Nine months ago, the oceans became bathwater. As historically hot sea temperatures forced corals to expel the microorganisms that keep them alive, the world endured its fourth mass coral bleaching event, affecting more than half of all coral reefs in dozens of countries. As the temperatures continued to climb, many died.
It was an early taste of what would become a year marked by the consequences of record-breaking heat. And now it’s official: Last week, when much of the world’s attention was turned to the U.S. presidential elections, scientists from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service crowned 2024 as the hottest year on record — and the first year to surpass the 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark. And that’s with 2 months left to go in the year.
“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference, COP29,” said Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’ deputy direction, in a press release. Burgess called the announcement “virtually certain” because, barring an extreme event like a volcanic eruption that blocks the atmosphere’s excess heat, it’s nearly impossible for temperatures to fall enough for 2024 not to break the record.
It’s against this backdrop that world leaders, policymakers, and activists are descending on Azerbaijan for the 29th United Nations Climate Conference of the Parties, to tout their new climate goals and negotiate funding for vulnerable countries affected by climate change. Back home, many of their countries will still be recuperating from this year’s floods, fires, and other natural disasters. At the last conference in December 2023, governments agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the aim of trying to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures.
“2024 is the hottest year on record, and nothing can change that at this point,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, which, due to slight variations in their model, found last year exceeded 1.5 degrees C too. “It’s not about a single year passing that that 1.5 level. It’s more important to consider the longer term average of human contribution to climate change.”
There are half a dozen groups, including Berkeley Earth, Copernicus, and NASA, that calculate the progress of global warming, and each has its own approach to filling in data gaps from the beginning of the century when records were less reliable, leading to different estimations of how much the Earth has warmed since then. The average of these models is used by international scientific authorities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization. This is the first year, Hausfather says, that this communal average also shows the 1.5C threshold has been passed.
“1.5 degrees is not a magic number. Each degree matters,” said Andrew Dessler, director of Texas A&M University’s Texas Center for Climate Studies. Because each part of our climate system has different thresholds for tolerating the excess heat, small changes in temperature can have major consequences, and push ecosystems past their tipping points. “The world is engineered for the climate of the 20th century,” he said, “and we’re just now exiting that climate. We’re maladapted.”
Global warming alone can’t account for all the excess heat from these past two years. At least some of the super-charged temperatures and the disasters they catalyzed can be chalked up to a strong El Niño — a cyclical upwelling of warm water in the Pacific Ocean that shifts weather patterns across the globe. Although the most recent El Niño cycle was expected to give way to the cooler La Niña pattern this summer, the heat has persisted into the end of the year.
Once El Niño’s effects ease up, there’s a chance that coming years may dip back below the 1.5C mark. Hausfather notes that only once the planet’s temperatures have remained above the 1.5 degrees C threshold for a decade or more will scientists consider international emissions agreements to be breached. “A big El Niño year like this one gives us a sneak peek as to what the new normal is going to be like in a decade or so,” he said.
A wildfire burns in the Amazon rainforest in August, 2024. Evaristo Sa / AFP via Getty
And the new normal isn’t pretty. In addition to the widespread demise of coral reefs, the year brought record-setting heat waves in the Arctic and Antarctica that melted sea ice to near-historic lows, stoking concerns that sea levels would rise faster than anticipated. During summer months, some 2 billion people, a quarter of all humans on Earth, were exposed to dangerously hot temperatures, including 91 million people in the United States and hundreds of millions in Asia.
The extra heat fueled disasters throughout the year. Deadly wildfires raged in South America, burning millions of hectares across the Amazon Basin and Chile. Arctic forests in Russia and Canada went up in flames too, spewing record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Catastrophic flooding killed hundreds in Spain, Africa, and South Asia. And recently, hurricanes Helene and Milton, catalyzed by hot ocean temperatures, tore through the Caribbean and the American South. Meanwhile, droughts gripped communities in nearly every continent.
“Those impacts are unacceptable. They’re being felt by those who are most vulnerable, which also happen to be, in general, those that are least responsible,” said Max Homes, president and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
At the U.N. conference in Azerbaijan, organizations like the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the World Wildlife Fund are given the platform to speak directly to country representatives and showcase their research on climate change. There, activists hope that wealthy countries shore up their commitments to support poorer countries in their efforts to cope with the climate crisis, develop clean energy, and restore ecosystems.
“People shouldn’t think the game is over because we passed 1.5 degrees,” Dessler said. “The game is never over.”
Early Tuesday afternoon, Kurt Wilkening drove to his usual Election Day polling location at a church in Sarasota, Florida. But the 90-year-old quickly discovered no one there, the building destroyed by flooding during hurricanes Milton and Helene earlier this fall. So Wilkening hopped back into his car and headed to another location in Bird Key, the barrier island where he lives. When he arrived, he was told he was once again at the wrong spot, and directed to yet another. That site, a recreation center that doubles as a voting precinct and a Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster recovery center, finally ended up being his correct polling place.
“Why didn’t they put this in the paper?” he said, gesturing toward the polling station. Wilkening, whose home sustained “tremendous” flooding and damage during both storms, expressed frustration at the run-around. “It’s been a real challenge. When you are 90 years of age, it’s tough to deal with all this.”
It’s been less than two months since Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s western flank as a Category 4 storm before quickly pivoting north to unleash torrential rain and wind on five more states across the Southeast. The September storm killed nearly 230 people, displaced thousands more, and caused some $53 billion dollars in damage. Even as North Carolina, the state that bore the brunt of the storm’s impact, was still assessing the wreckage, Florida braced for another major hurricane in nearly the same corridor. Milton hit as a Category 3 on October 9, knocking out power for millions and killing more than 20 people in several counties.
It was the first time that two major hurricanes made landfall in the United States within weeks of a presidential election. Georgia and North Carolina, both still recovering from Helene, are two of seven swing states that will likely determine the outcome of the race.
A temporary polling location in Sarasota, Florida, set up after hurricanes Helene and Milton damaged several other sites around the city. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
In Florida, record-breaking storm surge inundated coastal polling locations, forcing their closure for Election Day. Inland, in states like North Carolina, the hurricane’s rain-driven flooding washed away homes and roads, closed mail routes, and destroyed voting sites. Election officials along the storms’ paths scrambled to ensure access to early voting and absentee ballots for hurricane victims and establish temporary poll locations.
In disaster-battered communities across Florida and North Carolina on Tuesday, registered voters turned out in droves to cast their ballots. Many said they were excited to vote, even as the storms made doing so far more challenging than they expected.
In the Asheville metro area, voters arrived at Fairview Public Library one or two at a time. A few stepped inside only to reemerge seconds later, having discovered they had the wrong location. The Fairview Public Library is one of 17 last-minute polling locations in Buncombe County, which had to scramble to reorganize polling sites after Hurricane Helene battered the region.
As a light drizzle turned to rain, Sean Miller, a 26-year-old Democrat, left the library, having just cast her ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris. Miller lost nearly all of her possessions in Helene. The storm deepened her conviction that Harris was the right candidate. “I would really like to be able to keep the National Weather Service free and accessible to everyone,” she said, referring to a Project 2025 initiative to privatize federal weather data collection. “Helene didn’t change my opinion, but it made me feel more encouraged to vote to keep basic things like that.”
Election day scenes from around western North Carolina, including a sign redirecting voters to a new polling site and a temporary dirt road. Zoya Teirstein / Grist
Stacey Troy Smith hasn’t voted since 1992, when she cast her ballot for Bill Clinton. This time, she’s voting Republican. She owns a small farm in Swannanoa, North Carolina that was destroyed by Hurricane Helene. “My fence is gone and bears have eaten half my livestock,” she said, standing in the parking lot of a last-minute polling location at Warren Wilson College. “I couldn’t seem to get any help.” Smith said that someone registered under her address and claimed the $750 relief payment that FEMA distributes to disaster victims for immediate necessities. The experience soured her on the agency and on the federal government in general. “I would definitely say a lot of people are negative against FEMA in this area,” she said.
Smith voted for Trump, but she split her ticket with some Democrats, too, she said. “In some areas, I think there should be women, but I wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris as the first woman president.”
A few miles away, at a temporary polling place at the Art Space Charter School in Swannanoa, Sarah Mclaughlin, a 25-year-old Amazon employee, was preparing to cast her vote for Harris. “I feel like there’s an obvious choice,” she said. “Everything Trump says is the exact opposite of what I want to see happen in this country.” Mclaughlin (“I swear that’s real,” she said, referring to the fact that her name closely resembles the name of Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan) heard the conspiracy theories that the federal government had purposefully abandoned the people of western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene hit, but she didn’t put any stock in it.
“We’re in the mountains, you don’t expect there to be a hurricane,” she said. “So of course there are going to be people who are angry because we’re not getting a response as quickly as places like Florida. I figured they would come whenever they were able to, and they have.”
Katie Myers / Grist
In Yancey County, northeast of Asheville, board of elections officer Charles McCurry sat waiting in traffic behind a jack-knifed tractor trailer near Ramseytown, reflecting on the scale of devastation in the rural communities where he had spent the morning. “It was absolutely destroyed,” he said of Ramseytown. The local polling place was not spared.
“The voting house was a fire department, and the fire department was completely washed away during the flood,” McCurry said.
When asked about whether he’d heard misinformation about voting, McCurry sighed. “Well, in the entire area,” he said, there were “rumors about FEMA, rumors about, you know, that the storm was somehow brought on by a particular group of people to upset voting in the area, yada yada yada. This is the kind of stuff people don’t need.”
County officials erected a makeshift polling site in a tent in Ramseytown outside a small Baptist church. The site is accessible only by a newly packed dirt road, created after rising floodwaters in the Cane River washed away the highway into town. Mccurry said early voting turnout was large. On Election Day, the speed was closer to a couple of people per hour.
A sign at a restaurant in Asheville.
Zoya Teirstein / Grist
Five hundred miles to the south, voters walked into the Cuban Civic Club in Florida’s Hillsborough County. The community center was a temporary polling site for residents in precincts hard-hit by hurricanes Milton and Helene.
Jerrie Daniels waited for an Uber to pick her up early Tuesday after casting her vote. She had to figure out how to get to her new precinct this morning, an added hurdle and costly expense.
“I was sort of counting my money,” Daniels said. She also didn’t feel like she had enough information to vote for candidates and issues beyond the biggest races. The back-to-back storms and the hurdles they created didn’t change how she voted, but they “solidified,” she noted, her decisions at the ballot box. “I’m an American descendent of Black slaves,” she said. “The election for me means a big change. A better life.”
Tara Gonzalez agrees that much is at stake. The 47-year-old mother of two got emotional in the parking lot of the Cuban Civic Club voting site about what the election could mean for her and her family. “It’s so personal,” she said. “I have a 17-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son. And to me, it’s their rights, their future.”
Jerrie Daniels stands outside of her last-minute voting site, the Cuban Civic Club, in Florida’s Hillsborough County. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
Gonzalez, a former teacher and union organizer, said she has been worried that the one-two punch on her community would negatively impact how people would vote, particularly on a local initiative that would increase property taxes to finance higher salaries for public school teachers and staff. “So many people were hurt by [the storms],” she said. “How can they possibly consider more… to afford a tax on their home?”
Elsewhere in Tampa, Victory Baptist Church is serving as another new polling location. Parking spots remained hard to come by all morning, lines of cars gridlocked on adjacent roads. A lifelong Floridian, Bill Butler lives down the street. The storms brought high winds, severe rain, and a deadly storm surge that slammed his Ballast Point neighborhood and damaged his house, as well as his typical voting precinct. “They moved us here after all that area was pretty much water,” said Butler.
The church also showed signs of damage: The main building’s windows were encased in plastic tarp and Butler said he suspects the interior had been flooded during Helene.
His experience with the hurricanes further reinforced his decision to vote for former President Trump. “What you like to see is people that are coming to your help as quickly as possible,” he said. “I think that Trump came to the help of a lot of people very quickly because he lives here. He knows what it’s like in Florida. And we’ve been hit pretty hard. I mean, two major hurricanes within two weeks.”
At Temple Beth-El in St. Petersburg, voters have been making their way from across Pinellas County to cast ballots. Mounds of debris still line the streets, and a pocket of storm-ravaged houses encircle the polling location.
Mike Trombley drove down to the site Tuesday afternoon from Seminole after his usual voting place in Treasure Island was decimated by Helene. Trombley has been displaced since the hurricane flooded his house with three and a half feet of water. “We got our asses kicked by Helene,” he said. He’s not sure exactly when he’ll be able to return home. He grappled with the “politicization of information” when casting his ballot. “I don’t know what I should know, and even when I do look it up, it’s like watching TV. You’re going to get a conservative or a liberal slant.”
Tampa resident Bill Butler stands outside of Victory Baptist Church, a temporary polling site for some that shows signs of damage from hurricanes Helene and Milton, including plastic covered windows. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
What Trombley knows for sure is that the outcome of this election will not make much of a difference in how his community rebuilds in the months and years to come. “FEMA is a mess no matter what,” he said.
State Representative Linda Chaney, a Republican from Florida’s 61st district, was also at Temple Beth-El. Chaney, up for re-election, greeted voters in the parking lot. Severe flooding from Helene displaced both her and her 93-year-old mother from their homes.
Devastation from the storm has driven much of Treasure Island’s coastal community from their neighborhoods. Chaney said she expects that many people in the hardest-hit areas will not make it to the polls. People across the state also reported issues with Florida’s online voter resource tool intermittently crashing all morning, keeping an unknown number of people from being able to look up their current polling location.
“The majority of my district got wiped out by the hurricanes,” said Chaney. “Those folks might have a hard time coming to the polls, because they’re kind of busy. They’ve got no home, they’ve got no clothes. And then the polls got changed.” She knows of at least six people who showed up at one St. Petersburg polling location only to discover it wasn’t their new precinct.
Further north, outside of a polling station in Safety Harbor, Florida, Bill and Elizabeth Wadsworth sat in folding chairs, a cooler tucked between them, urging passerby to vote for Harris and Walz. The two considered themselves staunchly Republican until former Trump took office in 2017. Bill served in the U.S. Navy during the Cold War from 1963 to 1970. Elizabeth remembers what it was like to fight for abortion rights in the early 1970s.
“Our youngest granddaughter just turned 21,” she said. She also is worried about the security of the country under another Trump administration. “You think about them and what kind of country they’re going to inherit.” Although Milton and Helene didn’t change their polling location, or their votes, she is aware that many others across the Tampa Bay region are grappling with the voting hurdles and extensive damage left behind by both storms.
“To me, if a person wants to vote, they are going to vote,” she said.
It’s been a little over a month since Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeastern United States, claiming hundreds of lives and causing an estimated $53 billion dollars in damages. In addition to being a record-breaking storm in its own right, Helene was also the first hurricane in American history to hit two battleground states within weeks of a major election. In North Carolina…
It’s been a little over a month since Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeastern United States, claiming hundreds of lives and causing an estimated $53 billion dollars in damages. In addition to being a record-breaking storm in its own right, Helene was also the first hurricane in American history to hit two battleground states within weeks of a major election.
In North Carolina, one of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential race this week, Helene’s destruction displaced thousands of people, caused hundreds of road closures, and disrupted mail just weeks before early voting in the state began. More than 20 post offices were still redirecting mail as of October 22.
North Carolina’s election board quickly took action to ensure people affected by the storm maintained their right to vote, approving a resolution to extend early voting deadlines and loosen some restrictions around absentee ballots, among other actions, in the 13 western counties impacted most severely by Helene. Despite these measures, a question still loomed: Would the storm dampen voter turnout?
As early voting wraps up, data being released by local officials in Helene’s path indicate that voter enthusiasm has not waned. Indeed, an inverse trend may be under way. North Carolina and Georgia, the other battleground state affected by Helene, have reported record-breaking early voting numbers: Voter turnout has surpassed 2012, 2016, and, in North Carolina, 2020 — a pandemic election year when many people were voting early to avoid crowds.
“It looks like even the western North Carolina counties that were most affected by Hurricane Helene do not have massively lower early voter turnout rates,” said Jowei Chen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan who studies redistricting and political geography. “It’s possible that the conveniences of mail-in voting and early voting have mitigated the potentially negative effects of the hurricane on voters.”
Chen noted that while displaced voters can request a mail-in ballot sent to their new, temporary residences, it’s inevitable that some of these hurricane victims will fall through the cracks as they deal with the logistics and mental burden of disaster recovery.
The high turnout in North Carolina and Georgia is a testament to the stakes of this election, widely viewed as among the most consequential of the 21st century, as well as the Republican party’s embrace of early voting this cycle. But election officials’ response to Hurricane Helene has also opened up new avenues for affected and displaced voters to participate. Disaster researchers say that the federal and state disaster relief process itself is likely influencing both how voters show up to vote and who they vote for.
A poll worker directs residents for early voting on October 17, 2024 in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Sue Gerrits / Getty Images
In Avery County, North Carolina, the Roaring Creek, Ingalls, and Plumtree voting sites, which were damaged by the storm, were consolidated into Riverside Elementary School. In the middle of the day on Thursday, poll workers sat eating lunch as teachers went in and out of the school picking up supplies to deliver to struggling areas around the county. Though the day had been slow, workers said they’d seen between 600 and 700 people cast their ballots already that week — larger, they said, than previous years.
One county over, in hard-hit Spruce Pine, the largest town in heavily-Republican Mitchell County, about a dozen early voters pulled up to the volunteer fire department to cast their ballots over the course of an hour. The site, which is downtown and surrounded by wide, well-paved roads and parking lots, remains easily accessible. One voter, who gave her name as Lauren, said it was easier to vote early than to wait for Election Day, since she owned a campground affected by the flooding and had cleanup work to do.
Past research has shown that a hurricane can both suppress and galvanize voters. An otherwise politically engaged person who has had his or her home destroyed in a major disaster might deprioritize casting a ballot in favor of prioritizing something else more pressing, such as rebuilding their home.
On the other hand, voters who received federal aid or some other kind of kickback following a storm might be more inclined to vote, and, some studies show, vote for the incumbent party (the party responsible for delivering that kickback). Research also shows that people who did not receive sufficient help from the government are similarly inclined to vote, but for the challenging party.
James Robinson, a welder casting his ballot at the Spruce Pine polling center on Thursday, said he was a Trump voter before the hurricane and he would be one after. Robinson sustained home damage from Helene. He didn’t lose everything, like some did, but the experience reaffirmed his beliefs. “The government response here was pathetic,” Robinson said, citing what he said was a slow response, as he and his neighbors cut themselves out of their own driveways.
Thirty miles away, in Madison County, a majority-Republican area not far from Asheville, Francine, a 67-year-old small business owner who asked for her last name to be withheld, has been a registered voter for 10 years. Her house wasn’t badly damaged by Helene, but many of her neighbors’ homes and businesses, and her town’s infrastructure, were destroyed. “You go a few miles in any direction and it’s just terrible,” she said.
Days before the storm hit, Francine woke up in the middle of the night with a gastrointestinal obstruction and spent eight days in the hospital recovering. When she was discharged, she came home and noticed that she hadn’t received her voter registration card in the mail, but that her husband had. Over the course of the past year, North Carolina has removed nearly 750,000 registrants in an effort to flush duplicates, the deceased, and other ineligible voters from its voter rolls. Francine wondered if she had accidentally been counted among them. But she wasn’t well enough yet to drive to the election office to sort it out. The day she was due to get her sutures removed, Hurricane Helene hit. Francine’s husband removed the stitches himself as the storm raged around them.
Two weeks ago, Francine was finally able to drive to her local election office and prove to the officer that an error on her recently renewed driver’s license had led her registration to be improperly purged by the state. She cast her vote early last week for Kamala Harris, and was surprised by how many people she saw voting early as well.
Francine’s top issues are women’s rights, separation of church and state, and U.S. involvement in conflicts abroad. She wasn’t happy with either candidate, but she said she couldn’t stomach voting for Trump. The former president’s response to the hurricane, which poured gasoline on the fire of false rumors and conspiracy theories that cropped up after the storm, further soured her on his candidacy. “Everybody is pointing fingers at each other and it’s just getting really ugly,” she said. “Everybody is so worked up I think the turnout is going to be big.”
Florida’s houseless communities are reeling in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, the second Category 5 hurricane of the season. The storm pummeled Central Florida with catastrophic rainfall, storm surges, and 100 mph wind gusts. It made landfall on Oct. 9 near Siesta Key, Florida, as a Category 3 storm. The storm left thousands of people displaced, raising concerns about the challenges faced by…
As climate change accelerates, hurricanes, wildfires and hail storms pound the U.S. with growing vigor—and the insurance market is struggling to foot the bill of the damages they leave behind for customers.
In 2023 alone, extreme weather cost the U.S. more than $92 billion. And it’s not just home insurance providers that are hiking rates.
Now, car insurance quotes are reflecting trends seen across the home insurance market as climate change becomes an increasingly prevalent — and costly — factor.
This could spell trouble for car owners, experts say. Vehicles are a key means of escape during a climate-driven disaster, but they can also fall victim to floods and fires just as homes do.
Primary and secondary perils
When Hurricane Helene whipped through the southern U.S. in early October, cars floated down streets like boats as flood waters submerged entire neighborhoods. Other vehicles were pulverized by felled trees or flying debris.
Most car insurance plans cover flooding and these external damages to help people recoup some of their losses. The Palm Beach Post reports that since Hurricanes Helene and Milton, Floridians have filed more than 90,000 auto insurance claims.
The bad news is that increasing hurricane intensity is pushing insurance companies to raise rates to account for future payouts. And it’s not just megastorms that have the auto insurance market on edge, according to Andrew Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan.
“We can talk about the big storms like Helene and Milton, but it’s actually the secondary perils that are causing more payouts. And that’s heavy rain storms [and] flash flooding that comes with that,” Hoffman told me. Other such perils can include hailstorms, droughts, and wildfires — all fueled by climate change.
“It’s actually secondary perils that are really having a dominant influence on driving up insurance costs,” he added.
An August report found that the average U.S. auto insurance policy could spike by 22 percent by the end of this year. That’s due to a number of factors, including inflation, extreme weather, and more cases of severe accidents or dangerous driving. The report finds that rates in California, Missouri, and Minnesota could go up by as much as 50 percent, and that “damage from severe storms and wildfires contributes to rising rates in the states.”
In 2023, insurance company Allstate threatened to stop renewing auto policies in several states until governments agreed to higher rates, The Wall Street Journal reports. The problem is much worse on the home insurance market. In March, my colleague Amy Green wrote about homeowners grappling with astronomical home insurance premiums in Florida, where climate shocks are upending the state’s entire real estate market. Florida now has the third-highest car insurance rates in the country as well.
“A lot of the things that apply to the weather effects on home insurance also apply to the car that’s sitting in your driveway,” Hoffman said.
Worldwide, only some of the cost of natural catastrophes is covered by insurance companies: Last year, insurers and reinsurers paid $95 billion of the $250 billion in economic losses, according to Munich Re.
Rippling market effects
After the recent back-to-back hurricanes, rental car agencies were inundated with customers waiting for repairs on their own vehicles. Those with totalled cars turned to local dealerships to find a new ride — but some of these businesses couldn’t dodge the storms’ paths of destruction, either. For example, one dealership in New Port Richey, Florida, lost an estimated 672 vehicles during Hurricane Helene. Though the business’ cars were insured and the manufacturer sent new ones to meet demand, the dealership’s owner said he will have to pay roughly $3.5 million to cover deductibles.
Demand and prices for new and used cars often surge after hurricanes. So does the risk for scams, experts say. A recent report from auto data company Carfax estimates that as many as 138,000 vehicles experienced flood damage across six states during and after Hurricane Helene. The company warned that thousands of these vehicles will likely be bought and cleaned up by fraudulent salespeople, who target customers unaware of the lingering internal damage, the company says. Similar scams occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“After cleaning up the cars and moving them across the country, these scammers will try to lure unsuspecting buyers into thinking they’re getting a great deal,” Faisal Hasan, the vice president for data at Carfax, said in a statement. “These cars may look showroom fresh, but they’re literally rotting from the inside out.”
Last week, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul issued a warning for consumers that these flood-damaged vehicles could soon enter the state’s used car market because they are “often shipped to places hundreds of miles from areas hit by storms.”
When Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida three weeks ago, Jason Madison was alone at his place, which doubled as a shrimp storefront in Keaton Beach. As the wind began to roar and the bay started to roil, Madison decided to flee. It was the right call. When he returned home the next morning, he found that the nearly 20-foot storm surge had torn it apart. Dead fish and broken furniture littered the landscape. Most everything in the building was lost, taking with it a cornerstone of his livelihood.
“I had five tanks under there where I stored shrimp, because we sell everything alive, but all that’s all gone now,” said Madison, a commercial bait and shrimp farmer for the last 23 years. He paused to take in the strewn debris. “Well, the pieces are around.” Anything Helene left behind is a waterlogged shell of what used to be. He doesn’t know how, or even if, he’ll rebuild.
Stories like this are playing out all through the Southeast. The storm battered six states, causing billions of dollars in losses to crops, livestock, and aquaculture. Just 13 days later, Milton barreled across Florida, leaving millions without power and hampering ports, feed facilities, and fertilizer plants along the state’s west coast.
Preliminary estimates suggest Helene, one of the nation’s deadliest and costliest hurricanes since Katrina in 2005, upended hundreds of thousands of businesses throughout the Southeast and devastated a wide swath of the region’s agricultural operations. Milton’s impact was more limited, but the two calamities are expected to reduce feed and fertilizer supplies and increase production costs, which could drive up prices for things like chicken and fruit in the months and years to come.
The compounding effect of the two storms will create “a direct impact on agricultural production,” said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University.
When a farm, an orchard, a ranch, or any other agricultural operation is damaged in a disaster, it often leads to a drop in production, or even brings it to a screeching halt. That slowdown inevitably ripples through the companies that sell things like seeds and fertilizer and equipment. Even those growers and producers who manage to keep going — or weren’t directly impacted at all — might find that damage to roads and other critical infrastructure hampers the ability to bring their goods to market.
Early reports indicate this is already happening. Downed trees, flooded roads, and congested highways have disrupted key transport routes throughout the Southeast, while ports across the region suspended operations because of the storms, compounding a slowdown that followed a dockworker strike along the Gulf and East Coast.
Helene dismantled farming operations that serve as linchpins for the nation’s food supply chain. Cataclysmic winds destroyed hundreds of poultry houses across Georgia and North Carolina, which account for more than 25 percent of the machinery used to produce most of the country’s chicken meat. An analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation found that the region hit by Helene produced some $6.3 billion in poultry products in 2022, with over 80 percent of it coming from the most severely impacted parts of both states. In Florida, the storm flattened roughly one in seven broiler houses, which the Farm Bureau noted, compounding losses throughout the region that “will not only reduce the immediate supply of poultry but also hinder local production capacity for months or even years.”
The storm uprooted groves, vegetable fields, and row crops throughout the region. Georgia produces more than a third of the nation’s pecans, and some growers have lost all of their trees. Farmers in Florida, one of the nation’s leading producers of oranges, bell peppers, sugar, and orchids, also have reported steep production losses, facing an uncertain future. The rain and floods unleashed by Helene hobbled livestock operations in every affected state, with the situation in western North Carolina so dire that local agricultural officials are crowdfunding feed and other supplies to help ranchers who lost their hay to rising water. Those working the sea were impacted as well; clam farmers along the Gulf Coast are grappling with the losses they incurred when Helene’s storm surge ravaged their stocks.
Residents in Black Mountain, North Carolina prepare to tow donated hay across Helene’s floodwaters with a paddleboard to feed horses and goats on a nearby farm on October 3, 2024. Mario Tama via Getty Images
All told, the counties affected by Helene produce about $14.8 billion in crops and livestock each year, with Georgia and Florida accounting for more than half of that. If even one-third of that output has been lost to the two hurricanes, the loss could reach nearly $5 billion, according to the Farm Bureau.
As bad as it is, it could have been worse both for consumers and for farmers nationwide. Florida is home to the highest concentration of fertilizer manufacturing plants in the nation. Twenty-two of the state’s 25 phosphate waste piles, several owned by industry powerhouse Mosaic, were in Milton’s path. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, shuttered operations ahead of the storm, and has since announced it sustained “limited damage” to its plants and warehouses. (But the Tampa Bay Times reported that one facility was grappling with water intrusion following Helene and was inundated during Milton, likely sending water polluted with phosphate waste flowing into Tampa Bay.) The storm also halted operations for several days at Port Tampa Bay, which handles around a quarter of the country’s fertilizer exports.
Production impacts from both hurricanes may be felt most acutely by the Sunshine State’s struggling citrus industry, which has long been embattled by diseases and destructive hurricanes. Any additional losses could further inflate costs for goods like orange juice, which reached record highs this year, according to Lee, the agricultural economist. “In the face of hurricane shocks, agricultural production in southern states like Florida will take it on the chin,” he said.
But teasing out the effect of a single storm on consumer prices is not only exceedingly difficult, it requires many years of research, Lee warned. Although all signs indicate that Hurricane Ian was partly responsible for the record food prices that followed that storm in 2022, the strain the hurricane placed on costs compounded other factors, including global conflict, droughts in breadbasket regions and the bird flu epidemic that decimated the poultry sector.
Even so, there’s still a chance that ongoing disruptions to ports and trucking routes could cause “the entire food supply chain to experience additional strain due to rising prices” associated with moving those goods, said Lee. If that turns out to be the case, “eventually, when you go to the supermarket, you will end up finding more expensive commodities, by and large.”
One of the greatest unknowns remains the question of how many storm-weary operations will simply call it quits. Industrial-scale businesses will surely rebound, but the rapid succession of ruinous hurricanes may well discourage family farms and small producers from rebuilding, abandoning their livelihoods for less vulnerable ventures.
“It’s what we call a compound disaster. You’re still dealing with the effects of one particular storm while another storm is hitting,” said economist Christa Court. She directs the University of Florida’s Economic Impact Analysis program, which specializes in rapid assessments of agricultural losses after disasters. “We did see after Hurricane Idalia that there were operations that just decided to get out of the business and do something else because they were impacted so severely.”
Jason Madison, pictured, surveys the damage caused by Helene to his waterfront property in Keaton Beach, Florida on September 28, 2024. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
Madison isn’t sure what’s next for his shrimp operation. He’s too focused on salvaging what he can to think that far ahead. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” he said. He hasn’t been able to afford flood insurance, so he’s not sure how much financial support he’ll end up getting to help him rebuild even as he’s still recovering from Hurricane Idalia, which pummeled Florida’s Big Bend area in August. “The last few years, it’s just things are dropping off, and times are getting hard … it’s like, what can you do?”
As the world continues to warm, more and more farmers may find themselves confronting the same question.
Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were looking forward to their annual Cherokee Indian Fair this year — 2024’s event was to be the 112th celebration. There were going to be Indigenous stickball tournaments, bubble gum-blowing contests, and a longest-hair competition.
But the tribe, located in the western part of North Carolina, was slammed by Hurricane Helene less than a week before the fair, with floods, destruction, and a death toll of more than 200 across the state. Some members thought maybe canceling would be for the best.
To Hicks, the gathering was more important now than ever, as a way to collect donations for those in need and to “honor our traditions while supporting those who need it most.”
Big country musical acts who were playing the fair, like the headliner, Midland, urged attendees to bring nonperishable food items and bottled water for those affected by the hurricane. And after the five-day celebration wrapped up on October 5, tribes from all over the region are continuing to come together to support the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, which was one of the most affected by Hurricane Helene.
Funds to repair damages are often harder for tribes to access, so as climate change-fueled natural disasters get worse, tribal nations often lean on community support from one another. For many tribes, a natural disaster exacerbates already-present inequalities.
Despite being located in some of the most vulnerable areas, tribal communities have a history of being left behind when extreme weather strikes. One 2019 study found that tribal citizens on average receive only $3 per person in federal disaster aid each year, compared to $26 for nontribal U.S. citizens. Also, federally recognized tribes were only granted the ability to apply directly to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for aid as recently as 2013. Before then, tribes could only apply for aid through the states their land was located in.
Kelbie Kennedy is FEMA’s first national tribal affairs advocate, and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation. She said that FEMA has been working hard to address the unique barriers that tribal nations encounter. “Before Hurricanes Helene and Milton made landfall, they worked with every tribal nation in the pathway to see if they had any unmet needs and needed additional support pre-landfall,” she said.
