Opinion | Climate catastrophes like Hurricane Helene don’t care who you vote for

My heart breaks for the people of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, whose experience of Hurricane Helene was a flood of biblical proportions. That’s not an empty expression of sympathy. It emerges from remembering the first time I walked through my house in New Orleans, which took on 8 feet of water, after the city’s floodwalls broke during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The stench of the water and food rotting in refrigerators and freezers. The squishiness of wet drywall and warped, waterlogged floors. The shock at the sight of all types of fungi and mold growing on the walls — and somehow even on the ceiling fans. The sting of finding a lifetime’s worth of books and snapshots and family heirlooms in a sodden heap on the floor.

While not as bad as seeing the totality of one’s life possessions moldering on the curb, one of the more awful things about flooding is hearing other people’s opinions about why you flooded or what it all means politically. You lived in a place that’s too low. You lived in a place controlled by the GOP. Or, from the other side: You should have picked a place more conservatively Christian that God wouldn’t strike with a storm.

Such simple-minded arguments proliferated on social media this weekend and are depressingly easy to find. Comments ran the gamut: from people saying residents in North Carolina, for example, got what they had coming because the state typically votes for Republicans for president, to people saying Asheville got what it had coming because it’s far more liberal than the rest of the state.

Regardless of the political persuasion making the argument, it’s borne of the idea that some people are deserving of disaster and some people are smart enough to avoid such disaster, while others aren’t.

It’s also based on an argument — contradicted by the reality that flooding is the most common disaster in the U.S. — that floods are to be expected only in certain places, places easily avoided by people with sense.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, “Ninety percent of natural disasters within the United States involve flooding. Consequently, floods inflict more economic damage and loss of life and property than any other natural hazard.” Pew reported in 2022: “Since 2000, at least one flood occurred in the U.S. on nearly 300 days per year, on average. The NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] database also shows that all 50 states and the District of Columbia were affected by flooding in 2021.”

In January 2014, more than a year after Hurricane Sandy had struck New Jersey and New York and more than eight years after Hurricane Katrina, I appeared on a stage with Tom Ashbrook, then the host of NPR’s show “On Point,” who was recording his show in front of a live audience in New Orleans.

When I noted that the subsidized National Flood Insurance Program had problems and argued instead for a kind of catastrophic insurance plan that would spread the risk and pull in people at risk of disasters from all over the country, the host posed an argument on behalf of people who might balk at such a proposition. He said, “If you’re sitting up on a mountaintop and thinking about that coast and thinking just how serious the threat of sea-level rise is and what it may cost to back that up, you might not want to pay for that.”

“It flooded in Colorado last summer,” I said. “It flooded in Nashville, Tennessee, just a few years ago. Flooding is the most common natural disaster in the United States, and I would hope that people would stop seeing it as just a Louisiana problem.”

Even though I was already aware that a place as hilly as Asheville could flood, it was still shocking that a hurricane that first struck the Gulf Coast would be a cause of it. (I say “a” cause because a so-called 1,000-year storm had already dumped as much as 8 inches of water in Asheville ahead of Helene’s arrival.)

I’d spent a lot of time thinking about how frightening it is that storms have been exploding in strength before they make landfall. But I hadn’t stopped to consider that stronger storms’ hitting the coasts could mean stronger storms and scarier rainmakers far inland.

KD Minor, an organizer who created a relief effort for people in her native Lake Charles, Louisiana, after that area of southwest Louisiana was hit by two hurricanes (Laura and Delta) in a six-week span in 2020, wrote Sunday on X, “The climate catastrophe doesn’t have an address on it.”

Nor does the climate catastrophe care whom you’re voting for in November or whether you’re gay or whether you live at sea level or whether you’re high above it. It affects us all.

If that’s not a reason to try to heal the climate, I don’t know what is.