A storm goes wherever it pleases.
The best 21st century science can muster is educated guesses about its path.
The rest, it seems, is up to the whims of nature and whether we happen to be lucky.
In the case of Helene, western North Carolina was very unlucky.
Who would have guessed that the mountains of this state, and not the beaches of Florida, would bear the brunt of a storm spawned by the Gulf of Mexico, even after it had weakened to below hurricane strength?
For North Carolina, Helene turned out to be a wicked witch of the West, swelling rivers and creeks with record rainfall and unleashing angry winds, floods and landslides.
The words “catastrophic devastation” didn’t do this storm justice, Buncombe County Emergency Services Assistant Director Ryan Cole told the Asheville Citizen-Times.
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“I would go a little bit further and say we have biblical devastation through the county,” Cole said.
County Manager Avril Pinder called it “Buncombe County’s own Hurricane Katrina.”
As of Tuesday, the full extent of the death toll and the damage was still unclear.
But we know it’s severe.
At this writing Helene had claimed 137 lives, 56 of them in North Carolina, more than any other state. That number is expected to grow, as hundreds remain missing.
Snapped power lines, blocked roads and disabled cellphone service have made assessing the grim totals difficult. Many residents remain isolated and helpless.
But experts already are calling it one of the worst storms in U.S. history.
And some of the stories that have already emerged are beyond heartbreaking.
A Texas woman frantically pleaded for help for her parents and her 6-year-old nephew, who were stranded on the roof of their house in Asheville as the floodwaters rose. But a rescue never happened. The roof collapsed and all three drowned.
Lake Lure, the setting for the movie “Dirty Dancing,” was filled with splintered debris.
Asheville’s Biltmore Village was inundated by floodwaters, the city’s River Arts District turned into a tattered array of caved roofs, buckled walls and snapped phone poles. The townof Chimney Rock was all but erased from the map.
Some areas received as much as 30 inches of rain. Helene ripped houses off their foundations, uprooted trees and hurled them like spears, and plucked fence posts out of the ground.
Rebuilding will take time and money. The Washington Post estimates $26 billion in property damage.
President Biden planned a visit Wednesday, to see the damage for himself. The president also said he would likely ask Congress to pass a supplemental funding bill provide relief to the states affected by Helene.
Gov. Roy Cooper noted ongoing efforts to reopen roads and provide emergency shelters. The National Guard has been deployed, he said, during a Tuesday morning briefing.
State lawmakers also tap North Carolina’s $5 billion budget reserves, called, by the way, “the rainy-day fund,” to help provide relief for the ultimate rainy day.
Meanwhile, 22 states are sending personnel and providing assistance.
What painful lessons can we learn from this latest natural disaster?
Deny it if you wish, but climate fuels more frequent and severe storms that tend to move more slowly and dump more rain. Even the mountains, once thought to be insulated from the effects of hurricanes, are vulnerable.
“This storm has the fingerprints of climate change all over it,” state climatologist Kathie Dello told The Guardian. “The ocean was warm and it grew and grew and there was a lot of water in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, our worst fears came true. Helene was supercharged by climate change and we should expect more storms like this going forward.”
Kudos, meanwhile, to the Greensboro and Winston-Salem police and fire departments for dispatching volunteers to help.
Triad pilots queued up to deliver badly needed supplies.
Local nonprofits mobilized to collect supplies.
And, as communities usually do, even in this season of deep divisions, people came together to help and comfort one another, with rakes and shovels and chainsaws and kind words.
As USA Today reported, the very worst of times can often bring out the very best in us.
“We are going to check on the neighbors,” a man in Red Hill who just happened to be named James Waters told his son. “That’s what we do.”
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