RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Last September, Hurricane Helene tore through six states, leaving over two hundred dead, and billions of dollars of damage.
NEWS ARCHIVE 1: In the mountains of North Carolina, entire towns are swamped, buried under mud and debris.
NEWS ARCHIVE 2: Parts of western North Carolina in and around Asheville hit with what officials are calling biblical devastation.
MALE BYSTANDER 1: We always thought that because we was in the mountains, that it wouldn’t happen…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: In the days after the storm, NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan and a team from FRONTLINE were on the ground in some of the hardest hit areas of Western North Carolina.
MALE BYSTANDER 2: We watched whole houses just crumble and go down the river, trucks turned end over end….
LAURA SULLIVAN: Did you feel like it was a safe place to live?
STEVE GIBSON: Oh yeah…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hurricane Helene is the latest in more than a decade of collaborative reporting on storms and their aftermath with NPR, and as we report in our new documentary, Helene served as a vivid sign of the country's growing vulnerability to climate-fueled storms.
ZUBILA SHAFIQ: What we thought we knew doesn't exist
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: …And the challenges communities face as they try to recover and rebuild.
KIT CRAMER: …businesses need to reopen and jobs need to be created again.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: The film is called Hurricane Helene's Deadly Warning. Laura Sullivan and director Jonathan Schienberg join me to discuss the documentary. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Laura, Jonathan, thank you for joining me on the Dispatch.
JONATHAN SCHIENBERG: Thank you.
LAURA SULLIVAN: Thanks so much for having us.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, Laura, I have to start with you. You’re definitely the storm correspondent for Frontline.
LAURA SULLIVAN: I know.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: But I mean, thank you for your incredible work over all these years. It's really profound when we saw it all laid out together, how much you've done. And, um, so I wanna start though, with the most recent, Hurricane Helene. That's the big storm that devastated the area surrounding Asheville, North Carolina. And we called you and we said, would you go? And you went, and it was just days after the storm. Tell me what it was like.
LAURA SULLIVAN: Getting down to Asheville and seeing the absolute devastation that was going on in that community was something unlike we had seen in so many of the other storms we had been to, where what was so unusual about this was just the sheer volume of water that was coming down, and with such force, down these incredibly steep mountains and bringing with it this wall of water. It wasn't like a flood where the water rose and then it just sort of dissipated and people were dealing with really wet homes and mold. This was, this was a force of water that had turned houses into matchsticks, that had moved semi-trailers on top of houses that had cars completely flipped over, and I mean, homes were in pieces, but so many communities were just gone and we were trying, you know, we were driving around in all this mud and just trying to get from one place to the other. We had a chainsaw in the back…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah, I saw those pictures.
LAURA SULLIVAN: Yeah. And so much of what we had seen was the people in Western North Carolina, which had just such a can-do spirit, were already in the roads clearing it themselves with the chainsaws and things like that. But just the, the sheer devastation of it all was, was really shocking. And the fact that there was no water for so long and how many people were missing for so long, because sometimes during a storm people will be missing, but then they're found in their house or they're found in their attic pretty quickly after. But a lot of the missing people had been swept down the river and buried under the mud and the debris, and it took weeks to find them.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: That is just devastating. I was thinking about the sort of scenes that we see with people that you talk to right when you land and how people were basically in shock that a hurricane like this could actually land there, which is so far inland. So talk to me about that, too.
LAURA SULLIVAN: So much of what we heard from people was that this was a climate haven, that this was not supposed to happen here. That they had moved to the western North Carolina because they believed they were safe from all these climate related storms, and they found out that they weren't. And, and so many of the communities that we had been before also learned that lesson because these storms are more frequent, they're more severe, and they're bringing a kind of torrential rain that has not been the pattern decades ago. And this new rain is what's causing this incredible flooding. And when you pair that with the mountains or storm surge or anything else that's moving the water at such a fast pace, you get these incredible damage in communities that never expected it.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So Laura, immediately after you left North Carolina, we started having discussions about going back to the disasters we'd covered before. And Jonathan, you know you come into the conversation while we're trying to figure out what is the narrative and of course, um, Laura has been to Superstorm Sandy in New York and New Jersey, Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico, and Hurricane Irma in Florida. So you're looking at all of these different storms. What's going through your mind as a director?
