When the North Carolina mountains become hurricane alley

When the warnings first arrived, days before the remnants of Hurricane Helene, Kimberly Moody took note of what was said — and what wasn’t. The storm was going to be bad, that much was clear. But no one said she needed to start packing.

In the wake of the devastation that leveled swaths of her town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, and that killed a friend when he was swept into the Swannanoa River, Moody is hesitant to point fingers. But she can’t help but wonder if evacuation orders might have helped save lives.

“The alert said, Stay in the house. Stay away from the window. But no one said to leave,” said Moody, 53, a UPS worker. “Next time they should ask us to leave. This storm was notorious. It was mean. It was raging.”

Across the inland region where Helene leveled towns and turned deadly, residents and public officials faced a reckoning this week. Most people said they could not have imagined such severe impacts from a storm that made landfall hundreds of miles away on the Florida coast, and few saw widespread evacuations as likely or risk-free fixes for future extreme weather emergencies.

But the post-Helene reassessments in western North Carolina and elsewhere reflect a growing recognition nationally that storm emergency planning needs to broaden its outreach. Long focused on the coasts where such storms make landfall, there are now calls to give equal attention to the risks in the places they end up.

Helene killed more than 200 people in six states. The first fatalities occurred in Florida, where at least a dozen people died, but many more were killed in inland areas where high winds and flash flooding wiped out homes, businesses, roads and bridges.

The heavy toll of hurricanes far away from the coastline is not new or surprising — or even that infrequent, as a warming climate supercharges storms with heavier rainfall. From 2013 to 2022, more than half of deaths attributed to tropical cyclones were caused by inland flooding, according to the National Hurricane Center.

What hasn’t caught up is the way that inland residents often view the risks of hurricanes and their aftermath. Many still tend to underreact to warnings, imagining themselves at a safe distance from hurricanes’ worst dangers.

“Inland deaths are growing because there’s too much focus on the coast,” said Craig Fugate, former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “People have to stop focusing just on landfall and understand that a tropical depression, after the hurricane is downgraded, is just as deadly.”

In North Carolina, emergency managers for both the state and individual counties sent repeated alerts to cellphones in at-risk areas before Helene struck, pinging all phones within range of designated cell towers. But mountainous terrain can block alerts from getting through, as can damage to the towers, and some older phones may not receive the alerts.

Some counties took additional measures. In Haywood County, North Carolina, west of Asheville, Allison Richmond, an emergency services spokesperson, said that new protocols developed after a powerful blow from Tropical Storm Fred three years ago led to more intensive preparation this time.

Such procedures included in-person outreach to remote areas where emergency personnel monitored newly-installed river gauges and used truck-mounted loudspeakers and Spanish-speaking deputies to spread warnings into far-flung corners.

“Because of the previous storm, people were more keyed in to the risk, and a lot of people did evacuate ahead of time,” she said.

One potentially lifesaving innovation wasn’t ready before Helene swept in: new siren systems, which the county purchased after the last storm but had not yet installed, to warn residents of imminent flooding. The long-term goal, Richmond said, is to link the river gauges and the sirens to create a seamless safety net. First, though, the brand-new gauges lost to Helene will have to be replaced.

In Canton, a town of 4,400, local officials sent alerts to residents to warn them to take the storm seriously. Local television news was full of dire warnings. But not everyone felt the urgency, and the town did not call for widespread evacuations. Few residents interviewed there and in other hard-hit communities said they had seriously considered leaving.

Some said they wanted to stay and help. Many, looking at the alternatives, decided they were more at risk trying to escape the storm on narrow, winding mountain roads or on rain-swept highways than hunkered down at home. Others said they could not afford to travel and pay for lodging elsewhere.

“Most people don’t really think about evacuating,” said Davit Scott, 70, of Black Mountain, 15 miles east of Asheville. “We have jobs. We have to make a living.”

Margaret Marshall, 57, a supermarket cashier whose home in Candler, 11 miles southwest of Asheville, was spared, scoffed at the idea that she and her husband could have fled to another city like Charlotte, two hours away, to escape Helene. “We’ve got nowhere else to go,” she said.

Some places, such as Buncombe County, home to Asheville, did order evacuations, with gentler “self-evacuation” recommendations last Thursday giving way to mandatory orders last Friday morning, as the most intense part of the storm struck the area.

Fugate said he expected more discussion about the use of mandatory evacuation orders in inland areas in the wake of Helene, and about the clear communication of inland storm risks to the public.

Last Wednesday, the day before the storm hit Florida, forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned of “catastrophic, life-threatening inland flooding” that could occur “even well after landfall.” The National Weather Service in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, made its own attempt to seize inland residents’ attention, posting a warning of the potential for “an extremely rare event with catastrophic flash flooding likely.”

Flood forecasting for mountain regions can be tricky because of complex terrain. And better models are needed to harness data and pinpoint predictions with a finer degree of accuracy, said Vidya Samadi, an assistant professor of water resources engineering at Clemson University who has worked on designing flood evacuation routes.

In towns like Canton, local officials said they would continue to develop better systems for storm planning — with a newfound understanding of the risks.

“The world has changed,” said Zeb Smathers, Canton’s mayor. “Western North Carolina, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the coast, is now in hurricane alley.”

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