In 2022, the same year Kennedy was appointed, FEMA released its National Tribal Strategy guide where the department laid out its plan to address long-standing inequalities — for instance, by increasing climate change education and improving coordination and delivery of federal assistance. But two years later, some are still waiting to see if this guide has actually improved relief efforts. Cari Cullen is with the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and runs its Native American and Tribal Recovery Program. She works with tribes to manage grants and address gaps in funding for tribal communities affected by climate-driven natural disasters, and said that she sees much work to be done to address natural disaster recovery, because many tribes are already operating at a deficit.
“There’s already a lot of preexisting conditions and disparities in many of our tribal communities,” Cullen said, citing long distances from medical clinics, lack of emergency management resources, and substandard housing.
She said that tribes have to construct a patchwork of support, and rope in other organizations, as well as other tribes, to address natural disasters faster than FEMA can.
Members of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma knew there might be such gaps in support, and many traveled 13 hours to North Carolina to attend the 112th Indian Fair put on by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Volunteers from their Cherokee Language Immersion School and their Emergency Management Department dropped off 38,000 bottles of water and 100 pallets of clothing and bedding.
Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, said that as climate change gets worse and natural disasters increase, the two tribes’ shared history has helped them develop an understanding that they need each other during hard times.
“These storms are getting more intense, and hurricanes affecting further inland into the continent makes us all feel a degree of vulnerability,” he said.
The damages from Helene have been appraised to be in the billions. When Hurricane Milton hit just weeks later, funding for FEMA was already in jeopardy. Hoskin said that gives him pause, and makes the future more uncertain. As climate change becomes more extreme, Hoskin’s worries about how much worse the hurricanes could get. “We need to make efforts to curb it,” he said. “But we are a planet behind and suffering the consequences now.”
Volunteers from the Lumbee Boys & Girls Club pack buckets for Hurricane victims in western North Carolina.Courtesy of The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina
The supplies came with a handwritten note from the young volunteers.Courtesy of The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina
Other tribes in the state know what it’s like to be hit with natural disasters that impact a community for decades. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, which is a state-recognized tribe, is helping to coordinate disaster relief efforts for its western neighbors, partnering with a religious organization called the Burnt Swamp Baptist Association. The tribe has collected donation items and sent teams to assess the damage in the western part of the state. Members of the Lumbee Tribe Boys & Girls Club spent a week putting together hygiene kits, and children made coloring cards for affected families.
John L. Lowery, tribal chairman of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, said their community went through two natural disasters — Hurricane Mathew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018 — and they know the road to recovery is long.
“We want to do our part to support our neighbors in the mountains of North Carolina during this difficult time following the devastation of Hurricane Helene,” he said. “We know how hard it is to live through great loss and we want to help these families.”
Courtney Steed often burns barefoot. It is, in part, a practical choice. Setting fires in the Sandhills of central North Carolina requires an understanding of moisture levels in the scrubby underbrush, and she gets a better sense of it in bare feet. But for Steed, who is Lumbee and leads the tribe’s Cultural Burn Association, it’s also about forming a connection with the Earth and with her relatives. “I’m positive,” she said, “they didn’t wear fire boots.”
Mention wildfire, and most people picture the Western U.S. And while it’s true that in recent years those states have burned at a frightening rate, fire has long been a destructive force in the East as well. That wasn’t always so. For more than 10,000 years, the Lumbee, like many Indigenous peoples, used controlled burns to promote healthy ecosystems and clear brush and tinder. That practice was all but eliminated as colonization and government-sanctioned genocideforced tribes from nearly 99 percent of their land. Some states, including California, outlawed controlled burns, and in 1905, the U.S. government made fighting wildfires at all cost its policy.
The benefits of controlled burns are well established, and the practice, along with other Indigenous land management techniques, has seen a resurgence in the West. Now it is becoming increasingly common in the Southeast as people like Steed restore fire to a region that desperately needs it.
Courtney Steed, who is Lumbee, starts a controlled fire. She leads the tribe’s Cultural Burn Association, which is restoring the use of fire to manage woodlands. Photo courtesy of Courtney Steed
Organizations like the Cultural Burn Association have been working with landowners to set portions of farms and homesteads alight. Such efforts have been augmented by those of the Southern Region of the U.S. Forest Service, which has, over the past five years, burned an average of more than 1 million acres annually. But even that isn’t enough to match the historic scale or frequency of wildfires there. The country’s biggest increase in large burns over the past two decades occurred in the Southeast and central Appalachia, where the incidence of major fires was twice the number seen between 1984 and 1999. Each year, some 45,000 wildfires scorch 1 million acres of the region, which spans 13 states.
All of this poses a grave threat, because population centers like Asheville, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, have little to no buffer between communities and the forests alongside them, an area called the wildland-urban interface. In North Carolina, for example, 45 percent of the state’s 4.7 million homes lie within that zone. But restoring Indigenous burns isn’t as straightforward as it is in the West, because 86 percent of the region’s land is privately held. Compounding the challenge, many people consider fire a threat to be extinguished quickly. Even those willing to ignite their property could wait years to do so.
“The Forest Service here has a backlog of several hundred landowners, and they’re never going to get to burn for them. They can’t; they don’t have the capacity,” said Steed. That leaves groups like hers as their only option, and “If we can’t do it, it’s going to have dire consequences.”
Across the country, drought, higher temperatures, and changing precipitation patterns have made fires larger, increasingly frequent, and more intense. These changes are particularly worrying in the Southeast, given that some 90 million people live there, many of them in proximity to the wildland-urban interface, or WUI.
“The wildland-urban interface is the area where we tend to see the most risk and destruction from wildfires to human life and property,” said Victoria Donovan, assistant professor of forest management at the University of Florida and lead author of the study that found the Southwest experienced the biggest increase in large fires. “It’s extensive, it continues to grow, and it’s predicted to continue that trend in the future.”
Of the five states with the greatest number of homes in this danger zone, two are in the Southeast: Florida (which has been actively using controlled burns since 1971) and North Carolina. A third, Pennsylvania, abuts it. The threat is no less acute elsewhere: In South Carolina, 56 percent of all housing sits within the WUI. In West Virginia, it’s nearly 80 percent. Big cities are not exempt, either; in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, North Carolina, 11 percent of homes lie within it.
Despite the elevated risk, many homeowners don’t recognize the danger. “They don’t associate these regions with large wildfires; we think about that happening out west,” Donovan said. “So, people don’t prepare for them the same way they might be preparing for, say, a hurricane.”
Without mitigation, she added, major fires will be a foregone conclusion in a place where aggressive suppression has created a large accumulation of fuel and conflagrations that are hotter and more difficult to suppress. “You have these dynamics playing out in the region, then you throw in changes in climate and potentially warmer and drier conditions,” Donovan said, “and you set yourself up for more destructive wildfires.”
Such dynamics played out in April, 2023, when a blaze in North Carolina’s Croatan National Forest jumped from 7,000 acres to 32,000 in two days and burned for 10 weeks. In 2016, the Great Smoky Mountain fire killed 14 people, destroyed 2,500 structures, and caused $2 billion in damage in eastern Tennessee. That blaze sparked new interest in controlled burning, and was a flashpoint for the creation of organizations dedicated to restoring that Indigenous practice.
Research shows that low-intensity fires like those the Lumbee and other tribes have traditionally used can reduce wildfires by 64 percent in the year following a controlled burn. Their use, coupled with selective clearing of smaller trees and underbrush in another Indigenous technique called thinning, reduces the severity, intensity, and tree mortality of wildfires.
Even after the government banished controlled burns, inhabitants of the Sandhills continued using them. “My mom was born in 1920, and she would talk about fire the same way you’d talk about a thunderstorm,” said Jesse Wimberley. “It was just something that happened in the Southeast.” In the near-decade since Wimberley launched the North Carolina Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association, or PBA, he has worked with some 700 landowners. “I do 70 burns a year, easy; this year I’ve done 75 since January, and had more than 250 landowners with a drip torch in their hand.”
Lori Greene’s land east of Charlotte has for 30 years teemed with trees planted to harvest longleaf pine needle straw. Instead, the land went unmanaged, providing plenty of fuel for a fire. After hearing Wimberley’s “spiel” at a meeting of local landowners not long ago, she committed to burning even though she was “really intimidated, and really afraid things will get out of hand.” She and her husband became certified burners, and one evening last year they gathered with friends to set the pines alight.
Lori and Richard Greene earned their certifications in controlled burns from the North Carolina Forest Service. Their neighbors were apprehensive, but they have come to appreciate the positive impact of fire on the landscape. Photo courtesy of Lori Greene
“Some of my neighbors, I don’t think they were too happy,” she said. One of them notified the fire department, which knew of the burn ahead of time. With the trees cleared, their attitudes seem to have changed. “It looks good,” she said. “I think they’re OK with it.”
Steed worked with Wimberley and the Sandhills PBA before leading the Cultural Burn Association. The Lumbee tribe hosted its inaugural burn in December and has lit more than 80 since then. The fires are “the first step in longleaf [pine] restoration,” she said. The organization has invited anyone with an interest to attend its cultural burns and “watch us hit that reset button,” Steed said. “Then they came out and we planted longleaf plugs and had a native grass planting.”
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is restoring managed fire in the western end of North Carolina to encourage the growth of white oak saplings and rivercane, a traditional weaving material. Fire provides “everything from basket material to food to medicine,” said Tommy Cabe, the tribe’s forest resource specialist, and improves the health and quality of the region’s watershed. It’s also been a cultural touchstone for generations of his people.
“There’s a reciprocal relationship,” said Cabe, who holds a degree in forest management and is working with the Forest Service to restore culturally significant plans on the tribe’s land. “It’s not solely to reduce fuel loads. Fire has a heartbeat. Fire is like a relative. The intention is to have a relationship.”
Fire weaves through the trees during a burn in North Carolina. One of the challenges to restoring prescribed burns is that so much of the region’s land is privately owned. Photo courtesy of Lori Greene
His tribe is uniquely poised to reestablish that relationship because, like the Lumbee, “we’re still on our homelands,” he said. “They weren’t successful in removing us. So we’re also known as keepers of the homeland. We possess and retain a lot of stories and a lot of practice that we just just haven’t been able to do. Right now, we’re starting to awaken. I think during this awakening, we could actually showcase some of our ancient practices.”
“We interface with all of the different organizations that are putting fire on the ground,” said Steed. A wildfire doesn’t recognize the boundaries of federal, private, or tribal land, and “the solution can’t either,” she said. “We have to all bring what we can offer to the table and find some common ground.”
Finding early adopters among private landowners can be tough, though. Unlike the West, where the federal government manages — and routinely burns — many millions of acres taken from tribal nations, most Eastern forests are privately held.
A Yurok tribal member stands in prayer before leading a cultural training burn on the Yurok reservation in Weitchpec, California, in October 2021. David Goldman / AP Photo
“Despite its widely known benefits, prescribed fire is rarely used on private lands in Pennsylvania,” Penn State researchers wrote last year. “Out of the 14,093 acres burned in 2019, only 340 acres were on private lands. This discrepancy is surprising when considering that 70 percent of the almost 17 million acres of forests in Pennsylvania are privately owned.”
For that reason, educating people about the need to burn is essential.
“It’s important to understand why PBAs are so crucial to this story,” Wimberley said. “If you’re going to get fire on the landscape, you’re going to work with private landowners.” Wimberley started his PBA informally, by inviting neighbors over to burn his land; “kind of an old-school thing,” he said. “Then, we’d go over and burn their land.”
Fire management isn’t just about protecting communities from catastrophic wildfire: It has myriad added boons like tick and other pest reduction, improved nutrient cycling, and better pasture growth. It also may also be the only way to preserve the unique ecology of an ecosystem that could provide a climate refuge, but faces mounting peril as the world warms.
Many keystone tree species of the region, including red and white oaks, depend on fire to curb undergrowth and create space within the canopy so sunlight can reach seedlings. In regions dominated by trees like Table Mountain pine and the pitch pine, fire is even more important. Their serotinous cones, coated in a sticky resin, can’t open and spread their seeds without it.
“A vast majority of these systems have evolved with fire, and a lot of them with very frequent fire. And so when we take fire out of those systems, we’re removing a fundamental process,” Donovan said. “We can see basically the entire system change. We see infilling of species that wouldn’t typically be there, that then can out-compete the fire-loving species and replace them. If we suppress fire long enough, we shift over to a new type of ecosystem.”
In short, burning may be the only way to preserve ecosystems already under existential threat from low regeneration, non-native species, and extreme weather. “If we can help to boost their resilience by getting fire back on the landscape,” Donovan said, “the hope is they will be more resilient to some of these other changes.”
As we continue to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, we speak with Manuel Ivan Guerrero, a freshman at the University of Central Florida and an organizer with the Sunrise Movement, who says young people are extremely worried about the impact of the climate crisis on their communities. “This just has me more scared for what the future’s going to look like in Florida,” he says.
Hurricane Milton made landfall on Wednesday night, near Siesta Key, Florida, as a Category 3 storm, bringing ashore 120 mile-per-hour winds, heavy rain, and as much as a 10-foot storm surge into regions of the state still reeling from the impacts of Hurricane Helene just two weeks ago. By Thursday morning, Milton had crossed Florida and was headed out to sea, its hurricane force winds intact.
“First responders have been working throughout the night,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said at a press conference on Thursday morning. “The storm was significant but, thankfully, this was not the worst-case scenario.”
While the state broadly avoided catastrophe, Milton still hit Floridians hard. In some coastal communities, floodwaters rose nearly up to second-floor levels, spurring dangerous middle-of-the-night rescues. Powerful winds ripped roofs off buildings — including Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg — and left more than 3 million homes and businesses without power. Farther inland, as much as 18 inches of rain fell in just a few hours, representing a 1 in 1000 year event. In the hours preceding landfall, the storm also kicked up roughly two dozen tornadoes across the state, one of which officials say hit a retirement community. At least six people died in the storm, and some 80,000 ended up in shelters.
“We have flooding in places and to levels that I’ve never seen, and I’ve lived in this community for my entire life,” Bill McDaniel, the city manager of Plant City told The Guardian, calling it “absolutely staggering.”
A drone image shows the dome of Tropicana Field torn open due to Hurricane Milton in St. Petersburg, Florida, on October 10.
Bryan R. Smith / AFP via Getty Images
Floridians were still cleaning up debris and damage from Hurricane Helene when Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico. Fueled by near record-warm waters from a waning El Niño and climate change, the storm jumped from a Category 1 to a Category 5 with 180 mph winds in just 24 hours — one of the most rapid intensifications in history. Forecasts originally had the storm’s northern right side, also known as the “dirty side” of a hurricane, hitting Tampa, which would have funneled water straight up the bay into one of the lowest-lying cities in the United States. The hurricane weakened slightly, however, and came ashore a bit south, which not only avoided the most dire flooding possibilities, but actually sucked water out of the bay.
“Do not walk out into receding water in Tampa Bay,” the Florida Division of Emergency Management, or FDEM, warned on X. “The water WILL return through storm surge and poses a life-threatening risk.”
The region’s back-to-back hurricanes represent the compounding disasters that scientific models have predicted will become more frequent with climate change. They also come at a time when the Federal Emergency Management Agency is running out of money and staff. As Milton approached, more than 40 congressional Democrats wrote to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, imploring him to reconvene the chamber to vote on additional funding for FEMA. Johnson has previously said he won’t take up the matter until after the November 5 elections — a month from now.
At Thursday morning’s press conference, officials continued to urge caution across the state. Rivers could still flood, roads remained impassable, and debris was abundant. They also warned residents to be careful as they began to clean up, as downed lines and other hazards could be extremely dangerous.
“We do not need Florida Man and Florida Woman out there cutting random lines as they go,” said Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of FDEM. “Let our crews get out there and get everything back up and running.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. agency in charge of disaster relief, is facing financial and staffing challenges ahead of Hurricane Milton’s arrival in Florida — as additional disaster funding gets tied up in partisan power-jockeying in Washington.
Parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast are bracing for a Category 3 hurricane just two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall, devastating much of the state’s panhandle region and southern Appalachia. Nearly a dozen counties in Florida have received evacuation orders to prepare for Hurricane Milton, which stunned meteorologists with its extreme rapid intensification and is expected to make landfall Wednesday night.
