Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

We still have time to mess this up!

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

How stupid are these people?

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

“Alexa, change the president.”

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Fight them, without becoming them!

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Asheville, Goddam

Asheville, Goddam

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Asheville, Goddam

My wife and I are traveling from Hawaii to Rochester, picking up our van, then heading to Virginia and back to Denver, and I wanted to travel through Asheville on the way back, so I’ve been watching the news about that town. It’s awful.  This is a town that’s 6 hours from the nearest beach.

A few years back, we visited Corning, NY, which was inundated by a flood caused by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, and there are still markings on the walls there indicating the high points of the flood caused by that storm.  They weren’t at the rooftops, but it was still bad.   So, massive inland flooding caused by tropical storms dumping massive amounts of rain isn’t unprecedented, but this feels different.   Some of the mountain towns around Asheville are still cut off, and at least 1,100 people are missing.

I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity, and I think we can fight the causes of climate change and engineer solutions to limit loss of life.  But we can’t do this if a bunch of ideologues who pretend it doesn’t exist are in charge.

Reader Interactions

147Comments

  1. 1.

    Poe Larity

    Those missing numbers are scary.

    My wife and I are traveling from Hawaii to Rochester, picking up our van, then heading to Virginia and back to Denver,

    I think you’re doing it the hard way. There’s a map thingy on your phone thingy that might help.

  3. 3.

    frosty

    Re: faith in human ingenuity and engineering solutions. This book is fiction, and maybe science fiction, but it had some interesting solutions to problems from climate change which sound feasible. I hope someone is thinking about it.

    Ministry for the Future

  4. 4.

    HumboldtBlue

    The images, stories and videos from Western North Carolina are heart-breaking. Just utter devastation.

  6. 6.

    frosty

    @@mistermix.bsky.social: Well, I’ve done that a few times and I’m here to tell you it will take some time. First, figuring out what part of your trip you want to blog about, second, sorting through 50+ pictures to find 10. Third, deciding it will take two posts to cover everything because you had a lot of pictures. Fourth, writing an intro and captions. #4 is kind of what you’re doing with one of these front page posts.

    I’d love to see what you’ve got to write about where you’ve been!

  7. 7.

    lowtechcyclist

    I may be wrong, but my impression is that the folks in western NC and east TN didn’t get a whole lot of warning of the impending disaster. The people in coastal FL had days of warning about the storm surge right up to landfall, and seemingly hours later, it was dumping shit-tons of rain in narrow mountain valleys.

  8. 8.

    Jackie

    Latest death toll has jumped from 54 to 89 per evening news. That number won’t be the final count.😢

    Asheville always intrigued me as a possible place to retire to… politics and climate change have made me rethink it.

  11. 11.

    Dangerman

    Can’t buy fire insurance in some places in CA. Well, I suppose you could if you are Elon or willing to sell some vital organs.

    Same thing will happen with flooding. If you HAD it, rates are destined to go sky high.

  12. 12.

    Spanky

    @Trivia Man: Agnes was in June of’72. Way early for a hurricane, and it too stalled. Everyone in the Susquahana and Allegheny watersheds have Agnes stories.

    Asheville will not be the same.

  14. 14.

    TaMara

    I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity, and I think we can fight the causes of climate change and engineer solutions to limit loss of life.  But we can’t do this if a bunch of ideologues who pretend it doesn’t exist are in charge.

    Thank you for that

  15. 15.

    JoyceH

    I’m really paying attention to this because a friend and I went to Asheville just a couple months ago. We toured Biltmore and the Chihuly exhibit and also did part of the River Arts District. (We did what we could, but there’s a LOT there!) Biltmore is on higher ground so it seems to be fine, but a good chunk of the River Arts District was underwater. News reports wonder if the District will be able to retain its “funky vibrant vibe”.

  16. 16.

    TaMara

    @lowtechcyclist: I think it was a flash flood, so not a lot of notice  is correct. When we had the catastrophic flash flood here, they had maybe a couple of hours notice and were banging on doors downstream as the water rushed toward them minutes later.

    I literally went to bed, day three of a steady, but not horrendous, rainfall, and awoke to our entire city being cut off from everyone.  And devastation across two counties and multiple communities.

  17. 17.

    Spanky

    As a metric, the Johnstown Flood of 1889 killed 2208. It too was triggered by heavy rainfall, but over several days. The South Fork Dam failed, sending a wall of water down the valley.

    My grandfather was 26 and working on the Pennsylvania Railroad. He was called on to be on the first relief train to make it there, since he was from nearby Portage. It was something he could never talk about, according to my dad.

