Hurricane Helene’s path from its birth in the Gulf of Mexico, across Florida, and into Appalachia is a stunning reminder of how little separates much of the United States from massive weather disasters. Helene’s scale was so vast we have to turn to numbers in an attempt to understand it, and even that comes up short. By some standards Helene was unprecedented, a 1,000-year storm, and yet ones like it are becoming increasingly common. What does that even mean? How can we process that kind of information?
When it struck the coast, Helene was a Category 4 hurricane, centered about 200 miles north of Tampa. A wall of seawater more than 10 feet high inundated neighborhoods where such flooding had never been seen before. Families huddled on their roofs waiting for rescuers. Fires burned other houses down to the water. And beyond the physical damage, there were thousands of individual stories of friends or family members dead, of homes and businesses lost.
As the storm rushed inland, up to two feet of rain fell in places, adding to an already saturated ground — a condition similar to when the 1938 Hurricane blasted across Long Island and floods roared through New England. Experts have said that it would take three or more Septembers to produce as much rain as fell in the interior, especially on North Carolina. Mudslides cut off towns from rescuers. Thousands of people were left homeless, or without running water, gas, toilet paper, or a way to flush waste.
The Hurricane Helene death count is now more than 160 people, with the likelihood of more yet to be discovered amid the mud and rubble. Hurricane Sandy may have been similar in the breadth of property damage, yet fewer people lost their lives, with 131 dead in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Helene’s size and the volume of moisture within it were fed by excess heat in the Gulf of Mexico, which itself was the result of climate change. Making the devastation worse, Helene came ashore along a coast where sea level rise was already outpacing predictions, doubling its rate in the last decade in many places. But even the numbers don’t make sense — once every 200 to 1,000 years. We need a new way to talk about what is happening.
Here on the East End, we might have more experience with hurricanes than people in the mountains. Yet we are all in this together. Climate change is a collective problem, and it will require a collective approach to slow it.