In early September 1996, the Dickson’s home in Haymount was battered by Hurricane Fran, leaving an enormous tree branch across our front yard. Every other house on our one-block street suffered a tree crashing through their roofs, making terrifying sounds that residents heard from their basement shelters. Our next-door neighbors had two trees, one in the front and one in the back. The house behind ours was severed into two parts. Blessedly the mother and young daughter inside survived, physically unharmed. Power was out for days, making the post-storm heat and humidity almost unbearable.
Hurricane Fran tore through Fayetteville and much of eastern and central North Carolina, leaving both devastation and carnage in her wake. Our state suffered 26 fatalities, making Fran the deadliest and most expensive natural disaster in North Carolina history at that time. Like other major hurricanes including Hazel in October 1954, Fran became the benchmark by which other storms were measured.
Until, that is, Hurricane Helene, which dropped 40 trillion gallons of rain across the Southeast. If all that water had fallen in North Carolina, the entire state would have been under 3 ½ feet of water, according to Ed Clark of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Water Center.
At this writing, much of western North Carolina had no power or cell phone coverage. Clean water was in short supply as were food, shelter, and gasoline in some places. Schools and roads were closed with few openings in sight. Family and friends were still searching for loved ones, and rescue operations were morphing into recovery efforts. Helene’s death toll was approaching 230 people, with about half of them in North Carolina. It was still rising, with officials acknowledging that some victims may never be found and some of those who are found will never be identified.
Helene is a new and terrifying benchmark.
Mother Nature has her own agenda that we mere humans do not know or even pretend to understand. None of us anticipated the power of Helene or the massive amounts of water she expended in western North Carolina. Helene is being described as a once-in-a-lifetime storm, an event with Biblical scope, over which we had no control.
That said, experts are saying there are measures we could have taken that might have mitigated Helene’s destruction and devastating death toll, measures we should now prioritize.
Both scientists and common sense tell us that storms are getting stronger and more frequent, with Helene being the most recent example. Hindsight is often 20/20 but there is little doubt now that we are seeing the results of human-caused climate change, which probably cannot be stopped but perhaps can be slowed down by limiting our use of fossil fuels. This should not be a political issue, because both Democrats and Republicans want to survive.
In addition, over the last 15 years, the North Carolina General Assembly has bowed to development and constructions interests, rejecting building requirements in western counties with construction on slopes at risk of landslides. The legislature also lengthened the timetable required for building code updates and allowed more paving of green spaces, increasing flood risks.
There is no way to assess Helene’s aftermath had measures aimed at climate change and commercial development been in place, but it is a fact that, in part, we are reaping what we have sewn. Helene can and should be our signal to take new paths in the coming years.
As Anita Crowder told the Washington Post at the remains of her father’s house in Swannanoa about the turning point of this moment.
“Two different eras. Things will be totally different.”