Devastation from Hurricane Helene . .

Helene Has Killed More Than 110 People .

Here Are Some of Their Stories.

– the New York Times (09-26-2024, updated 09-30-2024)

Excerpt:
After the Category 4 hurricane made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast and pummeled the Southeast, some victims’ portraits were coming into focus.

A woman in her 70s who repaired nuclear cooling towers and rode motorcycles. A Florida resident who helped her community recover from Hurricane Ian two years ago. A man who had just moved to South Carolina to work as an electrical lineman.

All three were among the more than 110 people killed by Helene, a roaring Category 4 hurricane that has devastated much of the Southeast since coming ashore last week.

The victims came from at least six states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Many people drowned, and others were killed by falling trees, car crashes under heavy rains and a tornado produced by the storm. A lot of the victims were still unidentified.

The toll is almost certain to rise as rescuers reach communities in the Appalachian Mountains, where devastating flooding and mudslides have decimated whole towns.

But on Sunday, three days after the giant storm made landfall in the Big Bend region, some victims’ stories were coming into focus.

Most of the victims in Florida drowned in Pinellas County, the state’s most densely populated county, which is in the Tampa Bay region.

One of them was Marjorie Havard, 79, of St. Pete Beach. Her son, Todd Webb, 58, who also lives in St. Pete Beach, believes that his mother tripped, fell and drowned in several feet of storm surge.

After raising her children in Ohio, Ms. Havard became a licensed carpenter and traveled the country to repair nuclear cooling towers. She rode motorcycles and loved animals; she had owned a llama, a horse and a mule, in addition to dogs and cats.

“At one time she was pretty darn tough,” Mr. Webb said. “But at 79, the storm took her.”

Mr. Webb said his mother had insisted on staying in her home before the storm, even though she was under an evacuation order. He believes many of her neighbors made the same decision because Helene had been expected to make landfall much farther north. But even so, the record-breaking hurricane — Helene is the strongest to ever hit the Big Bend region — brought dangerous storm surge to the Tampa Bay area.

Aidan Bowles, a 71-year-old retired lawyer who had owned a local sports bar, also chose not to evacuate from his one-story cottage in Indian Rocks Beach in Pinellas County.

One of his neighbors, John Comer, an artist who had also stayed during the storm, checked on Mr. Bowles the day after the hurricane made landfall and came across a harrowing scene: Mr. Bowles had been trapped under a dresser and covered in mud.

“It’s not something you can get out of your mind easily,” Mr. Comer said…

Read Full Article. . .

Drone image of coast homes, Laguna Beach, United States (by Derek Liang via Unsplash).
Drone image of coast homes, Laguna Beach, United States (by Derek Liang via Unsplash).

Excerpt:
California is a place of magnificent tectonic forces that lift mountains only for them to be constantly eroded by glaciers, wind and rain, ground down to one of the most basic commodities on Earth: sand.

Sand covers our deserts, creates our foothills and fills our arroyos. It blankets the shores and piles into towering dunes. It’s everywhere.

So why are Californians fighting one another for it?

The sand wars are being waged up and down the coast on levels both micro and macro, as beachgoers, neighbors and cities quarrel over their share of a seemingly infinite resource. As beaches shrink, lines are now literally being drawn in the sand.

The situation has gained urgency in recent decades, as rising seas and coastal development derailed the normal cycles of sand replenishment. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that California could lose up to 75% of its beaches in the next 75 years.

In July, a Laguna Beach homeowner went viral on TikTok after screaming at a family to get off what she wrongfully claimed was her property and hastily installing a rope barricade to block off the section of sand in front of her home.

“Karen of the week,” said the woman filming the video.

Shortly after, the California Coastal Commission hit the homeowner with a violation notice for harassing beachgoers, ordering her to remove the rope barrier from the beach or face a fine of $11,000 per day.

On the beach, fights in the sandbox come with big lawyers and big buckets.

In Malibu, the ultra-wealthy are fighting it out in the enclave of Broad Beach. Business titan James Kohlberg is suing his neighbor, billionaire Mark Attanasio, for allegedly stealing sand from the beach with excavators.

Kohlberg’s lawsuit accuses Attanasio, who owns the Milwaukee Brewers, of scooping up public sand and carrying it back to his property as part of a construction project.

Broad Beach — where houses hover just above the water, propped up on deteriorating seawalls bashed by crashing waves — needs all the sand it can get.

“It does get a little awkward being so close to the houses,” said Maggie Taylor, who lies out on Broad Beach every few weeks during the summer. “Depending on where the tide is, I can end up a few feet away from someone’s property.”

