Hurricane Helene is America’s Chernobyl moment, by Malcolm Kyeyune

Chernobyl put the spotlight on the Soviet Union’s decrepit government, just as Helene is putting the spotlight on America’s decrepit government. From Malcolm Kyeyune at unherd.com:

Hurricane Katrina looms large in American cultural consciousness. As one of the defining events during George W. Bush’s second term as president, the scale of the devastation that struck Louisiana — combined with the inadequacy of the relief effort — earned notoriety even outside the United States. Almost 20 years after the levees broke, another storm has swept in an unprecedented catastrophe: the economic and human cost of Hurricane Helene might be even greater than that of Katrina. So why, then, are so few people acting like that is the case?

In Appalachia, one of the poorest regions in the country, the common belief is that the mountains protect the locals from storms. Unfortunately, this is true only up to a point: when a hurricane like Helene hits — bringing once-in-a-thousand-years levels of rainfall — the mountains become a curse rather than a blessing. Helene has brought the mountains down, triggering mudslides and rockfalls that have destroyed entire towns and obliterated almost every road in a vast radius.

When the lowlands flood, that is bad enough: in 2005, New Orleans stopped being a vibrant city and turned into one big, murky lake. But with storm surges and flooding, you can often navigate much of the disaster area by boat. Up in the mountains, it is the earth, not the water, that becomes your worst enemy. With the roads gone and bridges smashed, driving is impossible, travel by foot is next to impossible: isolated settlements can often only be reached via helicopter. Those I have spoken to in North Carolina describe a disaster of “biblical dimensions”. The only thing that comes close to it in recent history is the “Great Flood” of 1916 in North Carolina, but Helene has easily beaten the river gage measurements from back then.

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