From drought to deluge: North Carolina’s long road ahead - Kathie Dello

[Yeager] There's a new way to stay connected and know what's happening with Market to Market. When you subscribe to Market Insider, one email and a lot of information awaits you, go to markettomarket.org and subscribe to Market Insider.

[Yeager] Hello, I'm Paul Yeager. Welcome to the MToM Show podcast, a production of Iowa PBS and the Market to Market TV show. Weather. Climate. Always a topic of interest here for farmers in our audience and farmers around the world, which hopefully is always our audience. But that's for another story. Another time we're going to talk about Hurricane Helene, the water that fell in the state of North Carolina. We're going to talk to the state climatologist to find out exactly how much fell. How widespread is this been? What has been happening in recent times there in North Carolina this year alone, there's a day that Kathie Dello is going to tell us about where they were talking about fire dangers, heat dangers and then flooding. just things have changed dramatically there this year. Helene wiped out the drought in four states. But in just the last two and a half weeks, some things have changed. Again, we're going to talk about the weather, the climate and the reporting of it and how this story is going to be around for quite some time. If you want to learn more, about this topic, there will be a link in the description in the, transcript of this page, a story that you could read. And also, if you're watching this on video, you already saw the pictures, but if you're listening to it in an audio, go back and look at the video of some of those images, which I know you've seen plenty of, a reminder, we have our market Insider newsletter. Subscribe today on our website. And you're always the first to know about what's next on this podcast. But now let's go to North Carolina and learn more about the climate there. North Carolina has this reputation of everybody's from somewhere else. And I think that's you right?

[Kathie Dello] Yeah. So I was born in New York, like many North Carolinians, and I didn't make my way immediately south. I went out to Oregon first and worked out there for a bit and went to grad school, and then finally made my way back to the East Coast and North Carolina.

[Yeager] What's the, is it half-backers? Is that what I think sometimes is the term that I remember hearing about North Carolina? You're halfway back to New York or something?

[Dello] I haven't heard that one. I've heard Yankee.

[Yeager] Okay. Oh, well, yeah, that's a whole nother thing. We could that'd be another discussion for another time. But those are three different areas that you have lived and work. What prompted you to get into the climatology weather? What prompt? What was that spark?

[Dello] I, like everybody else in this field, was just a dorky kid who liked weather and figured out you could do it as a job. I grew up in upstate New York. We had all sorts of lake effect snow. I wanted to know more about it and went to college to become a weather forecaster. But it turns out I'm actually really bad at weather forecasting. So I made a pivot toward climate.

[Yeager] And that's more reporting what has happened, not predicting right.

[Dello] Well, it's more, what things should be and how they may be changing over the longer term, but it's definitely not day to day telling people to take an umbrella or put on a sweater, because I'm almost never prepared myself.

[Yeager] Yeah, well, we got a freeze warning or, you know, we've got something going on. So, but how does one get to be a state climatologist then? What's that path look like?

[Dello] Well, as, people in my life, I'll tell you, I went to school for an excruciatingly long time and studied a lot about climate and weather and people and a little bit about policy to how data gets integrated into decision making. And it worked in a few climate service jobs. So I worked in Oregon's version of their state climate office for a number of years. And then this job in North Carolina opened up. And I knew a lot about the North Carolina office and NC State. And, I knew it would be a challenging climate and applied and got the job.

[Yeager] You're based in Raleigh, right in the center.

[Dello] I am in Raleigh, okay.

[Yeager] And at NC state. So then North Carolina is opposite of Oregon. The coast is on your east coast, whereas in Oregon it's on your west coast. And but you're still there in the center. I think that is my rough geography right?

[Dello] It is. The mountains are a little bit shorter here. and the coast is a little bit further away from where I was in Oregon. But yeah, it's Oregon, but in reverse.

[Yeager] Day to day before September of 2024. What was a typical day for you?

