I didn’t pick up on the forecast

“Nowhere is safe” – Asheville, North Carolina resident

Oliver Milman, “‘Nowhere is safe’: shattered Asheville shows stunning reach of climate crisis”, The Guardian, October 1, 2024

When I last did my last post last week, I had no idea the devastation that would be wrought by the hurricane. I feared it would be bad for Florida being a Cat 4 hurricane, but I did not think North Carolina or Tennessee would be hammered.

Did the forecasters warn about the impending onslaught of rain? I think they did because I vaguely remember graphics with Asheville being sort of a bull’s eye for heavy rain, but the message did not sink in.

It really didn’t register until the next day or the weekend.

And since then I have not stopped perusing the news.

Did the forecasters stress enough about the dangers? I don’t know. I do recall the weather people trying to warn Florida residents to evacuate if told by their local officials and I was more in tuned with those warnings, knowing the dangers of storm surge. But I was not on the lookout for warnings for Georgia, North Carolina or Tennessee. Those were further inland and thus I thought the impact from Helene would be reduced due to land friction.

I didn’t know about the dangers of hurricanes meeting up with mountains.

This article, where I culled the quote from, describes how a series of storms hitting places previously deemed “safe” from climate change is now hitting us that “nowhere is safe”. Maybe Montana or Wisconsin, states up in those areas, but you might still suffer from the smoke fires trailing from Canada.

This other article provides a good scientific explanation of why hurricane Helene so adversely impacted Asheville and surrounding areas in the mountain. There were three factors contributing to the deluge, one of which is climate change.

I need to research this stunning statistic that Helene is the eighth hurricane categorized as a 4 or 5 to hit the US since 2017.

“Helene was the eighth category 4 or 5 hurricane to strike the US since 2017 – the same number of such extreme storms to hit the country in the previous 57 years.”

Oliver Milman, “‘Nowhere is safe’: shattered Asheville shows stunning reach of climate crisis”, The Guardian, October 1, 2024

Next time I will have to pay more attention to the forecasts, although hopefully, there won’t be a next time.