Examination of conscience and regret over unheeded warnings follow Helene’s downfall

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Before Hurricane Helene made landfall last week, the National Weather Service launched a major effort to alert emergency planners, first responders and residents across the Southeast that the storm’s heavy rains and strong winds could reach hundreds of miles Could cause disasters from the coast.

Warnings included phrases like “URGENT,” “life-threatening” and “catastrophic,” describing impending dangers as far inland as the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. Smartphones repeatedly buzzed with push notifications of flash floods and damaging winds. A state of emergency was declared from Florida to Virginia. And the Weather Service reached back to 1916 to find a precedent in correctly predicting that Helene would be among the “most significant weather events” the Asheville, North Carolina, area had ever experienced.

But the warning signals and catastrophe forecasts were not enough to prevent the death toll from rising. The number has risen to at least 215 in six states. At least 72 of those were in Asheville and surrounding Buncombe County, which was hit hardest by flash floods, mudslides, falling trees, collapsed roads and other disasters.

“Despite the dire forecast, the impact was probably even worse than we expected,” said Steve Wilkinson, the meteorologist who heads the National Weather Service’s regional office in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina.

“We reserve this strong language for only the most dire situations,” he said. “But it’s hard to tell people that this is going to completely change the landscape of western North Carolina.”

As the region begins its long road to recovery, a task made difficult by cut-off communities, a lack of running water and still spotty cell phone connections, the growing number of casualties has left both devastated homeowners and officials concerned reflect on whether there is more that could have been done to raise the alarm and respond in a mountainous region that is not often in the catchment area of ​​hurricanes.

“It sounds stupid to say this, but I didn’t realize it would be like bombs going off,” Brenton Murrell said after walking through his mud- and debris-strewn neighborhood in Asheville, with military Osprey planes flying overhead whirred. “It’s like a war zone.”

Like many residents interviewed by The Associated Press, Murrell had never experienced the effects of a hurricane and felt detached from the danger despite numerous warnings about the “extreme risk of loss of life and property.”

Murrell said those words never really frightened him, in part because his neighbors had talked for days about the last major flood two decades ago and mostly found reassuring words: “If you’re not in a low-lying area, you will be.” Fine.”

“There was some sort of separation,” said Murrell, who now regrets weathering the storm at home with his wife, two children and dog, even though they are all safe. “It is human nature to only truly understand something once you have felt it yourself.”

Many residents said they didn’t realize the extent of the storm until it was too late. For some, evacuation became impossible as fallen trees and rising floodwaters made roads and bridges impassable. The flood of emergencies seemed to surprise everyone.

Sara Lavery of Canton said she received several warnings last Thursday before the worst of the storm hit and was alarmed by how quickly “flood warnings” on her phone turned into “flood warnings.” Then she looked at the Pigeon River near her house and became very afraid.

“We saw a tree the size of a telephone pole, a kitchen sink and a bedroom dresser,” she said. “It was terrifying.”

Still, she and her fiancé decided to stay, partly because their home was on high ground, partly to keep the roads clear for others and to help vulnerable residents in low-lying areas.

“Some people don’t have a place to go, some people don’t have a four-wheeled vehicle to get out,” Lavery said. “People always say, ‘Why didn’t you evacuate?’ Not everyone can do that.”

“We never thought this would happen,” she said. “Western North Carolina is the mountains.”

As the storm passed through, Mia Taylor of nearby Hendersonville said she received warnings on her phone about impending flooding, “but some of us just said, ‘Oh, it’s not that serious.'”

She tried to drive with her adult children to a nearby town for shelter, but found that “all avenues were blocked.” She ended up turning around, but her car stalled in the rising water.

“You wouldn’t have thought it would be this bad,” she said.

Lillian Govus, a spokeswoman for Buncombe County, said that has been a familiar refrain since the storm, as no one in the area has seen anything even close to Helene’s destruction. She described the storm’s arrival before dawn last Friday as “treacherous,” noting that some residents were in bed and may not have heard the emergency warnings.

“People were trying to evacuate, but there was nowhere to go,” she said. “If there’s a landslide, it doesn’t matter how high you climb.”

Wilkinson, the meteorologist, said meteorologists knew many days before the storm that Helene would be catastrophic for western North Carolina and began informing the emergency management community in briefings and presentations, focusing primarily on flooding and secondarily focused on wind. Surrounding mountain towns such as Asheville, a city of about 95,000, were particularly worrisome because the communities were built in valleys.

An AP analysis of social media posts and cellphone alerts found more than a dozen were sent by Buncombe County and the National Weather Service on Wednesday and Thursday alone. And the language used to convey Helene’s threat – “extremely rare event”, “prepare for a life-threatening storm”, “act now!” – grew worse as authorities urged people to do so to seek higher ground and, in some cases, evacuate. Those most worrisome said the destruction could be the worst in a century, citing the “Great Flood of 1916” in which 80 people were killed.

In one of his repeated posts on the social platform

“We tried to time our warnings based on previous events,” Wilkinson told the AP, “so the warnings went out before the strong winds came. They kind of kept coming.”

The weather service’s precipitation and wind speed forecasts largely held, Wilkinson said, with some areas receiving more than 1 foot (0.3 meters) of rain. Mount Mitchell State Park recorded wind gusts of 106 mph (171 km/h). In the French Broad River basin, rivers rose several feet above their highest ever crests, the weather service reported, adding that Helene “probably caused the most severe flooding on record in all of Buncombe County.” Trees and power lines were downed and hundreds of homes and businesses were flooded. Large sections of highway were under water and some roads and bridges were completely destroyed.

“The last time a storm like this struck was in the book of Genesis when Noah had to build an ark,” said Zeb Smathers, the mayor of Canton, North Carolina.

Wilkinson said it may be impossible to know how many people did not heed or understand the warnings. Cell phone reception is sometimes spotty in the mountainous region and may have worsened as the storm worsened.

“I really think we did everything we could have done,” he said. “It’s sad that we couldn’t do more, but we try to recognize that what we did made a difference.”

After the storm, Wilkinson’s office published an emotional letter on X in which she thanked first responders and called Helene “the worst event in the history of our office.”

“As meteorologists, we always want to make the right forecast,” it said. “This is something we wanted to do wrong.”

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Mustian and Condon reported from New York. Brittany Peterson in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and Christopher Keller in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed reporting.