Hurricane Helene

I'm perfectly happy to wait until professional climatologists present their verdict on climate change and Hurricane Helene, the hurricane that slammed into northwestern Florida a few days ago, but it's hard to imagine it wasn't a factor. It struck Florida as a Category Four hurricane--only two years after the Category 5 hurricane Ian tore close to Helene's path, and did a huge amount of damage there, and Georgia and, especially it seems, in western North Carolina. 

I'm OK with waiting because I lived through the aftermath of Hurricane Agnes in June 1972, which hit Pennsylvania especially hard. That storm caused 128 deaths, 50 of them in Pennsylvania, where I grew up. (Adjusting for population, 128 deaths then would be the equivalent of approximately 206 today, if you adjust for population.) About Agnes in Pennsylvania, here's what Wiki says:

Though Agnes made landfall as a hurricane [in Florida], no reports of hurricane-force winds exist....

In Pennsylvania, heavy rainfall was reported, with much of the state experiencing more than 7 inches (180 mm) of precipitation. Furthermore, a large swath of rainfall exceeding 10 inches (250 mm) was reported in the central part of the state. Overall, the rains peaked at 19 inches (480 mm) in the western portions of Schuylkill County. As a result, Agnes is listed as the wettest tropical cyclone on record for the state of Pennsylvania. Overall, more than 100,000 people were forced to leave their homes due to flooding. The Allegheny River reached above flood stage at several low-lying locations and at some places rose about 7 in (180 mm) per hour during the height of the storm. Additionally, the Susquehanna River threatened to reach record crests along its course.[42] Some buildings were under 13 ft (4.0 m) of water in Harrisburg. At the Governor's Mansion, the first floor was submerged by flood waters. Governor Milton Shapp and his wife Muriel had to be evacuated by boat due to flooding.

Our little white wooden house--which didn't even have a bathroom, just a toilet under the stairs and a rusty shower in the coal cellar--had a pretty stream that went along two sides of our big yard. It was great for messing in for hours, catching crabs (crayfish), shooting the legs of water skippers off with BB guns (if you shot two legs off one side it could only go in a circle), throwing your puppy in on a cold winter day, that kind of thing. But it must have worried my mom to death because after big rains it would become a roiling brown deluge about 20 yards wide, not too far from our backdoor then curling around and across the bottom of the yard. Kids were always outside then, unsupervised, so she had to have worried one or more or her kids or others' kids or both might get swept away.

For Hurricane Agnes, the creek ("crick" where I grew up) went up over its bank and flooded most of your yard. Our lawn furniture was swept away, as was a swing set. We were standing around watching it and my grandmother said to my dad's uncle, you better get that [Volkswagon] Beetle out of the driveway before it floats away! For some reason they never spoke again after that incident. There must have been bad blood going into it.

I was just a kid so I didn't really understand the extent of the damage, which was over the entire region and other parts of the state. Downstream a few miles from us it wiped out a Mennonite community, so afterward the state brought bulldozers in, scraped the creek clean and piled the rocks up on the side.

Was Hurricane Agnes affected by climate change? I don't know. It was 1972, when CO2 was only 328 ppm. So what does that say about Hurricane Helene? I don't think we know yet until climate scientists run their models with and without the effect of today's added CO2. I suspect those will be coming in due course. But sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were higher, so there must have been at least some impact. But clearly there have been greater or equal storm when CO2 was much lower. 

Helene's damage in Florida is bad enough, but western North Carolina looks worse than a war zone and it's possible to imagine it might never come back full. 

It's such a beautiful area. In 1996 I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Massachusetts (sprained my ankle 1/4th of the way and only made it 2/3rds of the entire trail), and there are so many pretty towns way up in westernmost North Carolina, some of which the Trail runs down main street: Franklin NC, Hot Springs NC, Damascus VA all of which we took a day or three off in and which I have great memories of.

Here's Hot Springs; the Appalachian Trail runs right down this street:

I had maybe the best day of my life there, thanks to heavy hiking the days before, nothing but rest and eating on a beautiful early spring day with green buds coming out, several of our friends there at the same time, four fun white kittens on the back porch of the B&B we stayed at, a big cozy bed and a major shot of testesterone due to having lost 30 pounds in 30 days. (It affected all the men the same, my girlfriend said her trail girlfriends told her.)

The mountains there are so beautiful. A couple are over 6,000 ft in elevation (1,830 m). Not huge compared to the Alps and the western US and the Himalayas. But they are flooded with green, and snow, and hiking them for an extended period was like living in a cloud no one else ever saw.

I'm sad other hikers might not get to experience Hot Springs in the same way. There have to be huge blowdowns over the trail in that entire region. Yesterday the director of the Appalachian Trail Conference said it may be years until the Trail is back in shape. It probably won't deter hikers planning to start in Georgia in the spring, but there could be lots or erosion and damage way up there in the mountains.

The people way up in those mountains usually don't have much money and are very unlikely to have flood insurance. Many may have lost everything they own and will simply not have a house to go back to. One day you think you're living in paradise and the next day it's entirely gone.

I've never been to Asheville NC, but it's such a well known place now after attracting a lot of breweries and artists and businesspeople and progressives and good people in the last few decades. It might be worst of all. People haven't even been able to get in or out of town, though that's probably taken care of, in part, by today. There's almost no gas, I saw a video of a casket floating down a flooded stream, no electricity, the entire River Arts District was wiped away.

Predictably, Trump is already telling obnoxious lies about it about President Biden's response to the storm.

Anyway, this is what I'm thinking yesterday and today. If I didn't have to work I have half a mind to drive across the country and help out there in whatever way I could.

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Added a couple hours later: Of course I’m aware of the impacts of climate change in other parts of the world: in Bangladesh, where the area affected by the encroaching ocean has increased by a factor of over 12 from 1973 to 2009, in western and Canadian wildfires, in Africa, where climate change is costing up to 5% of GDP, etc. It’s just that it really hits home when its somewhere you love or know well. Obviously.