NCICS staff are safe and have returned to work, but friends,
neighbors, and our region experienced devastating impacts.
By Tom Maycock. Edited by Mark Essig and Andrea McCarrick.
The North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies is based in downtown
Asheville, North Carolina, where we share a building with NOAA’s
National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Asheville sits in
a broad river valley surrounded by the mountains of Western North
Carolina, including the highest elevations in the eastern United States.
October usually brings a stunning display of fall colors and a massive
influx of leaf-peeping tourists. This year, things turned out very
differently.
In late September, one of the most devastating extreme weather events
in US history upended life here in Asheville and across the region. We
at NCICS will be experiencing the effects of—and working to
understand—Hurricane Helene for months and years to come.
Fortunately, all of our staff are safe, as are all of our colleagues
at NCEI. Most of us experienced fairly minimal direct damages, but some
are still dealing with significant home or auto damage. Grappling with
what has happened to friends, neighbors, and our community will be a
long and difficult process. We are all grateful to those who have been
working long hours under extreme circumstances to restore power,
communications, and water services and to support those in need. At
NCICS, we are now back working a regular schedule, although our
definitions of normal in every other sense have changed.
The Storm
NCICS’s Mark Essig measured 7.92 inches of rain between the afternoon of Wednesday, September 25th, and the morning of Thursday, September 26th, in north Asheville. Helene delivered another 5.6 inches by Friday afternoon, for a total of almost 14 inches of rain over three days. Photo by Mark Essig.
The rains
began in earnest on Wednesday, September 25—an unrelenting stream of
precipitation along a front that funneled moisture from the Gulf of
Mexico into Western North Carolina. This predecessor
rain event brought inches of rainfall to many locations, and by
Thursday morning, many rivers and streams had reached minor to moderate
flood stages. Some areas lost power that morning as trees and power
lines fell. Still, this precipitation alone would not have led to
devastating outcomes.
But the rain continued later on Thursday as Helene was intensifying
rapidly over the Gulf. Helene
eventually reached Category 4 strength before making landfall in
Florida, and then moved on a collision course with the Blue
Ridge Escarpment and the high mountains of the southern
Appalachians.
Although Helene weakened to tropical storm force by the time the eye
of the storm passed to the west of Asheville, it nonetheless delivered
record-setting single-day rainfall totals—as much as a foot of rain in
some areas, resulting in three-day totals exceeding 30 inches in some
areas. The storm’s sustained winds wreaked havoc for hours, with gusts
reaching hurricane force at many higher elevations.
Flood heights along major rivers exceeded previous records by as
much as 10 feet. Small creeks became raging rivers. More than a
thousand
landslides and debris flows scarred the landscape and destroyed homes and businesses. At last count, the storm has led to 102 deaths in North Carolina, including 43 in Buncombe County, where
Asheville is located. Downed trees and washed-out roads made travel
almost impossible across Western North Carolina. Power, cell, and
internet service disappeared by Friday morning for almost everyone in
the area. These barriers to both access and communications made search,
rescue, and relief efforts incredibly challenging.
A street in north Asheville, September 27, 2024. Photo by Mark Essig.
Meanwhile, faucets for most people in the Asheville area ran dry on
Friday as the pipeline and distribution network from the city’s primary
reservoir were severely damaged. As of a month later, water flow to most
of Asheville has been restored, but the water is not safe to drink as
the reservoir has
far more sediment than the standard filtration equipment can
handle. Fortunately, climate adaptation and earthquake mitigation work
on the reservoir’s dam, completed in 2020, may have avoided an even more catastrophic outcome.
The Influence of Climate Change
All weather events now occur against a background climate that has
been altered by more than 100 years of human-driven climate change, and
this event was no exception. Some of the most direct consequences of
greenhouse gas–driven global warming are increases in atmospheric
moisture and associated heavy precipitation, as well as increases in
ocean temperatures that provide critical fuel for hurricanes. Evidence,
including research led by NCICS scientists, shows that these outcomes are
already happening. Methods now exist for estimating the influence of climate change on
specific weather events, and three
early
rapid-attribution studies
found that climate change likely increased the magnitude and/or
likelihood of the devastating impacts of this storm.
Asheville is one of the world’s leading centers for documenting,
studying, and communicating about climate change, and some news stories
have noted the irony that this center of climate expertise is
experiencing the profound effects of a storm fueled by climate change.
Sadly, this is an outcome that may have been more inevitable than
ironic. In any case, the climate science community here will certainly
have much to say about this storm, its impacts, and the extent to which
climate change influenced this unprecedented event. That work, however,
will take some time.
Inside a Disaster
With power and communications suddenly unavailable or difficult to
access, the normal work of NCICS became impossible. Our new priorities
included ensuring access to food and water. For some, damage to homes or
cars demanded immediate attention and, in some cases, finding a new
place to stay.
North Carolina National Guard Soldiers help with a swiftwater rescue in Polk County, NC, on September 26, 2024. US Army photo by Sgt. Jordan Hayden. CC BY 2.0.
