After the fire had retreated and the evacuation orders were lifted, my mother took me on a walk through our backyard. The pale dust of the southern California landscape had turned black with soot, and the desert creatures — quails and rattlesnakes — were frozen, ash-coated, in Pompeian tableaus. My family was lucky: While other homes on the block were reduced to rubble, we just had to contend with melted window panes.
I was 5 years old when the 2003 Cedar Fire tore through San Diego County. At the time, it was the largest wildfire in modern California history, burning more than 270,000 acres, destroying 2,820 buildings and killing 15 people. It now stands as only the 10th-largest fire on California’s record. It was surpassed first in 2012, and then again and again, eight more times — all in the last seven years.
Not long after the Cedar Fire, my mom and I packed up and moved across the country to Raleigh, North Carolina. The fire wasn’t the main reason we moved, but North Carolina’s mild climate certainly had its appeal. California had long been the land of earthquakes, infernos and droughts. North Carolina, on the other hand, was known for its temperate weather, leafy green trees and houses affordable enough for a single mom like mine to buy.
I’ve now called North Carolina home for more than 20 years. Even after I moved away for work and school, North Carolina has remained the center of my gravity, where my mom still lives, and where so many of my loved ones and memories are rooted. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of others have relocated to North Carolina, too, making it one of the fastest growing states in the U.S. Raleigh’s population has nearly doubled since 2000, and dozens of other cities have surged in popularity.
One of those booming areas is Asheville, located about four hours west of Raleigh in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I visited Asheville often growing up, watching firsthand as it grew in size and blossomed into a national destination. But I spent most of my time in Boone, the mountain town where Appalachian State University is located. A family friend owned a cabin there, and in the summer, we’d lug our orange kayaks to the New River and paddle downstream, winding past cow fields and fly fishermen casting their lines. In the winter, we’d pile chopped wood into the fireplace and try to scoot our sleds down the hill of the driveaway. One February in elementary school, my best friend and I slipped off a fallen tree trunk and plunged into the river, ice-cold and raging with snow melt. We clung to a branch for dear life and shouted for help until a parent could come rescue us. It’s not hyperbolic to say that, aside from my hometown, there is nowhere to which I feel a greater sentimental attachment than North Carolina’s mountains. As a friend, also from the state, recently wrote on Instagram, “I do not think I would have a connection to the beauty of the world without these places.”
On the afternoon of September 27, my mom texted me a video. “Boone!” she wrote. Her friend’s son, a student at App State, had shared footage taken by a classmate of cars and buildings downtown, submerged in brown floodwater. I didn’t quite grasp what had happened; a flooded Boone made no sense.
Over the next several hours, I watched as the social media posts and local news reports began to pile up. I scrolled through hometown Facebook groups and swiped across Instagram stories, gradually coming to the realization that, through the six-inch display of my phone screen, I was digesting real-life images of some of my favorite places, now totally destroyed. I began reaching out to friends in the area. The scope of devastation from Hurricane Helene was mind-boggling; it wasn’t just Boone, but the entire western North Carolina and East Tennessee region, as well as parts of Georgia and South Carolina.
For a brief moment that night, the Wikipedia page for Chimney Rock, North Carolina, heavily ravaged by a flash flood, was edited to read in the past tense: “Chimney Rock was a village in Rutherford County, North Carolina, United States.” By the next morning, someone had changed it back — a small relief. And then the mainstream news alerts finally started.
It was surreal to see reporters try to convey the significance of the flooding to a national audience. There is, unfortunately, a certain degree of susceptibility to disaster that you accept when you’re living in a place known for its hurricanes or wildfires. But the people of western North Carolina did not live with that same understanding of everyday precarity. For years, media outlets and developers have pitched Asheville as a “climate haven,” largely insulated from the most devastating impacts of the climate crisis. That myth is now sufficiently shattered — not even mountain towns, 250 miles inland, are safe. In one illustrative case: My friend’s parents recently moved from Miami to Asheville. Two days after Helene had knocked out electricity and cell service, she was finally able to contact them. They’d evacuated to Charlotte, further east in the state, and were on their way back down to Florida.
The flooding in Appalachia has awakened many of us to a new reality: This is the 21st-century climate crisis, spurred by fossil fuel extraction. Much of that extraction has occurred in Appalachia’s own coal mines, as the region led the U.S. in coal production for more than a century. The death toll from Helene across the Southeast has now surpassed 160, though that number is expected to climb as rescue missions search for an estimated 600 missing people.
For six days now, people across the region have been cut off from the outside world without water, power or cell service, hemmed in by decimated roads. As a result, reports of devastation in the small towns across more rural parts of Appalachia are just starting to roll in: Marshall, Helton, Lansing, Creston, West Jefferson, Banner Elk, Burnsville, Linville and Spruce Pine, just to name a few. “Most people here couldn’t even see the news or anything for days, so we’re all slowly finding out what’s happening,” a friend in Sylva texted me when she finally regained service on October 2. I grew up visiting the town of Todd in Ashe County, population 2,141. Unable to find any news coverage of Todd specifically, I turned to a local business’s Facebook page: Yes, much of the town was underwater.
The flooding of the River Arts District in Asheville was particularly jarring to see. The area had flourished in recent years, thanks to concerted efforts by community members to foster a cultural hub there. It was where I fell in love for the first time, at 19, sitting on a tree trunk stretched over the French Broad River at golden hour. That years later the French Broad could swell angrily, cresting at nearly 25 feet, swallowing the vibrant district and washing away dozens of livelihoods — unthinkable.
It’s important to note, however, that ultimately I grew up interfacing with the Blue Ridge like so many others do: as a tourist. The economies of Asheville and other mountain towns rely heavily on the tourism industry, and to this Helene has dealt another devastating blow.
But Appalachian people have always been resilient. Community members and coalitions immediately sprang into action. Online, people are disseminating information through missing person Facebook groups, a Discord server, Reddit threads and an interactive crowdsourced resource map. On the ground, communities have implemented creative solutions to internet blackouts, sharing updates via white boards, town meetings and paper notes, while NGOs work alongside federal and state officials to administer relief. Mutual aid groups are collecting funds and mobilizing to distribute food, water and supplies. I’ve heard stories of neighbors pooling their resources while they await aid, sharing things like chainsaws, generators and home-cooked meals.
While it’s not the first time that hurricanes or floods have happened in Appalachia, scientists estimate that climate change increased Helene’s rainfall by up to 50 percent in some parts of North Carolina, as well as South Carolina and Georgia. For more than 100 years, the worst flood on record in western North Carolina was the Great Flood of 1916, which Asheville’s city government website calls “the flood by which all other floods are measured.” That page will probably be updated; flooding from Hurricane Helene set a new record. The storm dropped at least 40 trillion gallons of rain, even knocking the nation’s top center for tracking climate data offline.
Without aggressive climate action, these catastrophes will continue. They will not be relegated to California or Florida, Louisiana or Texas. For many of us, they will hit increasingly close to home. And as I learned after 2003’s Cedar Fire — when it comes to the climate crisis, records are all too easy to break.
Resource lists for Hurricane Helene: