“Western North Carolina is destroyed. Hell on earth. I spent last night chainsawing fallen logs on a mountain so people could get in. Before that we were hunting for survivors in (town) and delivering water to the fire department. Got a family out today…”
(media.greatawakening.win)
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While it would've been hard to know what the storm was capable of, there's no excuse for the residents who stayed behind, either in FL or in the rain path up to Appalachia that had set itself up like a conveyor belt for days before the eye made landfall. When you choose to live in a flood plain or near any moving body of water, there is one thing you must always be vigilant for: water levels.
Once you see that level get past a certain point, it's time to put away your hubris and ego and get yourself to higher ground. Period. Keeping or "saving" physical possessions aren't ever worth risking one's life, or the lives of loved ones to "protect." It amazes me that we still have people on this planet who think they can beat Nature when it decides to show its strength.
If you go back and watch the radar findings of Helene as she started impacting the S.E., you'll see that for almost two full days before the eye even made landfall, a conveyor belt of sorts had set up and pushed all they way into NC. If you pay attention to how big storms like hurricanes move, you'll notice they ALWAYS follow the path of the most moisture.
This isn't the early 1900s anymore, the time before Doplar Radar, folks. There were warnings for days about this storm. There were also evac.notices going out in the places that were most at risk of damaging flooding and high winds. Only now it's a "tragedy" because some people decided to tempt fate, thinking they could "beat" nature like some idiotic version of Lt Dan? Completely and totally asinine.
The fact that people who refused to heed the warnings are complaining about the emergency response is also stupid. Y'all got yourselves into this mess, you can get yourselves out of it. They act like the USCG, Nat Guard, etc have a duty to come and save them when they were dumb enough to test and tempt fate. This is erroneous and dangerous thinking. NO ONE has a duty to come save you when you've risked your own life by being stupid. And you damn sure don't have the right to risk someone else's life by being stupid, either.
This is why I never donate to help "rebuild" an area when things like this happen. This isn't some sudden flash flood that came out of nowhere. There were signs and scientific proof this was going to be a huge rain making and high wind event. Yet it was ignored by the ignorant and foolish.
Yes, it's a tragedy that it happened. But it's a stupid tragedy that could've been avoided had people remained smart and vigilant and not acted with false bravado and egoic stupidity. They don't deserve our sympathy, they deserve our ire and criticism.
The warnings for this storm were not in any way sufficient for the people who actually got hit. I was in the "predicted" path of the storm (north of ATL), and I didn't even know about it until my Alexa (of all things) put out a Tropical Storm Watch Wednesday morning. Kudos to Amazon, our Alexa was going crazy with notifications all Wed and Thurs, however the storm wasn't actually heading to us. Even got a Tropical Storm Warning Friday afternoon, when the storm was already well into NC and didn't hit us at all. By contrast, I got exactly 1 emergency broadcast alert on my phone, and that was well into Friday morning when the storm was way further east. For people in areas that weren't supposed to be hit that hard but were, I'd imagine they didn't even get warnings until the storm was upon them, if even then. Yes, they knew there was supposed to be some flooding in Asheville, but nowhere near what they got. It's like they programmed the alerts well before the storm, and didn't bother updating when the storm took a different path.