For those of us lucky enough to avoid significant damage, we were
suddenly part of a community working to sustain each other. We helped
clear roads of downed trees. We checked on family, friends, colleagues,
and neighbors, bringing them food and sometimes flushing their toilets
with buckets of water. We gave clothes to those who had nothing more
than what they were wearing. We spent time just listening to those who
needed to talk about what they had lost. When routes to the outside
world began to open, we made trips to other cities to bring back
supplies to friends and strangers. We helped organizations like World
Central Kitchen prepare and deliver meals and drove nearly impassable
roads to do wellness checks. We donated time and money to many local
organizations, such as BeLoved Asheville and MANNA Foodbank. We shared
meals with neighbors and strangers. We even marveled at the beautiful
October weather that followed the storm. Meanwhile, some of us worked
tirelessly to help restore internet and computing services for NCICS and
NCEI.
Others responded to multiple requests for media
interviews, providing informed climate insight into this
unprecedented event.
Recovery efforts involved countless hours of incredibly challenging work from the US Army, the National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, other federal, state, and city agencies, fire departments from around the country, thousands of linemen and other utility-restoration experts from across the US and Canada, dozens of charitable organizations, and individual volunteers. Asheville, NC. October 6, 2024. Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/billmcmannis. CC BY 2.0
We watched our skies fill with helicopters from dawn to dusk and saw
search and rescue teams arrive from all over the country—rescuing many
but sometimes only able to help recover those who were lost. As hot
spots of cell or WiFi service opened up, we gradually became aware of
the extent of the devastation. We listened to briefings that revealed
the severity of damage to the city’s water system, and we wondered what
the next days and weeks would bring.
We watched fleets of power trucks fill the roads and even saw
helicopters delivering new power poles in some areas. We welcomed the
donations, assistance, concern, and condolences that poured in from
everywhere.
First Steps Down a Long Road
It took a while for food and water to become widely available to
those in need, but eventually, churches and community centers and
improvised roadside stands and front porches were overflowing with
water, canned goods, diapers, baby formula, and other necessities. Some
of the most vulnerable or most isolated still face extreme challenges.
Many no longer have homes, have limited access to food and water, or are
facing weeks or even months before power is restored to their area.
Some areas now look relatively unscathed, although even in these
areas, growing debris piles along roads make it impossible to forget
what happened here. But in many areas around Asheville and across the
region, the transition from complete devastation to something different
will take much longer. The mountains and forests will bear the scars for
many years to come.
And as with other weather disasters like Helene, the injuries,
illness, and even fatalities don’t
stop when the skies clear. A study
published just after Helene found that an average tropical
cyclone event in the contiguous United States ultimately results in
7,000–11,000 excess deaths over the days, months, and years following
the event.
But society did not break down. Instead, people shared anything they
could and took only what they needed. Asheville being Asheville, local
musicians quickly organized a daily schedule of free outdoor music to
bring some joy to those preparing and sharing meals downtown. And there
are other things to celebrate.
Relief efforts organized by BeLoved Asheville. October 15, 2024. Photo by Mark Essig.
World Central Kitchen continues to supply meals and potable water to communities in Western North Carolina. It is one of many organizations providing food, supplies, and cleanup and rebuilding assistance in the region. Asheville, NC. October 1, 2024. Photo by Mark Essig.
Returning to Work with New Perspectives
Thanks to some astonishing efforts by workers across multiple
infrastructure sectors, we are back at work, appreciative of the
patience and grace of our partners and colleagues around the country and
across the globe. And NCEI is busy catching
up on ingesting and archiving data and reporting
on the state of the climate.
But things are and will be different. We knew this storm would be
bad—especially those of us with deep expertise in meteorology and
tropical storm systems and how mountains can wring extreme rainfall out
of those storms. But we still couldn’t quite imagine how bad the
outcomes could be. No one alive in this region had seen anything like
it. We hope none of us ever will again.
We research the long-term health impacts of disasters, teasing out
knowledge from datasets. But it is a different thing to have to explain
that every route to a hospital is blocked by downed trees to a mother
trying to find help for her son who is having an asthma attack. Or to
know that weeks after the storm, sewer systems in some areas are still
damaged, leaving untreated sewage flowing into local rivers, threatening
the health of those downstream.
We understand the physics and statistics of extreme weather events
and how powerful they can be. That understanding did not prepare us to
look down on a field of mud where once there were homes, or to smell the
gas leaking from pipes that were once connected to houses.
These experiences will change us and the work we do. In the near
term, damaged roads and the lack of potable water from our taps make
everything a bit more challenging. There will be physical and
psychological tolls that play out over time, in different ways. And we
carry with us an awareness that we have been much luckier than many.
But the work will continue, informed by this heightened awareness and
an even greater sense of urgency. The ongoing recovery efforts will
remind us of the critical need to understand how we are affecting our
climate and the options we have to minimize and respond to those
changes. And even as we work on global- and national-scale questions, we
will also strive to help Asheville and Western North Carolina become
more resilient in the face of a changing climate.