The one-two punch of back-to-back hurricanes is straining federal disaster relief resources. As FEMA contends with Helene recovery as well as wildfires blazing across the West, only 8 percent of the agency’s incident management staff is available to respond to new disasters, according to its daily operations briefing for Wednesday.
FEMA faced funding problems well before Helene came along: In a report on the state of the agency’s disaster relief fund from the end of August, FEMA projected it would hit a deficit the following month. A few weeks later, in September, Congress allocated $20 billion to the emergency agency as part of a stopgap spending bill meant to avoid a government shutdown.
But in the week after Helene made landfall, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose cabinet department houses FEMA, said the agency would not have enough money to get through the rest of hurricane season, which lasts through the end of November. President Joe Biden has since urged lawmakers to send more money FEMA’s way — so the agency can avoid making the “unnecessary trade-off” of diverting resources away from long-term recovery efforts in order to address any immediate emergencies.
Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend with winds up to 140 miles per hour and storm surges. Sean Rayford / Stringer / Getty Images
Additional funding seems unlikely to arrive in time to affect recovery efforts for Hurricane Milton. Speaking to Fox News, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he will not bring the lower chamber of Congress back from its October break to consider sending more money to FEMA, and that he won’t consider the matter until after the November 5 election.
FEMA uses its disaster relief fund to do things like pay for disaster support and local debris removal, repair damaged public infrastructure, and offer financial aid to qualifying victims. The fund spent an average of $12 billion dollars annually between 1992 and 2021, with 44 percent of that money going to hurricane relief.
But in the wake of Helene, FEMA has faced a barrage of bogus rumors about disaster relief dollars being misused and redirected towards housing migrants. The agency has plainly denied the claim on its website: “This is false. No money is being diverted from disaster response needs.” FEMA does have a small grant program, representing less than 3 percent of its annual budget, that provides humanitarian support for noncitizen immigrants being released from detention facilities — but this program is entirely separate from its disaster relief fund. Still, rumors about misspent disaster funding have added fuel to the fire created by right-wing pot-stirrers like radio host Alex Jones and Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who claim that FEMA is botching its response to Helene.
Although the rumors of redirected funds are baseless, they have proved to be sticky, with several Republican lawmakers spreading the misinformation. For example, when asked why she voted against the congressional stopgap measure that sent $20 billion to FEMA, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, who represents Tennessee, called the bill “reckless” and said she would not fund “flying illegals into our country.” In his Fox News interview, Speaker Mike Johnson conceded that, yes, FEMA’s disaster relief and migrant aid dollars come from two different pools of funding — and then continued to conflate the two efforts.
Flooding in the coastal community of Steinhatchee, Florida.
Sean Rayford / Stringer / Getty Images
As extreme weather events are made worse by climate change and impact more of the country, disaster relief needs will continue to grow. On Wednesday, dozens of Democratic members of Congress urged Johnson to reconvene the House to pass additional disaster relief funding. And some Republican lawmakers — even those who originally voted against the congressional bill that sent $20 billion to the emergency management agency — are now publicly calling for more money for FEMA. Last week, Representative Anna Paulina Luna introduced a bipartisan bill to allocate $15 billion to FEMA and the U.S. Department of Housing of Urban Development to aid Helene recovery efforts. “We need FEMA DOLLARS FREE’D UP,” wrote Luna in a tweet directed at vice president and presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Luna’s district includes most of Pinellas County, Florida, which Milton is expected to hit.
Luna previously voted against the measure to fund FEMA through the end of the calendar year.
Less than two weeks ago, Val Stunja was frantically stacking furniture and belongings on her kitchen countertop. Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the west coast of Florida, and she was preparing her first-floor condominium in St. Petersburg, a Tampa Bay city that sits on a barrier island just a few hundred feet from the Gulf of Mexico.
Stunja, who works as an airline dispatcher, rode out the storm with a friend on the second floor and watched in horror as the storm surge inundated the streets around her. A wall of water several feet deep destroyed almost everything she owns; outside, it pushed cars and boats around like toys. Stunja thought she could save her own vehicle by parking it on higher ground a few miles inland, but the storm surge flooded it as well.
Crews had only just begun the arduous task of clearing shattered homes, ruined cars, and unfathomable amounts of debris from the neighborhoods around Stunja’s condo when she started to hear about another major storm: Milton, a tropical storm which formed in the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend and grew with stunning ferocity into a Category 5 hurricane over the course of less than a day on Monday. Stunja was already headed toward a friend’s home in Sarasota, an hour south of Tampa, when she learned that the storm was headed right for her. She turned around and tried to fly to her hometown in Texas. When that failed, she got into a car loaned by her insurance company on Monday afternoon and made for her son’s house in Jacksonville, spending hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic headed north and east.
“I can’t think straight,” she said. “I’m very confused. I haven’t even filed a claim yet on my house.”
Stunja is among hundreds of thousands of Floridians staring down a direct hit from a second major hurricane — even before they’ve come anywhere close to reckoning with the damage from Hurricane Helene. The quick turnaround has given Florida residents little time to find, let alone regain, their footing. The unfinished cleanup of the mess Helene created could compound the devastation to come from Hurricane Milton, and the one-two punch could have a devastating impact on the state’s ability to recover.
After Milton exploded in intensity, becoming a worst-case Category 5 hurricane within 24 hours, its wind speed surged to nearly 180 mph. Meteorologists attribute the rapid intensification to record-hot sea surface temperatures made 400 to 800 times more likely due to climate change. Forecasters say Hurricane Milton could lash the Florida panhandle with storm surges reaching 12 feet high and bring as much as 15 inches of rain, potentially creating flash floods. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis had declared a state of emergency for more than 50 counties as of Monday, and several were under evacuation orders — including many told just 14 days ago to evacuate ahead of Helene.
Wreckage from Hurricane Helene remains strewn across the street in Clearwater, Florida, in the days precediing Hurricane Milton. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
“A lot of the damage that occurred with Helene is going to get worse,” said Carlos Martin, director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Wreckage from Helene could be whipped into the air by Hurricane Milton. In the Tampa Bay area, more than 300 vehicles carted broken furniture and other trash to a landfill on Sunday, while lifeguards removed chairs and other items from beaches. Sarasota County, just south of Tampa, said it was focusing “all efforts on removing Hurricane Helene debris” in the most vulnerable places, and the county lifted landfill fees for people living in unincorporated areas.
Progress has been exceedingly slow, however; the mayor of Clearwater, a city just north of St. Petersburg, said on Sunday that only 5 percent of the debris on Clearwater Beach had been cleared. Some residents don’t think the city and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are doing enough to clear away the wreckage ahead of the impending storm.
“This is going to all be weapons,” Clearwater resident Monika Spaldo said, referring to the waterlogged furniture and trash surrounding her. “The debris from all of this is going to hit windows, roofs, cars, people. … It’s going to fly and destroy everything.”
Spaldo is a property manager at Coconut Grove, a beachside condominium complex that was damaged by storm surge from Hurricane Helene. In the days following the storm, she felt so sick from exposure to dirty floodwaters and refuse that she almost went to the hospital. With Hurricane Milton rapidly approaching, she is terrified by all the debris lining the streets — and what the storm to come will mean for the town’s future.
“I don’t know how we’re ever going to recover,” she said. “Everything on the island is going to be destroyed.”
Meanwhile, experts are concerned that the two disasters striking in quick succession will complicate the essential process of filing insurance claims in order to make victims whole for the financial damage they’ve suffered. Those who experienced losses during Helene are supposed to document them before evacuating ahead of Milton, so that claims adjusters can differentiate the damage caused by the two events. Lisa Miller, a former deputy insurance commissioner for Florida, called the situation “unparalleled.”
“All bets are off,” she added.
A boy and his dog climb the steps to their home as their family prepares for Hurricane Milton in Port Richey, Florida.
AP Photo / Mike Carlson
For many victims, filing insurance claims so quickly could well be impossible, given the rapid sequence of events and the urgency of current evacuation orders. In Sarasota County on Monday, residents were urged to leave immediately. “If you wait, you will get stuck in traffic,” a government website warned.
Some people may, like Stunja, head to relatives’ homes in safer areas. But because Helene reached up to 500 miles inland in some parts of Florida, they may have to travel much farther than that to find suitable accommodations. Others may need to take shelter in schools or athletic facilities, which are listed in a county-by-county directory compiled by the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency often steps in to run shelters during major emergencies, but its capacity may be limited by a major staffing shortage as it continues to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene — along with fires, flooding, landslides, and tornadoes in several other states.
In the longer term, the storms may exacerbate Florida’s insurance crisis. “People’s premiums are going to go through the roof,” said Martin of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The state is already the most expensive in the country for home insurance, according to a 2024 report by Insurify, a digital insurance agent. Helene and Milton could increase the cost of housing in other ways as well. Buildings that were damaged during Helene could become unrecoverable after Milton, making it harder for people to return.
Sara McTarnaghan, a principal research associate at the nonprofit policy research organization the Urban Institute, said Florida hasn’t even yet recovered from vulnerabilities in its housing stock which were created by storms that struck years ago, including Idalia, Ian, and Michael.
“Many parts of Florida have experienced multiple events over the past five to 10 years, which is the timeline for recovery and making repairs to existing housing,” she said. “Depending on the trajectory of Hurricane Milton it could be hitting a vulnerable housing stock and we could be seeing more loss of units, more costly repairs.”
As Stunja prepares to ride out Hurricane Milton in Jacksonville, she still doesn’t know what she’s going to do after the storm passes. She’s just begun to work through her flood insurance claim with FEMA, but the surge from Milton could flood both floors of her condo building. If that happens, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to stay.
“If the second floor gets water on this one, the building’s probably a tear-down,” she said. “If that happens, I’ll go off-island. I love Florida, but I don’t need to be on the beach.”
Jake Bittle and Ayurella Horn-Muller contributed reporting to this story.
As Floridians raced to prepare for and escape the path of Hurricane Milton, an analysis published Monday showed that high sea-surface temperatures fueling the monstrous storm’s rapid intensification were made between 400 and 800 times more likely by the climate crisis. The research organization Climate Central noted that Milton, which is expected to make landfall in the populous Tampa Bay…
By the time that Hurricane Helene made its way hundreds of miles inland on September 27, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm. But Helene remained unusually expansive and strong, fueled by the warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The storm brought high winds and catastrophic flooding, knocking out power for more than 2 million Duke Energy customers in the Carolinas, and tearing through a region of the country that wasn’t widely seen as vulnerable to hurricane damage: the Mountain South. Asheville, North Carolina, the city hardest hit, had even appeared on lists of “climate havens” considered comparatively safe from the natural disasters whose impacts are intensified by global warming.
Over the course of the following week, more than 50,000 utility workers, with crews from 41 U.S. states and Canada, set about the heroic work to restore power. In some areas, they even transported power poles by helicopter where roads remained impassable. By Saturday, service had been restored to more than 90 percent of the customers who lost power. But some of the remaining outages may prove harder to repair, because they require the complete replacement of technically complex power infrastructure equipment. These repairs “will take potentially many weeks,” said Jeff Brooks, a Duke Energy spokesperson.
The unprecedented devastation has brought renewed attention to the problem of ensuring the resilience of America’s power grids in the face of climate change, and to the massive transformation that decarbonization, electrification, and a projected growth in electricity demand bring. Global shortages of crucial electrical equipment like transformers and circuit breakers don’t make that question any easier to figure out.
Electrical equipment and water don’t mix, so heavy flooding presents a serious threat to power grids that aren’t prepared for it. “There has been a dramatic miscalculation of risk factors here,” said Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special advisor at the Department of Energy. “So this event is going to have to prompt a wide range of new analysis on the vulnerability of various parts of the power system.”
Among the challenges that western North Carolina will face in rebuilding its grid are its geographic differences from the regions where various solutions have been tested. Norris described the region as “a mountainous area that still has a relatively decent population density.” In low-lying coastal areas that are more accustomed to hurricanes, for instance, some utility companies have begun moving power lines underground to avoid the problems that hurricane-force winds pose. But in Duke Energy’s service area, “you have this really far-flung set of distribution lines going up into the hills and serving different communities,” Norris continued.
Transformers are the pieces of electrical equipment required to shift an electric current from one voltage to another. They are needed at either end of a transmission line — the massive power lines that transmit electricity at a high voltage between power plants and the lower-voltage distribution lines that power homes and businesses. They are housed in substations, the junctions between the transmission and distribution systems.
It turns out that the crisis wasn’t so dire. Of the 360 substations that were reported down, most “were out because of damage to the transmission system that supplies them with power, not necessarily damage to all those substations,” said Brooks, the Duke Energy spokesperson. But even a handful of destroyed substations is no small matter. At least two sites, the utility has trucked in temporary “mobile substations” that will power nearby communities until the equipment can be repaired.
In normal times, said John Wilson, a vice president at the consulting firm Grid Strategies, it takes over a year to build a new substation from scratch, including drawing up a site-specific design and procuring the equipment. Rebuilding can be a significantly shorter process when the designs are already complete, and utilities keep some amount of equipment in reserve. But the depletion of those reserves would only add to the potential supply chain bottleneck for future crises.
Global demand for transformers is growing, in part because the transition to renewable energy will require many more sites of power generation than the old fossil fuel-powered system — and each new power plant requires its own equipment. With few manufacturers of transformers operating in the U.S., utilities must wait an average of 150 weeks for an order to arrive.
While it’s unclear whether the storm recovery will be directly impeded by the transformer shortage, it may breathe life into solutions that have been recently proposed. In September, the president’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council recommended that the federal government create a strategic reserve of transformers to bypass the industry’s long lead times. And in a report published in August, Grid Strategies recommended that utilities band together in a collective procurement organization — ideally with federal loan backing — to make large orders and share the costs. “That would help deal with the construction backlog; right now, manufacturers are hesitant to build new factories to build this equipment in the U.S. or North America because they aren’t confident that the market will be there,” said Wilson.
The reconstruction of the power grid in the areas of Appalachia where it was wrecked by Helene will ultimately offer a chance for the utility industry to rethink how the electricity system should be structured. “In areas where there could be more extreme weather events like this, it’s going to be more and more difficult to maintain far-flung distribution systems,” Norris said. “And the cost of service is going to rise, and you either have to muddle through that or think about other measures, like undergrounding lines, or trying to bring load into higher degrees of concentration so it isn’t so far-flung, or, obviously, to think more about distributed energy systems and backup power.”
There are ways to build grid resilience that could be implemented on a more local level — although they’re costly. One is the concept of microgrids — local electric grids that are disconnected from the wider power system. Norris said this concept could be extended further by allowing individual homes and businesses to power themselves with rooftop solar when the grid is down. Most solar arrays aren’t configured to produce power when there isn’t a wider grid to feed them into, in order to protect the line workers repairing power lines from a live current. But this can be prevented by a technique called solar islanding, which effectively disconnects the solar array from the grid.
Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeastern United States, killing more than 200 people and causing perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in property and economic damage, Hurricane Milton has spun up in the Gulf of Mexico and taken aim at Florida. On Monday, Milton reached Category 5 status with winds reaching as high as 180 mph, and it’s expected to cause widespread flooding with torrential rainfall and a towering storm surge when it makes landfall likely around Tampa Bay on Wednesday.
How Milton got to this point is even more remarkable. A hurricane undergoes “rapid intensification” if its sustained wind speeds jump by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours. Helene did that before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida’s west coast. But Milton’s intensification has been nothing short of explosive: Wind speeds skyrocketed by 90 mph in 24 hours — at one point managing a 70-mph leap in just 13 hours — leaving meteorologists and researchers stunned.
It’s one of the fastest intensification events scientists have ever observed in the Atlantic. Even sophisticated hurricane models didn’t see it coming. “This is definitely extraordinary,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”
Like Helene before it, Milton formed under the perfect conditions for rapid intensification. A hurricane’s fuel is high ocean temperatures, and the Gulf of Mexico has been a warm bath in recent months, with temperatures over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, well above average figures. “Sea surface temperatures in this area are near record, if not record-breaking,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “It’s a little bit difficult to say, actually.”
