It's hard to even comprehend the scope of the devastation of Hurricane Helene in the Appalachian region.
Fifteen minutes down the road from where I live, I-26 is washed out. In that same area, more than 50 people had to be evacuated from the roof of the Unicoi hospital, and others died while working at the Impact Plastics factory. Fifteen minutes in a different direction, flooding engulfed downtown Elizabethton and prompted the evacuation of local hospitals and prisons.
This doesn't even begin to cover the impacts all along the Nolichucky river in East Tennessee, with all but one bridge washed out, severely limiting travel for those on the other side of the river who are without water, power, and cell service. Greeneville, TN ran out of water for residents, and other areas (including where I live) are under a boil water advisory.
North Carolina had it way worse. Because so many roads and towns got washed out and so much infrastructure got destroyed, people are trapped with no water, cell service, or power. Chimney Rock, Boone, Asheville, Black Mountain, I-40, and so many more places in the mountains are severely damaged.
Climate Change Logistics
Amid the outpouring of love and support, I've seen some not particularly helpful responses: 1) We should have just built our infrastructure better! 2) Individuals should have prepared better and seen this coming. 3) Why didn't people just evacuate?
Let's talk through these one by one to understand the particular set of problems that climate change poses for my home region.
1) We should have built better infrastructure.
I agree that we should be building better infrastructure that is more climate resilient. Thank god the Nolichucky Dam held! It also makes sense to be more cautious when building near flood plains—the Unicoi hospital should have been built elsewhere.
But the mountains present unique challenges. When unprecedented levels of rain fall in the mountains, all that water flows into the valleys. For the Nolichucky river that creeks from all over feed into it, that means catastrophic, rapid flooding.
For reference, the last great flood in 1977 peaked at 82,000 cubic feet per second, but this flood capped out at 162,000 cubic feet per second (not captured by the graph because they had to evacuate earlier). Now imagine that same scale of water collecting in other smaller gulleys on the way down the mountain. You can see why there were catastrophic landslides, mudslides, and flash floods all over the area.
Let's say we want to build better infrastructure to avoid these impacts from a future Helene. Almost all the major roads are in valleys and along rivers for a reason—it's the easiest way to get through the mountains, and it's the easiest place to build. If you want to build roads on the sides of the mountains, they're going to be a lot more windy, and they're still going to be subject to landslides and significant water erosion from smaller creeks.
This is an existential problem not just for big cities and highways but also for anyone living up in the mountains who are currently only accessible by helicopter. And if sea temperatures continue to rise, we will almost certainly see more storms like Helene in the future.
I only hope that we can find more sustainable ways to build our communities in the mountains, because honestly it's a pretty difficult problem to solve. The fast-moving water rushing down the mountains and converging in one place is just a different beast than the storm surge people on the coast experience. We will need different solutions.
2) Individuals should have prepared better.
All disasters like this are community-wide problems. You can't magically avoid the impacts by prepping hard enough. And you can't foresee every possible climate disaster that might come your way. I thought that forest fires would be the biggest threat to the region; I never expected something like this.
That doesn't mean that prepping doesn't hurt. I myself am compiling a small list of things that I'd like to have in future housing to survive at least a few days if a disaster strikes.
But you can't out-prep your house being washed away by unexpected and sudden flooding that wasn't sufficiently warned in advance. You can't do much to avoid the impacts of local water and power being out for the next few weeks. You can't do much if all the roads are washed out.
These require system-wide repairs and coordination. We get through these events together.
3) Why didn't people just evacuate?
While some people anticipated the level of flooding, it was not clearly communicated enough, at least where I live. All the warnings on the weather channel looked normal to me. High winds with gusts up to 50-60 miles per hour? That doesn't sound much worse than regular storms that come through here. Flash flooding? Those warnings happen all the time.
By the time I was getting all the major emergency alerts blasted to my phone, the flooding was too high for some people to evacuate. The water rose fast, and one of my friends even went to take pictures not knowing that later in the day the road he was on would be completely washed out.
If we are going to have more of these devastating events, we need better public communication about the severity of possible flooding.
Even with that preparation and good communication, it may still be hard to predict the sheer enormity of some of these weather events.
How You Can Help
If you want to donate to help, check out this Google doc that lists a variety of local and national organizations involved in relief and repair.
I'm fine and my family is fine. We're going to be okay, and we don't need any help. But this is a years-long rebuild for the region, and I will be grieving this for quite some time.
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