The scenes in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South in the wake of Hurricane Helene are as shocking as they are harrowing. Asheville and the surrounding area, a seven-hour drive from the Atlantic Ocean, is not exactly hurricane alley. Residents’ and planners’ inexperience with massive storms will likely add to the death toll, and Americans distressed at the images of people awaiting rescue on rooftops must be realistic about the time it takes to complete lifesaving operations.
The death toll from Helene already exceeds 130 people, and hundreds more are missing. In Asheville, North Carolina, three people perished when the roof on which they were waiting collapsed. Horrific as it is, such a human cost isn’t extraordinary; Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida two years ago as a similar Category 4 storm, claimed 150 lives in the Sunshine State.
What’s different here is the location: inland North Carolina isn’t coastal Florida or South Carolina (or even North Carolina’s Outer Banks), or Gulf Coast Texas, Mississippi, or Louisiana. Hurricanes just don’t generally hit inland like this; Helene first hit coastal northwest Florida before moving across the southeast United States.
The fact that Florida isn’t much in the news today is partly a testament to the state’s experience with and readiness for such storms. The state has strict residential construction codes; longtime residents know that if they don’t evacuate, they’re on their own for a while; and rescue crews—both local and from out-of-town—are familiar with the terrain. But, sadly, it’s also because the state has gotten used to people dying from storms: Helene killed at least 13 people in Florida.
Helene was no longer a hurricane by the time it hooked north and east through Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina over the weekend, though. It isn’t mostly the winds that have devasted these communities, but the rain. Parts of the inland South got two and even nearly three feet of rainfall—months’ worth of accumulation—within hours. Flash floods and sustained water pressure, combined with high though not hurricane-force winds, poured down mountains, cratered roofs, overwhelmed dams, and washed away vehicles; at least 40 people are dead in North Carolina’s Buncombe County, which includes the 100,000-strong city of Asheville.
What mitigates a storm’s death toll? First, evacuation—but Buncombe County residents didn’t receive a partial evacuation order until danger was imminent. To note this fact is not to blame state, county, or local officials; the county was not expecting and is not accustomed to this intensity of storm, and residents, unlike those in coastal Florida, don’t have plans already at hand after previous experiences. And an evacuation in a panic without at least a day’s notice could be worse than no evacuation at all: people get into their cars and SUVs only to be washed away.
The second mitigating factor is private homes and public infrastructure that rebuilt after previous storms. It may be counterintuitive, but Florida, and poorer Louisiana, are more resilient to big storms now, because earlier ones already heavily damaged or destroyed many of their most fragile buildings and other structures, with the property then either abandoned as too risky or rebuilt to higher, more modern standards.
A third factor is well-managed density. When people think of a storm that catastrophically hit a major city, Hurricane Katrina, nearly 20 years old now, still likely comes to mind. But New Orleans’s suffering in 2005 was just as much the result of bad management as it was of urban density. The scenes from Katrina were nightmarish, with elderly people stranded on roofs and dozens of hospital patients dying for lack of electricity and oxygen. But the biggest impediment to the post-storm recovery was the badly conceived pre-storm evacuation effort, which left tens of thousands of people stranded in low-lying areas, as well as ineffective post-storm coordination between the state and city and the federal government. Uncontrolled looting scared away rescue workers—a failure on the part of the city’s weak government, led by then-mayor Ray Nagin, who later went to federal prison on corruption charges. By contrast, well-managed density of an area whose residents are accustomed to evacuating from the most vulnerable areas can be an asset: Florida got rescue operations in and around Tallahassee underway, for example, just hours after Helene passed through Thursday night.
It’s harder to move rescuers and supplies into a rural area, such as the area surrounding Asheville, where houses are spaced far apart and narrow roads become quickly impassable. The Asheville urban area, a measure of the city itself and densely developed areas surrounding it, ranks only #141 on a list of American conurbations: hurricane-vulnerable Miami, by contrast, is #4, Houston #5, and Tampa #17. The more a county’s residents are spread out from an urban core, the harder it is to reach them, and to rescue several at the same time via boat, helicopter, or land vehicle. Spread-out power lines and cellphone towers make basic infrastructure recovery harder, too.
Finally, Asheville has grown quickly in recent decades, adding 13.4 percent to its population between 2010 and 2020. Its residents were sensibly building and buying homes far from hurricane alley. They had little reason to think that hurricane alley would come to them.
Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images