  18. 18.

    kalakal

    Florida got it’s lesson the hard way with Andrew in 1992. It was a small storm but very powerful, it destroyed over 60,000 homes. Had it come in 20 miles further north it would have flattened Miami. Nearly all the damage was caused by wind. Building codes and general preparations improved immensely

  22. 22.

    Another Scott

    Asheville had gotten 14.2″ of rain in September even before Helene’s remnants arrived. It looks like the airport got an additional 1.2″ or so on the 27th.

    Glade Creek, NC got 17.5″ of rain in the last week.

    That much water has to go somewhere… :-(

    There are still markers one can find in Dayton after the Great Flood of 1913. A series of dams and other flood control measures were built and completed in 1922.

    There are areas in WV that have had huge flooding events as well.

    One can imagine a great building spree to try to control these giant floods, but the atmosphere is so much warmer now, holding so much more water, that it seems to be an even more massive job than it might initially appear right now…

    :-(

    Best wishes to everyone affected,
    Scott.

  23. 23.

    RevRick

    As catastrophic as the loss of life may be from Helene, the big weather killer is still heat. Phoenix and Las Vegas are just one power outage in a heat wave from mass death.
    And we see the freakout over refugees pouring over our Southern border. Now multiply that by a thousand, when heat and sustained brutal wet bulb temperatures render huge swaths of territory uninhabitable.

  24. 24.

    different-church-lady

    But we can’t do this if a bunch of ideologues who pretend it doesn’t exist are in charge.

    We also can’t do it if the people of North Carolina keep voting for the ideologues.

  25. 25.

    RevRick

    @Spanky: The South Fork dam was built to create a playground for the rich, some of Pittsburgh’s elites were investors in the project. But in the immediate aftermath blame was placed on…. Hungarians, who were alleged to be robbing…. and cannibalizing the dead.
    *Does this sound familiar?

  27. 27.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @JoyceH: Biltmore Estate is okay, but Biltmore Village is inundated. These were the highest water levels for the Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers ever.  Duke Power is estimating that power won’t be restored until Friday, which means everything else (water, food, etc) will take longer.

    The River Arts district is (well, was) mostly kitsch for tourists. It was vibrant back in the late 90s/early naughts when artists who used to rent cheap upstairs lofts were chased out of downtown by rising rents and gentrification.  They moved into the old warehouse district down by the river until that became a new thing for the tourists.

    @lowtechcyclist: NWS was predicting a possible “catastrophic” event a couple of days before Helena landfall. What made this really bad was that we had around 10 inches of rain from a different storm system the day before Helena hit. I’ve been in Fayetteville this week so I missed the storms.

  31. 31.

    Jackie

    @HumboldtBlue: My daughter’s in-laws live in eastern TN; Greeneville, to be specific. All are accounted for, although cut off from one another due to washed out/blocked off roads. Daughter and SIL lived there for a few years. I visited twice to welcome 2nd grandson and then once more before they moved “back home” to WA for a few years. Such beautiful country – although redder than red politically. This was during the Obama yrs.

  33. 33.

    Another Scott

    Governor Roy Cooper

    @NC_Governor
    5h

    There is a massive effort underway to get help to the people of western North Carolina including state and federal relief but we know there will be additional needs. If you would like to donate to the NC Disaster Relief Fund, visit nc.gov/donate.

    Sep 29, 2024 · 8:49 PM UTC

    (via Fritschner)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  34. 34.

    Leto

    there are still markings on the walls there indicating the high points of the flood caused by that storm.

    We will have marks from Katrina until they’re displaced by a larger hurricane. Charlestonians still talk about Hugo. I knew old timers who still spoke of Gracie. Some of these events leave permanent scars that just never go away, even when the people that experienced them first hand have moved on from that place.

  37. 37.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @different-church-lady: Dems typically get more votes in NC, but gerrymandering here is demonic. Even so we had a bare majority in the GA until She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named played butthurt over some perceived slight (that was the public reason, I’m sure Art Pope had something to do with it) and switched parties.

  38. 38.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @@mistermix.bsky.social:

    I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity, and I think we can fight the causes of climate change and engineer solutions to limit loss of life.

    Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world has let civil engineering capacity atrophy badly, or has never developed it. Other than the obvious exception of the PRC, the only ones I can think of that still has retained significant capabilities are South Korea & Türkiye.

    This is not just about technical knowhow, but ability to construct quickly & at scale, & w/ acceptable quality.

  40. 40.

    Chet Murthy

    @lowtechcyclist: I may be wrong, but my impression is that the folks in western NC and east TN didn’t get a whole lot of warning of the impending disaster.

