Don’t Blame the Hurricane Helene Tragedy in North Carolina on Climate Change
How the data matters and why the focus should be on disaster recovery
The tragedy of Hurricane Helene is real. And it has occurred multiple times over the past 100 years. That’s why it’s shamefully reprehensible that climate change advocates jumped on their soapboxes less than a week after the storm struck and before the damage could be assessed. We’ll not debate climate change or climate variability here other than to say that everything tragic about Hurricane Helene is not the result of the past 25 years. One big thing is that the historical context and relative information will be shared first.
Storm Intensity
A review of the most intense hurricanes to reach western North Carolina comes from NOAA. The top five are Ivan (2004), Hugo (1989), Florence (2018), Francis (2004), and the Unnamed Hurricane of 1949.
Looking at the top ten storms, five occurred from 1896 to 1950 and five after 1950. Four intense hurricanes occurred around 1900, and three around 2000.
When those strong storms reached western North Carolina, they were normally in the range of 20 to 35 knots. Hurricane Hugo was the notable exception at 55 knots.
The pattern has been consistent for nearly 150 years.
The greatest damage from extreme weather in western NC is more from flood than wind.
Floods
The top 5 floods that have had the most significant impact on Western North Carolina:
1. The Great Flood of 1916: This flood was caused by the remnants of two hurricanes that hit within a week of each other, leading to record-breaking rainfall and devastating flooding across the region
2. Hurricane Helene (2024): This recent storm caused catastrophic flooding with rainfall totals reaching up to 31 inches in some areas
3. The Flood of 1940: Triggered by the remnants of a hurricane, this flood caused widespread damage and significant flooding, particularly in the mountainous areas.
4. Hurricanes Frances and Ivan (2004): These back-to-back hurricanes caused widespread flooding and landslides in the mountains, severely impacting the region
5. Hurricane Florence (2018): Although more impactful in eastern NC, Florence’s remnants caused significant flooding in the western part of the state
Which event among the top three had the greatest impact will be a subject of debate. Certainly, it’s Hurricane Helene for now, and the death toll and flood levels in many areas will make it the greatest. However, there is a good argument in the historical context that the scale of the 1916 and 1940 floods makes them stand out as the most significant flood events. No one can argue that all three were events of biblical proportions in their respective times.
The Great Flood of 1916
Elliston states, “The most notorious occasion fell in July of 1916 when waves of record-breaking precipitation piled up. The first week of the month, the remnants of a Gulf Coast hurricane soaked WNC, and the rains never seemed to stop after that. Then, on July 16, a hurricane from the Atlantic brought an additional onslaught. At one local weather station, 22 inches of rain were recorded in 24 hours.
At the time, flood stage on the French Broad was marked at four feet over the norm; the combined storms pushed the waters to a crest of more than 23 feet. The river, which averaged 380 feet in width, swelled to more than four times that span. As riverside residents began to seek higher ground or, in some cases, drown, houses on waterlogged mountainsides cascaded down in landslides. In several interviews after the flood, that’s what people emphasized: the sickening sound of a home sliding down a ridge, sometimes with a family inside it.
Contemporary accounts suggest grim numbers: 50 to 80 people dead with hundreds gravely injured, thousands of houses destroyed, and untold businesses suddenly washed out. Hundreds of miles of railroads, a key means of moving people and goods, were disabled. When the waters finally receded, the financial damages were estimated at some $22 million — the equivalent of almost half a billion dollars today.”
The Great Flood of 1916 Happened Rapidly
According to Willimas, “All around Asheville that Sunday, people were taken by surprise at the speed and volume of the rising floodwaters. Automobiles and streetcars were abandoned midtrip and left in the middle of roads. The water would reach a height of nine feet at the gate of the Biltmore Estate, although the home was spared. All throughout Asheville, people clung to trees and lumber piles, waiting for lifeguards in flat-bottom boats carrying ropes to deliver them to safety.
For nine long hours, Kathleen Lipe Carter, who was caught in the raging Swannanoa River, clung to a maple tree, awaiting rescue as frigid water swirled around her. She watched floodwater sweep her father away, killing him and several other members of her party that day.
In the next county over, the Marshall community saw 53 homes wash downstream. The Madison County town, which sits tucked between the river and the mountain in a low-lying valley, filled with water. It was also reported that 500 excursionists from Knoxville, Tennessee, were marooned in Madison, with only one railway bridge left standing for the entire county. And just east of Asheville, in McDowell County and northeast in Mitchell, flooding leveled much of the landscape, especially along the Eastern Continental Divide.”
