After an unexpectedly sleepy summer, the tropics have now woken up. And what a wake-up call the latest storm, Hurricane Helene, was.
Like Francine last month and like a new blob that we’re all watching warily right now, Helene developed not out in the Atlantic Ocean but much closer to home in the Western Caribbean.
It didn’t need much time or distance to grow into the sort of monster storm that’s becoming more and more common. This one, though, stood out not just for its devastation, but for the immense area affected.
After slamming into Florida as a Category 4 storm, Helene weakened but still forged a path of destruction through Georgia and South Carolina into western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, where rivers overflowed their banks, major roads washed out and towns were basically destroyed.
Our state thankfully found itself on the pleasant side of the storm this time around, but the images hit close to home on several levels.
One is that the road between Louisiana and that part of the country is well traveled.
The painful irony is that Asheville and the towns in the vicinity are popular getaways for Gulf Coast residents, fleeing not just from the heat and humidity but from the risk of hurricanes. It’s an area that many locals know well and cherish, and where they have personal connections.?
And even those who don’t have those ties viscerally understand the terror of being stranded amid rushing water and the frustration of being without power and safe drinking water for weeks. They also know how long and difficult the rebuilding will be.
It’s no longer shocking when a storm blows up into a major hurricane as it approaches landfall, as Helene did while barreling toward Florida’s Big Bend area, where it wiped out beachfront communities and caused deadly flooding as far away as the Tampa area. Over the last few years, late intensification has become the norm.
But that a tropical system could cause such immense damage so far inland still seemed unimaginable as recently as a week ago. In hindsight, that’s probably na?ve given what scientists are telling us and what we’ve all experienced in this new age of climate change-fueled extreme weather.
Right now the top priority remains search and rescue, but we all know what comes next for those affected: the mucking out, the fights with insurance companies, the struggle to decide how to rebuild safely and how to pay for it in communities that have never before relied upon flood insurance.
If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that there is no safe haven and that politicians from every state need to work on a whole range of disaster mitigation and response strategies — not just because Americans must take care of fellow Americans, but because any community, in any state, could be the next struck by tragedy.
