Hurricane Helene Came Relentlessly. Leaving Is a Luxury

It happened again.

On Thursday night, September 26, as Hurricane Helene was slamming into the Florida coast, social media feeds began filling with keyboard warriors victim-shaming those who didn't evacuate.

One video of a young man trapped in waist-high water inside his second-floor bedroom—after Helene's surge ripped off the windows and rampaged through his home—garnered thousands of comments:

"Why didn't he evacuate?", "So he could take videos and get likes", "No sympathy from this way","Typical American overconfidence", "He's jeopardizing the lives of first responders", "He should have left."

Of course, he "should have left," I wanted to respond—but did he have a choice? Could he have left?

While sitting on my friend's couch in New York City—where I had come for work—we watched the news images of Helene thrashing, blowing, and roiling the ocean. I thought about him.

I imagined his fear—did he think he would die and was recording the final moments of his life? Could he see the waves rising and meeting the wind as together they moved inland, cresting and slamming down on marinas, roadways, and homes, unmooring lampposts and traffic lights? Could he hear the trees bending, snapping, and crashing into roofs and highways, their branches snagging power lines and dragging them down into a tangled mess?

While he stood waist-high in water, huddled in his room, Helene—with her 822-mile diameter and 370-mile wind field—continued to roar, making her way up the east coast. She moved deeper inland to Georgia and South Carolina, but her eye was dead-set on the most unlikely of places: the mountains of Western North Carolina (WNC), where I live with my husband, daughter, and rescue dog.

I called my husband, worried because Asheville was under a Tropical Storm Watch—not a Hurricane Watch.

"Helene is a monster of a storm," I said.

Despite the rain, thunder, and wind that Helene was bringing to WNC, he, like thousands of others, wasn't overly concerned—the main worry was power outages. So he took precautions, stocking up on food, filling pots with water, and checking the flashlights for batteries. Afterward, he and my daughter ate dinner with friends. At that point, no one believed that Helene would become cataclysmic.

"I'm sure if they were in real danger the city would warn them," my friend assured me.

But I couldn't shake the images of Helene, her bigness and her 140 mph winds, or that WNC is chock-full of flowing water: creeks, rivers, gorges, ravines, lakes, and waterfalls. Entire neighborhoods nod to the flows through or around them—Haw Creek, Bent Creek, Avery Creek, Hoopers Creek.

Along the winding two-lane roads that meander through these neighborhoods are smaller roads that lead to hollows, coves, and small mountain communities where many live in everything from trailers to villas perched on slopes or at the bottom of valleys with tiny babbling creeks.

When Helene came, those comely little creeks—stippled with bold-colored, newly fallen autumn leaves—transformed into wild rivers, rapids that rushed down the steep terrain, smashing into homes and sending them tumbling down the mountainsides.

The French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers crested three times above flood stage—the water pummeled bridges, roads, and interstates, creating devastating mudslides. Power, water, and cell phone service ceased, disconnecting tens of thousands from the world. Hundreds of people became like the young man in his second-floor bedroom—trapped and then swept away. As of today, the death toll has surpassed 100, and in the coming days, it will no doubt continue to rise.

In WNC, it rains heavily and sometimes places flood, but Helene was never considered a possibility—a storm event rainfall probability map from NOAA suggested that the amount of rain Helene emptied on WNC in 48 hours was a once-in-a-1,000-years event. It was historic, never-before-seen, and many people had no chance to escape.

Even if officials had considered that the already saturated ground—it had rained for two days—would refuel Helene enough to warrant issuing evacuation orders, how many people could manage to leave?

Leaving—it seems like such an easy thing to do.

I believe that some of today's news channels have conditioned us into believing that evacuating is simple: just pack a suitcase, take yourself, your family, and pets, get in your car, and drive away from your belongings, your home, and the oncoming storm. For some, this may be the case. But for many, it's a far-fetched fantasy, an impossible reality.

And yet, instead of showing compassion to those who are forced to stay, we demonize them—blame them for "taking up resources," for being "inconsiderate" and "foolish."