JONATHAN SCHIENBERG: Yeah, for me it was just thinking about, okay, what is the connective tissue? Where is the through-line that connects the dots between all of these different, you know, stories of disasters that you and Laura have done over the years? And then we started talking about, you know, the rinse and repeat aspect of it, and how essentially this keeps happening again and again, as Laura mentioned, because we see these stronger, more intense storms with these heavy rains. And people keep building back again, so trying to figure out what it is that we can, you know, put our finger on and really help us to understand what's happening here and, and why this keeps happening more frequently and getting worse.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah, I mean, the thing about a documentary film, and Jonathan, you and I spoke a lot about this and Laura, you've done so many films with us, is, you know, this sort of secret ingredient is like, what is the actual through-line, right? So for something like this type of storm, this hurricane, you could have had the question mark be, you know, what about the survivors? Right? What about climate change? And all of that is inside the film. But talk me through, Laura, the through line that we all decided on and, and I like that rinse and repeat idea because you actually take us to places and other storms where you revisit them to show us what's actually happening.
LAURA SULLIVAN: I mean, the truth is that, that it was this feeling when we were there, even in those first days of how are we here again? There are always lots of stories you can do, certainly about FEMA or the, the response or how people are faring or, and, and what it was like in the area. But the overall question is why do we keep standing here? You know, why after 20 years since Katrina, are we still standing in these devastated places wondering how did this happen? And how did it happen here? And why are so many people dead? And that's when we started asking, is there a way to do this differently? Can we build in a way where it doesn't hit the community quite as hard. And you know the easy question was, well, has anybody done it?
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. What did you guys find where Sandy happened?
LAURA SULLIVAN: Um, so when we went back up to New York, I remembered from one of the earlier films that they were trying to do a bunch of programs and one of the major programs they were trying to do was to buy people out of the way. I mean, to get people out of the way of water, right? And to do large scale buyouts. They were trying a whole variety of things. And so, I mean, it was kind of like, well, did that work? Should everybody be doing this? And it had been 10 years since we had been there. And it almost looked like a recovery trapped in time. It didn't look very different from the last time we had been there 10 years ago. It had that same jack of lantern effect of some houses were really high and some were, were gone and, and then some were exactly the same as they were the night of the storm, and it's like the teeth of the jack-o-lantern and it was really hard to find anybody who thought that this had turned out well. But then when we went and looked at the buyout program, it was kind of like, at first it was like, okay, well a whole bunch of these homes have left. Like that was the idea. But at the time, the governor then Governor Cuomo was like, this is gonna be marshlands and wetlands and it's gonna be oyster beds. And we got out there and it was a lot of empty lots, you know, we just saw a lot of empty lots. And then we started hearing that they were gonna build a soccer-plex, and then we started seeing all this development that was happening down there and then we started realizing that there was a lot of people who didn't want the lots anymore. And we ended up talking to the borough president in Staten Island. And he said he wants to develop the lots. So all of this initiative to buy people out of the way of danger and to have them move to safe areas and turn the area into oyster beds that will soak up the storm water. Um, you know… what we asked him was, was this all for nothing then, you know, after all these years?
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: What did he say? What, what's his response to something like this, if he heard that? What did he say back about that?
LAURA SULLIVAN: He said that he thinks sometimes the pendulum can swing too far and that he said that he would like to see the lots rebuilt. He would like to bring life back to the area. And he said that, that you can't live in fear of the next storm, and that it was time to bring life back to the area. He's right it — these neighborhoods do look very desolate with half the houses gone. It, it doesn't have that vibrancy, but the whole idea was that people weren't gonna live in danger anymore and instead these neighborhoods kind of got stuck in the middle. And now there's a lot of feeling that these areas should just be redeveloped and, and allow people to come back.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And so that feeling was something that you kept hearing over and over again, even in North Carolina. So I wanna go back to Asheville. Jonathan, you're filming, and what were you guys hearing on the ground there?
