Milton Is the hurricane that scientists were dreading; it comes on the heels of Helene whose flooding devastated the mountainous areas of five states and the Big Bend area of the Florida Gulf Coast in Daydreaming on the Porch

Unless you live up in the Appalachian Mountains and foothills of five states devastated by wind and flooding from Hurricane Helene, it is almost impossible to grasp how many lives were lost, how many homes were washed away, bridges destroyed, and livelihoods lost — all over a vast area. And now, maybe the climate change deniers will take seriously the fact that this ongoing human-caused global warming set up the Gulf of Mexico to spew forth from its super-heated waters, a storm this strong, this fast. And another, Milton, even more powerful.

“In a way, Milton is exactly the type of storm that scientists have been warning could happen; Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, called it shocking but not surprising. “One of the things we know is that, in a warmer world, the most intense storms are more intense,” he told me. Milton might have been a significant hurricane regardless, but every aspect of the storm that could have been dialed up has been.

In the New York Times, the environmental writer David Wallace-Wells recently published an Op-Ed about why the US “slept” through Hurricane Helene, failing to adequately prepare for and properly process the incredible destructiveness of the storm:

Last week, warning about the imminent arrival of Hurricane Helene, the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Fla., used the word ‘unsurvivable.’ And yet the storm seemed to take much of the country by surprise. You might have thought, not that long ago, that the arrival of extreme weather could wake us up, belatedly, from climate complacency. But the dull drumbeat of disaster seems almost to be putting us to sleep instead. Even the imminent arrival of a cataclysm like Helene, a Category 4 storm that spanned more than 400 miles across the Gulf Coast and threatened communities as far north as Appalachia, was not enough to generate all that much attention ahead of time, when more might have been done to limit the devastation…

I’m dreading reading and watching the news tomorrow and Thursday about Hurricane Milton striking Florida. From the description of the storm, it’s an awful thing to contemplate. The videos of miles of gridlocked highway going out of the Tampa Bay Area are horrible to watch, because that could be any of us living long the East Coast. Can you imagine getting stuck in a car with hurricane force winds?

It’s been heartbreaking to see video after video of the devastating flooding and destruction in the mountainous areas  of the states affected so severely by Hurricane Helene.  The Blue Ridge area of Asheville and surrounding picturesque mountain towns and landscapes which I love so much, have been severely damaged, and in many areas most of the homes, structures, buildings, roads and bridges have been destroyed by the terrible flood waters.   It’s surreal watching those videos.  

The destruction  is on a larger scale than Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which causes so much death and destruction in my hometown of New Orleans.
Helene’s devastation is spread over many thousands of square miles,  though all the images of New Orleans after Katrina  and the flooding and loss of life are too horrible to ever forget.   

I wonder if all the mountain cities and towns can ever return to what they were, given the massive loss of infrastructure, roads and bridges, as well as thousands of homes and businesses. The other day, everywhere I went I heard people talking about Helene and how they had friends and family in the areas affected.  A family friend is in Asheville coping with that post-apocalyptic scene.  She is a very positive and upbeat person, but I wonder how all this is affecting her.

I have spent perhaps too much time the past few days watching YouTube videos of those  devastated communities.  They are nightmarish, surreal, and predictive of the environmental apocalypse that maybe coming sooner than any of the climate scientists expected.

Three of those  towns in western North Carolina are very special to me, in particular, Brevard, which I have visited on three occasions years ago, and one, Marshall, is a place I had hoped to visit.

Brevard is/was a dream-come-true town, quaint, filled with artists, craftspeople, musicians and music lovers. I stayed on several occasions in an inn with a beautiful waterfall on the property. The area around Brevard is surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful national forest land, and it is near the now-closed Blue Ridge Parkway.  The town suffered terribly from flood waters as did the surrounding area. Unimaginable.

I am attaching a video that show the flood waters flowing through the idyllic little downtown of Marshall.  The one hopeful thing in all this is how much people are helping each other out, sacrificing and risking their own lives.

It will take years for the people in those areas to recover and rebuild, but many will not, and those who do will have to relocate and rebuilt on higher ground and with future flood disasters and hurricane damage in mind.  Many are not insured and have lost everything.  It is such a vast tragedy. 

I cannot imagine what the victims of Helene are going through and what millions of Florida evacuees will come back to..  They will need so much help for so long.  And then fatigue replaces the initial shock and disbelief.  

Rain events, flooding, hurricanes etc., are crazy now that human-caused  global warming has truly kicked in.  The scientists predicted this, but the avarice and greed of corporations associated with the fossil fuel industries led to the dangers of global warming being ignored and covered up.   But we all have a portion of the blame, burning those fuels and collectively polluting and warming the planet.  Did we  think we could go on doing this forever?   It’s such a tragedy I feel for the  human race and the future when I see and hear about the destruction from Helene.  It’s really depressing.   No one is immune now anywhere on earth.  Signs of our times. 

And, as I write this, monstrous Hurricane Milton is predicted to make a landing late this evening in an area of major cities populated by three million people. They have been evacuating en masse for days now, stuck in gridlock in many places, and with no fuel to be had as supplies are running out. I would be freaking out if I was trapped in that hellish exodus.

This is how Marshall, NC, not far from Asheville, looked on September 28.

https://youtube.com/shorts/eRXg1_mTBfA?si=GlK7roiB9Mdp7ZCF