You could say James Gill spent his entire life dodging hurricanes.
The New Orleans native was just two years old when Hurricane Katrina devastated his city in 2005, becoming the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, claiming 1,833 lives.
Gill's family evacuated and sheltered in Virginia for two months during and after the storm. They then returned, salvaged their house, and spent nearly two decades at sea level, enduring other life-threatening storms and evacuations.
Guill’s mother, Terenia Urban Guill, called her son a “Katrina baby,” just as today’s young parents call their 2020 children “COVID babies”: a world-changing moment that fundamentally shaped them and Provided them with information.
“I have no direct memory,” James Gill said of Katrina. “But I say it’s in my bones.”
The heavy rains, flooding and roof-shearing winds he experienced shaped the trajectory of his life after high school. He attended the University of North Carolina Asheville, studying environmental science.
“It feels a little out of reach in the mountains,” Gill said. “It feels like one of the safer areas.”
In recent years, many people have uprooted their homes and moved to these mountains due to the increasing risk of extreme weather events elsewhere. Asheville, North Carolina, tops the list of cities considered by some to be relatively immune to the impacts of climate change.
Hurricane Helen upended that understanding.
At least 230 people died in six states as the storm raged in September 2024, nearly half of them in North Carolina. Two weeks after Helen, many communities in the region are still without water or power. The disaster caught many residents off guard and shook their sense of climate security.
I know this feeling all too well. I grew up in western North Carolina and then moved out of the state to start my career.
Today, my hometown of Swannanoa looks like a wasteland. The semitrailer split apart, spilling its entrails onto the muddy street above the Swannanoa River. Entire houses were swept from their foundations and torn to pieces. The car was still bent around the damaged hardwood.
familiar mentality
Gill and much of the region lost power, water and cell phone service during the storm.
He told me that he was able to stay calm and feel prepared to move past the effects of previous hurricanes.
He reported to Food Services and volunteered to prepare a large number of meals for students stranded on campus. But as he evacuated campus and the state, the scale of destruction that unfolded in the coming days changed his perspective on the city and the impact of today's climate events.
“If Asheville is hit this hard, who knows what it's like elsewhere,” Gill, who was evacuating again with her family in Virginia, said by phone.
Unlike during Katrina, this time he went to his parents' house in Richmond. Last year, they moved to Virginia as major hurricanes escalated in the Gulf.
Helen marks the eighth Category 4 or 5 hurricane to hit the United States in the past seven years. (This count does not include Category 3 Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida on October 9). There had been eight such severe storms in the previous 57 years.
Trenia Urban-Gill told me that leaving New Orleans after decades was one of the hardest decisions she had ever made.
“We left because of anxiety,” she said.
That anxiety returned in a big way on Sept. 26 when she watched Helen make landfall in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, heading toward an already saturated area of western North Carolina.
Trenia said she woke up every hour throughout the night to check radar and weather forecasts for the storm's progress toward James. It's a familiar mentality in Louisiana life.
Losing all contact with her son made things even more stressful. So her husband, Michael, began driving from Richmond to Asheville to try to find James and his girlfriend and evacuate them from campus.
Ironically, Trenia, Michael and their daughter evacuated to Asheville with James three years ago during deadly Hurricane Ida in New Orleans. It was that storm that convinced the family to move permanently.
“What happens when it disappears?”
My friend Sam Smetana describes a similar dissonance as Helene unfolds.
Just weeks before the storm hit, Smetana accepted an offer to buy a home in Sylva, North Carolina, just outside Asheville. While waiting for his house to be completed, he worked as a tricycle in New Orleans, where his partner lived.
As images emerged depicting disaster in the mountains, he worked with a mutual aid group in New Orleans. In the days following the hurricane, community members gathered a shipment of supplies that was shipped from Smetana to western North Carolina.
It felt like we were heading in the wrong direction during hurricane recovery.
“It was surreal to see something like this happen in the safety of my home in the mountains,” Smetana said.
Once he arrived, he focused on supporting a friend's property that suffered severe flooding in Barnardsville, northeast of Asheville.
A kayaker rescued a friend from the window of her home, a restored farmhouse whose high stilts were flooded to the floor.
Before Helen, Smetana spent a year traveling across the country in a van and campervan in search of a reliable, climate-safe city. In 2022, he settled in Western North Carolina and began traveling between the Asheville area and New Orleans while trying to purchase a home in the competitive real estate market.
He didn't expect flooding of the magnitude of Helen in the area, or certainly not so quickly.
“A lot of people have emergency shelter or climate shelters here. So what happens when this disappears?” he asked.
A sense of security has enormous value in the human psyche. But this is a fragile and malleable state. In addition to hard indicators such as the death toll and the number of destroyed homes, Helen also eliminated many people's sense of security.
Stories from high-risk areas show how to restore it. No matter where you are, preparedness strategies such as creating a home emergency plan, storing non-perishable items in your home, and building a trustworthy community network can increase your personal storm resilience.
In New Orleans, the Guill family relies on a stack of customized cards that list specific steps and reminders that must be followed during an evacuation. “We need that automated system,” Trenia said.
The methods above focus on elements within your control, which can help you feel more supported and secure. All of this becomes increasingly valuable as we face larger weather events that are beyond our personal control and impact places we never expected.
As Smetana considers closing on his mountain home, he reminds himself of this reality.
“There are fires in Montana. Buffalo, New York, is going to get a lot of snow. It's going to be hurricanes or droughts and earthquakes across the South,” he said. “I think I'll stick with it. I don't know where else I can go. It seems like things are happening everywhere.
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