Why did Helene devastate mountain towns in North Carolina, but not in Georgia?

The answer is BAD Land Use Planning from the day the North Carolina Mountain towns were founded!

The tendency of North Carolina mountain valleys to have flash floods and landsides can be explained by topography and geology, but the placement of buildings in locales, known to flood or have landslides, cannot.

Oh, despite the caca de toro being parroted on the TV newscasts about hurricanes never hitting the Appalachians and causing flooding, it is almost an annual occurrence. Locations where Asheville and Buncombe County have recently allowed dense commercial development flooded twice during the decade that I lived there.

A hurricane in 1916 caused devastating flooding in the Asheville Area, equal to that of Hurricane Helane. Severe floods in more extreme western North Carolina were caused by Hurricanes Opal (1995), Mathew (2016) and Zeta (2020).

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

This is the location of the new Riverside Arts District, which was destroyed in 2024.

North Georgia’s complex terrain is the result of an ancient chain of volcanoes intersecting with the even more ancient Blue Ridge Mountains, plus several younger ranges, created by sedimentary or metamorphized sedimentary rocks. The Northeast Georgia Mountains have the heaviest rainfall, east of the Olympic Range in Washington State. Where I live is classified as a Temperate Rain Forest. Rivers flow off the Georgia Mountains in all directions. Five of those rivers flow into North Carolina.

In contrast, North Carolina’s mountains are characterized by single river systems draining the terrain from the center of the region. Most of those rivers in Western North Carolina begin in Georgia.

For reasons not fully understood, a predominate type of soil on North Carolina mountainsides tends to quickly change from a solid to liquid state, when exposed to a certain level of water content. I used to dread springtime on my former farm in the Reems Creek Valley, north of Asheville, because after the frozen soil thawed, it turned into brown Elmers Glue!

A very different political tradition

Existing Land Use Map of Savannah, Georgia – 1735 by James Edward Oglethorpe

A Tale of Two States

Soon after arriving in Landskrona, Sweden in early June 1972,  I quickly realized that the staff of the Stadsarkitektkontoret knew more about the Colonial and Antebellum history of the State of Georgia than most professors at Georgia Tech.  Yet, many educated Swedes had never even heard of the City of Atlanta!  Those few who did, had no clue that it was major metropolitan city that was even then larger than any city in Scandinavia.

You see,  the planning and development of Savannah is studied in Swedish high school civic books and university architecture and planning curricula.  University political science classes study the colony’s and young state’s experiments with socialism. Say what?  We will explain.

As a matter of state policy in Georgia prior the Civil War,  architects & engineers, employed by the state, located county seats on natural terraces above flood plains, where Native American trade paths had intersected.  They mimicked the original plan of Savannah, when preparing plans for new towns.  That’s right,  all county seats in Georgia, prior to the Civil War, were planned towns, developed and marketed by the state government. 

Once the Redcoats were gone in 1783, the new State of Georgia took over ownership and management of the Port of Savannah.  Whereas most docks in the United States are run by municipal authorities or private corporations, the Georgia Ports Authority still owns all coastal and inland ports.  

In 1785, Georgia chartered the first government-owned university in North America . . . the University of Georgia.  Google tells you that the University of North Carolina was first, but it was founded in 1789.

The State of Georgia also developed and owned the nation’s only regional railroad system prior to the Civil War. Its rails interconnected the Tennessee River Valley, Appalachians, Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.  Elsewhere, private railroads continued to be linear connections between major cities until the 1880s.

The radial branches of the Georgia State Railroad were intentionally joined at the tip of the Appalachians. It was first called Terminus.  The town around the surveyor’s monument was formally planned to become the industrial center of the Southeast . . . thus the reason that General Sherman went to extreme efforts to capture and burn it.  We know Terminus by the name of Atlanta.

The only exception to this enlightened regional planning was Rome in Northwest Georgia.  The commercial heart of the new city was placed at the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula Rivers, where they form the Coosa River.  The ruins of a large Creek Indian town lay here, along with several large mounds. Residential neighborhoods were placed on seven hills that surrounded the bottomland.

Rome’s location was a major booboo, which has cost its residents and the US Government hundreds of millions of dollars . . . because the rivers flood almost every year . . . sometimes more than once, if a hurricane or tropical storm comes through the region. As late as 2022, Rome experienced a flood, where the waters were as deep as those in Biltmore Village, NC.

On the positive side,  in three western North Carolina counties,  pioneers, following Georgia’s example, established their county seats on natural terraces above the flood plains.  They were Downtown Asheville, Hayesville, the county seat of Clay County and Murphy, the county seat of Cherokee County.  Have you noticed that there are no horrific aerial images of flooding in Downtown Asheville, Hayesville and Murphy?

Cumberland Island, Georgia

The legacy of Jimmy Carter

Upon being inaugurated governor of Georgia in 1971,  Jimmy Carter reminded his constituents of Georgia’s long tradition of enlightened regional planning, then embarked on an aggressive program to preserve the natural environment of the state for future generations.  That program included laws and policies to reduce the damage done by flooding streams and hurricanes.   The implementing agency was the Division of Soil and Water Conservation.  As one of Jimmy’s first college interns, I was appointed to work for that agency in the summer of 1971.

It became a statewide policy to ban commercial development in designated flood hazard zones.  Thus, when driving southward along the Little Tennessee River near Murphy, North Carolina, one sees an endless clutter of pre-engineered metal buildings, until passing the state line into Georgia.  Then, one only sees rich bottomland fields being cultivated in the Little Tennessee River Flood Plain.

Laws were also passed to prohibit any type of building next to Georgia’s beaches. The State of Georgia aggressively sought means to return most of its coastal islands to a near-natural state.  Thus,  one constantly sees documentaries about houses and hotels being washed into the ocean near North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida . . . but never on Georgia’s coast.

Whose responsible when local officials flaunt Mother Nature?

The United States Government is going to be under severe pressure to fund the re-construction of buildings that were destroyed by the Hurricane Helene Flood. This week, FEMA estimated that only 1/2% of the property owners and tenants, affected by this flood had active Federal Flood Insurance policies. Most private insurance companies will not pay for flood damage.

Most of the “total loss” buildings were located within Flood Hazard Zones, where floods had occurred in the past. Expenditures for rebuilding structures that are destined to be destroyed again in the future, would be contrary to the laws and policies created by Congress.

If someone parks their mobile home . . . constructs a house, apartments, convenience store, auto repair garage, “big box” store, shopping center, restaurant, office park, warehouse or factory in a flood plain,  they should expect it to get flooded!