When the North Carolina Mountains Become Hurricane Alley
The New York Times
Most of the deaths from Hurricane Helene occurred far from Florida, where the storm first made landfall. Experts say alerts and evacuation orders need to target inland residents too.
When the warnings first arrived, days before the remnants of Hurricane Helene, Kimberly Moody took note of what was said — and what wasn’t. The storm was going to be bad, that much was clear. But no one said she needed to start packing.
In the wake of the devastation that leveled swaths of her town of Black Mountain, N.C., and that killed a friend when he was swept into the Swannanoa River, Ms. Moody is hesitant to point fingers. But she can’t help but wonder if evacuation orders might have helped save lives.
“The alert said, Stay in the house. Stay away from the window. But no one said to leave,” Ms. Moody, a 53-year-old UPS worker, said. “Next time they should ask us to leave. This storm was notorious. It was mean. It was raging.”
Across the inland region where Helene leveled towns and turned deadly, residents and public officials faced a reckoning this week. Most people said they could not have imagined such severe impacts from a storm that made landfall hundreds of miles away on the Florida coast, and few saw widespread evacuations as likely or risk-free fixes for future extreme weather emergencies.
But the post-Helene re-assessments in western North Carolina and elsewhere reflect a growing recognition nationally that storm emergency planning needs to broaden its outreach. Long focused on the coasts where such storms make landfall, there are now calls to give equal attention to the risks in the places they end up.
Helene killed 175 people in six states. The first fatalities occurred in Florida, where at least a dozen people died, but many more were killed in inland areas where high winds and flash flooding wiped out homes, businesses, roads and bridges.