That’s because of an unfortunate irony: Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, North Carolina, where the National Centers for Environmental Information stores data on ocean temperatures. “The sea surface temperature data that we rely on to make our day-to-day climate attribution calculations is actually unavailable to us,” said Gilford. “It’s been down for about 11 days now because of Hurricane Helene.”
Losing access to that data is making it harder to calculate how much climate change has contributed to Milton’s intensification. But Gilford can say with confidence that the sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made at least 100 times more likely because of climate change, and that’s a conservative estimate.
Hurricanes also like high humidity, which Milton has plenty of. And low wind shear — winds moving at different speeds at various heights in the atmosphere — meant Milton could organize and spin up nicely. “There’s nothing to impede the storm from the atmospheric standpoint,” Balaguru said.
Milton’s extreme intensification has the fingerprints of climate change all over it. For one, as the atmosphere warms, so too do the oceans, providing vast pools of fuel for hurricanes. Scientists are also finding that changes in atmospheric patterns have been decreasing wind shear in coastal regions. A difference in temperature between the land and sea also creates circulation patterns that boost the amount of humidity in the atmosphere.
So with higher humidity, warmer oceans, and weaker wind shear, hurricanes have everything they need to rapidly intensify into monsters. Indeed, scientists arefinding a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore in recent years. That makes hurricanes all the more dangerous: A coastal community might be preparing to ride out a Category 1 storm only for an unsurvivable Category 5 to suddenly come ashore.
In general, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes have more moisture to ring out as rain. A recent study found that climate change caused Helene to dump 50 percent more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Gilford expects climate change to also boost the rainfall that Milton dumps on Florida.
Like Helene did in Big Bend, Milton is expected to bulldoze ashore a storm surge of perhaps 15 feet along Florida’s west coast. That’s in part a consequence of the gentle slope from the coast out into the Gulf of Mexico: If the water were deeper, the storm surge could flow into the depths. But in this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. The surge in Tampa Bay could be especially dangerous, since it acts like an overflowing bowl.
As a result, the National Weather Service is warning that Milton could be the worst storm to hit the Tampa area in more than a century. Milton might not just be an immediate emergency for Florida — it could well be a harbinger of the supercharged hurricanes to come.
Chelsy Robison huddled in an empty building on the Paradise Park mobile home campground in Perry, Florida on the evening of September 26, listening as 140 mile-per-hour winds tore through the state’s Big Bend region. Robison, recovering from hernia surgery, her boyfriend Steve, and their dog Judah had abandoned their violently shaking trailer just a few hours earlier, fearing it would not survive the storm.
The next morning, as the worst of the winds died down, they emerged to find that Hurricane Helene had left behind a world of damage: Fragments of one neighbor’s walls littered the grass, roof panels had been ripped clean off a communal building, and a trailer just a few dozen feet from her own had been flipped entirely upside down. In the distance, a sea of downed power lines and felled trees covered the mobile home park’s 8 acres. Her trailer sat amid the calamitous scene, miraculously unscathed.
Robison was relieved. She had lost everything the year before when Hurricane Idalia, another Category 4, bore down on Taylor County and caused a tree to crash through her manufactured home. That’s how she ended up at Paradise Park in the first place, living in a temporary trailer issued to her by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. “It’s just a little bit of damage. It ain’t too much. It ain’t like Idalia,” said Robison, which crushed her trailer “like a can.” “We just living, man. I just hope ain’t nothing else gonna come through here.”
Not even two weeks later, Florida’s Big Bend communities are now preparing for Hurricane Milton, a rapidly intensifying system forecasted to bring life-threatening storm surge and winds to many of the same areas devastated by Helene later this week.
Chelsy Robison stands in front of her FEMA-issued trailer home in Paradise Park, a mobile home in Perry, Florida. Robison has been living in the trailer park since a few months after last year’s Hurricane Idalia, and her home narrowly avoided damage during last month’s Hurricane Helene. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
Florida’s Big Bend is nestled into the crook of the state’s Gulf Coast, largely underdeveloped and lower-income. A huge share of the region’s residents live in manufactured housing. In Taylor County, where Helene made landfall and where Milton is expected to inflict damage, more than a third of the housing stock consists of prefabbed units, according to Census data. Many of the counties in southern Georgia where Helene’s eye moved next have a similar mix. And in western North Carolina, where the storm’s heavy rain caused mass flooding and landslides, around 15 percent of housing stock is manufactured — nearly triple the national average.
Communities like Robison’s — littered with crumpled trailers, scraped-off aluminum siding, and waterlogged campers — now serve as an acute example of how the climate and housing crises in the United States overlap.
Because of how mobile home units are anchored and the materials typically used to build them, manufactured housing is among the most vulnerable types of housing stock in climate disasters. They aren’t rooted as deeply into the ground, which means they can flip or collapse during wind events, and they tend to have thinner exteriors and insulation than site-built homes, which means they are more vulnerable to leakage and the spread of mold. These problems are far more common with “mobile homes,” or manufactured homes built before the launch of 1970s-era construction guidelines, but they also exist in more recent models.
A ballooning shortage of affordable housing has pushed more Americans into manufactured homes at the same time that extreme weather like hurricanes are becoming more severe. Victims of climate disasters also often find themselves turning to manufactured homes in the absence of other housing stock — perpetuating a cycle of substandard living and displacement. Making matters even worse is that many mobile home residents, like those at Paradise Park, don’t own the land underneath their house.
An aerial photo shows damage in Steinhatchee, Florida, after Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm. The Big Bend of Florida has been hit by three hurricanes in the past thirteen months. Photo by Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images
“Families who live in manufactured home parks, their rate of poverty is about three times as much as people who have conventional housing,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies household and community risk to hazards and climate change. They also either lack insurance, or are under-insured, further magnifying their chance of long-term economic disruption from a hurricane like Helene. People in these situations additionally often confront “really complicated issues” in financing a home, he noted.
“You can’t get a conventional mortgage on a manufactured home in most states, including Florida, because it’s not ‘real property.’ It’s what we call ‘chattel property’ or personal property,” he said.
This key distinction makes it harder for those trying to rebuild a manufactured home after a disaster, because it can be more difficult to get aid, particularly when such properties are purchased informally through private sales, Rumbach said. People living in mobile home parks across the nation also often find themselves ineligible for recovery programs like buyouts because they don’t own the land below their structures.
Florida has more manufactured homes than almost any other state in the country. An estimated 12 percent of the housing stock in Helene’s path in Florida, spread across 21 counties, is made up of mobile or manufactured homes, according to an analysis provided to Grist by researchers at the Urban Institute. More than a third of those are rentals. The proportion is far higher in the Big Bend, where the storm made landfall, and in South Carolina, where it also brought damaging winds.
Clayton Aldern / Grist
These homes once provided an alternative for those who couldn’t afford traditional housing, but climate change is stripping them of being this lifeline, a refuge. The cost of the average manufactured home has risen alongside the cost of building materials like wood and aluminum, and many people who lost their mobile homes during 2023’s Hurricane Idalia have struggled to purchase or rent new ones.
“The prices of mobile homes [have gone] up significantly since COVID,” said Leon Wright, the building director for Dixie County, where more than half of the housing stock consists of manufactured homes, one of the highest rates in the nation. “It’s not as affordable as it once was.” Dixie lost 130 houses to Idalia last year, and it still has yet to repair many of them. Wright said Helene destroyed far more.
One of the largest providers of manufactured homes in the Big Bend is none other than FEMA itself, which deploys them to house storm victims, like Robison.The agency tends to use these units, known colloquially as “FEMA trailers,” when it cannot find enough traditional housing in a given disaster area.
Bobbi Pattison’s examines damage to her home in Steinhatchee, Florida after 2023’s Hurricane Idalia, left, and then again in September after Hurricane Helene. Ted Richardson & Thomas Simonetti / The Washington Post via Getty Images
FEMA has drawn criticism in the past for relying on travel trailers rather than relocating disaster victims into standard homes or apartments, and for being too slow to provide these trailers. States like Louisiana have begun to buy and ship in their own manufactured homes after big storms in order to avoid federal red tape, and Florida’s top emergency official said that he would seek to do the same after Helene.
Hundreds of these trailers have become a part of the Big Bend’s manufactured housing ecosystem since Idalia, and more will arrive soon following Helene, and likely Milton. Todd Mikola, the owner of Paradise Park, told Grist two days after landfall that he is planning to clear trees and crush damaged trailers to make room for more FEMA trailers — he was in the midst of moving trees away from the former home of a woman who had lost her job and fallen behind on rent.
“I want to beautify the place,” said Mikola, who lives in Germany and bought the trailer park three years ago. He had flown in from Germany just a few days before the storm, and was planning to leave town a few days later. He told Grist that Helene hadn’t damaged the park — omitting mention of the flipped and damaged trailers or the transformers that burst in Helene’s immediate aftermath.
Hurricane Helene caused widespread devastation in Horseshoe Bend, Florida, along the state’s Gulf Coast. In the background, a “pole barn” shelter designed for a travel trailer stands undamaged by the storm. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
FEMA only rents its mobile home units to storm victims for 18 months, but trailers often become a dead-end for displaced people, who in many cases cannot find affordable housing long after the disaster. A 2022 analysis by the New York Times found that a large share of victims from recent hurricanes, such as 2020’s Laura and 2021’s Ida, remained in trailers even as FEMA wound down its aid for those storms.
Tony Lacey, who also lives in a FEMA trailer just next door to Robison in Paradise Park, said he had no idea what he would do if the agency kicked him out of his home in February, the 18-month anniversary of Idalia. That storm had destroyed his home in the coastal town of Keaton Beach, landing him in Paradise Park. In the year since, he has been unable to find a job in the area, and his car permanently broke down. The agency hasn’t been receptive to his attempts to purchase the structure.
“They didn’t even talk to me about it,” he said. “[FEMA] said, ‘You don’t have income.’ And they’re intimidating when you talk to them.” A spokesperson for FEMA did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment by publication, citing the demands of the agency’s ongoing emergency response to Helene.
Robison has also been stuck in a waiting game with the agency ever since she moved in last November, unsure when or if it will force her out of her home, out of Paradise Park.
“I don’t know if they ain’t getting it, or they don’t understand, or I don’t know,” she said, “but I would like for them to give us these campers, because we don’t have homes to go to.”
Campers and mobile homes are an affordable backup for many families in areas with scarce housing, but some residents in disaster areas are starting to see them as a permanent solution — a way to avoid the high cost of building to flood and wind standards.
Tony Lacey stands in front of his FEMA trailer in Paradise Park, a mobile home park in Perry, Florida. Lacey has been living in the trailer since Hurricane Idalia destroyed his previous home in Horseshoe Bend last year. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
When a home suffers significant damage during a storm, federal regulations require the homeowner to rebuild it to a higher flood standard. For coastal homeowners on the Big Bend, that can mean elevating as much as 18 or 20 feet in the air — an expensive and lengthy process.
Those who can’t afford to elevate are turning to manufactured housing. Coastal residents can bring campers onto their land and erect “pole barns,” or rudimentary roof shelters, to protect them from the elements. Because these homes aren’t permanent structures, they aren’t subject to local building codes or insurance mandates. When big storms come, the owners can just drive them to higher ground for a few days.
Wright said more coastal residents in his county are turning to campers, and that he understands why, given the stringency of state and federal building codes designed to protect against flood and wind damage.
“You always see it,” he said. “People lose freedoms in the name of security or safety.” He went on to refer to the building codes as “borderline communism.” He added, however, that the conversion of many homes to camper parking spaces could deal a big hit to the Dixie County budget, which relies to a great extent on property tax revenue from coastal homes. The taxable value of a pole barn lot is much lower than that of an actual house.
Rumbach, the hazard and housing expert, worries about more residents utilizing this sort of largely unregulated manufactured housing. The financial strain of hurricanes, he said, compounded by a shortage of affordable housing, could force people to make decisions that put them at greater risk during future disasters.
“I worry about [this] being maladaptation,” he said. “I’m concerned that the outcome of this storm could be that we are more vulnerable next time, not less.”
An aerial view of debris of damaged houses are seen after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Horseshoe Beach, Florida, on September 27, 2024. The storm destroyed hundreds of manufactured and mobile homes, which tend to be more vulnerable to wind and flooding. Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images
Clint and Brooke Hiers, longtime residents of Horseshoe Beach, a town of just 170 people, are considering a transition to this tentative form of housing. After evacuating to higher ground ahead of Helene, they drove back to their seaside community in Dixie County on Friday to find it reduced to a maze of splinters and debris. Their home, which was elevated around 5 feet, had been pushed off its pilings by storm surge and fallen into a neighbor’s yard. Brooke’s sister’s house next door had been sheared apart by the water.
“You can’t rebuild down here, because, if you do, you got to go to code,” said Clint, staring at what remained of his house, stuck in a stand of waterlogged trees. He estimated that elevating his house to 18 feet would cost a few hundred thousand dollars. Even then he would still have to pay more than $10,000 a year for flood and windstorm insurance, assuming insurance companies would sell it to him.
Given those costs, it seemed far easier for him and Brooke to adopt a more tentative form of residence on the coast.
“I could take that lot and build a pretty good-sized pole barn to put a camper on,” he said. “Then when the storm comes, you just pull it out. You don’t have to have insurance. That’s what everybody’s going to after Idalia — a lot of people already did that down here.”
As Brooke examined the damage, she seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “Everybody’s bone-ass broke right now from everything we had to do for Idalia,” she said. “We are broke, broke. Spent all our savings. And now it’s just gone.”
This story is part of State of Emergency, a Grist series exploring how climate disasters are impacting voting and politics.
The conspiracy theories started swirling even as the flood waters were rising: Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm to strike the United States since Katrina in 2005, was created specifically to target Trump voters in crucial swing states. “Yes they can control the weather,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, posted on X on Thursday. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, best known for insisting the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, released a video on X claiming the government aimed Helene at North Carolina. Why? To force people out of the region so it could mine the state’s large reserves of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy. The video gleaned nearly a million views in three days.
Hundreds of keyboard conspiracists have taken to TikTok, X, Reddit, and other social media sites to say the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, is withholding critical supplies from stranded communities across the Southeast. “Just got down from the mountains delivering supplies,” someone with the username “RastaGuerilla” posted on X on September 30. “As crazy as it sounds FEMA is directly confiscating donated items and blocking volunteers from helping, kicking churches out of parking lots, etc.” The post received tens of thousands of likes, and similar messages from people claiming they were in the disaster zone have been racking up hundreds of thousands of views and reposts.
Search and rescue teams hike along the Broad River where North Carolina Route 9 used to be, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 2, 2024 near Chimney Rock, North Carolina.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
There’s no saying what percentage of these bogus claims came from people actually in the areas devastated by Helene, let alone whether humans or bots spewed them. Regardless of who or what wrote them, the conspiracies are patently untrue. FEMA is not confiscating supplies. The Biden administration is not trying to kick people off of land it wants to mine for lithium. And the federal government most certainly cannot control the weather. To disaster researchers, the barrage of pointed conspiracies are further proof that conspiratorial thinking is becoming something of an epidemic.
“We’ve moved into a space where conspiratorial thinking has become mainstream,” said Rachel Goldwasser, who tracks far-right activity and disinformation at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”
Disasters invariably kick up a cloud of conspiracies aimed at casting doubt on government’s legitimacy — the dark corners of society have long typecast FEMA as a sinister, all-powerful boogeyman capable of the most outlandish and fiendish deeds. During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracists alleged that it was seizing medical supplies from hospitals and local governments. Similar rumors about FEMA and the Red Cross confiscating donations in Lahaina ricocheted around the internet after the devastating wildfire in Hawaii last year.
But experts told Grist that the storm’s proximity to Election Day has produced a toxic stew of conspiracies that reflect broader conversations about immigration, workplace inclusivity, and other hot-button issues that Republicans and conservative news outlets have sought to turn into cultural referendums ahead of November 5.
Debris is seen in front of a home with a Trump 2024 campaign sign in Lake Lure, North Carolina, October 2, 2024, after the passage of Hurricane Helene.
Allison Joyce / AFP
One popular theory littering online forums alleges that the government had directed money away from FEMA to fund programs for illegal immigrants. “FEMA spending over a billion dollars on illegals while they leave Americans stranded and without help is treasonous,” Tim Burchett, a Republican representative from Tennessee, said on X, without citing evidence. Another theory says the agency had prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, training over disaster preparedness. Immigration, and to a lesser extent DEI, are the heart of former president Donald Trump’s re-election platform. (The former president took to Truth Social on Thursday to decry the Biden Administration’s response as “the worst and most incompetently managed ‘storm,’ at the federal level,” before adding, “but their management of the border is worse!”)