    This for sure doesn’t change anything, but I -do- remember seeing the predicted storm track back when Helene was still forming near the Yucatan, and it was predicted to do what it did — which is to track north to eastern TN and then just stall there.  Now what I don’t know (b/c wasn’t paying that kind of attention) is whether predictions were made for the kind of rainfall they got.  But for sure, it was predicted to stall where it stalled.

  41. 41.

    Bupalos

    Many of the people voting for climate change are not ideologies, in fact very few of them are. If, a quarter century or so since we became viscerally aware of this issue, you’re personally living a lifestyle that largely runs on gas and jet fuel and red meat, then you’re part of the reason there won’t be a “larger political solution”

  43. 43.

    TBone

    @Spanky: I have an original newspaper (crumbling but legible) from the day of the Johnstown flood that was saved by my ancestors in our old PA family farmhouse.

  46. 46.

    wjca

    @different-church-lady: We also can’t do it if the people of North Carolina keep voting for the ideologues.

    Eastern Tennessee may be equally hard hit.  Just hasn’t made the news yet.  North Carolina seems to be moving away from the ideologues.  Tennessee?  Not so much.

  47. 47.

    Princess

    I’m hearing about so many places with no phone or cell or internet service. I’m hoping a lot of the 1000+ missing are simply people who can’t communicate to say they are alive.

  50. 50.

    Ksmiami

    @xephyr: like the Ancient cultures Jared Diamond covered in Collapse: the worse things got in terms of resources, weather, food, the more people were sacrificed to the gods…but in the end it all fell

  51. 51.

    TBone

    Agnes, ’72 was and still is a huge deal here in my valley.

    Tropical Storm Agnes, which hit the Susquehanna Valley in late June 1972, remains the flood of record in dozens of locations throughout our watershed. It was known as the costliest natural flood in US history, according to Stuhl, taking more than 125 lives and causing more than $3 billion (in 1972 money) in damage across the Mid-Atlantic – the bulk of that was in Pennsylvania and the bulk of our statewide damage was felt in the Susquehanna Valley.

    “This would be why people are still talking about this event 50 years later – because it is our worst natural disaster,” Stuhl said. “It is to the credit of those who lived through it who maintained the history of the storm as a benchmark, as a warning and a cautionary tale of what it is like to live with rivers.”

    https://www.middlesusquehannariverkeeper.org/blog/agnes-flood-of-1972s-long-lasting-emotional-ecological-and-economic-impacts-still-felt-after-50-years

  53. 53.

    MissWimsey

    I lived in West Asheville for a few years back in the late aughts. Lying on the floor next to me is my dog, who is adopted from Brother Wolf Animal Rescue before I relocated in 2011. I used to spend so much time just driving those back roads to the Blue Ridge Parkway, to the Smokies — just exploring and being amazed at how untouched and beautiful the region was. I visited Brevard, Black Mountain, Blowing Rock, Little Switzerland, Franklin, Lake Lure — I did an Easter sunrise service at Chimney Rock. I have so many memories of how wonderful the whole region could be — it hurts to see it like this and I cannot imagine how frightening it was to go through this. I saw a video on twitter taken just as the flash flood hit in front of a home — the speed of the water was intense. I almost wish I hadn’t seen that.

  54. 54.

    Tony G

    And about half of the people who will bother to vote in a few weeks will vote for that bunch of ideologues.

  58. 58.

    Bupalos

    @different-church-lady: when Megan Thee Stallion was giving her energetic endorsement for Harris at a concert, she did a long list of things Kamala was going to do… the loudest cheer was for “Kamala gettin ready to lower these gas prices.”

  60. 60.

    TooManyJens

    @Princess: ​

    I’m hoping a lot of the 1000+ missing are simply people who can’t communicate to say they are alive.

    Seems likely from what I’ve been reading.

    I was supposed to be going to Asheville to canvass for most of October, but, well. Not sure what to do now. They don’t even know when people will have water, and a lot of people don’t have homes anymore. Canvassing would be ghoulish. If the place I was planning to stay has water and power, I’m sort of tempted to go anyway and try to help out, but that might not be useful since I don’t have specialized skills or any connections there.

  62. 62.

    frosty

    @TBone: Ellicott City MD got hammered by Agnes, I’ve seen the high water marks. I don’t know if the two recent “1000-year” storms were higher. I don’t think so because these were floods coming downstream through the town instead of the Patapsco rising up like the Pigeon in NC.

    I was away in San Diego in June of ’72, looking at pictures in the paper of the Baltimore Beltway flooded up to the overpasses – sections I’d been commuting on the previous summer.

