Dozens of people died in several states this week as Hurricane Helene swept across parts of the southeastern United States, bringing heavy rain and a 15-foot storm surge.
Coastal towns and cities in Florida were devastated when the Category 4 hurricane made landfall, but inland communities bore similar damage as the storm carved a path through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee have.
“Turn around, don’t drown,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper urged managers in a press conference.
At least 42 people did died from the storm. As of Friday, Florida has reported seven deaths. Meanwhile, Georgia reported 15 and South Carolina, 17. In both of the latter states, most of the known deaths were from falling trees and debris. North Carolina reported two deaths, including a car crash that killed a 4-year-old girl after a road flooded.
Atlanta received 11.12 inches of rain in 48 hourswhich broke its previous record of 9.59 inches in the same period from 1886, according to Bill Murphey, Georgia’s state climatologist. More than 1 million Georgia residents also lost power in the storm, especially in the southern and eastern parts of the state.
AP Photo/Jason Allen
In western North Carolina, officials sounded the alarm and evacuated door-to-door residents south of the Lake Lure Dam in Rutherford County after the National Weather Service warned that a dam failure “at hand.” Emergency crews also performed more than 50 swift water rescues across the region, with one sheriff’s department warning that it could not respond to all 911 calls due to flooded roads. The North Carolina Department of Transportation warned on social media that “all roads in Western NC should be considered closed” due to flood from Helene.
In Tennessee, more than 50 people was stranded on the roof from a hospital due to heavy flooding and had to be rescued by helicopter. Residents of Cocke County in Tennessee were also asked to evacuate after reports that a separate dam could fail, although officials later said the dam failure was a false alarm. In South Carolina, the National Weather Service said the storm was “one of the most significant weather events … in the modern era.”
The hurricane’s widespread flooding was exacerbated by climate change, scientists told Grist. Hurricane Helene was an unusually large storm with an extensive reach. After forming in the Caribbean, it traveled over extremely warm ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico that allowed the storm to intensify faster than it otherwise would have. In fact, Helene went from a relatively weak tropical storm to a Category 4 in just two days. Warmer air also holds more moisture, overloading the storm’s water content and leading to faster rainfall and intense flooding.
“When that increased moisture comes up and hits terrain like the Appalachian Mountains,” said Steve Businger, professor of meteorology at the University of Hawaii. “This leads to very, very high rainfall figures, exceptionally high rainfall figures and unfortunately it leads to a lot of flash floods.”
Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with the scientific group Central climatesaid research has shown that the Gulf’s current extra-warm ocean temperatures have been made up to 500 times more likely with climate change. “One of the things we’re seeing with these big storms, especially as they become more frequent, is that they’re no longer natural disasters, they’re unnatural disasters,” Winkley said. “It’s not just a normal weather system anymore.”
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Hurricanes do occur naturally, but the conditions that led to Helene’s severity—the rapid intensification and heavy rainfall—were driven in part by warmer ocean and atmospheric temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels. “There is a fingerprint of climate change in that process,” Winkley said.
“This summer was record hot globally and there was a record amount of water vapor in the global atmosphere,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA. Both factors contributed to what the Southeastern US experienced this week. “This is one of the more significant flooding events in the US in recent memory.”
Initial estimates for the storm’s damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure range between $15 billion and $26 billion, the New York Times reported. Bushinger said he expected the enormous loss to fuel more conversations about the uncertainty of the existing property insurance system. “The cost to society is becoming prohibitive,” he said.
Scientists noted that the fact that the storm’s winds increased by 55 miles per hour in the 24 hours before it made landfall also made it deadlier.
“It was so strong and moving so fast that it just didn’t have time to weaken much before it made it far inland,” Swain said. Rapid intensification is especially dangerous, he said, because people often make decisions about how to prepare for storms and whether or not to evacuate based on how bad they initially appear to be.
“It was one of the storms that intensified faster,” Swain said. “This is not a coincidence. We should expect to see hurricanes intensifying faster in a warm climate.”