“Along the riverfronts in the Swannanoa and French Broad valleys, industrial plants have been submerged and wrecked,” the Asheville Citizen newspaper reported on July 16. “The damage in Asheville is estimated at $1,000,000; in Buncombe County the loss will add close to two million to this sum. … From the outside towns and communities come reports of death and havoc to property.”
The Flood of 1940
According to Dean, “Just 24 years later, in 1940, the state suffered from another devastating flood event brought on by the remnants of a slow-moving system. This time it was a single, category 2 hurricane that made landfall along the South Carolina coast on Aug. 11.
The storm moved inland into Georgia and then turned north over western North Carolina, where it dumped torrential rain over the region for five days.
Rivers and streams quickly became overwhelmed by the torrential rains. Mudslides were common due to heavy rain falling on lands that had been clear-cut of their old-growth timber, leaving nothing to hold the soil to the bedrock. Whole mountainsides came rushing down, engulfing homes and killing their residents.
An example of this destruction is what happened to the small town of Mortimer in rural Caldwell County in the Pisgah National Forest. In 1904, the town was built as a lumbering town on the banks of Wilson Creek.
The 1916 flood washed out the railroad there, but not before the area had been clear-cut of the trees that held the soil to the mountainsides. By 1940, there were about 800 residents in the town that included a textile mill, a school, a hotel, a church, and many homes.
On Aug. 13, the tropical rains caused Wilson Creek to flood to an astonishing crest of 94 feet as it torn through the small valley, completely destroying Mortimer. The only remnants that remain are the partial cement foundation of the textile Mill, various buildings, and a couple of railroad trestles.
On August 11, a hurricane once again hit South Carolina and moved west, before turning northward over the WNC mountains. As before, previous storms had saturated the region — twenty-one inches of rain had fallen in August alone. By the 13th, rivers overflowed their banks as rains and flooding ravaged the mountains, wreaking havoc from Sylva to North Wilkesboro.
In Canton, the Pigeon River swelled and over 100 families were forced to evacuate. A twenty-year-old college student died in Black Mountain attempting to open flood gates on Lake Eden, and in Asheville, the three mains controlling the city’s water supply burst. At least twenty in the high-country region perished from flooding and landslides.
Downtown Boone, at 3,333 feet above sea level, flooded after receiving eight inches of rain within a day. Watauga County alone likely experienced over 2,000 landslides, many of them occurring in the dark, giving residents in small communities like Deep Gap or Meat Camp little to no warning or chance to flee. Rail service to Boone was permanently disabled as the flood washed away the line leading from Cranberry Gap, leaving a locomotive and its crew stranded.
The Asheville Museum of History cites contemporary reports: “Elsewhere, the Tuckasegee River spread destruction in Jackson County, washing away several bridges and roads, with some residents clinging to the tops of trees to save themselves. Meanwhile the Watauga and New rivers crested several feet above their records from the 1916 flood.
Several towns and villages in the region, such as Blowing Rock, were completely cut off for days, if not longer. In agricultural regions, such as those around Hendersonville, entire crops and fields were ruined.
The Red Cross worked to arrange hasty relief and evacuation sites, and many evacuees were inoculated for typhoid fever, including at the All Souls Cathedral in Asheville’s Biltmore Village.
Some estimates, adjusted for modern inflation put the damage toll of the 1940 flood at over $300 million, and at least eight stream gauges in the mountains still mark this as the worst flooding recorded.”
Don’t Forget 1791
Spring rains in 1791 were so heavy they raised floods that Davy Crockett called “the second epistle to Noah’s.”
It impossible to compare that period to the Great Flood of 1916, the Flood of 1940, the one-two punch of hurricanes Frances and Ivan, or Hurricane Helene. But we can say that epic floods have occurred in western North Carolina for centuries.
The Great Flood of 1916 and Hurricane Helene
According to Jesse Ferrell of AccuWeather, “The first hurricane made landfall on July 5 and brought heavy rain into the southern Appalachians, saturating the ground and raising creeks and rivers. The second storm hit the coast of South Carolina on July 14 and dissipated over southwestern North Carolina after dumping more than a day’s worth of heavy rain.
The second storm produced nearly 2 feet of rain in the mountains of North Carolina, quickly sending streams over their banks and into the Biltmore area of Asheville. The Swannanoa River at Biltmore rose to 21.70 feet, a record that stood for more than 100 years, until Helene sent it to 26.10 feet, breaking that record by 5 feet.
The maximum rainfall recorded during the second hurricane in 1916 was 22.22 inches in 24 hours. That’s higher than any 24-hour report from Helene’s flooding, but totals for Helene exceeded 36 inches in one spot after nearly three days of heavy rain.”
