Life in the Appalachians once felt ‘untouchable.’ Then Helene struck. » Yale Climate Connections

You could say James Guill has been running from hurricanes for his whole life.

The New Orleans native was just two years old when Hurricane Katrina swallowed his city in 2005 and became the most costly hurricane in U.S. history, claiming 1,833 lives.

During and after the storm, Guill’s family evacuated and sheltered in Virginia for two months. Then they returned, salvaged their house, and spent nearly two more decades – enduring other life-threatening storms and evacuations – at sea level.

Guill’s mother, Terenia Urban Guill, calls her son a Katrina baby, in the same way young parents today call their 2020 kids COVID babies: the world-altering moment shaped and informed them in fundamental ways.

“I don’t have direct memories,” James Guill said of Katrina. “But I say it’s in my bones.”

His history with torrential rains, flooding, and roof-shearing winds influenced his trajectory straight out of high school. He enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where he’s studying environmental science.

“Being high up in the mountains felt a little bit untouchable,” Guill said. “It felt like one of the more secure areas.”

In recent years, many people have uprooted their lives to relocate to these mountains, driven by the growing risks of extreme weather events elsewhere. Asheville, North Carolina, has ranked high on lists of cities that some thought would be relatively shielded from climate change.

Hurricane Helene upended that understanding.

At least 230 people died across six states, nearly half of those in North Carolina, during the storm’s September 2024 rampage. Two weeks after Helene, many communities in the region remained without water or power. The devastation blindsided many residents, shaking their sense of climate security.

It’s a feeling that I know intimately. I grew up in western North Carolina before moving out of state to start my career.

Today, my hometown of Swannanoa looks like a wasteland. Semitrailers split open, spilling their innards across the muddy street above the Swannanoa River. Entire homes were swept from their foundations and ripped to pieces. Cars are still bent around mangled hardwoods.

A familiar state of mind

During the storm, Guill along with most of the region lost power, water, and cell service.

He told me he was able to keep his cool and felt prepared, pulling from his prior hurricane exposure.

He reported to food services, volunteering to bulk-prep meals for students stuck on campus. But the scale of the damage that surfaced in the days ahead – after he evacuated from campus and the state – shifted his perception of the city and the reach of climate events today.

“If Asheville can be hit this hard, who knows about everywhere else,” Guill said over the phone from Virginia, where he evacuated once again with family.

Unlike during Katrina, this time he went to his parents’ house in Richmond. They relocated to Virginia last year due to the escalating volley of major hurricanes in the Gulf.

Helene marked the eighth Cat 4 or 5 hurricane to hit the U.S. in the past seven years. (The count does not include Milton, which hit Florida October 9 as a Cat 3 hurricane). Before that, eight such severe storms had occurred over the span of 57 years.

Terenia Urban Guill told me that leaving New Orleans after decades was one of the hardest decisions she has ever made.

“We left because of my anxiety,” she said.

Much of that anxiety returned on September 26 while she watched Helene make landfall as a Cat 4 hurricane in Florida and tear its way toward the already-saturated terrain of western North Carolina.

Terenia said she woke up hourly throughout the night to check radar and weather reports about the storm’s progress toward James. It was a familiar state of mind from living in Louisiana.

Losing all contact with her son made matters more stressful. So her husband, Michael, started driving from Richmond to Asheville in an attempt to find James and his girlfriend and evacuate them from campus.

Ironically, three years earlier, Terenia, Michael, and their daughter evacuated to Asheville for sanctuary with James during the deadly Hurricane Ida in New Orleans. That was the storm that convinced the family to move permanently.

‘What happens when this is gone?’

My friend Sam Smetana described a similar dissonance as Helene unfolded.

Just weeks before the storm struck, Smetana had an offer accepted to purchase a home in Sylva, North Carolina, just outside of Asheville. While waiting to close on his home, he was working as a pedicab in New Orleans, where his partner lives.

As images surfaced portraying the devastation in the mountains, he collaborated with a New Orleans mutual aid group. Within a few days of the hurricane, community members put together a load of supplies that Smetana drove to western North Carolina.

It felt like driving in the wrong direction for hurricane recovery.

“It was absolutely surreal seeing this happen to my safe home in the mountains,” Smetana said.

Upon arrival, he focused his support on friends’ properties that were severely flooded in Barnardsville northeast of Asheville.

A kayaker rescued one of his friends from a window in her home, a restored farmhouse elevated on stilts where floodwaters had reached the floorboards.

Before Helene, Smetana had spent a year traversing the country in a van and camper seeking a reliable climate-secure city. He settled on western North Carolina in 2022 and began splitting his time between the Asheville area and New Orleans while trying to buy a home in the competitive real estate market.

He never expected a flood on the scale of Helene in the area, or certainly not this soon.

“So many people have their emergency home or their climate refuge here. So what happens when this is gone?” he asked.

A sense of security holds great value in the human psyche. But it’s a fragile and malleable state. In addition to hard metrics like the death toll and number of homes destroyed, Helene swept away that sense of security for many.

Stories from high-risk risk zones demonstrate how to reclaim it. Preparedness strategies like outlining a family emergency plan, stashing nonperishable goods at home, and building out a trusted neighborhood network of people can bolster personal storm resilience, wherever you live.

In New Orleans, the Guill family relied on a stack of customized cards that outlined specific must-do steps and reminders during evacuation. “We needed that automatic system,” Terenia said.

The approaches above focus on elements within your control, which can help you feel more supported and secure. And all of this is becoming increasingly valuable as we face bigger weather events that are outside of our individual control and affecting places we never expected.

Smetana is reminding himself of this reality as he weighs closing on his home in the mountains.

“There are fires in Montana. There’s going to be insane amounts of snow in Buffalo, New York. It will be hurricanes all over the South, or drought and earthquakes,” he said. “I think I’ll stick with it. I don’t know where else I would go. It seems like stuff happens everywhere.”