Why North Carolina wasn’t prepared for Helene

As the death toll from Hurricane Helene climbs across southern Appalachia, a painful truth has emerged from the devastation: The region wasn’t ready for the storm, despite being warned for years of potential catastrophic flooding.

And it might not be ready for the next disaster, either.

Few people in western North Carolina have flood insurance, leaving them vulnerable to financial ruin in the wake of disasters such as Helene. And the state has devoted relatively little of its federal funding for disaster protection in its western region, which is often considered less vulnerable to extreme weather than the coast.

That’s despite the fact that western North Carolina’s flood and landslide risks are rising as global temperatures climb, hurricanes strengthen and other extreme rainfall events intensify, scientists warn. That means disasters such as Helene, previously almost unthinkable, may keep happening in the coming decades.

“We’re definitely expecting more extreme precip[itation] events like what we just saw,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist.

A confluence of climate-charged factors helped fuel the current disaster unfolding in southern Appalachia.

Heavy rainfall, produced by an entirely separate inland storm system, pummeled the region immediately before Helene arrived, soaking the ground and priming the steep landscape for floods and landslides. These kinds of extreme precipitation events are expected to worsen as the planet continues to warm, studies suggest.

Meanwhile, Helene rapidly swelled into a monstrous Category 4 hurricane with a wind field extending nearly 300 miles from its center — a storm large and powerful enough to carve a path of destruction from Florida into Appalachia. Record-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico helped drive its swift intensification, a phenomenon also expected to increase as climate change marches on.

The combination of the earlier storm followed by Helene dumped more than 2 feet of rain on some communities in western North Carolina. It was likely a 1-in-1,000-year event for the region, according to Dello, meaning such extreme levels of rainfall would have only a 1 in 1,000 chance of occurring in any given year.

The event shocked a region generally considered less prone to disasters than coastal regions, where cities like Asheville recently have seen large influxes of migration from other parts of the country.

Yet scientists say the disaster wasn’t a complete surprise.

Destructive floods have swept the region in the past, including similarly catastrophic events in 1916 and 1940. Hurricane Ivan caused widespread floods and landslides in 2004, and Tropical Storm Fred devastated the town of Canton, North Carolina, in 2021.

At the same time, scientists have known for decades that climate change would worsen extreme weather events in southern Appalachia.

“A lot of us had been waiting for this for 30 years,” said Brad Johnson, a geologist and landslide expert at Davidson College in North Carolina. “I think we’ve all been living in fear of this.”

Few had flood insurance

North Carolina published its first state climate change adaptation plan in 2020. It included scientific risk assessments and resilience recommendations across 11 sectors from agriculture and forestry to health and human services.

The plan warns that North Carolina’s western mountains are vulnerable to extreme precipitation events, floods and landslides. Aging infrastructure, including failing drainage systems and deteriorating slopes, increases the risk of landslides along major transportation routes such as Interstate 40, Interstate 26 and the Blue Ridge Parkway. And many western communities have few routes in or out — meaning there may be few or no detours available in the case of disasters.

“Even Asheville itself is not immune,” the plan warned, four years before Helene’s floodwaters submerged entire neighborhoods across the city.

The plan also notes that flood insurance coverage is uneven across the state, despite the fact that “insurance access and coverage will influence the survival of entire neighborhoods and towns.”

An analysis by POLITICO'S E&E News found that just 0.8 percent of the nearly 700,000 households in the North Carolina counties heavily flooded by Helene have flood insurance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to agency records. In Cleveland County, North Carolina, only 39 of the 36,600 households — 0.1 percent — have flood insurance through FEMA, which sells most of the coverage in the U.S. through its National Flood Insurance Program.

Flood insurance is not included under homeowners’ policies, meaning it must be purchased separately. The same is true for landslide insurance, which can be even more complicated to obtain. While mudflow can be covered by FEMA’s flood insurance program, landslides are generally not.

“A significant portion of these people that survive landslides and lose their houses will go through bankruptcy,” Johnson said. “Floods can be that way, too.”

At the same time, the portion of North Carolina swamped by Helene has been largely ignored by the state as it's distributed federal disaster-protection money and safeguarded homes against flooding.

North Carolina has received $445 billion since 1989 from FEMA for projects that build protection against flooding and other natural disasters. But only 5 percent of that money has gone to the 25 counties in the state that have been declared a disaster following Helene, according to an E&E News analysis of FEMA records.

Those 25 counties account for 16 percent of North Carolina's population.

North Carolina has spent part of the FEMA money protecting 7,600 properties from flooding through elevation, relocation, flood-proofing or demolition. Yet only 2.5 percent of the properties are in the 25-county area damaged by Helene.

The analysis highlights the gaps in flood protections and adaptation efforts in western North Carolina, which — until now — has been often deemed more isolated from the impacts of climate change than other parts of the state.

The destruction wrought by Helene is a wake-up call about the growing odds of unprecedented disasters in a warming climate, said Dello, the North Carolina state climatologist — and the need to prepare for events that have rarely or never occurred in the past.

“The forecast was spot on,” Dello said. “But connecting the forecast with the destruction wasn’t a mental leap I was prepared to make. And I think also a lot of people weren't prepared to make that leap. It’s really hard to plan for something you’ve never seen.”