Asheville was touted as a climate paradise, a place to escape the worst ravages of extreme weather. But Hurricane Helene’s deadly path of destruction reveals that this North Carolina city, like every other city in America, has never been safe. Memories are short and the scale of the climate crisis is consistently underestimated.
“If you live in a place where it can rain, you live in a place where it can flood,” said North Carolina State Climatologist Kathie Dello. The past week has starkly demonstrated that reality.
After Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Thursday as a Category 4 hurricane, it raged northward and caused widespread destruction in six states, killing more than 160 people.
On Friday, western North Carolina was hit as a tropical storm. In Buncombe County, where Asheville is the county seat, more than 50 people have died and many more are missing.
Asheville, home to about 95,000 people, is decimated. Highways are broken and power lines are scattered like spaghetti. People struggle to access food, water and electricity.
Residents have compared Helene’s aftermath to a ‘war zone’; Officials have described it as ‘post-apocalyptic’.
It’s all a far cry from the picture some media, real estate agents and residents painted of Asheville, hundreds of miles from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico: a place relatively safe from the climate extremes hitting other parts of the US.
So-called climate migrants have long been arriving here from places like California, Arizona and the coastal Carolinas, said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University.
In online forums discussing where to escape heat, flooding and fire, Asheville consistently comes up. One poster wrote in 2019: They didn’t want to be “in a place where there is the constant threat of natural disasters that will destroy our property, so we are planning to move to (the) Asheville area.”
Even the climate experts who call Asheville home thought they were protected from the worst risks. Susan Hassol, a veteran communicator and science writer on climate change, said she and others have been “operating under the illusion that we live in a relatively climate-safe place.”
But in a world reshaped by man-made global warming, no place is truly safe and Helene had the “fingerprints of climate change” everywhere, Dello told CNN.
The hurricane formed and moved over the exceptionally warm waters of the Gulf, allowing it to “really grow and grow,” she said. A warmer atmosphere can also hold more water, allowing for more downpours.
A rapid climate analysis published Tuesday by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that fossil fuel pollution caused more than 50% more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. It also estimated that global warming makes these regions 20 times more likely to experience rain.
In some ways, this scenic part of western North Carolina was primed for catastrophe.
Much of Buncombe County is shaped like a bowl, meaning torrential rains can rush downhill quickly and flood neighborhoods. “It is a mountainous area and the slopes are very steep. It doesn’t take a lot of rain to cause a landslide,” Dello said.
Asheville, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and at the intersection of two major rivers – the French Broad and the Swannanoa – is vulnerable to flooding, as a long history proves.
In 1916, successive hurricanes dropped relentless rain on Asheville and other parts of western North Carolina, triggering biblical floods that washed away homes and killed about 80 people.
Almost exactly the same scenario played out in 2004, when Tropical Storms Ivan and Frances passed through the Appalachians. Both systems concentrated the heaviest rainfall in western North Carolina, killing eleven people.
More recently, Tropical Storm Fred caused catastrophic flooding in 2021, prompting a major disaster declaration.
Asheville has traditionally been sensitive to the effects of heavy rain, but Helene’s severity “apparently caught people off guard,” said Ed Kearns, chief data officer at First Street Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on weather risk research.
He attributed this to a tendency to rely on past experiences that are no longer relevant in a changing climate. “The risks are increasing more than we as humans can perceive,” Kerns told CNN.
A recent First Street report shows that parts of North Carolina devastated by Helene could now experience a once-in-100-year flood every 11 to 25 years.
As the water recedes, the process of rebuilding Asheville begins. “I can’t even think about a time frame for how long it will take to recover,” Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer said Monday.
But while Helene may have quashed the idea of a “climate safe” city, Tulane University’s Keenan doesn’t believe it will ultimately dampen people’s desire to move here. “I think this is actually going to speed up this process,” he said.
In a tragic twist, disasters like hurricanes are causing outside developers and investors to come in and buy up properties relatively cheaply to redevelop them into denser, more expensive homes, Keenan said.
“People have a fairly short memory in this area. There are always people who are willing to take a risk,” he says. “This is the story of American development after the disaster.”
There is also the feeling that you have nowhere else to go.
The risks are everywhere. “Canada has fires, flooding in Vermont, West Virginia has severe drought and there are heat issues in Phoenix,” Dello said.
“Where do you flee from climate change?”
CNN’s Rachel Ramirez, Ella Nilsen and Brandon Miller contributed reporting
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