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Two of my neighbors spend winters in their family home, in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.
For those with television, you may be aware that a great deal of Western North Carolina is now 'gone', courtesy of Hurricane Helene's historic rainfall.
Cell towers are down. Power is off, impacting over a million customers, six days after landfall. There's no drinking water. 300 roads have been destroyed. Bridges washed away. Mud slides. Historic river cresting. Homes and businesses washed away. 193-deaths as of this morning. No place to land helicopters. No way to get trucks in. Saturated soil, plus clear skies = fog, preventing aircraft to land in areas where they might. 1,000 active-duty ARMY soldiers have been sent in to assist local, county, state, and federal 1st responders in search & recovery.
My neighbors live in the mountains above Asheville. We can't call them. They can't call out. We have no idea of whether they survived or not. All thanks to the historic water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
Some towns in this region have existed since before the American Revolution. They've never experienced anything like this in recorded history.
Some Americans moved to this area, thinking it was immune from the effects of climate change. A fatal decision.