Western North Carolina was hailed as a ‘climate haven.’ Hurricane Helene shows it’s not so simple.

Western North Carolina, and specifically the Asheville area, had been considered a possible refuge from the impacts of climate change, but it is now suffering some of the worst devastation from Hurricane Helene.

The area was dubbed a potential “climate haven” due to its elevation and temperate climates as recently as 2022. 

The storm and its aftermath illustrate the damage that can be wrought by just one of the unusually extreme weather events that are becoming more common as a result of climate change, however — and make clear that elevation will sometimes not be enough to protect the region against such events.

“Some of these places, especially at higher elevation, it’s not too hot, you’re far from the coast … places like Asheville have a lot of appeal” as climate refuges, said Margaret Walls, an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future.

However, she said, in the mountains “the terrain makes it such that flooding is a problem,” and particularly in poverty-stricken areas, “there are a limited number of places people can live so they tend to live in flood prone places.”

“From a rainfall perspective, the Appalachian Mountains are woefully unprepared — at the community level, the household level, our infrastructure is not prepared,” said Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Severe flooding and mudslides brought on by Helene have left dozens of people in the region dead and displaced or stranded many others amid the wreckage of buildings and roads. Hundreds of thousands of households in North Carolina remain without power days after the storm hit, according to PowerOutage.us. Search and rescue operations are still ongoing.

Much of the rain fell on mountain communities with only one or two roads leading in or out, meaning that once they were washed out, it became all but impossible to deliver supplies and relief through overland routes.

Zegre noted the region has been hit with the aftereffects of heavy Gulf or Atlantic hurricanes before, notably in the early 1990s. Since then, however, the effects of climate change have likely made hurricanes more intense and denser with moisture, which made the aftermath of Helene “unprecedented” in the region, he said. 

Much of what has made the storm's impact so extreme, he added, comes down to a combination of the mountainous terrain and simple gravity. “When you drop that amount of rain in mountain topography, it’s hard to avoid being impacted by the flood.”

In the mountains, “the water doesn't linger like on a flat flood plain … it kind of is concentrated, and it moves at high velocity,” said Philip Berke, director of the Center for Resilient Communities and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Additionally, Berke said, the region had already seen heavy rain in the days before the Helene remnants moved north, and due to the elevation, “cold air goes up, the dew points get reached, and the hurricane was just pumping in all that warm, moist air on top of a highly saturated situation.”

An area doesn't have to be regularly impacted by extreme weather events to be devastated by one, experts said. Even if a storm like Helene is a far rarer occurrence for western North Carolina than wildfires are for the western U.S. or tropical storms are for Florida, a single catastrophic event can be enough.

“When you look at property damages or damages per capita and you look at the top counties in the U.S., in many counties one single event will shoot them up to the top of the list,” Walls said. “There’s a county in New Jersey that’s very high on the list purely because 99 percent of those damages came from Hurricane Sandy.”

“The lesson here is trends matter and there are certain locations that get hit repeatedly, but no place is really immune — every place needs to prepare,” she added. And when an area has limited resources — and a limited tax base — to begin with, a disaster at this level makes the rebuilding process even more difficult and complex.

“It’s easier for the city of Atlanta than it is for one of these small counties in North Carolina,” she said.

Berke noted that the devastation of the storm comes at a time when much of the region was experiencing the beginning of a resurgence that made it an attractive target for development. “They want to build. They want to expand. They want their tax bases,” he said. 

Places like the town of Chimney Rock, which floodwaters all but swept away, were seeing new economic growth in areas like tourism, rafting and vacation rentals that weren’t part of their economies a decade ago.

“At the same time, the climate and the heat has been building up and accelerating, so you have these converging forces,” he said.

Ultimately, events like Helene and its aftermath demonstrate the need for both mitigation of climate change and a more expansive vision of adapting to its impacts, Zegre said.

“We can’t stop the rain, we can’t stop the rivers, so we really need to think about how to adapt,” he said, particularly if the influx of tourism and permanent residents continues. “We need to expect that these storms are going to be a worst-case scenario.”