When the rains have passed, the same news channels return to the area and begin assailing us with storm stories. Some reporters stand in front of decimated communities, rattling off the death toll from the people who "refused" to evacuate—others interview evacuees, who've returned to find their homes flooded or damaged.

But despite the loss of property, the message we receive is this: Those who left are alive. They can unite and rebuild—unlike the people who remained and drowned.

In the days following Helene's frenzy on WNC—while I sat in New York, stuck, unable and desperate to contact my husband or daughter or fly back home to Asheville—I was asked again and again: why didn't people leave?

The truth is, some did leave. They were either more prepared or just had the money, a destination, and a full tank of gas. For my husband, it was gas, road closures, lack of cash, and our dog that kept him and so many others trapped for almost a week without water and cell service.

It's easy to ask people to evacuate, but behind the ask lies the presumption that everyone has the means and physical ability to heed the request. They don't.

Those who have evacuated know leaving is a complex dance that requires far more than just packing a bag and saying goodbye. For millions, being in the path of an oncoming storm means foremost securing your home, a task that takes time, money, and an able-bodied person with tools, knowledge, and strength to lift, drill, and lay sandbags.

Many people who work, especially those in hourly or contracted jobs, don't have the luxury of time or the option of taking off from work to board up houses or leave days in advance. For them, missing work means not getting paid—or worse, the possibility of being fired. So they stay behind, risking their lives to ride out the storm because they have no choice.

If someone can leave, they are often confronted with a stark reality: how to escape.

Flying, if flights are available, can result in paying double or triple for a ticket because airlines, like hotels and supermarkets, begin to price gouge. While driving is touted as the best option—if you leave days in advance, it requires having a license and a car with a full tank of gas and a place to go for what could become an extended period of time.

But not everyone has somewhere to go.

According to a study by Harvard University's FXB Center, not knowing where to go was the most common reason people didn't leave. Add language barriers, kids, pets, elderly, disabled, or sick to the mix, and things become more complicated—fast.

We were fortunate. Five days after Helene, my husband was able to find gas, so he, my daughter, and our dog could leave. They drove to Atlanta, where he will remain with our dog. My daughter flew to New York, and the two of us are staying with friends indefinitely until there is water, which we are told could take anywhere from three weeks to months. However, there are thousands whose homes have been decimated or who can't leave because they have nowhere to go. They are forced to stay and endure.

We live in a country of unchecked classism, where it's hard to believe people can't evacuate—this same classism bleeds into how we perceive many things, especially climate change.

Helene's catastrophic damage is an example of this structural haughtiness, and we should see her havoc as a clarion call, one climate scientists have been warning about for decades: as the Earth heats up, rainfall becomes deadlier and more extreme, making storms once considered "freak events" in places like Asheville—2100 feet above sea level and 300 miles from the nearest ocean—regular occurrence.

Knowing this, we must face these climate challenges on a national level—not just rebuilding with new infrastructure to withstand these monster storms, but with federal initiatives that will allow people to evacuate without worrying about money, transportation, or places to stay. While FEMA does give disaster relief, it happens after the event. But most people need it before.

One solution would be giving emergency vouchers for gas, lodging, food, airline/bus/train tickets, or car rentals prior to the storm so people can leave. There should also be federal mandates for employers stipulating that no one will be docked pay or fired for obeying evacuation orders days before a hurricane. There is no more time.

It's imperative that we act now and reassess what it means to evacuate; otherwise, our indifference will continue allowing storms like Helene to swallow entire cities and towns—along with the people who inhabit them.

Maria Smilios is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and adjunct lecturer at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She holds a Master of Arts in American literature and religion from Boston University where she was a Luce and Presidential scholar. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Narratively, The Forward, Lit Hub, Writers Digest, The Emancipator, and other publications.

Her book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis (Putnam 2023) won the 2024 Christopher Award, which celebrates works that "affirm the highest values of the human spirit." It was also a finalist for the prestigious Gotham Book Prize and chosen as an NPR Science Friday Summer Read for 2024.

All views expressed are the author's own.