“There was already a discourse around these issues and clearly there’s already people who are very concerned about them,” said Samantha Penta, a sociologist and expert on emergency management and homeland security at the University of Albany. “I’m not surprised that those concerns are being integrated into the discussion around Helene response.”
Some of the theories reflect some tiny facet of the truth. In his video, Jones cited a real government program from the 1960s called Project Stormfury as proof that the government had purposefully “seeded” the storm. The program, which explored the possibility of diminishing a hurricane’s strength by seeding it with silver iodide, ended in 1983.
Conspiracies alleging that FEMA is both absent from disaster relief efforts and confiscating supplies also contain a shred of truth based on a pervasive misconception of the role the agency plays in disaster relief. Many people believe it descends on a location with cases of water and pallets of food and armies of people armed with shovels and flashlights immediately after a disaster. But it is better described as a logistics coordination and check-writing organization. “You will never see someone in a FEMA jacket putting sandbags by a river bed,” Penta said. “That is not their job.”
One of its primary roles is to coordinate relief efforts and supply distribution with local and state officials and nonprofit agencies. FEMA typically discourages people from sending supplies or going into a disaster zone, not because it wants to keep aid from the people who need it, but because all those items and untrained volunteers simply get in the way and slow down relief efforts. That’s why states often echo FEMA’s calls to stay out of harm’s way and leave recovery efforts to those who know what they’re doing.
“The State of North Carolina is advising everyone NOT to travel into the affected region,” the North Carolina Business Emergency Operations Center said in an email on Thursday. “We have live communications and power cables on roadways providing essential resources to affected communities that must not be disturbed. We also have roadways uncleared.”
The federal Department of Transportation has placed temporary flight restrictions over parts of the southeast to prevent amateur drone operators and others from impeding rescue efforts, providing further fodder for those who insist the federal government is conspiring to prevent Good Samaritans from helping people in need. “Do not fly your drone near or around rescue and recovery efforts for Hurricane Helene,” the agency said in a post on X on Wednesday. “Interfering with emergency response operations impacts search and rescue operations on the ground.”
US Vice President Kamala Harris, alongside Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, speaks after she surveyed the damage from Hurricane Helene in the Meadowbrook neighborhood of Augusta, Georgia, on October 2, 2024.Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Former U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to leave after visiting Chez What Furniture store that was damaged during Hurricane Helene on September 30, 2024 in Valdosta, Georgia.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the storm, which laid waste to a wide swath of six states, many people — particularly those in remote areas or those entirely cut off by flooding — were left to fend for themselves.
Joshua Hensley, an entrepreneur who lives in Asheville, has been driving across western North Carolina delivering supplies. “Most of the government involvement we’ve seen are Ospreys and helicopters flying over trying to get stuff in and trying to evacuate people,” he told Grist on Thursday via a starlink satellite hotspot. “But as far as on the ground, I’ve been all over the place and it is almost entirely local.”
In the days before federal aid arrived, restaurants, breweries, and other establishments in Asheville took to providing water, medical care, and other assistance to residents. “All the employees and community members have been volunteering their time and energy,” said Mae Walker, a serviceworker who lives in the city. “Much more than any visible assistance from police or other city officials outside of power restoration.”
In the days following the storm, local pilots used the airport in Asheville as a distribution center to shuttle supplies to stranded communities and conduct search and rescue operations. But as the state and federal government’s vast disaster relief apparatus groaned into motion, their efforts became more of a hindrance than a help, and airport officials asked them to stop as the state took over such operations.
The misconception that the government is not responding to a disaster, and the bogus conspiracy theories that amplify such ideas, can have dangerous implications. The Southern Policy Law Center has heard credible reports that far-right militias and white supremacist organizations are moving into the region to provide assistance — and, if past disasters are any indication, drum up sympathy for their cause.
“The more people who believe that FEMA isn’t there, or that FEMA spent all its money on DEI or whatever, the more groups like militias believe they’re needed in those areas,” Goldwasser said. “They have their own agendas and goals that they’re trying to meet that supersede the needs of the people on the ground who need help.”
It’s easy to see how, in the chaotic hours and days after a disaster, people might think the government has abandoned residents of the afflicted areas. But the conspiracy theories sprouting up online, and the politicians and pundits cultivating their spread, obfuscate the truth, which is that disaster relief work is messy and, yes, often flawed. “FEMA is an institution built and run by humans,” Penta said. “It’s going to make mistakes and things are going to go poorly and they will get criticism for that.”
Such criticism is fair, even warranted. FEMA has been chronically underfunded for decades, a situation that will only grow worse as climate-fueled disasters become more common, more devastating, and more costly. Compounding the problem is the deepening polarization of American society, and a willingness by many people to see only the worst in the government and the people who work within it. The confluence of these two trends creates the fertile ground that allows conspiracy theories to flourish — and suggests that the flood of lies will continue to rise long after the water that inundated the southeast recedes.
Even as the full scale of devastation in the mountainous regions of North Carolina and Tennessee remains unknown, it’s clear that Hurricane Helene is one of the deadliest and most destructive storms in recent U.S. history. As of Friday, the storm had caused at least 180 deaths and destroyed or damaged many thousands of homes and other buildings.
In a preliminary damage estimate released on Thursday, the private forecaster AccuWeather pegged the financial cost of Hurricane Helene’s damages at $225 to $250 billion, more than double what it estimated in the first days after the storm made landfall in Florida last week — and far more than recent major hurricanes like 2012’s Sandy and 2017’s Harvey. That massive number includes the cost of rebuilding homes, businesses, roads, and infrastructure in the storm’s path from Florida to Tennessee, as well as the wages and economic output that will be lost during the yearslong rebuild.
Another fact that makes Helene’s devastation so unprecedented is that almost none of those hundreds of billions of dollars in losses will be paid out by insurance. While the storm caused most of its damage through flooding, which is covered under a government-run flood insurance program, very few residents of the southern Appalachian mountains hold flood policies — even those who live in federally designated flood zones. As of now, these storm victims in North Carolina and Tennessee have no guarantee of comprehensive public or private assistance as they try to piece their lives back together. The situation stands in stark contrast to other recent deadly storms like Hurricane Ian in 2022, where wind damage was paid out by standard homeowner’s insurance and flooding was limited to low-lying coastal areas where residents typically hold government flood insurance.
“A whole bunch of these [mountain] communities don’t have access to any of these things that can help you rebuild,” said Carolyn Kousky, an expert on disaster insurance who is the vice president for economics and policy at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s going to be really heartbreaking. It’s going to be a very long time before they can rebuild.”
Helene will likely cause around $6.4 billion in insured damages, according to the catastrophe modeling firm Karen Clark & Company — a tiny figure for a direct hit from a Category 4 hurricane where winds reached 140 miles per hour. It’s barely half the total of insured damages from the 2018 wildfires in California, and only 10 percent as much as the damage from Hurricane Ian.
Homeowner’s insurance premiums are rising almost everywhere in the United States as insurers deal with costly disasters, rising construction costs, and new development in vulnerable areas. They’re likely to continue to rise in states such as North Carolina, where the insurance commissioner just approved a double-digit premium rate hike.
But recent disasters such as Ian and the California wildfires have also seen many insurers go bankrupt or stop selling coverage in affected states. These market collapses have forced many homeowners to go without insurance or buy it from state-backed “insurers of last resort.” Despite Helene’s historic damage, states like North Carolina and Tennessee will likely not see a similar collapse in insurance availability.
“I’m not sure it’s going to have a big impact on the insurance market, because from an insurance industry perspective, this is not a very large loss,” said Karen Clark, the co-founder of Karen Clark & Company and one of the pioneers in the modeling of catastrophe risk.
That’s for the simple reason that most private companies stopped offering flood coverage around a century ago, following a series of devastating floods on the Mississippi River. The federal government then stepped in to try to protect America’s many waterfront homes from flood losses. As a result, insurance companies today pay out damage claims for wildfires in California and windstorms in the Midwest, but not for major rainfall events like Hurricane Helene.
The federal National Flood Insurance Program is supposed to serve as a public replacement for lost private coverage, but it isn’t working. The 5 million homes in the program tend to be very vulnerable to flooding, which has led to repeat loss events and driven the program billions of dollars into debt. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has been trying for decades to enroll more people in the program, including those who live far from the coasts, but even its subsidized rates are out of reach for many homeowners. As a result, participation remains limited: in Asheville, the hardest-hit large city in North Carolina, fewer than 1 percent of residents have flood insurance.
Even given the huge coverage gaps, Helene will still likely trigger one of the largest FEMA flood insurance payouts in recent years, perhaps to the tune of billions of dollars. But Swiss Re, the massive global reinsurance company that acts as a backstop for the national program, confirmed that most people who suffered damage during Helene won’t get anything at all.
“Sadly much of the damage from these devastating floods will not be covered by insurance,” said Monica Ningen, who leads the company’s property business in the United States. She added that the lack of coverage “will make the task of rebuilding the communities impacted all the more difficult.”
Without insurance, which is often the first line of defense against disaster damage, most homeowners who saw flood damage will be on their own as they rebuild. Some victims will receive a few thousand dollars from FEMA for repair costs, and some others will be able to secure low-interest rebuilding loans from the Small Business Administration. The Department of Housing and Urban Development also has a track record of spending billions of dollars on long-term recovery needs after big disasters, paying for home repairs and new housing development.
But this aid money could take months or years to reach hard-hit areas, said Kousky, and it won’t come close to covering the cost of reconstruction for most people, especially those in low-income households.
“These programs were intentionally designed not to replace insurance,” said Kousky. “It’s really limited.”
Despite the massive amount of media attention Hurricane Helene has generated, and the historic scale of the uninsured losses, Kousky said she’s pessimistic that the storm will change much about U.S. disaster policy, whether by encouraging more people to purchase flood insurance or increasing aid for disaster victims.
“There’s been so many events, they get attention and seem to be wake up calls, and our response has been insufficient every time,” she said.
Editor’s note:The Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Last year, researchers at Tulane University ranked Asheville, North Carolina, as one of the most “climate-resilient cities” in the United States — municipalities whose geographies, economies, and preparedness appeared to offer some refuge from wildfires, rising temperatures and torrential storms. Now, Asheville is reeling from the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene…
When the bubonic plague reached England in the summer of 1348 — spread by fleas, lice, or infected humans, according to the latest theories — it reached a breeding ground for disease. Londoners’ immune systems had little defense against the new strains of plague that had been circulating throughout Europe, and London’s streets were a cesspit, ringed by overcrowded, poorly ventilated homes. The conditions high in the atmosphere were also conducive for an epidemic. The jet stream, the band of winds that sails above Europe, had shifted dramatically northward, bringing two years of cool, damp summers that sent people indoors, where disease spreads easily. By 1350, the Black Death had killed around a third of England’s population, if not more.
The patterns of Earth’s high winds have surprisingly widespread effects on life on the ground. A recent study in the journal Nature shows that when the summer jet stream over Europe veers north or south of its usual path, it brings weather extremes that can exacerbate epidemics, ruin crop harvests, and feed wildfires.
“The jet stream has caused these extreme conditions for 700 years in the past without greenhouse gases,” said Ellie Broadman, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Arizona. “To me, that’s a little scary, to think about the compound effects of simply adding more heat to the atmosphere and imagining how those extremes might get more extreme in the future.”
Understanding how the jet stream behaved in the past is crucial for figuring out how it might be changing as the Earth heats up. Scientists believe that these fickle high winds are shifting northward and becoming “wavier,” vacillating closer to the poles and then closer to the equator instead of going in a straight line. But it has been hard to draw firm conclusions since real-world measurements of the jet stream only go back 60 years, Broadman said. By that point, greenhouse gas emissions spewed during the Industrial Revolution had already begun to affect its patterns.
For the recent study, however, a team of researchers from the United States, China, and several countries in Europe used data from tree rings to reconstruct the position of the jet stream over the last 700 years. Then they sought to understand how these shifts affected people, comparing the results to records on epidemics, crop yields, and wildfires. According to Broadman, the years that the Black Death raged through England were among the times when the jet stream was the furthest north in the new records, which trace back to the year 1300.
“The big challenge now is to work out how we can really use this new information to test and improve our climate models, and to make more confident predictions about how the jet [stream] might vary in the future,” Tim Woollings, a climate science professor at the University of Oxford who wrote a book about the jet stream, said in an email.
The jet stream’s whims can lead to what the study calls cascading effects. For example, bad harvests can lead to malnutrition, which can compromise people’s immune systems, making epidemics worse. And when people are sick, they can’t work as much in the fields, limiting harvests further. The study points to what happened in Russia in 2010, when a “blocking” pattern in the jet stream — which deflects oncoming weather — caused a prolonged heat wave, exacerbating wildfires and leading to the death of an estimated 55,000 people. In the aftermath, the country’s wheat production plummeted by 25 percent.
A corn field in southern Poland was flooded after intense rainfall from Storm Boris in September 2024.
Dominika Zarzycka / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Tracking the jet stream’s movement back to Medieval times wasn’t a simple process. The researchers knew that when the jet stream shifts north, it leads to cold, wet summers in the British Isles, and hot, dry ones in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. (When the jet stream veers south, those conditions are flipped.) They also knew that the density of the wood cells in tree rings says something about the type of weather the tree endured that year. During hot, dry weather, trees get stressed, and they start adding on smaller and smaller wood cells, leading to a thin, dense band of wood, Broadman said.
So researchers sampled very old trees in different parts of Europe to see whether they could piece together the position of the jet stream based on that data. After showing that the method worked reasonably well for predicting the past 60 years of jet stream behavior, they used tree rings to estimate the jet stream’s position going back centuries further.
Then they matched up the data with what they knew about European history, examining historical records about diseases, grain prices, and more. They found that the most extreme positions of the jet stream tended to create their own extremes on the ground. In the Mediterranean, for instance, wildfires occurred mostly during the hot, dry years when the jet stream was further north, and grape harvests (and wine quality) were particularly bad during the cool, wet years when the jet stream veered south.
“The very wonderful, convenient thing about working in Europe is that people have been writing things down for a very long time,” Broadman said. “Like, monks in Ireland for centuries and centuries have been writing things down about famine and epidemics.”
After the fire had retreated and the evacuation orders were lifted, my mother took me on a walk through our backyard. The pale dust of the southern California landscape had turned black with soot, and the desert creatures — quails and rattlesnakes — were frozen, ash-coated, in Pompeian tableaus. My family was lucky: While other homes on the block were reduced to rubble, we just had to contend with…
Consider the following scenario: A local government wants to relocate a neighborhood that is vulnerable to climate change. The streets have flooded several times in recent years during major storms, and projections indicate that the flooding will only get worse. This will require the city to send emergency responders into dangerous waters, and then use public money to pay to rebuild the neighborhood’s infrastructure over and over again. If conditions are bad enough, residents could even be killed before first responders can save them from floodwaters.
The city decides to buy out the block, using federal money to purchase residents’ homes and destroy them, leaving behind a vacant stretch of land that can absorb future floods. When officials approach residents and offer them cash payments to vacate the neighborhood, some of them agree to leave. But many others decline the offer and vow to stay put, arguing that they have a deep attachment to the neighborhood — and that the city should build flood walls or retention ponds to protect their neighborhood, rather than moving them out. If even a few homeowners stay, they will ensure that the city remains on the hook for future rescues and repairs. To break the deadlock, the city decides to use its eminent domain power to evict the holdouts from their homes.
Think about it for a minute. Whose side are you on?
After more than five years of reporting on the ways that the U.S. is adapting to climate change, I’ve encountered dozens of instances of this dilemma, where a government’s attempts to implement a “managed retreat” from a vulnerable area collide with the private property rights — as well as the deep, human attachments — of homeowners who don’t want to move. These fights have played out in diverse locales all over the country, from impoverished subdivisions along the bends of the Mississippi River to wealthy cliffside avenues along the California coast, from historically Black neighborhoods to new lily-white suburbs.