[Dello] I do a lot of work with people who are affected by weather or climate in some way, and that's truly everybody. That's all 10.5 million North Carolinians as well. North Carolina's residents aren't on my calendar. I'm often meeting with teachers or people who work with farmers, state agencies, planners, elected officials to talk about what we know about their climate risk, how we might help them either through research or decision support tools, or quite honestly, just general outreach. What's going on? Our summer has been hot. We had a drought.

What does this mean for our corn crop? What does this mean for all North Carolinians?

[Yeager] So that is very consistent with what Justin Glisan does for Iowa. So we're used to that. Who's the biggest requesters of information to you? 

[Dello] it depends. We get a lot of gardeners, obviously, round tomato time. People want to know what's up, but we work directly with a lot of North Carolina's state agencies. and I wouldn't even say it was requesting. It's a lot of collaboration. So we work with them on drought monitoring, fire weather, thinking about building transportation infrastructure over the next 50 to 100 years. And obviously we have a lot of that to rebuild in North Carolina. We work with a lot of teachers because they teach weather and climate in fifth grade in North Carolina. And by the time they get to that, on their lesson plan, lesson planning sheet, they reach out to us and say, can you help?

[Yeager] That's wide and that's varied. And, so then let's set the stage for September 1st in North Carolina. Where are we at for drought? Where have we been for moisture?

[Dello] So we had a really dry summer and we actually had a terribly dry June, big flash drought event. We were very, very hot. And this is an important time for our corn crop here in North Carolina. And we lost a fair bit of our corn crop, which was absolutely devastating to so many farmers. And we wanted rain, but we didn't want it to come in big destructive tropical systems. We know we need tropical moisture to break droughts here in North Carolina, but we didn't want Halloween to be breaking that drought. But when Halloween came, we were at the the tail end of a drought in Western North Carolina.

[Yeager] I think I wrote in a script a couple of weeks ago that the moisture wiped out all the drought in like four states. I mean, that's how big of a system it was. And that's a significant, start. But it's not supposed to happen in one week. 

[Dello] No. And I can see the drought monitor on our TV screen from where I sit in my office. And I looked up this morning and I just saw red and yellow and orange everywhere except for the southeast. And we're even drying out here again. It's been very dry these past two weeks. And, you know, we're not saying drought yet.

We just had this big flooding event and, we had a potential tropical cyclone even before Halloween. But it's feeling dry around here again.

[Yeager] You're on the coast, but hurricanes are not direct. Hurricanes are what? Want a season that would directly hit you? Not the effects of ones that roll up from somewhere else.

[Dello] We have always said that we have, dual risk of hurricanes here in North Carolina. The direct hits, obviously, and Florence is still fresh in everybody's memory. That was six years ago. That was our previously most destructive storm, a category one hurricane that made a direct hit but also slowed down and just parked itself over eastern North Carolina and rained and rained and rain. But we also knew that we had a risk of getting hit by a Gulf hurricane. and three years ago, Tropical Storm Fred, caused catastrophic flooding in the same area that Helene did. It was a little bit smaller, but six people died in that storm due to flooding on the Pigeon River. in Canning Crusoe. So we knew there was a risk up there. We just hadn't seen anything like Helene before in our past.

[Yeager] The biggest thing that stood out to me was, and I think how even stumbled upon your office was a line. I was trying to verify something. I saw the amount of rain that fell was equivalent to filling Lake Mead. Do I have that right?

[Dello] There's been a few comparisons like that, and I'm never great at these sorts of things. I don't necessarily know what a Lake Mead is, even though I spent quite a bit of time in the western U.S. it was a lot of water, and it seemed endless, and in part because we had this preceding rain event, there was this frontal boundary that was separate from Helen and the people who went through Helene. They don't really necessarily care about the difference, but it did cause quite a bit of the flooding because we soaked those soils very, very fast. And then Helene came in, and then there was even a tiny bit of rain on Saturday after up in the mountains. So those folks went through about a week of rain. And the numbers that we saw coming out of that storm, over 30 inches of rain in basic North Carolina. That's unheard of. That's a lot of water to fall on a region, and there aren't many places for it to go except down into the valleys.

