New beginning post-Helene or business as usual?

Bill Branyon

BY BILL BRANYON

As of Dec. 1, the U.S. Geological Survey had identified over 2,000 landslides caused by Tropical Storm Helene; more than 300 of them were in Buncombe County. According to official figures, 43 of the state’s 103 storm-related fatalities were also in Buncombe. And though it’s hard to know how many of those deaths were due to landslides, North Carolina has a long history of discouraging attempts to identify and reduce such risks.

For instance, in 2004, hurricanes Ivan and Frances hit the county mere days apart; in response, the state created a Landslide Hazard Mapping Team. But after mapping only four of the 19 targeted counties, it was disbanded.

“Politics came in,” professor Brad Johnson, a Davidson College landslide expert, told The New York Times. “Developers in the mountains pushed back about people being fully informed of their risks.”

But it didn’t end there. “Over the past 15 years,” another New York Times article noted in October, “North Carolina lawmakers have rejected limits on construction on steep slopes,” due in part to “the influence of the North Carolina’s home building industry.” According to Johnson, “The established threshold for landslides in North Carolina is 5 inches of rain.” But Helene and its precursor rainstorm averaged “2 feet of rain in a two-and-a-half-day period.”

And though Helene is now history, “There’s an elevated landslide hazard now that there’s been so much destabilization,” USGS geophysicist Paula Burgi told the Asheville Watchdog.

“The No. 1 driver of landslides is slopes,” Johnson said in an interview with Xpress, “and humans tend to increase the slope angle when they build things or cut roads or add mass to the slope.”

Humans helping hideous Helene

But landslides aren’t the only way human activity contributed to the catastrophe. In a joint statement to USA Today, three Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists wrote, “Our best estimate is that climate change may have caused as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas.”

And meanwhile, the increase in impervious surfaces continues unabated. Between 2010 and 2019, City Council approved at least 25 new hotels, according to an Asheville Citizen Times story, and some had adjacent surface parking lots. Since 2021, the Asheville Watchdog reported, an additional 1,700 new hotel rooms and their associated parking spaces have been built or approved.

Then there’s the seemingly endless infill construction that’s devouring the few remaining water-absorbing green spaces in our lower- and middle-income neighborhoods, not to mention the new, often immense, residential developments springing up in many parts of the city and county.

Johnson thinks impervious surfaces accounted for less than 10% of the tropical storm’s devastation, but due to the extraordinary amount of rain in a short period, the ground itself had become an impervious surface. And besides, he maintains, “Fighting against impervious surface is more important for day-to-day floods … because those are events that are certain to happen again.”

Mere days before Helene hit, an Asheville Watchdog article, citing the county’s hazard mitigation plan, noted, “From 2000 to 2020, 44 floods occurred in Buncombe, causing more than $85 million in property damage.” The article also pointed out, “By one estimate, the county will add more than 83,000 residents by 2045, meaning there will be more rooftops and other impervious surfaces, more runoff and more rainwater clogging or overrunning already taxed streams and stormwater drains.”

And in mid-October, a state Department of Transportation spokesperson said the storm damage was unlikely “to have a significant impact on the end date” for the massive Interstate 26 Connector project, which is slated to add the equivalent of another 70-80 football fields’ worth of impervious surface.

Neighbors helping neighbors

When Helene reached peak fury, Asheville’s streets and parking lots became raging black rivers that crashed into buildings, spawning torrential waterfalls. And all of that water, mud and debris descended upon the city’s low-lying population while rendering surrounding mountainsides more and more unstable. Swamped by the swelling Swannanoa and French Broad rivers, areas like the River Arts District and Biltmore Village were also engulfed from above by the cascading deluge.

People living or working in those areas should cringe every time developers cram another monster apartment complex into our community. Or when they stuff smaller-scale infill housing into the neighborhoods looming over them.

During the weeks of warm mountain sunshine after the storm, I joined several hundred volunteers at BeLoved Asheville’s warehouse on the Old Charlotte Highway. Forming a sort of bucket brigade, we unloaded crates of donated supplies that were constantly arriving from organizations across the city, county, state and nation. We then sorted the toys, clothes, food, toiletries and other items, packed bags containing some of each and shipped them out to the needy.

Almost everyone was in a good, hardworking humor, bolstered by the alt-folk music playing in the background. Along with organizations ranging from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to World Central Kitchen, from Samaritan’s Purse to Topwater Energy Solutions, we conducted a real-time experiment in philanthropic socialism: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. Most of us didn’t think of it in those terms, of course, but simply as caring for others and doing what needed to be done, taking advantage of the excess capacity generated by our predominantly capitalist economy.

Impervious thinking

In an Oct. 17 press conference, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg declared: “We can’t have the same assumptions that led us in the 1950s. The reality is the United States is in for more frequent and extreme weather events.”

So do we really want to return to maximizing profits and exploiting the beauty of our marvelous mountains and the brilliance of our creative people, while risking ever more floods, landslides and the havoc they wreak?

Against the backdrop of 44 flooding events in the last couple of decades, the impact of hurricanes Ivan, Frances and Helene, and escalating climate change, shouldn’t we instead establish zoning regulations reflecting the fact that we may already have all the buildings, housing and roads that Buncombe’s mountainous terrain can handle? The answer to that is obviously a resounding yes!

Yet when we recover from this latest catastrophe, we’ll almost certainly climb back on the development and profit-maximizing gravy train, setting up Buncombe County for perhaps even more horrendous Helene-type events. And unquestionably, for many more floods and landslides.

Yes, we want a healthy mixture of capitalism and socialism, but in the end, we will most likely keep following the lead of the N.C. General Assembly. In recent years, The New York Times noted, our esteemed legislators have taken actions that “blocked a rule requiring homes to be elevated above the height of an expected flood, and weakened protections for wetlands, increasing the risk of dangerous stormwater runoff.”

For the moment, though, our prevailing economic theory seems to be: Help those in need, with no questions asked. At least for a little while, development and capitalism have to take a back seat.

Freelance historian Bill Branyon has been reporting on Asheville’s environmental scene for over 30 years.

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One thought on “New beginning post-Helene or business as usual?

  1. Voirdire

    it’s always business as usual… and why it’s called the human race ( a race that’s looking more and more like it’s not going to end well for the majority of the human race in this century, unfortunately). As for the rest of it ..aka “prevailing economic theories” ..What?? Probably time to get real about all of this ..and that would entail taking in the reality of when there is big money to be made ..that’s pretty much will happen regardless of what will happen down the road a bit. Always. sigh.

    And oh, this 500 year flood brought on by Helene ..time to get real about that too. It’s now more like a 5 to 25 year flood with our super-charged atmosphere that’s only getting more so. Good luck trying to explain that to the MAGA minions down in Raleigh, or the cash strapped counties in -steep as it gets- WNC. sigh again.

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