When I discuss these stories with readers and friends, I find that people’s reactions depend a lot on who lives in the flood-prone community in question. If it’s a case of a coastal city trying to buy out wealthy beachfront homeowners, readers tend to side with the government trying to force residents to take a payout; if it’s a city trying to buy out a low-income or middle-class neighborhood, readers instead tend to side with the residents. In some cases, in other words, we decide that private property rights trump the public interest, and in other cases we decide the opposite, even when the underlying risk from climate change is the same. Your reaction to the thought experiment above was likely influenced by what kind of community you imagined the hypothetical buyout neighborhood to be.
The U.S. government has funded tens of thousands of home buyouts nationwide, and dozens of local governments across the country have pursued so-calledmanagedretreatefforts with varying degrees of controversy. Even after all these test cases, there exists nothing close to a rubric for deciding when it’s right for a government to force someone to leave their home for the sake of climate adaptation — or when the government has a moral obligation to protect a community that wants to remain in place.
This question involves so much more than managing government budgets and political blowback. The goal of climate adaptation is not only to avert future suffering, but also to build more resilient and better-functioning communities. When residents in vulnerable areas protest against retreat, they’re arguing that relocation would cause them more suffering than staying put in a vulnerable area, and that the only way their community can thrive is if they remain where they are. As the United States and other countries grapple with worsening extreme weather events and the political crises they create, governments need to be sure that their proposed solutions are alleviating the damage of a warming world rather than making it worse.
“You can’t read the fairness of [a retreat] only in the one action,” Linda Shi, a professor of urban planning at Cornell University, told me. “It’s always relative to what is being done in another community.”
Debates over retreat often seem to be clashes between public and private good, where the question is whether the interests of one community are more urgent than the interests of the general public. But retreating from vanishing coasts and other vulnerable areas at the scale that climate change demands will require moving beyond this framework, and instead considering individual relocation as part of a larger adaptation strategy. In order to make moral evaluations of an adaptation effort, we first need to know what that adaptation effort is trying to accomplish — not just for an individual neighborhood or even a city, but more broadly for that community’s state, region, nation, and maybe even the world. In other words, we need to know more about what kind of society we are trying to build once we make it to higher ground.
There is a very simple fact lurking beneath every initiative to adapt to climate change: Even the United States, the richest country in the history of the world, does not have enough money to protect every existing community from climate disasters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency grant programs that currently finance most climate adaptation efforts are funded at just a fraction of demand. Some states and cities fund these projects with local revenue, but most simply don’t have enough cash. Few local governments pay for more than a fraction of the cost of any shoreline defense or buyout initiative. There are finite resources available to build sea walls, firebreaks, and water recycling plants for the vulnerable households that want to stay in harm’s way. In almost every case, buyouts are a more cost-effective solution than capital projects like these.
But the funding available for buyouts is limited, too. Most managed retreat efforts are paid for by competitive federal grant programs, which means that local governments must submit an application and make the case that they should be chosen over other jurisdictions. FEMA and the federal agencies that fund these efforts only care about the individual costs and benefits of each project, not the larger trends that emerge from which projects they choose to support, and where. Buying out one town leaves less money to buy out towns around it with similar risk profiles. When money is finite, in other words, each adaptation project makes every other project more difficult.
The basic fact of this scarcity incentivizes inequality when it comes to adaptation efforts. The U.S. and its local governments have been moving people away from climate harms for decades now, and the vast majority of those relocations have been voluntary buyout agreements between willing homeowners and public agencies. The government enjoys broad legal authority to move people out of their homes to promote the public interest, so long as it provides property owners with what the U.S. Constitution calls “just compensation.”
This seemingly universal doctrine is unfair in a fundamental sense, however, since it makes it far easier for a government to buy out and relocate a poor neighborhood than a wealthy one. The cost of relocating an area like Houston’s Allen Field, a majority-Latino neighborhood where many homes cost less than $100,000, is a fraction of what it would cost to relocate a wealthy community like those in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where the kind of beachfront vacation home at risk of simply collapsing into the sea can cost a million dollars or more. Even if the latter community is at greater risk, cost considerations alone disincentivize bureaucrats from trying to strong-arm wealthy homeowners out of their property.
A crew works to stabilize a home after the structure was moved about 50 feet from the rapidly eroding beach where it originally sat on the Atlantic Ocean shoreline of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Wealthy residents are also more likely to have not just the money but also the time and connections that it takes to fight the government. Indeed, some wealthy Outer Banks homeowners have spent years waging legal battles against government efforts to limit coastal construction and remove precarious homes, often with assistance from conservative law groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation. Even the threat of these lawsuits can scare off governments attempting to pursue managed retreat: When I wrote about California’s attempts to limit coastal development, a Malibu city council member told me he was terrified that residents would sue if the city imposed construction limits on coastal areas.
The uneven legal landscape around eminent domain is one reason why past managed retreat patterns have been so unequal in the United States. One study of adaptation actions in North Carolina, for instance, found that “[property acquisitions] are found to correlate with low home values, household incomes, and population density and high racial diversity.”
An even more vexed issue is what counts as “just compensation.” If the government gives a homeowner the pre-flood market value of her home, is that enough? That’s the way most courts have ruled, but it’s easy to argue otherwise. If the government is razing a low-income neighborhood, residents may well not have enough money to afford homes in nearby areas. This happened in Kinston, North Carolina, one of the first places where FEMA attempted a major buyout around the turn of this century. Residents of a historic Black neighborhood relocated to wealthier white areas only to enter foreclosure when they fell behind on mortgage payments down the road.
There are emotional and spiritual considerations, too. After all, a community is not just a collection of houses but a tangle of social relations and cultural practices. In uprooting the residents of a fishing village from their homes and scattering them around a city, the government destroys those relationships and traditions. Relocated residents can lose their friends, their social support systems, their favorite spaces to play, their proximity to their jobs and sources of income, and even their connection to land and nature. These are huge losses, and they often can’t be captured in a dollar amount.
“It’s very limiting to conceptualize retreat in terms of property and possessions, rather than asking, ‘What kinds of relationships with my community I am able to maintain?’” said Simona Capisani, a political philosopher at Durham University in the United Kingdom who has studied the ethics of climate migration.
Many governments have recognized that Indigenous communities have an inviolate right to maintain communal bonds and cultural forms, though they have seldom made good on that recognition. When the state of Louisiana used federal money to relocate the eroding Indigenous community of Isle de Jean Charles starting in 2016, officials promised to build a new community with a fishing bayou and homes built in the island’s architectural vernacular. Instead, they ended up building an ordinary-looking subdivision that tribespeople from the island decried as shoddy and foreign. Some residents pulled out of the relocation effort altogether, opting to move elsewhere or in some cases to stay put on the eroding island.
Erosion along the side of the road that leads to Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana.Bill Haber / AP Photo
A sign posted by Edison Dardar welcoming visitors on the road that runs through Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana.Patrick Semansky / AP Photo
It seems inarguable that Indigenous nations who have been dispossessed of their land in the past should enjoy ample support to stay or move from at-risk areas as they choose. Beyond that, however, it’s hard to figure out where to draw the line between communities that merit similar consideration and those that don’t. The residents of Malibu and the Outer Banks could argue that their ways of life carry intangible value for them, too, but it would be absurd to claim that the government should have to provide residents of those areas with compensation for the culture they would lose by relocating (in addition to the compensation already forthcoming for their million-dollar homes).
A strategy that designed adaptation efforts around local consensus would work in some communities, especially those like the neighborhoods on New York’s Staten Island where residents rallied around buyoutsafter 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, but it would quickly run up against questions about how to define community consensus, not to mention massive funding constraints. Residents of rural villages will want flood-proofing infrastructure just as much as city dwellers, but building rural infrastructure provides far fewer benefits per dollar spent. If you take an approach designed to optimize bang-for-buck, you’ll end up building sea walls to protect wealthy cities and buying out poor towns, or maybe even leaving rural areas with no protection whatsoever.
Underlying all these considerations are further questions with no easy answers: What values or criteria could we use to decide whether a community should have to relocate, even if its residents don’t want to leave? Is it about a certain length of land tenure in a given place, or a place’s aesthetic or cultural uniqueness compared to the areas that surround it? And if marginalized communities have a claim on this kind of compensation, then how do we decide what forms of marginalization merit compensation? There has to be another calculus beyond the dollar. But what?
The stakes of coming up with good answers to these questions are high. If we admit that managed retreat has a moral dimension — that it isn’t just a logistical question of relocating people from unsafe areas to safe ones — then we should have a clear sense of which acts are justified and which ones aren’t, beyond a feeling in our collective gut. The moral quandary of managed retreat is not only that public and private interests conflict, but also that every adaptation effort in a vulnerable area implies a hierarchy of value and need.
The way out of this conundrum may be counterintuitive. Instead of avoiding the idea of a hierarchy, what if we embraced it? It’s tempting to think about each retreat effort as a separate moral question, one that involves weighing the interests of individual homeowners or communities against a collective “public” represented by the government and its taxpayers. Instead, we could think about each individual relocation as part of a broader nationwide effort to reduce vulnerability to climate change, and evaluate the justice of that effort as a whole, rather than trying to decide between competing interests in any one community.
There is some precedent for such an approach. During the Obama administration, the National Park Service started to outline a policy for how to respond to climate disasters, acknowledging that global warming would make it impossible to protect every sliver of the nation’s immense natural, historical, and architectural heritage. Marcy Rockman, the archaeologist who led the effort, imagined that rather than creating a hierarchy of heritage sites based on some criteria of worth, the government could prioritize diversity. The success of this climate program would not rest on identifying the “worthiest” or “most at risk” places, but instead on finding a way to consider and address the needs of as many types of heritage in as many different environments and communities as it could.
“[We need] that ability to sit down with a community … one that is facing some sort of relocation, and say, ‘You know, we can’t hold back the sea. We cannot keep things as they are,” said Rockman. But after acknowledging this threat, she added, residents could be asked exactly what it is that they want to save from their longtime communities, and public policy can follow that lead.
The Trump administration halted Rockman’s effort at the National Park Service, and the Biden administration has not resumed it. When it comes to adapting to climate change, U.S. policy involves nothing like Rockman’s vision of a comprehensive evaluation. Even though the government has been funding climate adaptation in one form or another for decades now, we have no nationwide or even regional strategy that guides our efforts.
As a result, there’s no intention behind the distribution of managed retreat efforts. Instead, relocations happen because disasters strike and local officials secure grant money, or because coastal homes suddenly start falling into the sea — not because any larger entity has decided that relocations should happen in those places as opposed to others. The government is required to conduct cost-benefit analyses for every adaptation project, but these analyses only consider the costs to the government for funding the project and the benefits to the community where the project takes place — not any larger questions about how a relocation or a sea wall might fit within the broader dynamics of a shoreline, a regional economy, or a national culture.
One can imagine bringing a holistic approach like Rockman’s to a nationwide adaptation strategy that is centered on the needs of people, rather than the cultural artifacts that are the purview of the National Park Service. This would shift policy away from the current focus on localized costs and toward the broad characteristics of a relocation program across a region or even the entire country. If the government articulated a clear unifying purpose for its managed retreat efforts, it would be easier to evaluate the justice of any specific buyout or land seizure, and easier to debate those acts in the political sphere.
To create such an adaptation plan would be the work of generations, but it’s possible to imagine agreement on a few basic principles for how it might work. Because the federal government will remain by far the largest funder of adaptation efforts, a national climate adaptation initiative would need permanent financing from Congress. The initiative could be housed under the Department of the Interior, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or perhaps even an independent commission that would be better shielded from partisan interference.
Though federal funding and coordination would be essential, a national adaptation plan might work best if divided into discrete regional efforts, treating broad areas like the Gulf Coast and the sinking shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay as the units of focus. Rather than parceling out money to a plethora of states, counties, and towns, a single council or commission could be formed for each region. These deliberative bodies would map vulnerable areas, conduct hearings and listening sessions with residents, compile catalogs of cultural and historical treasures, and estimate the cost of providing each community with the adaptation projects it needs — and the projects its residents desire.
In all likelihood, the cost of the resulting wish lists would exceed the available funding, so each commission would need to create a hierarchy of priority for where to build sea walls and shoreline protections, where to acquire and destroy homes, and where to do nothing.
To be sure, any such hierarchy would have its critics, and even a conscientious and consensus-driven adaptation effort would fail to persuade some holdouts, which would entail litigation and the continued backstop of eminent domain. Even so, the deliberate articulation of such a hierarchy would enable the pursuit of a coherent social goal — one that could combine Rockman’s efforts to preserve cultural heritage with a reparative attempt to foster economic and racial equity.
Rather than allocate funding based on a localized cost-benefit analysis — and in effect only protecting the densest areas with the highest property values — a regional commission could allocate its limited budget for levees and sea walls dedicated to marginalized communities, ensuring that they retain the social cohesion and property tenure that were denied to them under more prejudiced governments in the past. And in cases where middle-class homeowners are bought out and relocated, the government could still build new housing on higher ground to make up for the lost supply, or give residents moving stipends that are indexed to household income and the local property market, rather than the value of their lost property. The wealthiest coastal enclaves might receive little or no infrastructure aid in recognition of their existing advantages, and those who take buyouts on expensive second homes could make do with their market-value compensation, as they do today.
Ocean waves have eroded the beach behind 12 houses on Seagull Street on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Dare County has agreed to abandon Seagull Street and allow all 12 houses on this strip to be moved as far as is legally possible from the encroaching ocean. Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images
With a comprehensive strategy that would roll out over multiple decades, rather than a series of ad hoc land use decisions made to triage life-threatening risk, public officials could avoid many of the most difficult legal and political controversies that attend managed retreat today. Rather than try to relocate every holdout within a matter of a few years, a government could send clear advance signals to residents that their communities can’t stay as they are forever. It could buy a home from an elderly homeowner and rent it back to them until they pass away, for instance, or slowly reduce utility and road service to a neighborhood as its population declines. While even long-term consensus-building efforts would likely still face legal challenges, they would be easier and cheaper than fighting thousands of one-off fights over individual uses of eminent domain.
“What if we didn’t think about relocation as, ‘We’re going to move people out today’?” said A.R. Siders, a professor at the University of Delaware and one of the nation’s foremost experts on managed retreat. “What if we thought about it as, ‘Where are the places where the people who are in their homes right now are the last people to own those homes?’ That’s still going to be emotionally difficult and challenging, but you have years to prepare.”
On the preservation side, a regional commission could dedicate money to safeguarding representative samples of a region’s culture. On the Gulf Coast, for instance, funds could be directed toward protecting at least one shrimping village, one community of fishing camps, and one subdivision of bayou homes. In the fire-prone mountains of California, money might go toward preserving at least one historic mining town, one trailer park, and one ritzy cul-de-sac. In places where climate change and extreme weather have accelerated such that communities simply cannot be saved, the government could poll residents on what artifacts most represent their community, then preserve them in a museum, much as the relics of Pompeii have long been housed in a museum in Naples, Italy.
Such an effort would take an enormous amount of forethought and transparency to be successful, and a just outcome is far from guaranteed. But even if this sort of comprehensive plan fails, at least its coherence allows people to agree or disagree with the overall way that their representatives decide to handle the task of adapting to climate change.
As Siders puts it, the process of adaptation in this case would look less like a series of confrontations between the state and private citizens, and more like a collective attempt — however imperfect and rickety — to sketch the contours of a new nation: “What if we flip it and we say not just, ‘Who are we going to make move?’ but, ‘What is the future we’re trying to build?’”
There are battleground states, and then there’s North Carolina. Former President Donald Trump won the state by 1.3 percent in 2020, his lowest margin of victory in any state, and polls now show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris within just 2 percentage points of each other there. It also has more electoral votes than several of the other swing states that will decide the November election, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
“Kamala Harris wins North Carolina, she is the next president of the United States,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, said at an event in New York City last week.
In western North Carolina, moisture-laden Helene collided with a cold front that was already dropping rain on the Appalachian Mountains. Hundreds of roads in the region are now impassable or have been wiped off the map by flooding and landslides, communication systems are down, and hundreds of people are still missing. As the North Carolina Department of Transportation put it, “All roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed.” With just weeks until November 5, thousands of people displaced, mail service shut down or restricted in many ZIP codes, and many roadways shuttered, officials are now rushing to figure out how to handle voting in the midst of disaster.
