Climate Point: Helene toll likely worse than you think

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I'm Janet Wilson writing from Palm Springs, where a new record for hottest October day ever in the U.S. was set on Tuesday at 117 degrees ‒ besting three national records set the week before in California desert communities.

In the southeast, the devastation from Hurricane Helene has been wrenching, with confirmed deaths topping 200 on Thursday , according to a USA TODAY analysis. Urgent power and water needs remain on Friday, with hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses still without electricity in five states. Some in western North Carolina have no running water.

Colleagues in the USA TODAY Network, including in Asheville, North Carolina and Florida , have worked around-the-clock since Helene hit to report urgent updates and critical resources for their communities.

"It was terrifying to leave, and terrifying to stay," writes USA TODAY columnist Casey Blake, based in Asheville. But she says what she saw next helped her survive .

"The ramen place a few blocks up was cooking everything in their kitchen and handing it out for free for hours. The dive bar down the road had become a medic tent, run by folks in the neighborhood who offered ... the last Band-Aids in their pantries," she writes. "The kindnesses have been many."

She salutes those who braved rising waters in boats to help neighbors, volunteers who picked up animals from a shelter filled to the roof with water, the guys who spotted a groundhog clinging to a submerged fence and swam out to save it, and "the guys who drove through the night from another state, rode around neighborhoods hollering 'Y’all got water?' and unloading a case for anyone who even hesitated."

Years of hardship on tap . Troubling news is out this week about the long aftermath of hurricanes. Fresh research shows tropical cyclones are far deadlier than initial death tolls suggest, as USA TODAY's Doyle Rice reports . The deaths form a domino effect lasting for years, leading to thousands of additional deaths from cardiac disease, diabetes, sudden infant deaths and other post-cyclone mortality, particularly in ill-prepared areas that haven't been hit by hurricanes before and in communities with poor medical care.

Unnatural. Residents of Florida’s Big Bend region are confronting fears about whether they should stay in the wake of Hurricane Helene and multiple other storms, writes USA TODAY's Trevor Hughes.

Intensified. Scientists say that human-caused climate change is intensifying storms , pushing flood waters far inland and raising sea levels, with each event a result of weather variability and terrain, exacerbated by a warming atmosphere .

Scorching. In the southwest, unseasonably sizzling October weather could last until the middle of the month, and it comes after record-breaking summer heat. On Wednesday, 39 million people were under heat alerts, reports Thao Nguyen for USA TODAY.

Meanwhile, Flagstaff High counts among an estimated 13,700 public schools across the U.S. that once could get away without air conditioning or other cooling systems but now need them , according to a 2024 White House report. These schools are largely in northern or high-altitude places, where high temperatures were historically not a concern. Now, as teachers and students bake in high temperatures, they need solutions to learning challenges and health problems caused by excess heat, but lack funds to tackle the problem, as Joan Meiners of the Arizona Republic reports in a gripping account with Katie Worth for Climate Central.

School safety policies make it worse. Worries about mass shootings and break-ins led the Flagstaff district to forbid propping open doors or leaving windows open overnight to bring in cool air.

Read on for more, including how climate change fared in Tuesday's vice presidential debate and tips for how to clean up after a hurricane or flooding. Some stories below may require a subscription. Sign up and get access to eNewspapers in the USA TODAY Network. If someone forwarded you this email and you'd like to receive Climate Point in your inbox for free once a week, sign up here .

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Climate Point: Helene toll likely worse than you think