'We're Living In A Climate We've Never Seen" - NC State Climatologist On A New World Of Floods

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From last year’s disaster in Asheville to this month’s catastrophic floods in Central Texas, the world has entered a new era of rainfall supercharged by climate change, rendering existing response plans inadequate. A Washington Post analysis of atmospheric data found a record amount of moisture flowing in the skies over the past year and a half, largely due to rising global temperatures. With so much warm, moist air to fuel storms, they are increasingly able to move water vapor from the oceans to locations hundreds of miles from the coast, triggering flooding for which most inland communities are ill-prepared.

“We’re living in a climate that we’ve never seen, and it keeps throwing us curveballs,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist. “How do you plan for the worst thing you’ve never seen?” To understand why inland regions are so vulnerable to heavy rainfall, The Post compared the response to Helene in western North Carolina with that of Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the storm hit first. The investigation, based on analysis of cellphone data and interviews with two dozen meteorologists, disaster experts and storm survivors, revealed how scant flood awareness and a lack of effective warnings led to far fewer evacuations in North Carolina’s mountainous western counties. Yet it was in these inland areas that Helene wrought its greatest human toll. At least 78 people in North Carolina died in Helene’s floodwaters, according to data from the National Hurricane Center — more than five times the number of people who drowned on the coast.

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Evacuation patterns reflected this preparedness gap: Cellphone data provided by researchers at Columbia University and analyzed by The Post shows a 36 percent spike in people leaving affected counties in Florida for areas beyond Helene’s path in the four days before the storm hit. In contrast, movement out of the hardest-hit North Carolina counties didn’t change much compared with a normal week. By the time Buncombe County made evacuation orders mandatory, deadly flash floods were already underway.

This reconstruction of North Carolina’s scramble during Helene reveals parallels with Central Texas and holds lessons for other inland areas facing increasingly intense freshwater floods — an oft-overlooked hazard that, due in part to coastal safety measures, now accounts for more than half of all tropical-cyclone-related deaths in the United States.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/07/07/hurricane-helene-evacuation-north-carolina-warnings/