When Helene reached northern Georgia as a tropical storm at the end of last week, its wind speeds had dropped to the point that it was no longer a hurricane. Huge and comparatively slower-moving too, the storm took two days to pass through the Atlanta metro area, and while it hung over the city it dropped an extraordinary amount of rain: nearly a foot at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport, where the previous two-day record rainfall of 9 inches was set in 1886.
Some areas saw even more rain, like McDonough, Georgia, which recorded nearly 14 inches. According to the latest numbers, nearly 200 people have been killed by the hurricane, including 25 in Georgia, and hundreds of people are still missing.
The storm went from a tropical depression to being forecast as a major hurricane in what was likely record time.
“They had never forecast a major hurricane within 60 hours for a disturbance below tropical storm level,” said Sam Lillo, a meteorologist and software engineer for DTN Weather, based on a computer analysis of the center’s historical forecast data. “The entire forecast is also basically faster than has ever been seen for 36 hours and 48 hours from a tropical depression.” And the resulting storm ended up causing catastrophic damage in Western North Carolina.
When 12, 14, or 31 inches of rain falls just about anywhere it’s going to create problems — but Helene dropped so much water on some Western North Carolina mountain towns that they have all but washed away.
Nearly half of Black folks live in 11 southeastern states —Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Given the concentration of Black folks in the region, that makes hurricanes — and the torrential rain and flooding they often bring — a disproportionate threat to Black households.
As we’ve previously reported, structural racism exacerbates the dangers Black communities face when hurricanes (and so-called 100-year, or 1,000-year storms roll through) and bring torrential rains with them. Atlanta was rebuilt after the Civil War to be, by design, a city where white people lived at the tops of hills and Black people live at lower elevations — where water (and, before the city developed a municipal sewer system, waste) ran down to.
It’s no wonder then that research from McKinsey shows that Black people in the Southeast are almost twice as likely to be affected by a hurricane as their non-Black neighbors. And, McKinsey projects that “by 2050, nearly 17 percent of Black-owned homes will be at risk of storm damage.”
Although storms like Helene may have the potential to be worse for Black neighborhoods, they’re so large and so full of moisture that the damage can strike seemingly everywhere. Case in point: Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, both wealthy and largely white, flooded during the storm too.
Helene is just the latest storm to pose a serious threat of flooding and damage from intense rainfall. Hurricanes have always had the capacity to drench inland areas once they move past the coast — Beryl caused dramatic rain totals and flooding in Vermont in July. But climate change is making these weather events even more intense.
“We can’t talk about Hurricane Helene without talking about climate change, which is causing stronger and more destructive storms,” Michael Mann, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, told ABC News. “Helene is a poster-child for the ways that human-caused climate change is amplifying the coastal threat from intensified hurricanes combined with rising sea levels.”
Meanwhile, hurricane season doesn’t end until Nov. 30, so more catastrophic storms could be on the way.
