300 miles really isn’t very far for hurricanes to penetrate. And Asheville is a bowl in the mountains. So water runs to it, and drains out. It just can’t handle that much rain at once. It’s probably happened before, just long ago.
That said, I sat on my deck most of yesterday. It was the kind of weather we used to get all summer long 30 years ago. Now it only happens briefly in the spring and fall. Summers are becoming unbearable. Wildfires are the result.
For rain and flooding specifically, new development can make it drastically worse without a huge amount of changes. It’s totally possible that a similar amount of rain 20-30 years ago wouldn’t have caused the same scale of damage, because the water wouldn’t have concentrated as fast.
300 miles really isn’t very far for hurricanes to penetrate. And Asheville is a bowl in the mountains. So water runs to it, and drains out. It just can’t handle that much rain at once. It’s probably happened before, just long ago.
That said, I sat on my deck most of yesterday. It was the kind of weather we used to get all summer long 30 years ago. Now it only happens briefly in the spring and fall. Summers are becoming unbearable. Wildfires are the result.
For rain and flooding specifically, new development can make it drastically worse without a huge amount of changes. It’s totally possible that a similar amount of rain 20-30 years ago wouldn’t have caused the same scale of damage, because the water wouldn’t have concentrated as fast.