JONATHAN SCHIENBERG: I mean, I think really the focus was everybody wanted to just build back, and get back, you know, as quickly as they could. They were really just focused on getting their lives back together. Making sure that, uh, people had jobs and making sure that the economy was coming back and, you know, it's a big tourist area. So they really wanted to make sure that their tourism industry was back up and running. And then, you know, obviously we're asking the questions about, well, are you worried about, you know, just building back quickly and not building back better and what that could mean for the future? And the response was sort of mixed, you know? They certainly understand climate change and there are a lot of people who are more sympathetic to the idea that this could definitely happen again because of what's happening with climate change. But at the same time, there's these competing forces of the devastation that was wrought and what people are dealing with and people losing their homes and their jobs. And so, you know, it's, it's not the top priority about how we build back. And I think that's the unfortunate reality that we started to notice is that these two things didn't seem to go hand in hand. And that was something we noticed time and again as we talked to different people and, and it didn't necessarily matter which, um, part of, you know, the political spectrum you came from. Um, so that was really interesting.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah it definitely was, and Laura, you did talk to the chief lobbyist — the home builders lobbyist. What did he have to say about the need to update building codes and, and those types of issues that you raised with him?
LAURA SULLIVAN: What we found throughout the project was that if the federal government is not gonna robustly step in with rules about how people should rebuild and the communities maybe don't have the authority to do that, and people themselves don't really have the wherewithal to do that, in this vacuum, there are special interests are gonna come in and kind of fill this void. And that's really what we found in North Carolina. And in some cases, or in other parts of the country too, where this desire to develop is almost – is one of the most powerful forces in communities. And behind that, you often see special interests like the home builders lobby that want to see more development happen and they don't wanna see a lot of overregulation, is what they would call it. They feel that the codes are strong enough that the zoning is the way it should be that the way that North Carolina's rebuilding is in, in a good place and they are keeping homes affordable by not having too much regulation. On the flip side of this, FEMA rates North Carolina zero out of a hundred for its hazard resistance. It calls its building codes outdated. So there's a way that North…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Wait. I'm sorry. I just have to, I have to stop you there. Go back and say that point again. That's really important.
LAURA SULLIVAN: So, yeah. So, a zero out of a hundred, is what it's rated the state for its hazard resistance. And it questions its hurricane resistance. It questions its flood resistance. And, and those are decisions and choices that lawmakers in North Carolina have made over the past decade that a lot of the people we talked to said made people more vulnerable to this storm. Um, there's sometimes little you can do in the face of 26 feet of water, but not everybody was in 26 feet of water. And this storm affected so many people that even some flood mitigation, some storm mitigation would've helped in some way.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I mean that, that's just really important for us to know context going forward too. Um, so you also spoke with Congressman Chuck Edwards. He represents part of the area, hit hardest by Helene. What did he say about this?
LAURA SULLIVAN: He says, also, the same thing that we heard from so many people. We heard it in New York, we heard it in Houston, and we heard it in North Carolina from Congressman Edwards, that you cannot live in fear that these storms are gonna happen again. Congressman Edwards said, nobody in my, I've never seen a storm like this. Nobody in my family has seen a storm like this. And he said that he called it a once in a thousand year event. There's very little scientific knowledge about when a storm like this is gonna happen again and, and where it might hit. Every year we all start over with the same lottery ticket and, and, and there's no way to know who's gonna, who's, who's gonna get hit. And if Congressman Edwards says, but that cannot infringe on people's property rights if the property owner needs to take that risk assessment, there’s only — there's a couple problems we found with that, though, because on the one hand, what you do on your property does affect your community. What you do with shoring up your own home does affect whether or not it's gonna come off its foundation and smash into your neighbor's home. And then the second part of this is that if the community ends up paying the price for this, everybody in the community is going to pay the price for this. So you get affected by the decisions that are made across the board.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. So, one of the most interesting parts of the film to me was when you took a look at the federal government's flood maps, and those are created, of course, by FEMA. And you all spoke to a data scientist for a company who analyzed these maps and shared what he found. So Jonathan, first of all, tell me why did you decide that was important for the film?
JONATHAN SCHIENBERG: FEMA's maps are really sort of a baseline for how we build, you know, and where we build and how to essentially build safely given the dangers, the risks that we face. Um, this film had a lot of jargon. We talk about things like floodplains and hundred-year floodplains…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: No, absolutely.
