Disaster

 You don't expect hurricanes in the mountains.

Mast Store Annex in Valle Cruces.

But the remnants of Hurricane Helene absolutely devastated western North Carolina and parts of eastern Tennessee on Friday when her unlikely path of destruction brought a trail of misery from the Florida gulf to deep within the mountains of the Blue Ridge.

You expect blizzards to bring the mountains to a standstill. Not tropical storms.

And yet nearly two feet of water have inundated and isolated historic Asheville; rock slides have taken out portions of I-40, maiming a critical transportation artery for perhaps months; and cell towers have collapsed in the face of 60 mile per hour (or higher) gusts, shutting down communications. Power is gone for hundreds of thousands.

All roads in western North Carolina are closed. Asheville, at one point, was approachable only by air.

It could take years for recovery.

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo took a similar path after making landfall, only much closer to Charlotte. By the time it reached us, it, too, was a tropical storm, but I remember trees down all over the place. I mean, heck, we lived on a street called Woodsway Drive.

The Village of Chimney Rock.

 But we also lived on a hill, so flooding was never a problem for us. It was mostly the cleanup and power outages, as I recall. It might have been different for others.

It looks to be considerably worse for western North Carolina. As of Saturday morning, emergency crews in Buncombe County responded to more than 5,000 calls and performed more than 150 swiftwater rescues.

In Asheville, the largest North Carolina town in the mountains, flooding from the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers clobbered Biltmore Village and the River Arts District. In Boone, home to Appalachian State University, famous King Street was turned into a torrent of water.

Chimney Rock Village, a popular and scenic destination location, has been washed off the map.

The Lake Lure Dam was close to imminent failure for up to nine hours before Rutherford County engineers lifted the warning to evacuate.

There is also a political angle to this story. Helene was created in the gulf by unusually warm waters and intensified into a Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall in the Florida Bend area. The heated gulf waters added more moisture to the storm, causing heavier rainfalls than previously recorded

One element of Project 2025 – the Republican blueprint and its proposed agenda should it win the general election in November – is to defund FEMA, an agency critical in aiding natural disaster victims. The Project is also looking to shut down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service for no other reason than I guess they don't believe in science.

And yet, the empirical evidence we have to keep these agencies is in our own backyard.