  63. 63.

    wjca

    @xephyr:  the states impacted most by climate change seem to be on the red side. Go figure…

    Not hard to figure.  The places most impacted would be the places where dealing with the impact would be most costly.  Even for just the changes are already baked in (i.e. even if we stopped all carbon dioxide production world wide instantly).

    Vastly cheaper, and therefore easier, in the immediate term, to pretend nothing is really happening.  It’s the ostrich approach.

  66. 66.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    @lowtechcyclist: Weather maps showing the hurricane remnants would head north and then west were out fairly early, by Helene had come close to Cuba. The predictions as to direction were pretty solid.
    What was unclear was how much rain & wind the remnants would be carrying; some storms can drop huge amounts and others will give you a day’s solid rain but not anything to worry about.  You have to move on the fly at that point. The state authorities and weather service seem to have done their jobs, and with this sort of flooding, there’s not a lot you can do in advance.

  67. 67.

    TBone

    Ever hopeful, I remain, as the quest continues

    The company plans to vaporize enough rock to create the world’s deepest holes and harvest geothermal energy at a scale that could satisfy human energy consumption for millions of years. They haven’t yet solved all the related engineering challenges, but Quaise’s founders have set an ambitious timeline to begin harvesting energy from a pilot well by 2026.

    The plan would be easier to dismiss as unrealistic if it were based on a new and unproven technology. But Quaise’s drilling systems center around a microwave-emitting device called a gyrotron that has been used in research and manufacturing for decades.

    “This will happen quickly once we solve the immediate engineering problems of transmitting a clean beam and having it operate at a high energy density without breakdown,” explains Woskov, who is not formally affiliated with Quaise but serves as an advisor. “It’ll go fast because the underlying technology, gyrotrons, are commercially available.

    https://energy.mit.edu/news/mit-spinout-quaise-energy-working-to-create-geothermal-wells-made-from-the-deepest-holes-in-the-world/

  69. 69.

    Chet Murthy

    @TBone: okay, the excerpt wasn’t clear to me, so I read the article and now it’s clear.  They’re going to use these gyotrons to drill holes far deeper than currently feasible, like 20 km deep, And thenUse those for geothermal energy.  They talk about drilling those holes at existing coal-fired power plants so they can reuse all the infrastructure.  If it works it’ll be great!

  70. 70.

    wjca

    @Bupalos: the idea that we can engineer, grow, or build our way out of climate change is in my mind a sign of our addiction.

    Yet what is a solar panel but an engineered step towards addressing the problem?  Building more of those, growing/expanding use, both steps in the right direction.  Clearly not a complete solution — no single approach to a complex problem can be.

    Still, if we are not to slash our population by 80%, and revert to 1700s technology, the only way forward involves lots of engineering and building.

  71. 71.

    JoyceH

    @Leto: I can’t tell you how disillusioned I was years ago to learn that those iconic London “pea-souper “ fogs were actually coal smog.

  73. 73.

    RaflW

    @Leto: A friend is the minister of a church in Charleston. We toured it Thanksgiving weekend of ’22. The building about 3,000 feet inland, in the heart of the town.

    Their insurance co, Church Mutual (so, a not-for-profit that exists for the mutual benefit of members) cancelled them a year or so ago. Not for doing anything wrong. The insurer just said, we can’t write coverage for you — for anything — any more. Too many risks with flooding, hurricanes, sever weather of all sorts. We’ve heard they’re non-renewing many congregations (of all sorts of denominations) in coastal areas.

    So they’re going bare (Church Mutual is often the only insurer who will do churches. It’s just such a particular set of risks and costs). So if there’s a big loss of any sort, the congregation will just be homeless. I guess they’d still own the historic graveyard next door, unless all that is washed away.

  74. 74.

    Ishiyama

    Kamala Harris was in Las Vegas. People will talk about her extremely fashionable suit. She looked great.

  75. 75.

    Kelly

    I saw pics of a guy with a string of a dozen or so mules hauling supplies into a badly damaged area. Sometimes the old ways work well.

  76. 76.

    Burnspbesq

    We have family in Asheville and Black Mountain and friends in Brevard. Texts have gone unanswered since Thursday.

  77. 77.

    Chet Murthy

    OK, I variously read that Asheville can expect another massive bout of rain in 10-12 days, and that there’s another storm forming up in the Gulf down by Yucatan right now.  Crrrrikey

  78. 78.

    Brendan In NC

    @different-church-lady: Correct, but Asheville itself is a deep blue spot in a red area. My nephew lives in Boone (2 hrs NE of Asheville) – his apartment had 2.5 feet of water in it after flooding, and his car’s underwater. We knew it was going to be a doozy because we’d been warned (In Charlotte, NC) that it would be heading toward there, and link up with a 2nd low pressure system already dumping rain on the area…

  79. 79.

