Been thinking about severe weather

Ever since tropical storm Helene dumped inches of rain in western North Carolina, I’ve been thinking about big, bad weather.. We usually call these events, "Hundred Year" storms. I suppose these are labeled 100 year because the National Weather Service did not exist 200 years ago. 

President Ulysses S. Grant started the Weather Bureau of the United States on February 9, 1870 using a new-fangled invention called the electrical telegraph. This bureau connected weather stations across the country. Although its name has changed and the equipment has improved, the United States Weather Bureau still tries to inform us about our local weather and to warn us about severe weather. 

Most of the time our weather forecasters get it right but once in about a hundred years or so they don’t. For the next couple generations we will be having Hundred Year storms in North Carolina and then we will start having "Two Hundred Year" storms. 

After each Hundred Year storm our government will analyze what we did right, what we did wrong, and how we can improve our response to a hundred year storm. After that, an updated Emergency Response Plan will  be published and we will wait for the next hundred year (or two hundred year) storm. A problem is that our plans are "Response Plans" not prevention plans. When the damage is done by a storm that only occurs once in three or four generations too many things have changed for us to be prepared for everything. 

Today we are responding to the hundred year storm called Helene. In our mountains, we have never had to replace miles of paved roads that were once Native American trading trails. We have never had to prove clear title to properties that have been passed down on scraps of paper and recorded in a family’s Bible. We don’t have mountain building codes designed for six feet of water in the streets of Asheville and Boone. We don’t have flood insurance for areas that haven’t had a flood for a hundred years. We are not prepared for the complex administrative requirements of current government disaster relief. Our forests will be recovering for generations. Many of our trout streams have been rerouted and some vanished. Our merchants and tourist hosts have lost a critical season’s revenue. We will be recovering from much of Helene’s destruction  for at least a decade.

Two things are sure to happen after every hundred year storm. First, local folks help each other the best they can with water, food and shelter until outside aid comes in. Next, once the organized response begins, folks start looking for someone to blame because help didn’t come sooner, getting relief is too complicated and is taking too long. 

As we deal with the awesome damage inflicted by Helene, try to remember that the damage from HurricaneFlorence still hasten’t been settled and it wasn’t even a hundred year storm.