Climate change is exposing more regions and residents to dangerous storms. But Americans live and often rebuild in disaster-prone regions. They struggle to get and keep insurance and often remain vulnerable long after FEMA has left town. The new PBS Frontline documentary “Hurricane Helene’s Deadly Warning” draws on years of reporting. Our guest Laura Sullivan is an NPR and Frontline correspondent who has seen a number of disasters and their aftermath firsthand.
We're heading into hurricane season right now. Why do so many of us live in dangerous areas, like those that are profiled in this film?
Well, the easy answer, as we heard from so many people, is that humans tend to love the water. We always sort of built in places that that were next to water that had access to commercial avenues for ships and the ways that we could build a community. However, as things have shifted and changed over time, the storms are getting stronger, the weather patterns are changing, and a lot of that danger is more present now than it was in some of these places before. And now when people live in some of these communities, we haven't priced the risk of these communities accurately. So we in some ways subsidize some of the living in dangerous, risky places that we hadn't done so much in the past and historically in the United States.
100 years ago, 150 years ago, if you face a storm or disaster, you were on your own. It was up to each individual, each community, if they wanted to rebuild. But starting about 1950s, 1960s, the federal government was losing a lot of money when communities were not returning, it was starting to drain the growing American economy, and at that point, the United States government said, No, we're going to come in and help people out. And that has only grown over time, introduced the National Flood Insurance Program, but it, of course, does not actually pay for the actual cost of what these disasters mean for the communities, for the people that they hit.
Homeowners are often not really aware of the risks of where they live. How come?
Absolutely, this is something we found, especially in North Carolina. So FEMA puts out these flood maps, and they show the risk for what they perceive as the flood zone. These maps, everybody that we've spoken to tell us they are incredibly outdated. We went and talked to some data scientists at First Street in New York who looked at the way that the weather and rainfall and precipitation works, and they found more than two times as many Americans are actually living in risky areas than have any idea that they are at risk. And that not only means that they're not part of these federal programs, it means that they have not been required over the past half a century to build in any sort of way that would protect them from a severe storm. So in North Carolina, only 2% of the people that were affected by Helene were actually in this Flood Insurance Program, flood mapping area that FEMA had put together, and 98% of the people hit by Helene were not.
Just remind us, because the film centers on that particular disaster, although it looks at others, what were the Helene aftermath results? What was the situation like when you were there?
When we first got there, I mean, there was 100,000 people without power. There were hundreds of people missing. There was no cell service. There was this thick brown mud that just covered everything. Entire communities were flattened. This was not a flood where the water rose slowly and then dissipated and everybody's houses were all mucked up. This was a storm where the water, the rainfall, came slamming down the hills of western North Carolina and moving at such a rate — 26 feet of water was just tearing through the communities and turning homes into matchsticks in some places. It looked like the apocalypse when we were driving through, you would see semi trailers upside down, in trees. I mean, you would see homes stacked up against each other, some that had come off their foundations, and that just had ripped apart. And at the end of the day, 107 people were killed in Helene in North Carolina.
Here in the Northeast, we've dealt with ‘100-year’ storms like Irene and Lee and Sandy, and they've just kept coming. And this is not typically thought of as being in the hurricane zone, but clearly it is. I'm just wondering, given all this reporting, how do you think the average person should think about risk differently than they do?
Well, this is what a lot of people in Asheville, North Carolina woke up to, because they believe they were the climate haven. They thought that the storm was never coming for them because they were inland, that a hurricane wasn't going to hit western North Carolina. And it was interesting when we went down to Harvey in Texas back then, and then we returned recently, and we heard the same thing: ‘Well, that was a very rare event, and it was just this confluence of the storm sitting over Houston for four straight days.’
And then when we went back up to Sandy, you know this better than anybody, they also said, Well, that was a very rare event, because you had this one storm, you know, colliding with another storm, and these very specific things happened to make this converge. But what you're hearing in all these places is that they believe this to be a rare event. And what's happening now is that these rare events are not so rare anymore, and they're hitting places that were have not prepared for them and are having a very difficult time recovering from them.
We saw North Carolina really struggling to recover, and we were wondering how other places have done this, how did New York end up doing, and how did Houston end up doing? And we went back up to your neck of the woods, and we took a look. It's been 13 years since Sandy, and we wondered how some of these programs had worked out. We went out to Staten Island, and what we really found was a lot of unhappy people. It was very hard to find anybody who thought that the recovery from Sandy had turned out well. We talked to the head of FEMA, who was in charge of the Sandy recovery at the time, and he said, you know, we put a lot of stuff right back where it was. And we talked to the New York City Comptroller, who said they are not ready for the next storm after all these years. And we particularly looked at one of the signature programs in New York, which was a buyout program to let taxpayers spend the money to buy people out of these dangerous areas. And we found that that hadn't worked out so well either. There was the big promise up in New York that these properties, would be turned into wetlands. They would never be rebuilt. And what we found is that 13 years is a long time, and now a lot of people want to see homes and apartment buildings and businesses back on those empty lots that taxpayers paid for.
We tend to forget or minimize. I guess what I'm hearing you say, and this is a complicated issue, of course, but are we thinking about rebuilding in the wrong way? I mean, should we maybe take a cue from areas that have been devastated and sort of compartmentalize our impulse to say, ‘Well, we're going to come back better in the same spot?’
I mean, absolutely. I think what we found is that not only is there this human desire to rebuild quickly and to just put your house back the way it was and hope it doesn't happen again, or build put your business back together. And local officials are part of that too. They really just want to see their communities come back.
But what we also found was that there are very powerful forces of special interests that are in some ways putting their hands on the scale. And we found that the homebuilders lobby, in particular, was in North Carolina really influencing the codes and the way that people are building back from storms and building in the first place. We had a man who's been on the national homebuilders board for 25 years tell us that for as much as the homebuilders say that they want affordable homes for Americans, what they really want is profitable homes for themselves, and they want to build homes in a way where they can make the most profit, hand over the keys and walk away. And in some cases, that is leaving communities to rebuild with older codes and less resilient design and building materials.
