Helene taught North Carolina a lesson: No one is safe from the effects of climate change

James Hrynyshyn is a science editor based in Saluda, N.C.
The enormity of the devastation sunk in on Day 6 after the lashing of Helene. Although reports of rising water pressure and lights in the windows of essential services in the tiny western North Carolina town of Saluda were hinting at a return to something approaching normal, the morning e-mail from city hall was anything but.
“Water, Ice and MREs will be distributed at the Saluda Elementary School Bus Parking Lot. Can [sic] goods, Baby Formula, Diapers and Snacks will be distributed at 301 Chestnut Street, City Maintenance Facility.”
Emergency distribution of meals ready to eat and baby formula isn’t the kind of thing one expects to see in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Recovering from the aftermath of a catastrophic tropical storm certainly wasn’t what I signed up for when I left Vancouver almost 20 years ago.
Before my wife and I bought her family’s longtime mountain home, I did my homework. First was the local climate. The temperature range was similar to that of Canada’s West Coast. Winters were mild, with just the odd ice storm that might bring a brief power interruption. Summers and falls could be wet, but the hurricanes that stagger inland from the South Carolina lowlands or Gulf of Mexico inevitably disintegrate before they reach the Blue Ridge foothills. That’s what happened in 2018, when Hurricane Florence fizzled to a light rain before reaching us.
The one serious event on record is the flood of 1916 in Asheville, N.C., a 40-minute drive west. Yes, it was bad. But, unlike Asheville, Saluda doesn’t sit at the confluence of two rivers, and the damage wasn’t widespread.
So we made the move. And like most everyone who has grown up in or moved to these parts, we soon learned that the occasional weather warnings of flash flooding meant nothing more than stay off the roads and stock up on non-perishables for three or four days without electricity.
Until Sept. 27, when Tropical Storm Helene dropped half a metre of rain and pummelled us with winds of 80 kilometres an hour, even climatologists regarded the mountains of western North Carolina as sheltered from the worst ravages of anthropogenic global warming. Saluda itself – elevation 2,179 feet – was built 143 years ago in large part by wealthy residents of Charleston, S.C., seeking relief from summer heat and mosquito-borne disease.
As part of a 2017 research project commissioned by the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, I reported on Asheville’s climate-resiliency plan. While an early draft acknowledged the risks posed by flooding and wildfires, the take-home message was that the real pressure on infrastructure would come from modern-day climate refugees fleeing rising sea levels, not escalating climate threats.
Two years ago, drawing on similar studies, Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University in New Orleans, included Asheville in a list of “possible climate havens.” He’s probably not particularly proud of that call, but he wasn’t an outlier.
We were all spectacularly, fatally, wrong.
To be sure, a few of my friends – former Floridians mostly – warned us on Facebook as Helene approached to take it more seriously. But few if anyone expected to awaken that morning to the near-hurricane-force winds that came with it, or the sight of uprooted trees older than the city’s oldest building.
It took a day and a half to chainsaw through the deadfall blocking our street. By the next morning, our cellphones managed to connect to a weak signal, and we finally began to get a picture of what the storm had done to the region. Turns out Saluda was one of the more fortunate communities.
As I write (from an office 350 kilometres east of Saluda because my house has no power or water, making me a temporary climate refugee), the death toll because of Helene in North Carolina and the five other affected states has topped 230. Entire communities have been obliterated. Helene severed the interstate arteries connecting western North Carolina to both Virginia and Tennessee, washing out bridges and burying long stretches under landslides, and neither is expected to reopen until well into 2025.
At Asheville’s Mission Hospital, “bags and buckets” replaced toilets. The city’s waterlines will take months to repair. Our electrical utility companies enlisted repair crews from as far away as Quebec. The factory that provides 60 per cent of the nation’s supply of IV bags was forced to close, reminding us of just how interdependent we all are.
The terms “unprecedented” and “unprepared” aren’t up to the task.
We shouldn’t have been so naive. Even a cursory look at the science of what we’re doing – returning gigatonnes of fossilized heat-trapping carbon to the atmosphere and oceans literally a million times faster than the Earth can recycle it – makes it painfully clear that nowhere is safe, if not from hurricanes then drought or forest fires.
For starters, we’ve known for almost two centuries what happens if we increase air temperatures. According to the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, published in 1834, for every degree Celsius of warming, the air holds 7 per cent more water. Calculations made 50 years later by Svante Arrhenius tell us just how much the Earth will warm per unit of carbon emissions; a 2019 study in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science based on those formulas found that each degree of warming will increase rainfall by 13 per cent.
In other words, storms will continue to get wetter, strengthen, travel farther and do more damage if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels. This is not news. It certainly isn’t for the residents of central Florida, who just suffered through yet another devastating hurricane, Milton, which is the strongest on record this late in the season.
On the same day I received my city’s alert about MREs, Climate Central, a climate-communications non-profit, reported that September’s precipitation total for Asheville had reached 433 per cent of normal. The month had been a full one degree Celsius hotter than 1970 norms. Meanwhile, the global sea surface temperature anomaly, the proximate cause of every year’s hurricane activity, broke records every day for more than a year before Helene. Yet no one was ready when a major storm made it to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The next few months will be devoted to clearing debris, rebuilding infrastructure, rescheduling school calendars, and filling out financial-relief forms from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If we’re lucky, though, a paradigm shift might take place.
We need to stop building homes on flood plains, at the bottoms of narrow river gorges, and on steep mountain slopes, notwithstanding the inspiring views and easy access to fly-fishing paradises. Massive power plants should be shuttered in favour of decentralized solar- and wind-powered networks and battery backups, now that these technologies are economically competitive and reliable. Emergency response plans must acknowledge that climate catastrophes are not restricted to Tornado Alley and the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. And if climate change really has made nowhere safe, it’s probably time to stop laughing at the preppers who meet each year at our local campground to plan for the postapocalypse.
Even I have been known to dismiss the changing climate as someone else’s problem, despite spending more than 35 years covering its physical, social and economic effects. While Vancouver endured two of the wettest and hottest summers on record and when Yellowknife was evacuated as fires raged across the North, I failed to take those lessons to heart. Yet I’d lived in both cities for years and knew full well what such evidence of climate disruption implies.
I’d prefer collective action over a selfish bunker mentality. But if politics can’t find a way to decarbonize the economy, bolster building codes and adapt municipal zoning to the new normal, maybe a generator, Starlink terminal and cache of MREs will be worth the cost.