Hurricanes and Tropical Storms

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      A Deluge of Rain Poured Out of the Heavens. But There’s Still No Drinking Water.

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      City officials have refused to provide estimates of when the devastated water system in Asheville, N.C., will be back in operation.Since their home lost running water around 2 p.m. on Sept. 27 from Hurricane Helene, Etiska Jackson and her husband, Jayme, have been driving back and forth between their home in Asheville, N.C., and her brother’s in Madison County, about 25 miles north. There, they wash their clothes, take showers and fetch water from a well to flush their toilet.“I feel like I’m camping in my house,” Ms. Jackson, 61, who works as a receptionist at the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, said from the front yard of her bungalow on Friday afternoon.For Ms. Jackson, the most troubling part of not having running water is not knowing when it may return. “They can’t even give us a time frame,” she said. About a foot of water poured out of the dark, gray sky when the remnants of Helene inundated Asheville and much of western North Carolina. More than a week later, not a drop comes out of most people’s faucets. For many of them, it could be weeks before that changes.Bottled water was the only potable water that residents of the city of 94,000 had as of Friday. A treatment plant capable of serving a part of the city that accounts for about 20 percent of its needs was back at full capacity on Friday and city workers were sampling water in pipes to see if it was safe to drink, said Ben Woody, the assistant city manager. Residents have been told to boil any water that does come to them, before drinking it.During the day, you can see Asheville’s water crisis on street corners and at parks throughout the city.Christian Monterrosa for The New York TimesAt Pack Square Park, just outside the Buncombe County Courthouse, the limit was two gallons per person, or five per family.Christian Monterrosa for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hurricane Helene Deaths Will Continue for Years, Study Suggests

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      Research on hundreds of tropical storms finds that mortality keeps rising for more than a decade afterward, for reasons you might not expect.Over the past week, the official death toll from Hurricane Helene has surpassed 100 as the vortex creeping inland from Florida submerged homes and swept away cars. But the full weight of lost lives will be realized only years from now — and it could number in the thousands.A paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday lays out the hidden toll of tropical storms in the continental United States. Looking at 501 events from 1930 to 2015, researchers found that the average tropical storm resulted in an additional 7,000 to 11,000 deaths over the 15 years that followed.Overall during the study period, tropical storms killed more people than automobile crashes, infectious diseases and combat for U.S. soldiers. It’s such a big number — especially compared with the 24 direct deaths caused by hurricanes on average, according to federal statistics — that the authors spent years checking the math to make sure they were right.“The scale of these results is dramatically different from what we expected,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University, who conducted the study with Rachel Young, the Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.The pair used a technique that has also provided a more complete understanding of “excess deaths” caused by Covid-19 and heat waves. It works by looking at typical mortality patterns and isolating anomalies that could have been caused only by the variable under study — in this case, a sizable storm.Previously, researchers examined deaths and hospitalizations after hurricanes over much shorter periods. One study published in Nature found elevated hospitalizations among older Medicaid patients in the week after a storm. Another, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, associated higher death rates with U.S. counties hit by cyclones. A study in The Lancet found that across 14 countries, cyclones led to a 6 percent bump in mortality in the ensuing two weeks.Deaths from tropical storms in the U.S. have been spiking Fatalities connected to storms that struck as many as 15 years ago – measured as the number of deaths above what would otherwise be expected – are rising faster as storms increase in frequency.

      Source: Solomon Hsiang and Rachel YoungBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      North Carolina Officials Begin Post-Helene Election Planning

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      Four days after historic floods battered western North Carolina, the difficulties facing county officials who are trying to stage a presidential election in the area have begun to take shape.A preliminary check of election offices in North Carolina’s flooded west showed that offices in 14 counties were closed, with officials unsure when they would open, the State Board of Elections said late Monday. One office in Haywood County, just west of hard-hit Asheville, could not be reached.While the region is largely rural, it holds a healthy share of the state’s nearly 7.7 million registered voters. Some 570,000 registered voters live in the 11 counties where less than half of the electrical power had been restored as of Monday afternoon. They include 145,000 Democrats and 185,000 Republicans.One of the hardest hit counties, Buncombe, is home to Asheville, the region’s Democratic stronghold. In most counties, however, Republicans or unaffiliated voters are dominant.Election officials face a panoply of problems. The remnants of Hurricane Helene struck the region shortly after absentee ballots were put in the mail, and the U.S. Postal Service has suspended mail service to virtually all of western North Carolina.Those ballots would have been dispatched earlier, but they had to be reprinted after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quit the presidential race and sued to have his name removed from ballots.County officials also are likely to encounter trouble finding accessible sites for early voting, which begins Oct. 17. Finding voters who were displaced will be yet another headache. So will be registering voters, as the deadline for registering is Oct. 11.Michael C. Bitzer, an elections expert at Catawba College, said that “counties have been preparing for early voting sites that may no longer exist.”“They had reserved polling places that may have been swept away in the floodwaters,” he said. “They have voters who requested an absentee ballot and cannot receive that ballot, let alone the poll workers and the major disruption to their lives.”In 2018, after Hurricane Florence ravaged 28 counties along the North Carolina coast, the state extended the voter registration deadline and spent $400,000 for a campaign to locate displaced voters and educate other residents about voting options.Officials don’t have such plans yet, said Gerry Cohen, a veteran analyst of state government and a member of the election board in Wake County, which includes the state capital, Raleigh.“There are a lot of unknowns on what to do,” he said. “We’re a couple of days away from finding out what’s going on.” More

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      In Booming Asheville, Residents Rethink Their Sense of Safety

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      Worries of flooding had not been top of mind as the mountain-ringed city flourished in recent years as a haven for artists, chefs, brewmasters, entrepreneurs and retirees.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. Nearly all residents of Asheville are without running water.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Map: Tracking Tropical Storm Kirk

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      Kirk was a tropical storm in the North Atlantic Ocean Monday morning Eastern time, the National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory. The tropical storm had sustained wind speeds of 50 miles per hour.  All times on the map are Eastern. By The New York Times Where will it rain? Flash flooding can occur […] More

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      Helene Has Killed More Than 90 People. Here Are Some of Their Stories.

