In Booming Asheville, Residents Rethink Their Sense of Safety

Erica Scott, a wedding photographer, spent much of her life in California, but moved to Asheville, N.C., 16 years ago with a sense that she was leaving behind the perpetual threat of natural disasters. With its cool mountain climate and a setting hundreds of miles from the ocean, the city seemed like a refuge from some of the worries that come with a warming planet.

“I had always felt like we were safe from climate change in this region; we talked about that a lot in town,” Ms. Scott, 55, said. “But now this makes me question that maybe there’s nowhere that’s safe.”

Parts of Asheville, the fast-growing and culture-rich gem of the Blue Ridge Mountains, were wrecked by water and mud after Hurricane Helene roared up from the Florida coast on Friday, triggering catastrophic flooding across a broad swath of the Southeast.

Western North Carolina saw some of the worst of it, with Gov. Roy Cooper calling it “one of the worst storms in modern history” for the region. On Monday, the city and many of the surrounding towns had no running water; power and cell service remain scarce.

Asheville, set along the French Broad River, has a long history of flooding, most notably in 1916, when a pair of powerful summer storms engorged rivers and killed scores of people. Another river, the Swannanoa, flows nearby.