JONATHAN SCHIENBERG: You know, try to go into explaining it to the audience here because, uh, you know, I, I don't want to, you know, put anybody to sleep. But it's so important, incredibly important for people to understand their flood risk. And I think that if you start with those FEMA maps, you can really understand, OK – this is where I live. These are the flood zones. So we wanted to look at that and say, OK – what's going on with the maps in places like Asheville, North Carolina area, in New York, New Jersey, where Hurricane Sandy devastated many neighborhoods. And then in Houston, Harris County, devastated by Harvey and what are these maps telling us about the realities on the ground there? And what we largely found is that the maps were very out of date or inaccurate, and people didn't know the flood risks that they had or what they were dealing with.
LAURA SULLIVAN: Mm-hmm. And they found that more than two times as many Americans live in dangerous, risky areas than have any idea that they live in a dangerous, risky area.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: They, they actually don't know.
LAURA SULLIVAN: They don't know.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So let's go to the federal government and their response. What do we know so far about the new administration's approach to preparedness?
JONATHAN SCHIENBERG: I think generally their feeling is, let's leave this to the states and local municipalities, you know, they can do it better. Um, but what we found is at the state and local level, there's a lot of problems and a lot of disagreements and a lot of politics. So I think there's a lot of concern as we approach hurricane season what will response and rebuilding look like if we get hit with some more Helene-like storms.
LAURA SULLIVAN: Yeah, especially with all the budget cuts and the funding cuts that the Trump administration has put in place, um, there are a lot of people that are concerned that the federal government will not be ready.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Laura, when you think back to your time in Helene, what person or idea sticks with you the most?
LAURA SULLIVAN: There were a couple moments that were so hard with just hearing the stories, certainly Zubila Shafiq's husband and the fear that he faced the moment that he was dying and Zubila having to live with knowing that her husband died in that manner and, and saying that it kept her up at night. And it, it really sort of was very similar to the day that we met up at the Swannanoa trailer park, uh, was Shalana Jordan and she was looking for her parents and just sort of the sort of hopeful way that she approached the trailer, doing this sort of, you know, hourly mental gymnastics about, well, last I heard from them was 7:30 and that's the last they texted. And she's sort of like, looking for a clue in the hourly math and, and she's saying, well, that's their car, that's my dad's car over there, that black Jeep, and that's my mom's car. And she's just, you know, she's like hoping that they left a note in the trailer for her. And then when she gets to the trailer and she sees that the water line is so high up on the walls and that the entire wall has been like ripped off and that, and that all the furniture is up on the one side. And this sort of sinking realization that it — her parents couldn't have survived this and the way she broke down. And I think when you hear the statistics of a storm, you know, to say, well, 107 people died in West North Carolina, or this many people died in Katrina, or this many people died in Harvey. And here's the damage and here's what it costs and here's the tens of billions of dollars we spent to get lost in the numbers. And, and remember that not all this is just people, but that these people are dying in terrible, horrible ways.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. I mean, I definitely think that for me, those are the stories that stay with me, you know, to this moment as you're saying them. Of course, I see their faces and their, and really the trauma of that.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Laura, when I think about the next storm or hurricane, you know, I'm gonna be picking up the phone and calling you.
LAURA SULLIVAN: I fear that that's gonna be sooner than either of us expect. It will be interesting to see what happens when the next storm does hit.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Well, I hope we're there together, just covering this. Can't tell you how much we appreciate your work at Frontline and NPR. And Jonathan, thank you as well.
JONATHAN SCHIENBERG: Thank you. Thank you so much, Raney.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: You can watch Hurricane Helene's Deadly morning on frontline.org, frontlines YouTube channel, and the PBS app. We'll share more reporting from our partners at NPR. In the coming weeks.
Credits:
This podcast is produced by Emily Pisacreta.
Jim Sullivan is our audio engineer.
Katherine Griwert is our Story Editor & Coordinating Producer.
Additional research from Refael Kubersky
Frank Koughan is our senior producer.
Lauren Ezell is our Senior Editor of Investigations.
Andrew Metz is our Managing Editor.
I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor in chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE.
Music in the episode is by Stellwagon Symphonette.
The FRONTLINE Dispatch is produced at GBH and powered by PRX.