Taylor said she doesn’t want to invade anyone’s privacy, but she knows the beaches are for everyone to enjoy. And she doesn’t mind exercising that right.

That hasn’t stopped the rich from trying to block access, going as far as painting fake garage doors or posting false “No Parking” signs to dissuade beachgoers from parking near their properties.

But as the ocean slowly reclaims the sand in Broad Beach, a factor even more critical than pesky sunbathers is at play for homeowners: real estate values.

Over the last few decades, Malibu has emerged as one of the priciest communities in the country — primarily on the beach. Oakley founder James Jannard set a California price record when he sold his Malibu beach house for $210 million. Yet just two miles inland, a plot of land is currently available for $179,000.

What happens to a beach house when there’s no more beach?

Erosion has become such a problem in Broad Beach that high-profile residents such as Dustin Hoffman, Ray Romano and Pierce Brosnan committed their own money to a $31-million restoration project to bolster the beach’s sand and protect the value of the community’s 121 parcels, many of which were purchased for $20 million or more.

The resident-funded initiative involves trucking in sand from quarries in Simi Valley and Moorpark.

It’s a high price tag for a short-term solution, according to Brett Sanders, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine. Sanders said sand costs about $30 per cubic yard to ship. A modest nourishment would be about 100,000 cubic yards — so roughly $3 million.

But how long does the new sand last? It depends. A 1960s nourishment of Capistrano Beach in Orange County lasted for about two decades before thinning out, Sanders said. But some projects last only a matter of months before the fresh sand is pulled back into the water.

According to Sanders, however, that’s not such a bad thing.

“When sand gets pulled under, it refills the coastal area near the shore. Sand has to be under and above the water for a beach to be healthy,” he said. “Small amounts of sand go under quickly, but the more we have, the more the beach recovers.”

Sand flowing in and out of beaches is a natural process. It typically flows in through rivers, but that has been slowed down by dams designed to hold back sediment. It also comes from cliff erosion, but that has also stopped in some areas as Southern Californians cram houses onto cliffs and stabilize the slopes so their homes don’t careen into the sea.

It flows out by the force of heavy waves and strong rip currents, which drag sand off the beach, where it is transported by deeper currents laterally up and down the coast. Gentler waves bring the sand back to shore, which is why the beaches grow during the calmer seas of summer. But the currents are kingmakers, stealing mountains of sand away from some beaches and dropping it off at others.

That’s part of the reason why some Orange County beaches are suffering while others, such as Huntington Beach, are growing by roughly 3 feet each year.

“Solutions require a collective mindset where your project might help the beach next to you,” Sanders said. “Sand is shared, and it takes coordination across communities.”

Easier said than done for some California cities…

Beaches | Coasts of the Month . . .

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In Photos: The Aftermath of Hurricane Helene

Devastation in Asheville: Hurricane Helene caused widespread devastation in Western North Carolina (by Bill McMannis, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).
Devastation in Asheville: Hurricane Helene caused widespread devastation in Western North Carolina (by Bill McMannis, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

– the Atlantic (09-30-2024)

Late Thursday night, Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, with winds gusting up to 140 mph. The storm then crashed inland, causing wind damage and severe flooding that killed at least 120 people across six southeastern states, according to the Associated Press. Millions remain without power as first responders work to reach those in need and search for survivors…

View Photographs | Read Full Article. . .

Helene's Path through the SE USA

Hurricane Helene satellite animation: September 26-27, 2024 (Courtesy of the National Weather Service).
Hurricane Helene satellite animation: September 26-27, 2024 (Courtesy of the National Weather Service).

Hurricane Helene’s ‘historic flooding’ made worse by global heating, Fema says

– the Guardian (09-29-2024)

Excerpt:
It will be ‘complicated recovery’ in five states, says disaster relief agency, with hurricane killing at least 91 people so far.

The head of the US disaster relief agency has called Hurricane Helene, which has killed nearly 100 people, a “true multi-state event” that caused “significant infrastructure damage” and had been made worse because of global heating.

The storm killed at least 91 people, according to state and local officials in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Officials feared more bodies would be discovered.

“This is going to be a really complicated recovery in each of the five states” of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) administrator, Deanne Criswell.

She noted that a 15ft storm surge hit Florida’s Taylor county, where Helene came ashore as a category 4 hurricane late Thursday with winds of 140mph (225km/h), and pointed out that areas of western North Carolina, where search and rescue operations are continuing, recorded 29in (74cm) of rain when the storm stalled over the region.

“This is historic flooding up in North Carolina,” Criswell told the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday. “I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides they are having right now.”

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