A new era of floods has arrived. America isn’t prepared.
Skip to Main Content National News “We’re living in a climate that we’ve never seen, and it keeps throwing us curveballs.” Natalie Newman’s new home is filled with items she had to replace after Hurricane Helene swept away the apartment building where she lived. Jesse Barber / The Washington Post By Sarah Kaplan, Kevin Crowe, Naema Ahmed, Ben Noll, Washington Post July 21, 2025 | 8:46 AM 16 minutes to read Share Share Send this article to your social connections. Natalie Newman believed she had done everything she could to get ready for Helene. Before the hurricane carved a path of destruction across the Southeast in late September, she assumed it would be like other storms she’d experienced in five years of living in Asheville, North Carolina. So Newman took her usual precautions: packing a go-bag, stocking up on food, moving her car uphill from her apartment on the banks of the Swannanoa River. When Newman’s phone buzzed with a flash-flood warning the night before the storm hit, she skimmed the text: “This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order.” Then the artist returned to the painting she was working on. The river was still at least 20 feet below her second-story apartment, and she hadn’t received an evacuation order. If her home was no longer safe, Newman thought, surely officials would tell her to leave. But no order would come before the deadly floodwaters arrived at her door. The Swannanoa River alongside what remains of Newman’s apartment complex in Asheville on June 15. Jesse Barber / The Washington Post From last year’s disaster in Asheville to this month’s catastrophic floods in Central Texas, the world has entered a new era of rainfall supercharged by climate change, rendering existing response plans inadequate. A Washington Post analysis of atmospheric data found a record amount of moisture flowing in the skies over the past year and a half, largely due to rising global temperatures. With so much warm, moist air available as fuel, storms are increasingly able to move water vapor from the oceans to locations hundreds of miles from the coast, triggering flooding for which most inland communities are ill-prepared. “We’re living in a climate that we’ve never seen, and it keeps throwing us curveballs,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist. “How do you plan for the worst thing you’ve never seen?” To understand why inland regions are so vulnerable to heavy rainfall, The Post compared the response to Helene in western North Carolina with that of Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the storm hit first. The investigation, based on analysis of cellphone data and interviews with two dozen meteorologists, disaster experts and storm survivors, revealed how scant flood awareness and a lack of effective warnings led to far fewer evacuations in North Carolina’s mountainous western counties. Yet it was in these inland areas that Helene wrought its greatest human toll. At least 78 people in North Carolina died in Helene’s floodwaters, according to data from the National Hurricane Center – more than five times the number of people who drowned on the coast. The fact that many North Carolinians remained in harm’s way was not the fault of any one person or institution, The Post found. Instead, it resulted from a cascade of decisions all stemming from the mistaken assumption that hurricanes are mainly a coastal threat – an assumption that fails to account for the increasingly destructive power of torrential rain. As Helene bore down on the Gulf Coast, years of investment and experience equipped officials there to take decisive action, issuing mandatory evacuation orders to move people out of risk zones well before landfall. But most counties in western North Carolina – including Buncombe, where Asheville is located – lack the most basic tool: flood evacuation plans. The state’s official hurricane guide labels these areas as “host counties,” places to which coastal evacuees should flee. Though the National Weather Service correctly predicted that the flooding would be deadly, the warnings from local authorities were not forceful or specific enough to sway residents who never imagined a hurricane could hurt them so far from the sea. Evacuation patterns reflected this preparedness gap: Cellphone data provided by researchers at Columbia University and analyzed by The Post shows a 36 percent spike in people leaving affected counties in Florida for areas beyond Helene’s path in the four days before the storm hit. In contrast, movement out of the hardest-hit North Carolina counties didn’t change much compared with a normal week. By the time Buncombe County made evacuation orders mandatory, deadly flash floods were already underway. This reconstruction of North Carolina’s scramble during Helene reveals parallels with Central Texas and holds lessons for other inland areas facing increasingly intense freshwater floods – an oft-overlooked hazard that now accounts for more than half of all tropical-cyclone-related deaths in the United States. Like western North Carolina, the Texas Hill Country is a landscape of winding rivers and steep terrain that can quickly funnel heavy rainfall into a raging torrent. Forecasters had predicted that remnants of Tropical Storm Barry could collide with another storm system to inundate the flood-prone region, but authorities did not call for evacuations in the hardest-hit area, and warnings didn’t reach many residents until it was too late for them to flee. Climate and weather experts say both disasters were exacerbated by Earth’s rapidly warming atmosphere. The Post’s atmospheric analysis shows that the roiling air mass that constituted Helene contained 42 percent more water vapor than any other observed in western North Carolina since 1940- fueling a storm that obliterated the region’s rainfall records. Another plume brought record levels of moisture to Texas during the July 4 floods. If Helene was a wake-up call, experts said, then Texas must be a screaming alarm – prompting more robust flood planning in communities across the country and new efforts to communicate a danger beyond
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