Flooding in Asheville, North Carolina, on September 28.. Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Nestled in the bucolic Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina and far from any coast, Asheville was touted as a climate “haven” from extreme weather. Now the historic city has been devastated and cut off by Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic floodwaters, in a stunning display of the climate crisis’s unlimited reach in the United States.
Helene, which crunched into the western Florida coast as a category 4 hurricane on Thursday, brought darkly familiar carnage to a stretch of that state that has experienced three such storms in the past 13 months, flattening coastal homes and tossing boats inland.
But as the storm, with winds peaking at 140 mph, carved a path northward, it mangled places in multiple states that have never seen such impacts, obliterating small towns, hurling trees on to homes, unmooring houses that then floated in the floodwater, plunging millions of people into power blackouts, and turning major roads into rivers.
Helene, said Al Gore, is “a staggering and horrific reminder of the ways that the climate crisis can turbocharge extreme weather.”
In all, about 100 people have died across five states, with nearly a third of these deaths occurring in the county containing Asheville, a city of historic architecture where new residents have flocked amid boasts by real estate agents of a place that offers a reprieve from........