Last week, Helene slammed across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, killing at least 160, with hundreds still missing. As of press time, about 1 million households — likely more than 2 million people — across eastern Georgia and the Western Carolinas didn't have electricity.
That includes two-thirds of Buncombe County, where Hill editor Katie Wadington found herself in the middle of the story: Without water, power or reliable cell service.
"A friend said that at times it looked like an episode of 'Walking Dead,' with people wandering in the streets," she wrote.
"To conserve gas, I haven't ventured far by car, except for a run to my husband's office in Hendersonville, which had running water. The lines at stations with fuel, or the promise of it, have stretched to a mile long."
Her family, Wadington emphasized, were among "the lucky ones" in a region marked by tragedy.
While the full picture of that damage is still coming in, the anecdotes are stark. Eleven workers, kept late at their rural Tennessee plastics plants, were swept away on their drives home; only five were rescued.
One North Carolina family watched their wheelchair-bound grandfather taken by floodwaters; the rest clung for hours to a floating guitar case amid water tainted by a burst septic line. The town of Swannanoa, N.C., was largely wrecked by floodwaters that crested the tops of houses.
The damage underscores the awful power of floodwaters in a warming world, particularly in small towns and mid-sized cities with aging sewer systems — including in high-elevation areas like Appalachia, which are far from the risk of sea level rise but where ancient mountain valleys can become death-traps for flash flooding.
On Monday, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that found that the average flood control project would reduce costs by $2-$3 for every $1 spent — and in some cases, as much as $6.
Damage from flooding has averaged $46 billion per year for the past decade, CBO found. That makes it part of a package of overlapping disasters that have put community banks across the nation at stark risk of failure, according to a report by First Street Foundation — widening the exposure of local economies to the onslaught of climate change, and threatening to create urban dead zones as the financing essential to everyday life, or rebuilding after disaster, dries up.
But the question of any kind of future planning for infrastructure or financial resilience is tied up in a much more immediate question: Which party will capture the government next month.
With Georgia and North Carolina on the short list of swing states, the catastrophe quickly became part of the contest for the presidency. Soon after the storm, President Biden blasted former President Trump's accusation — made from the devastated town of Valdosta, Ga. — that he had slow-walked disaster declarations.
Contradicting Trump, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has praised the federal response, adding that "we've had FEMA embedded with us since, you know, a day or two before the storm hit."
Yet those claims were liable to stick, Democratic strategist Megan Hays warned Newsweek. In an "election that is going to be won on the margins," Hays said, "people are going to remember he is on the ground."
Vice President Harris, meanwhile, is planning a tour of Helene damage in Georgia and the Carolinas, per Reuters.
But if the storm affects the election — and particularly if it makes it hard to vote — it may not be to Trump's benefit, The Washington Post noted: nearly a quarter of 2020 Trump voters in the key swing states of Georgia and North Carolina live in areas currently under federal disaster declaration.
"If those counties are unable to vote at the same level as they did four years ago by the time Election Day arrives, that could spell trouble for the former president," the Post noted.
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