    SW

    I think we screwed the pooch early on by labeling the problem “global warming”.  Heat is just one manifestation of energy.  What we are doing is increasing the energy in a complex nonlinear system. Yes it means warmer average temperatures globally but that is just one of the myriad of consequences that flow from shaking that snow globe ever harder.

  81. 81.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Bupalos: Deploying solar/wind/nuclear/battery storage at massive scale to replace fossil fuels as much as possible requires civil engineering. Building dams & dikes to hold back rising sea levels & ensuring some of the low-lying areas remain habitable requires civil engineering. Building new communities (& associated infrastructure) & expanding existing communities (& associated infrastructure) at higher ground, at a massive scale, to accommodate the torrent of migrants from lower ground require civil engineering. Rebuilding & repairing damaged communities from ever more extreme weather events require civil engineering.

    Either countries quickly regain their lost competencies in civil engineering (among other skills), or the stresses from AGW will cause societal collapse (or at least reconfiguration) & possibly civil war over dwindling resources.

  85. 85.

    Chet Murthy

    @SW: back in the late 1970s in high school debate one of the questions was about climate change.  Even back then it wasn’t just about global warming, but rather that warming would amp up everything, cause more extreme weather events commaMore hurricanes more rain More snow,Just more extreme weather events.  I don’t know that There was anything that we could have done To Convince these people who refuse to be convinced.  Motivated reasoning is difficult to defeat.

  86. 86.

    TS

    @KatKapCC:

    Absolutely awful. I hope the Biden admin is providing whatever aid they can.

    They should all be very relieved that this happened during a democratic administration. Of course President Biden will have all hands on deck for this one.

  87. 87.

    Chet Murthy

    @TS: My memory is that the Biden admin made federal declarations of emergency for all states that requested ’em, several days before the hurricane hit.  Which states (haha, sigh, groan) didn’t include TN.  B/c Jayzus.

  88. 88.

    narya

    There’s a plaque on a building wall in Easton PA noting the high water mark from Hurricane Diane. The Delaware River is the border between NJ and PA and there’s a big/high river bank, so I was really struck by that when I saw it. I think my mom has a book about that hurricane and flood. I always think about that when I see flooding news.

  89. 89.

    SW

    For the first twenty years or so the most effective argument made by the denialists was that the uncertainties in the climate models were so great that they precluded using these models to justify action that could be damaging to the economy and our standard of living.

    This argument used uncertainty as a justification for inaction.  Allowing this argument to gain traction was a critical failure of our institutions.  The climate being a complex nonlinear system has uncertainty built into it.  The uncertainty is in reality the most terrifying aspect of the problem.  We never really got that point across properly.

  90. 90.

    Lily

    My good friend returned to live in Asheville to join her daughters who grew up there, all musicians eking a living.  Houses at a higher elevation than the main downtown but near water. No  word of course. My friend grew up in a rugged way and still has those skills so I’m picturing her at work and able to lend a hand to others.  Wish I knew though.

  92. 92.

    Josie (also)

    @Another Scott: There was a drought in the area, and then a front that caught an existing storm that caused a lot of rain in the Blue Ridge mountains last Tuesday.  The ground was saturated before Helene came through.  Helene came faster than forecasted, and dropped much more rain than forecasted.  When you are in the mountains there are not a lot of ways for the water to go but little creeks and rivers going down.  The waterways were way over their usual courses.  A biblical storm.

  93. 93.

    Chet Murthy

    @SW: Do you remember “the 1% doctrine” ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Percent_Doctrine

    If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.

    I remember when I heard about that (back during the Chimperor’s reign of error) and it was immediately apparent to me The Climate Change Corollary.  And  yet, the same people who trumpeted the 1% Doctrine’s application to terrorism, refused to apply it to climate change.

    I submit that the problem was not uncertainty: it was that they didn’t want to hear it.

  95. 95.

    Soprano2

    @Leto: We had an ice storm here that people who lived through it will never forget. Not nearly as bad as what these people are going through, but it was hopefully a once in a lifetime event.

  96. 96.

    BR

    @HumboldtBlue: ​

    The 1989 quake was like this level of damage in parts of the bay area. It took a decade for basic things to be rebuilt and two decades for some highways to be finished. But yeah, it’s that scale of devastation.

  97. 97.

    TS

    @Chet Murthy:

    Which states (haha, sigh, groan) didn’t include TN.  B/c Jayzus.

    Not asking won’t stop them telling everyone they were left out of the Federal declarations.

  98. 98.

