Entire communities gone

Six months ago, I stood on Main Street in Chimney Rock, N.C., marveling at this postcard-perfect Southern Appalachian tourist town. Flanked by towering blue-green mountains, it nestled along a frothy whitewater stream where laughing children collected salamanders and sported a brewery, a barbecue joint, a magnificent ice cream shop, a gem store, and an array of little shops walking the fine line between kitschy and charming. It had become a favorite family haunt of ours, a place we’d try to get away to for a hike or invite friends to visit. Today, Chimney Rock is gone, wiped off the map—along with so many of the western Carolina towns and landscapes where I spent my childhood. As we watched the aerial footage of a valley choked with the fragments of upstream towns and shattered lives, my daughter wept silently beside me.

Today, the nation is slowly waking up to the scale of the apocalypse that Hurricane Helene unleashed over 8,000 square miles of the southern Appalachians, as hundreds of thousands struggle to find food, water, cell service, or just a way out of a wrecked and twisted landscape where almost every road was turned into a raging river. Our broken political system and absentee president have struggled to respond, with private citizens forced to organize helicopter rescues and insulin drops. Perhaps more than any disaster in recent memory, Helene highlights the increasingly yawning gap between our technical knowledge-gathering prowess and our capacity to act upon it. Our tech titans tell us all we need is more data. Appalachia begs to differ.

From a forecasting standpoint, Helene was a marvel, one of the best-predicted storms in history. On Sept. 17, a week before the storm formed, the National Hurricane Center warned of possible development. On Sept. 23, forecasters correctly predicted a massive major hurricane would form, hit the Big Bend of Florida, and rapidly barrel into the southern Appalachians. By the time Helene was named the next day, the National Weather Service was already warning of “VERY heavy rainfall & gusty winds” in the western Carolinas, a forecast it steadily escalated, in deference to consistently catastrophic model data, till it was warning of the worst flooding in modern history, 36 hours in advance.

But that is all data. People do not think in data. People think in pictures, and it is hard to form a mental picture of what it is like to flee a crumbling mountainside along a winding road choked with fallen trees beside a raging torrent higher than you have ever seen it. “Extended power outages likely”—but it is hard to form a mental picture of being trapped with an ailing parent for days with no water, no electricity, no communication, and no way out because the roads no longer exist. Should we have really expected state troopers to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of people in advance of the storm?

No, but perhaps we might have expected thousands of first responders and National Guard assets from around the region to be staged and ready for mass search and rescue, rather than scrambled ad hoc, as firemen from San Diego and aviators from Connecticut rushed to fill the breach. In 2005, Americans were appalled by the flat-footed, chaotic response to Hurricane Katrina, as their fellow citizens hunted desperately for drinking water amid putrid corpses. Never again, we said.

Two decades later, our technical, data-crunching, predictive capacities have advanced at the speed of light, while our practical, people-mobilizing, political capacities have not budged—or perhaps regressed. It does not matter what the experts know if they no longer have the people’s trust, and if they don’t, politicians will hardly stick their necks out to mobilize for an apocalypse that may not materialize—not after COVID.

Even to say this, however, may be to point too many fingers. Those in Silicon Valley like to think that more information means more control. And to a certain extent, they are right. In the Tennessee Valley right now, engineers are using data to control the flow of an unprecedented 450,000 cubic feet per second of water, so that Knoxville, Tenn., does not end up looking like Asheville, N.C. But Helene reminds us that decoding nature is not the same as mastering her, that the analog world cannot be bent to our will as readily as ones and zeros. Appalachia is a place of analog technologies—of pickup trucks and propane tanks and asphalt roads, no match for the floodgates of the heavens unleashed upon its steep mountainsides.

As our tech-saturated culture dreams of virtual reality, Helene is a rude wake-up call of the implacability of three-dimensional reality. We like to think that with enough information and prediction, we can preempt suffering and cheat death, but Helene reminds us that frail flesh is heir to a thousand mortal shocks, and life under the sun is always shot through with tragedy.