“This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of North Carolina’s top election officials, told reporters on Tuesday. “The destruction is unprecedented and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting.”
Delivery of absentee ballots in North Carolina had already been delayed by three weeks by former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s last-minute lawsuit to take his name off of millions of already-printed ballots. The state’s election process is already in full swing: the deadline for voter registration in North Carolina is October 11, the early voting period in the state begins on October 17, and early voting ends on November 2. “We will take the measures necessary to ensure there is voting,” Brinson Bell said. But there are innumerable issues to solve first, and state officials still don’t have a full assessment of the damage Helene caused.
“There’s a cascading series of problems,” said Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board for Wake County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Raleigh.
At the moment, the central logistical problem is that the U.S. Postal Service has suspended service across much of western North Carolina. Even before the storm, more than 190,000 North Carolinians had requested mail-in ballots this election. The agency does not yet have an estimate of when mail will be restored — damage is so severe in some ZIP codes that it may be weeks or even months before local roads are passable. The issue is compounded by the fact that in rural areas, some postal workers use their own vehicles to deliver mail. Neither the state nor the Postal Service knows how many of those cars were destroyed by the storm.
“At this time, we are still assessing damage and impacts,” a spokesperson for the Postal Service told Grist. “As we continue our work on this, we will continue to communicate with local boards of election in impacted areas to ensure the ongoing transport and delivery of election mail as soon as it is safe to do so.”
Residents of Asheville, North Carolina, gather at a fire station to access WiFi and check emergency information after Hurricane Helene. The storm caused record flooding throughout western North Carolina.
Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images
Under state law, it is up to each voter to request a new ballot to the temporary address where they are staying. Voters must mail these ballots back in time for them to reach election offices by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day. The state used to have a three-day grace period for late-arriving ballots, but it ended that policy last year. The Elections Board is currently assessing whether it will ask the state to reinstate it. There’s also no way of tracking where the absentee ballots that counties already sent out ended up, or whether the delivery of those ballots was affected by the storm. “Who knows where they are,” Cohen said.
And then there’s the matter of in-person voting, which faces further logistical hurdles. Brinson Bell said that while there have been no reports of voting equipment or ballots destroyed by Helene, 12 county election offices in western North Carolina are currently closed due to flooding and other storm-related impacts. “There may be polling places affected by mudslides, there may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads, there may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them,” Brinson Bell said. There’s no saying, yet, how many of the people who will staff these polling places have been displaced, hurt, or killed by the storm.
Every county in North Carolina must offer at least 13 days of in-person early voting, and right now the state requires counties to open this process on October 17. Cohen said that many counties will struggle to meet that deadline, in particular smaller ones.
“The smaller counties just had one early voting location, and it’s normally at the board of elections office, which is usually downtown,” he said. “Because of the way these mountain towns were laid out in the 1700s or 1800s, they’re near rivers and creeks, so they’re prone to flooding.”
Cohen said he’s heard that the North Carolina legislature, which will convene next week, is considering some flexibility for early voting in affected counties, as well as resources to help these counties establish new voting sites and train up replacement poll workers. He believes the state can still manage a robust election if it provides proper support for local election boards — in other words, he said, “appropriate money.”
But the challenge that eclipses all other voting accessibility issues is the simple fact that people who have been affected by a historic and deadly flood event typically aren’t thinking about where they will cast their ballots — they’re focusing on locating their loved ones, mucking out their houses, finding new housing, filing insurance claims, and dozens of other priorities that trump voting.
The State Board of Elections in North Carolina has a website where residents can check their voter registration status, register a new permanent or temporary address, and monitor the progress of their mail-in ballot. But even if people wanted to find out where or how to vote, hundreds of thousands of customers in the state are currently without power, WiFi, and cell service.
For years, political scientists who study the effects of climate change on political turnout have warned about the inevitability of an event like Helene subverting a national election. “Hurricane season in the U.S. — between June and November every year — usually coincides with election season,” a recent report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or IDEA, said. “The chances of hurricanes disrupting U.S. elections are ever-present and will increase as hurricanes become more common and intense due to climate change.”
Residents of Marshall, North Carolina, search for missing items from a nearby mechanics shop in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The flooding from the storm has destroyed polling places across the western part of the state.
Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Prior to Helene, four elections were significantly disrupted by hurricanes in the 21st century: Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricane Michael in 2018, and Hurricane Ian in 2022. The report by IDEA found that voter turnout can dip precipitously during these events.
“The biggest challenge that we see is not just technology failure, but a decrease in public confidence,” Vasu Mohan, a senior advisor at IDEA who has analyzed how disasters affect elections in dozens of countries, told Grist. “If you’re not prepared, then making last minute accommodations is extremely difficult.” However, Mohan’s research shows that it’s possible to conduct elections fairly after displacement events if communities are given the resources they need.
“I am very, very worried about how [the storm] will affect voting,” said Abby Werner, a pediatrician who lives in Charlotte, which did not sustain severe damage from the storm. Werner and her partner are Democrats, and make a point of voting in person. She fears the storm will suppress voter turnout. “In a series of worries it is an additional wave,” she said.
Brinson Bell’s office will likely face a flurry of lawsuits due to its handling of post-storm voting — it is already navigating a lawsuit, filed by Republican groups prior to the storm, over its handling of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. But she said the COVID-19 pandemic and prior storms prepared the state for worst-case scenarios. “We held an incredibly successful election with record turnout during the COVID pandemic,” she said. “We’ve battled through hurricanes and tropical storms and still held safe and secure elections. And we will do everything in our power to do so again.”
In the hours just after Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida, James Pike sat in his truck, with his mobile home behind him. He was in the parking lot of a grocery store in Inglis, a town of 1,500 people in the state’s rural Big Bend region, waiting alongside dozens of other campers. Trucks rumbled by carrying utility linemen, search and rescue workers, and law enforcement as the displaced…
Hurricane Helene tears through the southeastern United States as scientists say climate change rapidly intensifies hurricanes. The storm devastated large swaths of the southeastern United States after making landfall in Florida as a Category 4 storm. Officials say the death toll is likely to rise, as many are still missing. Helene is expected to be one of the costliest hurricanes in U.S.
In the hours just after Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida, James Pike sat in his truck, with his mobile home behind him. He was in the parking lot of a grocery store in Inglis, a town of 1,500 people in the state’s rural Big Bend region, waiting alongside dozens of other campers. Trucks rumbled by carrying utility linemen, search and rescue workers, and law enforcement as the displaced residents sat and waited for news.
Pike had moved a few months earlier into a trailer park called Eleanor Oaks, in the neighboring hamlet of Yankeetown, after being priced out of another trailer park on higher ground where he’d ridden out last year’s Hurricane Idalia.
“Eleven in the morning, they said, ‘get out,’ and four in the afternoon, they cut the power,” he said on Friday. “I’m not sure when we’ll be able to get back in.”
James Pike sits in his car in a grocery store parking lot after Hurricane Helene. Pike and others evacuated a mobile home park in Yankeetown, Florida, which saw 10 feet of storm surge. Jake Bittle / Grist
Eleanor Oaks was in tatters, submerged by storm surge for the second time in just over a year. Trailers sat bent out of shape or strewn across the lot, left-behind cars and mobile homes were stained with muck, and the whole park stank of sewage.
Rescue crews searched the wreckage of the trailer park and Yankeetown for the dozens of residents who had refused to evacuate. The community is more than 5 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but the Category 4 storm delivered more than 10 feet of storm surge — pushing water so far inland that it inundated almost all of Yankeetown.
Helene’s powerful eye spared major cities like Tampa and Tallahassee, instead making a direct hit September 26 on Florida’s sparsely developed Big Bend, a largely lower-income part of the state where towns, like Inglis and Yankeetown, are small, many people live in substandard housing, and where local governments have little capacity to aid with rebuilding. There, communities are still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Idalia, which also brought a large storm surge to the region.
“This stuff’s coming in, it’s fierce, and it’s just unstoppable,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said at a press conference Saturday in Dekle Beach. “There’s a lot of damage that we’re seeing here. I remember … I walked the streets after Idalia in some of these areas, but this was like, ‘Wow.’ You see some just complete obliteration for homes.”
As residents such as Pike prepared to return to their campgrounds and homes to start over, they seemed resigned. Robert Thomas, 64, just moved to the Eleanor Oaks trailer park three weeks ago. Thomas has lived in Florida since 2018, making him no stranger to major hurricanes, but this was the first time he’s had to evacuate a place he’s still settling into. With the roads blocked, he doesn’t know when, or if, he’ll be able to return.
“I tried calling over there this morning,” said Thomas, who was waiting with Pike in the grocery store parking lot. “No one answered.”
Robert Thomas waits to bring his trailer back to the Eleanor Oaks mobile home park following Hurricane Helene. The park, and the rest of Yankeetown, Florida, saw widespread flooding.
Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
Florida’s Big Bend has had worse disaster luck than perhaps any other region in the country this decade — so much so that it has earned the moniker “hurricane alley” — but its recovery has taken place largely out of the public eye. Too far from major vacation destinations, rural communities like Inglis and Yankeetown have a track record of navigating extreme weather disasters without much aid from the government, or attention from the rest of the world. A year after Hurricane Idalia, Florida’s top disaster official, praised the fact that the recovery in Big Bend had required relatively little federal spending.
“Obviously $500 million goes a lot farther in a location like the Big Bend than it does in a highly populated area like southwest Florida,” Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said in late August.
But the lack of local resources makes dealing with a hurricane evacuation extremely difficult.
Yankeetown and Inglis deputy fire chief, Kelly Salter, said that the rollercoaster of storms over the past few years has influenced many residents’ decisions about whether to evacuate. Last August, Idalia, also a Category 4, caught many holdouts by surprise. Still reeling from that disaster, residents actually evacuated during the smaller Hurricane Debby earlier this summer, but when Debby produced only a minimal surge, Salter thinks they felt emboldened to resist evacuation orders again.
Helene’s massive circumference — around 400 miles across — fueled its record-breaking storm surge along the Gulf Coast, from Tampa Bay, which saw more than 6 feet of water, up to the beach towns of the Panhandle, which saw close to 20 feet. Yankeetown experienced an estimated 12-foot surge, Salter said, enough to push water up to the windows of homes that had been touched by just a few inches of flooding during Idalia.
Dozens of residents who chose not to evacuate found themselves climbing to their rooftops as the storm roared down upon Levy County, in a desperate attempt to escape the rapidly rising, sewage-riddled waters. In Yankeetown, 20 people had to be rescued. More than half were discovered sequestered on their roofs. Although both towns sit entirely within a FEMA-designated floodplain, only around 300 of their more than combined 1000 households hold flood insurance policies.
Floodwater recedes from the Eleanor Oaks trailer park in Yankeetown, Florida, after Hurricane Helene. The storm made landfall near Yankeetown as a Category 4 hurricane.
Jake Bittle / Grist
“One lady said, ‘Well, I’ve been here for 37 years, nothing has happened,’” said Salter. “And I said, ‘But it did this time, and now you’re putting all of us at risk. Now we have to come and get you because you didn’t do what we told you to do in the first place.’”
Helene is the first hurricane where Salter and her crew had any help from federal and state search and rescue teams.
In the days and weeks to come, the full scope of the damage left by Helene in northwestern Florida’s rural, inland towns will become more clear. What is already obvious is the limited personnel and resources available to help Yankeetown and Inglis rebuild. The budget of Yankeetown is under $4 million, less than the value of some homes in Florida, and its town manager doubles as a local pastor. Salter is not only the deputy fire chief and emergency management coordinator, using a Gmail account for her fire department business, but she also owns a construction company.
“We pretty much have job security here because we have so many hurricanes,” she said.
Dozens of people were killed across multiple states this week as Hurricane Helene swept across parts of the Southeastern United States, bringing heavy rains and a 15-foot storm surge. Coastal towns and cities in Florida were devastated when the Category 4 hurricane made landfall, but communities inland bore a similar brunt as the storm carved a path through North Carolina, South Carolina…
Dozens of people were killed across multiple states this week as Hurricane Helene swept across parts of the Southeastern United States, bringing heavy rains and a 15-foot storm surge.
Coastal towns and cities in Florida were devastated when the Category 4 hurricane made landfall, but communities inland bore a similar brunt as the storm carved a path through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.
At least 42 people have died from the storm. As of Friday, Florida reported seven deaths. Georgia, meanwhile, reported 15, and South Carolina, 17. In both of the latter states, most of the known fatalities were from falling trees and debris. North Carolina reported two deaths, including a car crash that killed a 4-year-old girl after a road flooded.
Atlanta received 11.12 inches of rain in 48 hours, breaking its previous record of 9.59 inches in the same time period from 1886, according to Bill Murphey, Georgia’s state climatologist. More than 1 million Georgia residents also lost power in the storm, particularly in southern and eastern parts of the state.
Floodwaters from Hurricane Helene surround a home near Peachtree Creek in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 27.
AP Photo/Jason Allen
In western North Carolina, officials sounded alarms and went door-to-door evacuating residents south of the Lake Lure Dam in Rutherford County after the National Weather Service warned that a dam failure was “imminent.” Emergency crews also conducted more than 50 swift water rescues across the region, with one sheriff’s department warning it could not respond to all of the 911 calls due to flooded roads. The North Carolina Department of Transportation warned on social media that “all roads in Western NC should be considered closed” due to flooding from Helene.
In Tennessee, more than 50 people were stranded on the roof of a hospital due to heavy flooding and had to be rescued by helicopter. Residents of Cocke County in Tennessee were also asked to evacuate after reports that a separate dam could fail, although officials later said the dam failure had been a false alarm. In South Carolina, the National Weather Service said the storm was “one of the most significant weather events… in the modern era.”
The hurricane’s widespread flooding was worsened by climate change, scientists told Grist. Hurricane Helene was an unusually large storm with an expansive reach. After forming in the Caribbean, it traveled over extremely warm ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico that enabled the storm to intensify more quickly than it may have otherwise. In fact, Helene went from a relatively weak tropical storm to a Category 4 in just two days. Warmer air also holds more moisture, supercharging the storm’s water content and leading to more rapid rainfall and intense flooding.
“When that enhanced moisture comes up and hits terrain like the Appalachian Mountains,” said University of Hawaiʻi meteorology professor Steve Businger,“it results in very, very high rainfall rates, exceptionally high rainfall rates and that unfortunately results in a lot of flash flooding.”
Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at the scientific group Climate Central, said research has shown that the Gulf’s current extra-warm ocean temperatures were made up to 500 times more likely with climate change. “One of the things that we’re seeing with these big storms, especially as they seem to become more frequent, is that they’re no longer natural disasters, but that they’re unnatural disasters,” Winkley said. “It’s not just a normal weather system anymore.”
A tree felled by Hurricane Helene leans on a home in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 27.
Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images
Hurricanes are naturally occuring, of course, but the conditions that led to Helene’s severity — its rapid intensification and heavy rainfall — were partially driven by warmer ocean and atmospheric temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels. “There is a fingerprint of climate change in that process,” Winkley said.
“This summer was record warm globally and there was a record amount of water vapor in the global atmosphere,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA. Both factors contributed to what the Southeastern U.S. experienced this week. “This is one of the more significant flood events in the U.S. in recent memory.”
Initial estimates for the storm’s damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure range between $15 billion and $26 billion, the New York Times reported. Busingersaid he expects the enormous loss to fuel more conversations about the precarity of the existing property insurance system. “The cost to society is becoming extravagant,” he said.
Scientists noted that the fact that the storm’s winds increased by 55 miles per hour in the 24 hours before it made landfall also made it deadlier.
“It was so strong and moving so fast it just didn’t have time to weaken very much before it made it far inland,” Swain said. Rapid intensification is particularly dangerous, he said, because people often make decisions on how to prepare for storms and whether or not to evacuate based on how bad they appear to be initially.
“It was one of the faster intensifying storms on record,” Swain said. “This is not a fluke. We should expect to see more rapidly intensifying hurricanes in a warming climate.”
Hurricane Helene slammed into the Florida coast on Thursday night, bringing pounding rains and “fierce, whipping winds that sounded like jet engines revving,” according to the New York Times. As it ripped through Florida and moved into Georgia, more than 2 million people lost power. While hurricanes are no stranger to the Gulf Coast, climate change has intensified their destructive impacts…