[Yeager] There's a chart in that, I think. Same article that I was referring to earlier, 30 inch. I saw plenty of two feet, 21in to 90. I mean, and these are three day totals. I'm guessing that's what you would normally have for some of those areas, if not annually, at least half a year.

[Dello] it's a few months worth, Mount Mitchell and some of those mountains can see over 100 inches of rain. And we saw that in 2018. And 2020 was a wet year as well. But if you look at the plot of accumulated precipitation over the year for Mount Mitchell, you see the drought, you see this dry, dry line tracking with one of the driest years on record. And then it just shoots up, 24in of rain, I think 24.20 4.5in of rain, roughly at Mount Mitchell in those three days.

[Yeager] What's the difference in soils in the mountains versus soils where they grow corn and have hogs in how they can handle water quickly?

[Dello] yeah. I mean, I'm not a soil expert, and some of our soils toward the coast are obviously a little more sandy. and we are growing corn, and we have some of our hog farms out there and up in the mountains. You know, it. They can vary a little bit. they were very, very dry. And they also, those mountains are very, very steep. They're not tall. So we talked a little bit about Oregon's mountains being, you know, especially tall here, 6000, 5000 feet. But those walls are steep. It's almost like an egg carton. And the soil is definitely played a role in that, having these really dry soils, that preceding rain event that's soaking moisture and then that runoff.

[Yeager] Yeah. And quick rain. Nobody handles quick rain.

[Dello] Well no, not over 20in. And we saw that the week before in Wilmington and Carolina Beach. Got over 20in of rain and an unnamed storm.

[Yeager] The amount of water that falls. I mean, you've mentioned several storms, but I'm looking at I think you talked about Fred already. You talked about historic things. I mean. There's no way to predict it, of course, but there's is there anything that can be done to prevent big effects from rain like that?

[Dello] Yeah. And I do want to call out the National Weather Service in Greenville. Spartanburg. Their forecast was spot on and it was spot on for days. And there were a number of us looking at it who are experts in this field and did not imagine this amount of devastation. And we need to take this event quite seriously. And we are. But think about this as our design storm. We can't put critical infrastructure back in places where Halloween flooded, and a lot of those places were actually mapped in the 100 year flood plain. So we know those are out of date in some areas. And some of the flooding did exceed that. But just because these valleys are so steep up in the mountains, they knew that this was the 100 year flood plain. We know that in 1916, there was a big flood in western North Carolina that flooded the River Arts District, which flooded again. You know, this has to be kind of our benchmark. We can't say, oh, this was just a fluke. This is just an aberration. It won't happen again because it likely will and can.

[Yeager] And that's what you mean by design. Flood.

[Dello] Yeah. So anything that is flooded, we just can't put things that we need, to live our lives in that area. And, you know, we need to put homes and businesses and people in safer places.

[Yeager] Homes, businesses, also roads.

[Dello] Yes. We lost a lot of roads in the storm, including some big ones. Interstate 40 will be closed for about a year up the North Carolina Tennessee border.

[Yeager] Is that hard to wrap your head around? Because I'm sure you've seen it in person, but to know that it's gone, it is.

[Dello] And I have just been go, go, go, go for the past two and a half weeks that every now and then I will stop talking. I'm talking to a lot of people like you and realize what I just said, that Interstate 40 is closed for a year. Interstate 40? That's a big, big road. But the one that hit me the hardest and probably the most personally was the Blue Ridge Parkway. The entire Blue Ridge Parkway is closed right now. It's such a special place. If you've spent any time in western, North Carolina or Virginia, you've maybe driven on that road. It's a special place for us in the fall. A lot of people go up there to see the foliage and the leaves and when I said that in an interview, I had to stop and say, the Blue Ridge Parkway is closed. So things like that are happening. A lot of my colleagues are up there. There's a lot of climate scientists in Asheville. They're not working right now, obviously, I'm not asking them for work, but knowing people who are directly impacted, some of the restaurants I love, some of the places I love to hike. You know, there's a personal connection to western North Carolina for many of us North Carolinians.