    Chet Murthy

    @BR: That was the quake that pancaked a highway leading to the Hayes Valley neighborhood in SF, right?  I came to SF in 2007, and that nbhd was still run-down from the aftermath.

  99. 99.

    Anoniminous

    @SW:

    It was effective because the average American is an ignorant motherfucker and damn proud of it.

    “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” — Issace Asimov

  100. 100.

    Chet Murthy

    @TS: haha, indeed it won’t, but from what I understand, the USG can’t make the declaration without the governor’s request.  State’s rights!  Ha!  After Helene hit, the TN gov did make the request.   Better late than never.

  102. 102.

    BR

    @Chet Murthy: ​

    Yeah. Pancaked freeways in Oakland and SF, broke part of the bay bridge, collapsed whole neighborhoods in SF, half of downtown Santa Cruz collapsed and then burned down, etc.

  104. 104.

    Trollhattan

    Kiddo”s maybe an hour east in Winston Salem. These “random events” have a way of becoming personal.

    Simply from video I’ve seen those poor folks won’t have normal back for half a decade.

  105. 105.

    wjca

    @Chet Murthy: Which states (haha, sigh, groan) didn’t include TN.  B/c Jayzus.

    Tennessee didn’t totally ignore the problem however.  The Governor did declare a Day of Prayer and Voluntary Fasting.  Not sure how much that helped….

  106. 106.

    Citizen Alan

    @Chet Murthy: Imagine someone put a box in front of you with a shiny red button in the middle of it and told you that, if you pressed the button, you would immediately be given a million dollars. But a scientist standing next him also tells you that if you press the button, there is a strong likelihood that, 50-100 years from now, millions of people will die as a proximate result of pressing the button. What percentage of people would press the button and then rationalize away what the scientist said? Now ask yourself, what percentage of oil company executives or even just people who are heavily invested in the oil sector would press that button without a second thought? Hell, what percentage of conservative evangelical Christians would press the button even as the laughed mockingly at the idea that we will make it 50-100 years before Jesus comes back and Raptures all the Christians away.

  109. 109.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Citizen Alan: I’m starting to put “Christian’”in quotes. (Because they don’t match up to the teachings, as I understood them when I was a regular child church attendee.)

    I said to a friend today this is what bottled water is for, and it all needs to ship over to the disaster area, where it’s urgently needed. She said, they aren’t gonna do that, how would the get their money?  My reply:

    Money and profit is so much more important than human lives. //s Actually that should be the subtitle to whatshisnames campaign.
    “T for president, money and profit matters so much more than human lives.”

    we giggled our outrage in sarcastic agreement.

    So much of the climate change comes straight from denialists who would push that button, never mind their grandkids, or who just go for the immediate profit gratification, never mind the long term costs and consequences to others.

    It makes more sense to me to consider many generations later how this will go. That stewardship is for the land and resources, not for a few big bank accounts.
    it’s very troubling.

  113. 113.

    hotshoe

    @BR:Still not even an order of magnitude as bad as this flood is turning out to be.

    63 people died in 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the majority under the section of freeway which collapsed — which has since been rebuilt with (we hope) sufficiently engineered protection against the next major quake, so that specific tragedy will never happen again. In Santa Cruz, 40 buildings collapsed, none caught fire, 6 people died in a couple of the collapsed stores.  In San Francisco’s Marina district, 4 buildings caught fire and about 70 other buildings were red-tagged.

    Yes, I would always choose to live in “earthquake country” instead of “flood country”.

    I’ve actually hiked to the Loma Prieta epicenter a couple of times. It’s in the middle of a redwood forest; there’s a boring little info sign — and if you know what you’re looking for, the trail goes near some groves of trees with “bent” trunks which were caused by the ground underneath tilting, then later their new growth heading up for a new vertical.​​​​

  115. 115.

    Matt McIrvin

    @TooManyJens: Somebody is going to need to make sure those people can vote, once their basic needs are met. I don’t know if a party canvasser is quite the role, though.

  117. 117.

    TBone

    @opiejeanne: 😆 thank you.  I am now starting my day off properly with a smile.  I just read Heather Cox Richardson and was PISSED but perspective was brought back by your comment.  😁

  119. 119.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Citizen Alan: ​

    Hell, what percentage of conservative evangelical Christians would press the button even as the laughed mockingly at the idea that we will make it 50-100 years before Jesus comes back and Raptures all the Christians away.

