Country Folks Can Survive: Information fog post-Hurricane Helene

The federal government is really messing this one up

If one looks at a map of the damage from Hurricane Helene it starts just about where my retired mother lives in her now flooded out condo in Tampa Florida and ends almost exactly where this publication is based in western central Virginia. In a column stretching from north to south from both of these spots is destruction. But it is the mountains of North Carolina that got things worst.

I spent a good amount of the weekend catching up on what happened with this historic storm via videos from citizen journalists.

Having grown up in Virginia Beach I have been brushed by a bunch of hurricanes and went right through Hurricane Floyd which was a category 2 storm at the time. I spent much of that storm, probably stupidly (I was a good bit younger), in a cinder block condo overlooking the ocean on the south end of the strip. What I remember most was how much the sea rose. We were right at the First Street jetty where I had spent many many days surfing so I knew how the ocean moved in the area. I knew what it looked like when it was calm. I knew what it looked like when conditions for surfing were good. I knew what it looked like in a full on Nor’ Easter rager. But I had never seen the ocean act the way it did that night. I could actually see the storm surge.

The next day I had a minor adventure trying to make my way back to Northern Virginia where I lived at the time but nothing like what this couple experienced trying to get out of Asheville post-Helene.

This has been a particularly odd hurricane disaster because it slammed into the highest mountains east of the Mississippi River. Helene in all its furry ran right into the Smokies. These mountains, some over 6000 feet in elevation, squeezed the moisture out of the hurricane which then fell on the slopes and then ran into the streams and rivers which then carved their way through hollows (hollars), valleys, and towns. Mount Mitchell got over two feet of rain in 24 hours.

Something similar actually happened just south of me in 1969 when the remnants of Hurricane Camille got hung up on the peaks of Nelson County Virginia. Camille scoured the slopes and wrecked havoc.

So much rain fell in such a short time in Nelson County that, according to the National Weather Service at the time, it was “the probable maximum rainfall which meteorologists compute to be theoretically possible.”

To this day people still talk about that flood which killed 124 people, mostly in their sleep as the ground underneath their homes gave way. Sadly the scale of the disaster wrought by Helene is magnitudes worse.

We still don’t know exactly how many magnitudes but I recently spoke to a colleague at length about the situation on the ground (this person was sent to the mountains by their employer) in the Carolinas and people remain in shock. The destruction is catastrophic and it extends for hundreds of miles. There are still bodies to be pulled from trees and to be extracted from collapsed structures. There may still be people isolated in valleys who haven’t been contacted yet and we are well over a week out.

People often speak of “the fog of war” but large scale natural disasters have a fog too. I remember in the wake of Katrina there were reports initially of 100,000 people dead. The still tragic total was actually 1400 for the storm. But it wasn’t 100,000. Rumors spread. Tragedies were embellished while others were never reported on.

There is a fog around Helene also. Almost as soon as the rain stopped the rumors began. Some were true. Some had some grounding in truth. Some were false. How do I know? Because that is how these things always seem to play out. 9/11, Covid, name the disaster, this is the pattern.

We are still deep in the information fog of Helene.

One area of particular concern are reports that volunteers are being turned away and relief supplies confiscated because FEMA wants this to be “their show” and to assert federal authority.