Message in a storm: There are no climate havens
By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
If you were asked to draw the front lines of climate change on a map of the U.S., you’d probably include all the coasts, along with Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana and Texas. It might not occur to you to include western North Carolina, a temperate, mountainous place hundreds of miles inland.
And yet the climate emergency, in the form of Hurricane Helene, has come to this idyllic region of the Appalachians. Some places there received more than 2 feet of rain before and during the storm, causing biblical flooding that has taken at least 40 lives, wiped away towns and roads and lifted houses from their pilings to float away downstream. It’s stark evidence that no matter how insulated people might feel from the global heating humanity has caused by burning fossil fuels and otherwise generating planet-warming gases, there are no real safe havens.
Nearly half a million people in North Carolina were without power days after the storm, along with more than a million others in states from Florida to Ohio. At one point, every North Carolina road from Catawba County to the state’s far western corner, a distance of about 200 miles, was closed to traffic. Even the lucky few who could drive couldn’t get gasoline. That left many people trapped in disaster areas with no mobile-phone service and dwindling supplies of food and medicine. Grocery store shelves were stripped clean for miles around, in scenes reminiscent of the pandemic. Some people were running low on water, their local sources contaminated by flooding.
AccuWeather, a private forecasting company, on Monday morning raised its estimate of Helene’s total economic damage to up to $160 billion from an initial estimate of up to $110 billion, partially because of the scenes in the Appalachians. This estimate includes not only the initial physical destruction but the loss of businesses, jobs and productivity. That would make it one of the most destructive hurricanes on record, joining the ranks of such infamous names as Katrina, Harvey, Sandy and Ian.
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