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      Days after the Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Florida’s gulf coast, some victims’ portraits were coming into focus. A woman in her 70s who repaired nuclear cooling towers and rode motorcycles. A Florida resident who helped her community recover from Hurricane Ian two years ago. A man who had just moved to South Carolina to work as an electrical lineman.All three were among the more than 90 people killed by Helene, a roaring Category 4 hurricane that has devastated much of the Southeast since coming ashore last week. The victims came from at least six states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Many people drowned, and others were killed by falling trees, car crashes under heavy rains and a tornado produced by the storm. A lot of the victims were still unidentified.The toll is almost certain to rise as rescuers reach communities in the Appalachian Mountains, where devastating flooding and mudslides have decimated whole towns.But on Sunday, three days after the giant storm made landfall in the Big Bend region, some victims’ stories were coming into focus.In Florida, most of the 11 victims there drowned in Pinellas County, which is in the Tampa Bay region and the most densely populated county in the state. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John D. MacDonald Knew a Hurricane Like Helene Was Coming

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      John D. MacDonald was eerily prescient about the risks of human-driven climate disasters in the region.When I learned early Friday morning that Cedar Key, Fla., had been flattened overnight by Hurricane Helene, one of the first things that came to my mind was a song lyric by Jimmy Buffett — early Buffett, before he became a walking tourist attraction. One of his better songs is “Incommunicado,” released in 1981. It begins: “Travis McGee’s still in Cedar Key/That’s what old John MacDonald said.”Buffett didn’t get it quite right. McGee, the tanned, laid-back antihero of John D. MacDonald’s terrific thriller novels, didn’t hang out in Cedar Key. He docked the houseboat he lived in — it was named the Busted Flush, because he’d won it in a card game — on the opposite coast, in Fort Lauderdale.But Buffett clearly knew MacDonald’s own geography. The novelist, who died in 1986, spent most of his adult life in Sarasota and on nearby Siesta Key, just a few hours south of Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast. When Helene scraped ruinously along the central and northern parts of the Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday night, it was taking aim at MacDonald country.There are many reasons to read MacDonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels, which include “The Deep Blue Good-By” (1964), “Pale Gray for Guilt” (1968) and “The Dreadful Lemon Sky” (1974). They’re sly, satirical, tattered around the edges. Kingsley Amis thought MacDonald was a better writer than Saul Bellow. All of the McGee books have colors in their titles. MacDonald was among the first to use this sort of mnemonic device, as Sue Grafton would in her alphabet series, so readers could remember which ones they’d read.Another reason to read MacDonald is that he was eerily prescient. How much so? He saw Helene coming, more clearly than most. Here is a paragraph from his novel “Dead Low Tide,” from 1953:You pray, every night, that the big one doesn’t come this year. A big one stomped and churned around Cedar Key a couple of years back, and took a mild pass at Clearwater and huffed itself out. One year it is going to show up, walking out of the Gulf and up the coast, like a big red top walking across the schoolyard. … It’s going to be like taking a good kick at an anthill, and then the local segment of that peculiar aberration called the human race is going to pick itself up, whistle for the dredges and start it all over again.In his 1956 novel “Murder in the Wind” (also published as “Hurricane”), he wrote about a storm named Hilda — not Helene, but close enough — that destroys the area around Cedar Key. In an author’s note at the front, he urges anyone doubting the plausibility of such a disaster to remember that just six years earlier, a hurricane had put much of the region underwater.“Though the chance is statistically remote,” MacDonald writes, “there need only be the unfortunate conjunction of hurricane path and high Gulf tide to create coastal death and damage surpassing the fictional account in this book.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What We Know About Hurricane Helene’s Destruction So Far

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      Helene was the strongest storm to ever hit Florida’s Big Bend region. As it made its way across the Southeast, the storm inundated towns with floods and mudslides, killing at least 61.Hurricane Helene ravaged much of the Southeast last week, carving a path of destruction from Florida to Appalachian states as it spawned deadly flooding, mudslides and tornadoes. After making landfall on Thursday on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the storm, with its powerful winds and record-breaking storm surges, killed at least 61 people, destroyed countless homes, put over four million customers in the dark and blocked hundreds of roads.Here’s how Helene has wreaked havoc across the Southeast.After roaring ashore into Florida, Helene set several records. Helene barreled into Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane on Thursday, packing 140-mile-per-hour winds. Fueled by very warm ocean temperatures, the storm was the strongest ever to strike the Big Bend region, a marshy and sparsely populated area.Helene, which was the third hurricane to hit the Big Bend in 13 months, broke storm surge records across the Gulf Coast, many of which were last set just over a year ago, when Hurricane Idalia drenched the same area.Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke about the “complete obliteration of homes” in parts of the state at a news conference on Saturday. Cedar Key, a small community on a collection of tiny islands jutting into the Gulf of Mexico, was “completely gone,” said Michael Bobbitt, who lives there. In Keaton Beach, another small shoreline community, the sheriff told a local TV station that 90 percent of the homes were washed away.A record-high storm surge inundated the Tampa Bay region, including in areas that had rarely, or never, seen flooding. After facing several hurricanes in recent years, some residents in the region were left wondering whether it’s worth living there. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More