[Yeager] I could go into a couple of different directions off of that answer, and I'll do it. I want you to delicately do this because I know this is what you're going to have to do moving forward. At what point, what you say gets used politically in deciding where things get built and not. You are a data person. You are presenting numbers, not presenting opinions. But you also said you also talk about an assist in policy. Do I have that accurate?

[Dello] Yeah. So we provide science and data to support decision making. And that rarely looks like me just throwing down a report and running away, or me giving somebody an Excel spreadsheet. And one of the things that we have been working on is we are funded by our state's Department of Transportation. Before any of this happened to update Atlas 14, which is the historical precipitation frequency curves, which are out of date and very out of date for North Carolina. They were last updated in 2006 using data through 2000. We know we're not living in that climate anymore, and they also want to know about the future. They're making huge investments for the next 50 to 100 years. We saw places that flooded in Holyoke. We saw places that flooded in. And Fred, we just can't constantly keep rebuilding. We can't afford that. So they want to know what we're thinking about the future. We don't tell them, you need to implement this policy. I don't advocate it for any specific policy. But I can say if you're thinking about the future, maybe consider Helene as the storm that you're designing to.

[Yeager] Let's go back to what you said there a couple minutes ago about when I said roads, not necessarily I-40 or the Blue Ridge Parkway, but other roads and mountains. In Iowa and Illinois and Minnesota, we don't have mountains to navigate with roads. You sometimes Colorado, Wyoming, you know, wherever you don't have big areas to put roads so that changes. If if you can't get a road around this mountain, there's a good chance that little village or city of Asheville is not going to become accessible anymore. And that becomes a much bigger discussion.

[Dello] Yeah. So a lot of these places had one road in to town and one road out, a lot of haulers, a lot of small, rural aging, very poor Appalachian communities. Marshall, North Carolina, which is 25 miles to the northwest of Asheville. The entire downtown was decimated. And we're also thinking about this. As you know, this isn't just Asheville. Asheville was certainly, you know, the the destruction up there is catastrophic, but there are a lot of very small rural communities, and it will take some of them longer to recover in some cases because of that lack of infrastructure, because of a lack of communication infrastructure. On a good day, the cell signal isn't great in some places. I mean, you saw my cell signal in Raleigh and, you know, we saw troubles with that after Halloween. it's difficult to get cars in and out of some of these places, even if they have rebuilt parts of the roads. They're bringing supplies in by mule. they're doing airdrops. You know, we have years and years of recovery ahead of us in some of these smaller communities.

[Yeager] Earlier in 2024, in Minnesota, South Dakota, North Iowa, there were large maybe 12 to 15 inch rain events, which for those areas are huge, do dramatic damage. Those might be in that 100 year, flood in Des Moines. We hear about a hundred year flood. We also hear about the 500 year flood. What's the difference? And is that even get talked about right now, when you're still just two and a half weeks and it's still very fresh on what happened.

[Dello] We are talking about it. It's been referred to as a thousand year flood. and in some cases, maybe even a little bit bigger. We don't love the framing. It's not entirely intuitive for folks. Oh, this only happens once every thousand years. Why has it happened twice in the last hundred and something years or, like I talked about with outlook 14 and the historical precipitation frequency curves, we know they're not necessarily accurate. So we may not even be framing that correctly. We think it doesn't necessarily communicate the risk, but people are slightly more comfortable with it when you've had multiple 1 in 1000 year storms like Florence and now Helene.

