With hurricane season just arrived, many are preparing for the next major storm.
But what can we learn from past storms?
WUFT spoke with NPR and PBS correspondent Laura Sullivan on her new documentary -- Hurricane Helene's Deadly Warning.
The documentary is available for streaming on PBS Passport and Youtube.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Kristin Moorehead: Much of the documentary focuses on building codes and resiliency. What are some of the things that you learned throughout your reporting?
Laura Sullivan: One of the things that was really a takeaway for us was just understanding how unprepared communities are across the United States.
So many places that we've been, and certainly in North Carolina after Helene, was this common thread of people saying, ‘But we just didn't think that this was gonna happen here.’ Especially in the Asheville area, saying ‘This was a climate haven. We were supposed to be safe from all this.’
But what we are finding is that these storms are more frequent, they're more severe, and they're coming for everyone everywhere. At some point in the future, people will be affected by these storms.
Historically, FEMA's really only been looking at tidal surges and large river flooding, and has missed this area of risk. They have not mapped for this. So there's an initiative now with private industry to map this risk.
What we're seeing is that two times as many Americans in the country are at risk for a flooding event or a disaster and have no idea that they are even at risk.
KM: One of the themes that I noticed is this dichotomy between a climate crisis and housing crisis. How can American communities reconcile these two things?
LS: This is something we heard from all the communities we have visited in this story, is that they're trying to address this incredible need for development while also creating safe places for people to build.
When it comes to how you rebuild after a storm there, it comes down to rules. Like, what are the rules in your area, in your state about how you can and will rebuild, and where you can rebuild? There's a lot of debate about this.
Down where you are in Florida, the state of Florida has done one of the best jobs in the country at mandating the most up-to-date building codes. People that we talked to said you can really see the difference now in Florida 20, 30 years after Hurricane Andrew. People's roofs are now surviving a hurricane, people's homes are surviving hurricanes, there's a way to survive storm surge.
I think because Florida has been hit with so many storms on the regular, there's more of an awareness of this. The rest of the country has not come to that awareness.
KM: One of the last quotes in the documentary that really stood out to me is from Representative Chuck Edwards. He says, “life is a risk,” in regards to building after a storm. Having been to the communities that were affected by this storm and other storms, how do you think they would feel about that quote?
LS: What was so striking about this idea that Congressman Edwards told us, is this mentality that these are rare events, you can't build for these storms.
What we found is that there's more to this than just trying to do the math of when this might happen again, which is a question that nobody can answer. What is really happening is that people are dying in horrible, terrible ways full of sorrow and sadness for their families and the community.
This is people dying in ways, in our country where we have so many vast resources, in ways that are unimaginable, and it's not just a risk about whether or not you're gonna lose your house. It's a question of who you're gonna lose and how you're gonna lose them.