disinformation frequently runs rampant in the aftermath of climate-related disasters, but ridiculous rumors and conspiracy theories have reached new levels in the wake of Helene. “I have been doing disaster work for nearly 20 years, and I cannot think of another acute disaster where there has been this much misinformation,” Dr. Montano told The Times.
Among the most outrageous lies in circulation right now — embraced and promulgated by both Elon Musk and Donald Trump — is the false claim that F.E.M.A. has spent all its money helping undocumented migrants and therefore has no funds left to help hurricane victims. There is absolutely no truth to this story, as F.E.M.A. has explained, and even Republican elected officials like Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs of Knox County, Tenn., and Kevin Corbin, a North Carolina state senator, have called out the misinformation, but the rumors are still flying. Among the many ironies of these lies is that Project 2025, the Republican playbook for a second Trump presidency, calls for gutting F.E.M.A.
But I can’t help finding a sliver of hope in the Republicans currently calling out disinformation and praising the federal government’s response to this hurricane. Will it last? I don’t know.
Maybe we’re finally at a point where even Republicans have no choice but to acknowledge that hurricanes are growing stronger. Droughts are getting deeper. Fires are burning hotter. While there’s still time — however we vote, wherever we live, whatever we believe — we must shore up against the next calamity. We must hold our elected officials accountable and force them to invest in the changes that will keep “natural” disasters from continuing to worsen. And in the meantime, we must help one another dig out.
In addition to donating to disaster-relief organizations already noted by The Times, here are some local organizations distributing aid, deploying volunteers or helping animals in need: Appalachian Funders Network; East Tennessee Foundation’s Neighbor to Neighbor Disaster Relief Fund; Feeding the Carolinas; Hearts With Hands; North Carolina Community Foundation Disaster Relief Fund; Animal Help Now (for wildlife); Humane Society of the U.S. and A.S.P.C.A. (for domestic animals).
The post There Is No Climate Haven. We All Live in Florida Now. appeared first on New York Times.