    Cripes, I first learned about all that End Times/Tribulation/Rapture stuff back in the summer of 1971, so from my personal POV it’s already been more than 50 years without Jesus coming back and Rapturing us all away. So it sure doesn’t look like he’s in a hurry about this. And why do they think this time is any more special than that one?
    @Gloria DryGarden: ​
     

    I’m starting to put “Christian’”in quotes. (Because they don’t match up to the teachings, as I understood them when I was a regular child church attendee.)

    I’ve started to refer to “people who identify as Christians” to be technically nonjudgmental about whether they are or not.

    As fundie preachers used to say, “joining a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than joining the Lions Club makes you a lion,” and that turn of phrase is ready to turn around and bite them right on the ass.

  120. 120.

    Jerszy

    My little sis and her fam have been stranded in their home up in the West Asheville mountains (in Clyde, to be exact) since Thursday night. She got word to me yesterday afternoon from a neighbor with StarLink: no phone or power, road to them is washed away. Hunkered down and counting blessings.

  121. 121.

    raven

    @Jerszy: My SIL is in West Asheville and her daughter lives out in the country and we have gotten word that they were safe. My buddy is in Brevard and we finally heard from him yesterday afternoon. It’s a nightmare and people can’t get out.

  124. 124.

    Barry

    @Trollhattan: “Simply from video I’ve seen those poor folks won’t have normal back for half a decade.”

     

    IMHO, far longer than that:

    Many places will not be worth rebuilding.

    Many people will not have the insurance money to rebuild.

    Red State aid will be terrible.

  125. 125.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @TBone: I’ve been following developments in geothermal. Oil companies are already drilling to depths at which constant geothermal energy can be tapped in reasonable proximity to just about everywhere. But being able to tap it right where existing power plants are is ideal because the system to draw and deliver power from those places is already in place.

    The last trip we took before the pandemic was a long (Veterans Day) weekend trip to Asheville. Stayed at The Grove Park Inn, which is where Henry Ford and his rich friends used to stay when in the area. I’ll never be a filthy rich industrialist but it was fun to just feel like we could get a glimmer of the lifestyle. Asheville was great, really fun, great food everywhere. The mountains around it are spectacular. We’ve been kicking the tires on retiring to that area but lately are thinking West Michigan. Not because of this flooding but mostly because I grew up in West Michigan and we have friends there. As you get older going somewhere where you have a ready waiting social life is a big draw.

  126. 126.

    lowtechcyclist

    We’ve got friends in the mountains on both sides of the NC-TN line, and we haven’t been able to contact them so far. We figure they’re probably conserving whatever power their cell phone batteries still have, and besides the towers might be down.  One friend of hers from college is in or near Spruce Knob, NC; a couple that were colleagues of hers long ago at Northeast Tennessee Community College are astronomers and have a place way up the mountain to get away from the lights of the Tri-Cities.  I’ve been to the couple’s place a few times, and my recollection is that their house is well situated to be out of any flash floods coming down the mountain, but it wouldn’t surprise me if their driveway and/or the road down the mountain are washed out.

    It’s always hard to realize there’s nothing you can do for people you know in situations like that, but there really isn’t a damn thing we can do. Certainly nobody other than rescue workers has any business trying to get there that wasn’t already there.

  127. 127.

    Matt McIrvin

    I had just been watching some old videos from the YouTube channel LGR (Lazy Game Reviews), who does a lot on old computers and their software and accessories. Watching one of them, on Microsoft Flight Simulator and the pleasure of flying over your own neighborhood in it, I realized that the creator, Clint Basinger, lives in Asheville. I did a search–he did tweet after the storm saying he wouldn’t be doing any videos for a while; sounds like he’s OK but he had to evacuate and his home sustained great damage.

  128. 128.

    TBone

    @What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: it is my fervent hope that the fueligarchs don’t start killing this geothermal research (and researchers) in their usual manner.  Once it becomes viable, which I am trying to will into existence by intention 😆 I hope all goes safely and smoothly, as is my hope for your transition to Michigan if that’s where you decide.  It’s always good to have people at the other end waiting for you 💙 as we are waiting on this miracle solution to the fossil fuels crisis.

    I had friends here in central PA when we moved from DelCo in 2015, but the pandemic and my politics caused me to be shunned in mid 2020 by most of my beloved hill people here.  Such is life.

  129. 129.

    Matt McIrvin

    I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity, and I think we can fight the causes of climate change and engineer solutions to limit loss of life.  But we can’t do this if a bunch of ideologues who pretend it doesn’t exist are in charge.

    A thing that’s kind of happening under the radar is an absolute explosion in global solar energy capacity, because it got dramatically cheaper to do so. The way that the rollout consistently destroys every big energy agency projection every single year has become a sort of running joke.