Ferrell’s article observed that “a look at rainfall maps from the 1916 storm and Helene shows a remarkable similarity.”
The Hurricane Main Development Region (MDR)
The Atlantic Ocean’s Main Development Region (MDR) runs from Africa to the Caribbean Islands and is where the majority of tropical cyclones form. There is no scientific standard for the MDR, so some hurricane forecasters consider parts of the Caribbean to be part of it. Climatologists estimate that 85% of major hurricanes and 60% of all other tropical cyclones form in either the Caribbean or the Atlantic MDR.
This page provides time series and map visualizations of daily mean Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from NOAA Optimum Interpolation SST (OISST) version 2.1. OISST is a 0.25°x0.25° gridded dataset that provides estimates of temperature based on a blend of satellite, ship, and buoy observations.
NOAA caveats that the daily temperatures are estimates specific to OISST, and any apparent record high or low OISST values should be considered cautiously and evaluated against other datasets.
Climate Change versus Climate Variability
Climate change and climate variability are terms often used interchangeably. Still, they have distinct meanings, especially in scientific contexts like those provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
According to the IPCC, climate change refers to statistically significant variations in the mean state of the climate or its variability that persist for an extended period, typically decades or longer. This includes changes due to natural processes, external forces, or persistent anthropogenic changes in the atmosphere’s composition or land use.
Climate variability, on the other hand, refers to variations in the climate that occur within shorter time frames, such as months, years, or decades. These variations can be due to natural internal processes within the climate system (e.g., El Niño and La Niña events) or external factors (e.g., volcanic eruptions).
Don’t Blame It on the Modern Denial of Climate Change
Six days after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, climate change activists decided to blame everything on the last 20 years of Republican and Duke Energy influence.
According to Lucy Dean Stockdon, “In the years before Hurricane Helene ravaged North Carolina last week, the state’s Republican lawmakers and corporate interests continually fought climate adaptation and mitigation measures that could have helped communities withstand the storm’s tidal surge, hurricane-force winds, and widespread flooding.” Her October 2, 2024, article is subtitled, “North Carolina was once a climate leader, but more than a decade of Republican and corporate obstruction left the state ill-prepared for the historic disaster.”
And according to Stockdon, “Asheville was once billed as a climate haven, given its elevation and distance from the state’s collapsing shoreline — but increasingly intense flooding is making hurricanes more dangerous inland.”
Oh, really?
What About the Past 100 Years?
Stockton’s article doesn’t discuss the Great Flood of 1921 or the Flood of 1940, both of which caused comparable destruction to Hurricane Helene.
Approximately 75% of the nearly 2000-word article is spent on what’s happened since 2000. Back then, “North Carolina, with Democratic control of the governor’s office, was considered an outpost of “Southern progressivism” and was seen by many as leading the charge on climate policy.”
I don’t know when leading the charge on climate change began, but it did not spare western North Carolina from the devastation that occurred in 2004 from Hurricanes Frances and Ivan. The 2004 flooding is considered fourth on the all-time list behind the Great Flood of 1921, the 1940 Flood, and Hurricane Helene.
The Tragedy is Real
The tragedy is real. And it has occurred multiple times over the past 100 years.
Climate change may be responsible for all of those past events, which means there could be a lot of blame to go around to everyone–not just Republican influence over the past 20 years as one climate activist recently claimed.
Yet I doubt what happened in North Carolina in 1900, 2000, or any date in between had much incremental influence on hurricane alley, the Caribbean, or the Gulf of Mexico. We should all have more reverence for the tragedy in western North Carolina caused by Hurricane Helene than blaming it all on the climate change policy of the past two decades.
References
Jon Elliston, “Unforgettable Rampage: Even a century later, the Great Flood of 1916’s watery depths haunt Western North Carolina,” WNC Magazine, July/August 2016
Heidi Coryell Williams, “Hell and High Water: The Flood of 1916,” Our State, 2013
Scott Dean, “Remembering the Great Floods of 1916 and 1940 in Western North Carolina,” Spectrum 1, June 24, 2023.
Jesse Ferrell, “Hurricane Helene vs. The Great Flood of 1916,” AccuWeather, October 4, 2024. https://ca.news.yahoo.com/hurricane-helene-vs-great-flood-195919483.html
University of Maine
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
JD Solomon resides in the Carolinas, where he fishes, sails, and coaches baseball. Professionally, JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE fishbone diagram®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method©. JD worked as part of the recovery efforts from Hurricanes Frances and Ivan in 2005. He has weathered many storms, both on land and at sea.
