More of Helene's Mess

Sorry, but I'm still a little obsessed with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, as I explained a few days ago. 

It's such a beautiful region. They mountains are layered, each one higher than the one in front of it. The highest is Clingman's Dome in the Smokey Mountains, 6644 ft in elevation (2025 m). Not high enough to feel a lack of oxygen, but high enough to not feel part of the real world. 

You know, I think I'm getting a better understanding of what's going on there from Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts and Insta than any network news programs. It's raw and it's personal without all the pretty people in makeup.

This guy says it's worse than a Middle East war zone and there's no coming back. He and his family are moving:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/487564184271601

(Sorry, these shorts aren't embeddable, and sometimes barely connectable. Sometimes you have to unmute the video and then hit your up-volume key to get audio.)

More grim:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/487564184271601

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1236075937535449

It seems everyone has trucks, a good thing at a time like this.

Here's a NY Times article that will make you think:

The People Fleeing Climate Disasters Are Going to Transform the American South

The link should be free, I think.

"Last week, warning about the imminent arrival of Hurricane Helene, the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Fla., used the word “unsurvivable.”

And yet the storm seemed to take much of the country by surprise."

Sleeping Through Hurricane Helene

In this last link, to his credit, David Wallace-Wells points out that these kinds of storms have hit this area before:

Helene gives one vision of the future, with the storm scarring a whole region and imposing perhaps a decade of recovery. But in truth, as extraordinary as its devastation might seem, this kind of flooding in this kind of setting was not unthinkable or, for that matter, even unprecedented. Indeed, it happened in western North Carolina in 1916, and Hurricanes Camille (1969) and Agnes (1972) offered additional cautionary tales. 

Some of the families in those mountains have been there for a century, generation after generation. (They can be quite xenophobic in that region, too, as I learned on the Appalachian Trail.) They won't leave, but will rebuild as best they can. But some people aren't going to be able to dig out and start again. They're the ones with a little more money, more options, probably not native to the region. They're not barely getting by. Ironic that the very poor are the ones who will survive there and stay there. Reminds me of the Middle East, with all its turmoil. People with deep roots respect them. Sometimes I think I should have respected mine too.