    This geothermal idea sounds like the kind of super-ambitious idea that often doesn’t pan out… but there are a lot of others like it. And even if nothing comes of it, this solar explosion is still rolling on.

    It feels dangerously naive to say that technology will save us–it won’t–but this gives us a tool. One of the most remarkable things to me is that the solar rollout in the US kept exploding even through Trump’s administration. He liked to brag about how he wanted to kill renewable energy, but he didn’t.

  132. 132.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Still. Renewables other than hydro power are still a tiny bit of global energy production, but the thing about exponentials is that they have a way of going from tiny to dominant sooner than you think–nothing else is blowing up like that. Obviously there are limits but we’re nowhere near them.

  134. 134.

    3Sice

    Not sure they’ve grokked the scale of the problem in western NC back in DC.

    Roads are unusable in Asheville. Bridges and culverts are washed out, trees everywhere, etc. So even if a store is open on generator, you can’t get to it. People are having to walk out of their neighborhoods. I don’t know what the bull about power is from Duke. Maybe the plant can spin up by Friday, but the line poles are all in the streets or lying in the mud. Lack of fuel is becoming an issue.

  135. 135.

    BellyCat

    @SW: I think we screwed the pooch early on by labeling the problem “global warming”.

    Global Weirding seems more apropos. Side benefit being that resulting geopolitical shifts  from climate change fit the label also too.

  137. 137.

    Denali5

    This is where I come from so it is very personal to me. I hope the people will have the resilience to come back from so much loss. They have the faith, but it will take so much determination and hard work to build back. Sometimes they make wrong decisions, like the coach in Johnson City who put football before the safety of his players. We have to keep on keeping on, but it is hard.

  138. 138.

    cmorenc

    @lowtechcyclist:

    I may be wrong, but my impression is that the folks in western NC and east TN didn’t get a whole lot of warning of the impending disaster. The people in coastal FL had days of warning about the storm surge right up to landfall, and seemingly hours later, it was dumping shit-tons of rain in narrow mountain valleys.

    Other than giving folks able & willing to do so time to flee the entire NC mountain region, 24-48 hours advance warning would have made little difference in the extent of flooding damage to roads, property, power lines, etc.

  139. 139.

    Denali5

    @3Sice:

    The lack of drinkable water in Asheville is a terrible problem, along with the power outage. I remember New Orleans after the hurricane; people with medical issues are going to have to evacuate.

  140. 140.

    3Sice

    @cmorenc:

    Thursday:

    In Asheville, Biltmore Village residents have been encouraged to evacuate as the National Weather Service and Buncombe County officials indicate the area will experience ‘historic’ flooding due to Hurricane Helene.

     

    Localized flooding from storms and hurricane remnants is pretty typical for the region, so maybe that factored in resident’s risk assessments. It always floods at Biltmore…

  141. 141.

    RAM

    We had driven through Vermont on our way to visit friends in New Hampshire when Hurricane Sandy hit. Communities we’d driven through the day before were nearly destroyed, and virtually every state highway in Vermont was damaged and closed. So on our way back to Illinois we had to take a substantial southern detour around the devastation. The radical right and their corporate overlords are directly responsible for the failure to address this accelerating climate disaster and the deaths and destruction that are coming with it.

    “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

  142. 142.

    lowtechcyclist

    @cmorenc:

    Other than giving folks able & willing to do so time to flee the entire NC mountain region, 24-48 hours advance warning would have made little difference in the extent of flooding damage to roads, property, power lines, etc.

    That’s really what I was thinking of – were they warned in time to get the hell out of Dodge while they could? The answer appears to be that the warnings were in time for that, but OTOH, it had to be hard for people to think that they might be hit by a storm of this severity.

  145. 145.

    kindness

    A friend of mine lives there. She was just able to post a ‘she’s OK’ on FB.  Her house/car didn’t get swept away but she’ll have no water for a week and no electricity for probably 2.  My heart goes out to them.

  146. 146.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Another Scott: Yes, vertical farming (of which the Netherlands is the world leader). Quite expensive, though.

    @Dan B: I am not suggesting that engineering will make AGW go away, that ship has sailed, but engineering solutions deployed quickly & at scale can help mitigate some of the worst effects, & help support the legitimacy of governments.

    Specifically on crop failure (either due to incessant drought or frequent flooding), part of the mitigation action is construction of dams & reservoirs in areas suffering from excessive precipitation, & building massive networks of canals/aqueducts to divert water from regions w/ overly abundant rainfall to regions w/ inadequate rainfall, such as the PRC’s South-North Water Transfer Project. Very expensive, lots of negative environmental/societal impact, controversial, but has helped to keep the parched northern China plains habitable & productive for agriculture/industry.

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