Asheville was considered a climate paradise. Helene shows that nowhere is safe

CNN
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Asheville has been touted as a climate paradise, a place to escape the worst ravages of extreme weather. But Hurricane Helene’s deadly path of destruction shows that this North Carolina city, like every other city in America, has never been safe – it’s just that memories are short and the scope of the climate crisis is constantly underestimated.

“If you live in a place where it can rain, you live in a place where there can be flooding,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina state climatologist. The past week has clearly shown the reality.

After hitting Florida as a Category 4 hurricane on Thursday, Hurricane Helene continued to rage north, wreaking havoc across six states and killing more than 160 people.

A tropical storm struck western North Carolina on Friday. In Buncombe County, where Asheville is the county seat, more than 50 people have died and many more are still missing.

Asheville, home to about 95,000 people, lies decimated. Highways are torn up and power lines are scattered like spaghetti. People are struggling to access food, water and electricity.

Local residents have compared Helene’s aftermath to a “war zone”; Officials have described it as “post-apocalyptic.”

All of this is a far cry from the image that some media, real estate agents and residents convey Asheville sits hundreds of miles from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico: a place relatively safe from the climate extremes that plague other parts of the United States.

So-called climate migrants have long been coming here from places like California, Arizona and coastal Carolinas, said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University.

Asheville is frequently mentioned in online forums discussing where to escape heat, floods and fires. One poster wrote in 2019: They “didn’t want to be in a place where there was a constant threat of natural disasters that would destroy our property, so we are planning on moving to the Asheville area.”

Even the climate experts based in Asheville believed they were protected from the worst risks. Susan Hassol, a veteran Climate communicator and science journalist said she and others had “perpetuated the illusion that we live in a relatively climate-safe place.”

But in a world transformed by human-caused 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 Gulf’s exceptionally warm waters, allowing it to “really develop and grow,” she said. A warmer atmosphere can also hold more water, producing heavier torrential rains.

A rapid climate analysis released Tuesday by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that fossil fuel pollution led to over 50% more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Global warming has also been estimated to increase the chance of rain in these regions by 20 times.

In some ways, this picturesque part of western North Carolina was primed for disaster.

Much of Buncombe County is shaped like a bowl, meaning torrential rain can move down quickly and flood neighborhoods. “It is a mountainous area and the hillsides are very steep. It doesn’t take much rain to trigger a landslide,” Dello said.

Asheville, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains and at the intersection of two major rivers – the French Broad and the Swannanoa – is, as a long history proves, prone to flooding.

In 1916, successive hurricanes dumped relentless rain on Asheville and other parts of western North Carolina, triggering biblical floods Houses washed away and about 80 people killed.

Almost exactly the same scenario played out in 2004 when Tropical Storms Ivan and Frances moved across the Appalachian Mountains. Both systems concentrated their highest rainfall in western North Carolina, killing 11 people.

Most recently, Tropical Storm Fred caused catastrophic flooding in 2021, resulting in a major disaster declaration.

Asheville has been vulnerable to the effects of heavy rains in the past, but the severity of Helene “seemed to have caught people by surprise,” said Ed Kearns, chief data officer at the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit focused on weather risk research.

He attributed this to the 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 found 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 imagine how long it will take for me to recover,” Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer said Monday.

But while Helene may have killed the idea of ​​a “climate-safe” city, Tulane University’s Keenan doesn’t think it will ultimately dampen people’s desire to move here. “I think this will actually speed up that process,” he said.

A tragic twist is that disasters like hurricanes “clean the slate” so that developers and investors come from outside and buy up properties relatively cheaply to convert them into denser, more expensive homes, Keenan said.

“People have pretty short memories for this stuff. There are always people willing to take a risk,” he said. “This is the story of American development after the disaster.”

There is also a feeling that there is nowhere else to go.

The risks are everywhere. “Canada has fires, floods in Vermont, West Virginia has severe drought, there are heat issues in Phoenix,” Dello said.

“Where are you fleeing from climate change?”

CNN’s Rachel Ramirez, Ella Nilsen and Brandon Miller contributed reporting