Damage to the Biltmore Village area of Asheville after Helene. (Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
As North Carolina lawmakers debated the best way to help Western North Carolina recover and rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Helene on Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Caleb Rudow noted two words that remained unsaid: climate change.
Rudow and Rep. Deb Butler, both Democrats, urged this oversight to be fixed during a press conference after the General Assembly session, and joined environmentalists to talk about how we can ensure Western North Carolina is rebuilt to withstand against a global climate whose disasters are becoming increasingly damaging. year.
“I hope this is the start of a broader conversation about resilience, about building back better and about confronting climate change head-on,” said Rudow, a data scientist who represents Buncombe County. “Because if we don’t address the root causes, we will continue to see these so-called millennial floods over and over again.”
He remembers helping clear roads in Asheville when flooding occurred in 2004, which, like Helene’s aftermath, brought mudslides and overflowing rivers. But where that flood felt like disasters seen before, Helene brought unprecedented devastation, Rudow said. He cited the example of a spare pipe buried six meters below the street in the aftermath of 2004 – designed to withstand the region’s worst flooding – that was nevertheless knocked out by the storm.
“Western North Carolina was supposed to be a climate paradise, a place where people could live to escape wildfires, floods and natural disasters,” Rudow said. “But due to climate change and more extreme weather conditions, no place is safe anymore.”
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that scientists have already determined the extent to which human-induced climate change has intensified Helene’s rain and wind. Rudow cited a study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that found parts of North Carolina were experiencing as much as 50% more rainfall due to climate change — and that such amounts of precipitation are now 20 times more likely in those areas.
Butler, who represents Wilmington, noted that the severe flooding and devastation that hit her region of the state weeks before Helene made landfall had been “already forgotten” by most of the state — a sign that severe storms and flooding have nearly were becoming a common experience. in North Carolina.
“We have been warned by science, we have been warned by nature and by our own experiences,” she said. “If we close our eyes now, we will be complicit in future disasters.”
Butler called for the construction of green infrastructure such as permeable paving and rain gardens as communities in western North Carolina rebuild, as well as the restoration of wetlands and forests that provide a buffer against flooding. Some areas, she said, may be “no longer arable” when you consider the impacts of climate change.
Brooks Rainey Pearson, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, criticized lawmakers’ relaxation of state building codes in recent years, citing bills that reduced flood and wind protection requirements in homes across the state. She urged the General Assembly to strengthen these standards so Western North Carolina can rebuild “smarter and more resilient.”
In the long term, Pearson called on the state to deliver on its pledges to reduce carbon emissions by 70% by 2030 and reach ‘net zero’ by 2050, to prevent a further worsening of the climate crisis. Chris Herndon, the director of the North Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club, echoed those calls, urging lawmakers to work to protect against the impacts of climate change with the same unity they showed when they unanimously passed the passed a $273 million relief bill.
Lawmakers did not announce any new bills at the news conference, citing divisions over climate change in the Legislature, although Butler said “I will have bills ready” if Speaker Tim Moore agrees to raise the issue.
“If we don’t talk about it, we won’t solve it,” Rudow said. “I feel like it is my duty as someone who survived the event and saw terrible destruction to tell people what I saw and talk about solutions.”
