Hurricane Helene and Unnatural Disasters
Our Carolina coasts have gotten heartbreakingly used to being in the eye of the storm. Supplies are stockpiled, sandbags ready, plywood and generators at hand, and webs of shelters, first responders, and early warning systems in place. We carry generations of knowledge on how to survive the once-in-a-lifetime storms that now seem to come every year. We have evacuation protocols, we’re well-versed in emergency preparedness. There are supplies stockpiled, sandbags on hand, plywood and generators and webs of shelters and first responders, early warning systems and generational knowledge of how to weather the once-in-a-lifetime storms that seem to come now every year. But for our western mountains, when the rains came, it was a new world.
Usually, when the Carolinas make headlines for hurricane damage, it’s my hometown, Wilmington, and surrounding areas, that take the brunt of the damage. Friends and family check in when they see the news. This time, though, it wasn’t the place I grew up that was suffering — but a set of places that have become my second home. My parents, both public school teachers, and I would run off to the mountains every chance we got during school breaks to go camping, a low-cost vacation that felt like the height of adventure to me. We’ve probably stayed in our old tent at every state park from North Carolina to West Virginia, all along that gorgeous stretch of Appalachian mountains, with its waterfalls and precious pockets of old-growth forest. I’ve backpacked long stretches of the Appalachian Trail that cross sloping balds, dip in and out of hollers, and cross creeks and rivers. I’ve spent so many hours driving across the state, spending stolen stretches of time in small mountain towns, from Boone to Sylva to Black Mountain.
I treasure my memories of collecting honey from the beehives my then-partner and her family tended during those Wilkesboro summers—picking raspberries straight off the vine, swimming in the lake, red-clay smeared and sunburnt under the gentle curve of the ancient mountains. I have been a loyal, enraptured pilgrim to these mountain places, always struck by their tough, tight-knit nature, the way they have weathered change and upheaval, and how vibrant and near at hand the more-than-human world seems. I know these places and the people who call them home hold so much strength and wisdom.
Which is why seeing what they have become, as pixels on a screen, is the most surreal kind of heartbreak. Lake Lure and Chimney Rock streets I’ve wandered a hundred times, splintered and unrecognizable. The house I lived in for a beautiful Asheville summer with dear friends, almost certainly flooded, the gas station down the road with the water reaching its roof. Over 200 are dead, and hundreds are missing. The funds run out for recovery at home but never for violence exported abroad. As a foreigner here in Iceland, attending a Master’s program that emphasizes community resilience and good governance, I’m often put in a position of having to explain America, and these days, when I try, my chest goes tight. With love, with shame. With a longing for things to be different.
Every place I’ve ever called home has faced some kind of catastrophe — nor’easters, hurricanes, wildfires, a mass shooting. Every place I’ve ever called home has come to its own rescue through radical acts of community and solidarity. The mutual aid and grassroots efforts active in Appalachia right now are nothing short of astonishing. Neighbors mobilize to meet one another’s needs, hiking in to access towns cut off behind destroyed roads, delivering food, water, generators, and medicine.
This is resilience, but make no mistake — this is the resilience that has arisen out of grim necessity. The people living in this climate disaster zone are rising to the challenge because their leaders are failing them. Our leaders are failing us, and because of it, we are all in harm’s way.
Many have shouted it without being heard, and my voice will join them: This was not a natural disaster. Florence, the hurricane that made my hometown an island for days in 2018, was not a natural disaster. Ongoing blazes worsening every fire season, mudslides and avalanches, and heat waves across the globe — these are not inevitable, not the simple result of chance. There is nothing natural about the planetary boundaries we have crossed, the chaos we have thrown into our systems, and the spiraling feedback loops of their response. This is a consequence of abdicated responsibility on a global scale, not just bad weather.
The devastating alignment of climate change worsening rainfall and misguided policy that failed to prepare areas and made Helene’s impact what it was are well-documented elsewhere. What feels more urgent to communicate is this: that my climate story will gradually become true for all of us. The climate crisis, if we do not find the courage to face it, will transform our homes irrevocably, no matter where those homes may be. Climate havens — the idea that there are some places who will slide by unscathed by cascading system failure — don’t exist. Asheville was supposed to be a climate haven. So was Maine, where I’ve lived for the past six years. Both, this year, have experienced devastating storms that will leave decades-long marks on infrastructure and griefs that know no boundaries. Safe places can only be insulated by their geography or privilege so much — the damage is pervasive enough that it will eventually break through every wall unless we act. As journalist Johnathan Larson put it, “the frontlines of climate change are everywhere, now.”
Rachel Carson wrote that “the obligation to endure gives us the right to know.” Yet still, deceitful news coverage sponsored by fossil fuel companies gets to write the story of Hurricane Helene. A story which they claim is divorced from their actions, which they have known full well for decades, would lead us here. Still, we are not honest with ourselves and one another about the scope of what we are facing and about what we are called upon to do. That is why, in my daily life, I try to tell Appalachia’s story, and the story of a climate future where we manage to get it right. We can honor those we have lost best by trying to build a future where this does not happen again and again. In their names, with my grief surging, tidal, at my back, I will write and speak and learn towards that future, every day.
RCC National Environment Leadership Fellow — Brianna Cunliffe – University Centre, Westfjords
Brianna (Brie) Cunliffe graduated from Bowdoin College in 2022 with majors in Government and Environmental Studies after completing an honors thesis focused on environmental injustice perpetrated by the biomass industry. She is now an MA student in Coastal Communities and Regional Development at the University Centre of the Westfjords.
