David Wallace-Wells, a regular contributor to the New York Times, is confounded by the lack of preparation for Hurricane Helene. The weather reports warned that it would be a deadly storm, yet many people thought they could ride it out, and they paid with their lives. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, and the public is not adequately prepared. Have they been lulled by the politicians who claim that climate change is a hoax? Climate change denial claims lives.

Wallace-Wells writes:

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. The storm has so far produced at least 100 deaths and perhaps $160 billion in damages (according to early estimates).

In Florida’s Big Bend region, Helene was the third hurricane to make landfall in barely a year, flattening beach towns and barrier islands and sending water into the attics of homes as far away as Tampa Bay. In several states to the north, locals from dozens of communities hundreds of miles from one another were calling the storm “our Katrina,” some of them watching whole homes or shiny caskets carried downstream, others clinging to tree branches for hours on end waiting for the floodwaters to recede or help to arrive. In Tennessee, there was no emergency declared before hospital patients were evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter, and as of Saturday, across western North Carolina, hundreds of vulnerable power substations were still down, along with the infrastructure and power lines meant to actually deliver electricity and the vast majority of the world’s supply of high purity quartz, a necessary input for the production of semiconductors. Dozens of coal ash ponds holding billions of tons of toxic coal ash have likely been flooded, as well. Cars and trucks “were tossed around like toys.”

Forty trillion gallons of rain fell in total, the equivalent of one-third of the total volume of Lake Erie, enough to cover the entire state of Massachusetts in 23 feet of water. The intense rainfall was made, over the last week, perhaps 50 percent more intense over parts of Georgia and the Carolinas by global warming. (Other rapid assessments suggested it was perhaps only 20 percent more intense.) Entire towns appear to have been turned into flotsam or pulverized into splinters, and few of those living in the hardest-hit areas even carried flood insurance. In Asheville, N.C., which sits hundreds of miles from the coastline and thousands of feet above sea level and is now the drowned ground zero of the storm, the National Flood Insurance Program coverage rate was under 1 percent. Across the country, as many as six million more homes are at severe risk of flooding than are even included on the federal government’s flood risk maps, Michael Thomas pointed out in the aftermath of the storm. Across Asheville’s Buncombe County, 17 times as many homes had been judged at risk in a 100-year flood event as carried insurance against that risk; Helene was called a “thousand-year” flood for certain parts of the Southeast, though those terms grow less meaningful almost by the day. Another ostensible thousand-year storm had hit the coastal Carolinas just one week before. “Sometimes ‘worst case’ scenarios really do come to pass,” the climate scientist Daniel Swain wrote over the weekend on Sunday, “and I think we often lack the collective imagination to fully envision what that looks like.”

Former President Trump was the first politician to arrive, and he indulged his impulse to politicize the disaster. He asserted, falsely, that President Biden refused to take calls from Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, though Kemp said that he had talked to Biden, who sent the help he asked for. Trump also claimed that Biden wasn’t sending help to states with Republican leaders (every state but North Carolina), but that wasn’t true either.

Trump never learned that natural disasters are times when people help people, regardless of party.