[Yeager] A 1000 year flood. I mean, that's not even something that I pay attention to. The 500 year alone is always, eye popping. The 1000 I that's just crazy to to discuss, but here we are. That's what we're talking about. And I'm guessing, Kathy, that's going to be the rest of your careers. It is, however long it is. That's what you're going to be working on.

[Dello] We talked about this as an office. We are going to be talking about this storm for a very, very long time. And there will be other storms. And we're not out of hurricane season yet either. So we're not completely out of the woods. The thing is, we're always working on the hazard to sure. Somebody called me about extreme heat yesterday, because Phoenix has been hot and they wanted to talk about North Carolina's hot summer. There was a week in June where we were doing drought interviews, heat interviews, fire interviews. Oh, and hurricane season interviews. So we're always, you know, shifting toward whatever the priorities are. But in North Carolina, flooding has always been top of mind statewide, from our rising oceans and coastal flooding. to flooding here in the triangle where we have more urbanization, more people living. It's not a thousand year storm, but we're seeing more of those three, 4 or 5 inch events happening. And then now up in the mountains.

[Yeager] Well, if you get three inches of rain in an hour, that's significant.

[Dello] It is. And we have a lot of pavement and some small hills. The Piedmont essentially means foothills and not many places for it to go. So we do see pretty rapid urban flooding in downtown Raleigh.

[Yeager] What about the discussion, then, of a back to I gotta find my year 1916? What? I mean, the where we live and travel is different than it was then. We've built in other spots. We've taken out, berms or if we flattened out something or curves of a river. I mean, that's just the way we've built. It's not a new common, new thing. It's been going on for a while.

[Dello] It has been. And the River Arts District in part, was developed because that area flooded and it was cheap land for people to move in. And build new spaces. And we weren't thinking about, you know, a changing climate. Then we weren't thinking about precipitation curbs being outdated. Then. And you can't blame people for building where they built. But we can set future generations up better. and we have manipulated the landscape quite a bit. We have, like you said, a lot of people who are not from North Carolina, living in North Carolina, people are moving here. We're one of the fastest growing states. We're turning rural areas urban. You know, it's the landscape has changed a lot. But if you're under a sky, you can flood.

[Yeager] That might have to be the episode name here. If you're under an F under a sky, you could flood. also when you said about, one road in one road out in the mountains and the quick change you think about around Yellowstone a couple of years ago, I mean, they had similar situation. High mountains, high amounts of water taken out, roads. They can't get to that national park for for a long period of time. So it is not isolated to one part of this country. It's everywhere.

[Dello] No. And I've been telling folks, you know, the story of is Asheville actually a climate haven has come up over and over and over and many of us have said we knew Asheville had a flooding risk. We knew Asheville had a fire risk. There were big fires in 2016 just over the mountain in Gatlinburg. And also in western North Carolina. And there's no real climate haven. You have risks in Iowa. We have risks in, North Carolina, Vermont floods. You had the flooding in Yellowstone. You had a big heat wave in Oregon. We've just got to be managing things differently and keeping people safe.

[Yeager] Well, what is the biggest climate risk then moving forward?

[Dello] Like I said, flooding has always been top of mind here in North Carolina, in part because it's just such a an acute hazard when you get these big, you know, rain events or tropical systems and the ensuing flood, and the devastation that follows, we are tracking heat as well. Carolina summers are hot. Carolina summers have always been hot. They're getting hotter, especially at night. And we're seeing the impacts on our agriculture. Some of our stone fruits and berries need some cold temperatures to develop overnight. We don't have those chilling hours anymore, but also just in public health. These back to back hot days and hot nights. I know you think everybody in North Carolina has air conditioning, but we don't. And that cumulative effect can make people sick, especially the elderly. so keeping an eye on those things and also thinking about, you know, should maintenance workers go out earlier in the day to stay out of these hot temperatures? Should high school football practice earlier in the morning instead of at 2 p.m.? making small tweaks to our daily lives to keep people, heat safe.

