Currently making its way across the Gulf of Mexico and gathering up both speed and lots and lots of moisture along the way, Hurricane Helene is expected to make landfall along Florida’s Gulf coast late on Thursday.
Once it arrives, it could potentially be a Category 4 hurricane — which would make it the strongest storm of the season, and one of the most quickly developing storms ever documented. And while evacuations are already underway in Florida, where officials have warned that Helene could knock power out in some areas for as long as a week, there will likely be significant inland effects from the storm after it makes landfall, slows down significantly, and begins to release all of that pent-up moisture: lots and lots and lots of rain. The resulting flooding will likely be particularly bad for Black communities within the storm’s path.
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Currently, the forecast for swaths of inland Alabama and Georgia are for a month’s worth of rain to fall as the storm passes through — more than a month’s worth in some places. Atlanta is in the boat (or is that boat?), with between 8 inches and a foot of rain in the forecast, essentially two month’s worth of rainfall. There are areas in the mountains northeast of Atlanta up toward Asheville, North Carolina, that could see three month’s worth of rain from the storm.
Helene is just the latest big storm to present a major risk of flooding and other damage from excessive rain. Of course, hurricanes have always had the potential to drop lots of water in non-coastal areas after they’ve made landfall.
But with the bigger storms that hold more energy (and moisture) as a result of climate change, it’s becoming far more common for there to be dramatic rainfall events in areas that are sometimes far, far away from the nearest beach — like the flooding that happened in Vermont this summer, caused by Hurricane Beryl.
When 8, 10, or 12 inches of rain falls just about anywhere it’s going to create problems — that’s an awful lot of water. But flooding has the potential to be even worse in predominately Black communities like Atlanta, which was rebuilt after the Civil War to be, by design, a city where white people lived at the tops of hills and Black people live at lower elevationssxemn,. — where water (and, before the city developed a municipal sewer system, waste) ran down to.
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While the exact details vary from city to city and state to state, this kind of structural racism is widespread, and particularly so in the Southeast. According a McKinsey study on climate change, Black Americans in that part of the country are 1.6 times more likely to experience a 100-year storm (i.e., a storm that has a 1% statistical chance of occurring in any given year) than the general population of the country.
And the way these forecasts are shaping up for communities in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, this weekend might be some 100-year rainfall events.