[Yeager] There's an old climatologist in Iowa who has since retired. He's an emeritus status. He told me probably 5 or 6 years ago, when we started talking climate change in agriculture and things that we're not necessarily in climate change. We have patterns of 14 years of drought, 11 to 14 years of flood. And then we get into that volatility period. Are we in a volatility period or are we in something else.

[Dello] So we're changing the climate. It's warming. It's here in North Carolina it's getting hotter. It's getting wetter. It's getting more humid. And we can measure that with data. Things are becoming more volatile because of this. So the higher highs in the lower lows we talked a little bit about North Carolina's drought earlier this year. And then we swung into this this big flooding event. And we had other big rains here in North Carolina. You know it's to me it's one less about antagonizing people, more about talking about the data, talking about what we're seeing. And I know that farmers are among the best observers of weather and climate because they're living it and they're planting and they're making decisions around it every day. I like having those discussions, about essentially what we're all doing in our daily lives to think about volatile weather and climate and how we may plan for, like I said, a future that sets future generations up for success.

[Yeager] Farmers are the same everywhere around the world. They are dependent on what happens. They are watching that weather forecast. So can I put the hay down? Can I send the cows out? Can I plant that corn? It's the same everywhere. It's all around the world and it's not going to change. And you clearly see it that when I asked you earlier about who calls your office, I'm guessing there's a few farmers that call to.

[Dello] Absolutely. And we talk about cattle, heat, stress and the corn crop and planting and field conditions. And I love it because we talked about who I get to interact with. In my job. It's people who do things that I don't do and know things that I don't know. So I learned so much every single day.

[Yeager] We all do. And that's why it's, I appreciate you taking time. I know it's still very fresh. and I guess if you want those outside of your region of the country to know about what happened there, in North Carolina, just for perspective, I know comparisons are hard to do, but what's that thing you want us to know?

[Dello] This is absolutely devastating. the pictures that you're seeing are some of the story, but we don't entirely know about some of these, especially more rural areas. There are still people missing in North Carolina. this has been compared to Katrina, and I don't know that we need to, compare storms like that, but this is really, really bad. It's not going to be months of recovery. It's going to be years. This will be a different Asheville and a different western North Carolina. And I think, you know, we're it's top of mind right now. But keep these people in your thoughts for the next few months, the next few years because it's a long road ahead. Some of them are just getting water back now and they can't even drink it. And this is a metro area in the United States. So I think one of the things that's been really heartening is just the kindness of everybody coming together, helping people out, folks from Raleigh and eastern North Carolina, sharing resources with the folks up there, especially the folks who went through Florence six years ago. So we've all got to come together and we know this, you know this in Iowa. We know this in North Carolina. So I would say, just look out for your neighbors and, your community.

[Yeager] I greatly appreciate your time. I know it's been some long hours here, and you're still probably collecting data on what happened, because gauges might have gone offline and you're still looking at, radar estimates to try to exactly hammer in what exactly happened. Is that true?

[Dello] It's true. Our last econ at station. So we run our own mesonet here in North Carolina. It came back online Friday afternoon, so we know it's there. That was a question. We weren't able to get to any of these to check them out. It's talking to us again. We're definitely going to have to get out though and see if there is any damage to any of our stations. We are still getting data that is coming in when the power does come on. Some of the stations did record during the storm, so taking in that and readjusting some of our estimates, working with our partners at the National Weather Service, they are putting in long hours, still thinking about the next, you know, forecast that they have to make, but also recapping this storm. And they're amazing partners and they do really incredible lifesaving work.

[Yeager] Well, thank you for recapping the storm with us. Thank you Kathy.

[Dello] Thanks for having me.

[Yeager] My thanks to Doctor Kathy Delo and her time as the state climatologist for the state of North Carolina. We appreciate that and we appreciate you for watching, listening or reading. We'll see you next time. New episodes of this podcast come out each and every Tuesday. We'll see you then. Bye bye.