In less than two weeks since I titled a piece “Everywhere Is Under Water,” everywhere else has joined in. Just in that brief period, while Poland and Romania and Vietnam and Myanmar and Chad and Nigeria and a dozen other countries are trying to dry out and clean up, flooding has descended upon Mexico, Nepal, and of course the southeastern U.S. “Biblical” starts to feel appropriate.
In Mexico, the “zombie” remnants of hurricane John have killed at least 22 people in the southwestern part of the country, primarily in the state of Guerrero. Dozens of landslides were reported in Oaxaca, and the resort city of Acapulco was also hit hard — less than a year after a devastating direct hit from hurricane Otis.
Across the world in Nepal, the heaviest monsoon rain in decades fell on Kathmandu; surrounded on all sides by the Himalayas, that much water has nowhere to go. The flooding has killed upward of 200 people, with that count likely to rise. One expert there said he had “never before seen flooding on this scale in Kathmandu,” according to the Guardian.
Meanwhile, parts of North Carolina and neighboring states are facing one of the worst catastrophes in their history. The death toll from Helene is now at least 107, also likely to rise. Asheville, North Carolina — hundreds of miles inland and 2,200 feet above sea level — was entirely inundated; roads were washed out, and even days after the storm moved through the state’s department of transportation still said on Monday that all roads in western N.C. should be considered closed to traffic.
Food and fuel are in short supply in a region now largely cut off from the outside world. The water infrastructure in the area has been badly damaged, and tens of thousands of people may be without water access for weeks. Once NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information can get back online — the critical data repository is headquartered in Asheville and has been dark for days now — its catalog of billion-dollar disasters will need an obvious update.
This condensed period of deluge and ruin is demonstrating again a fundamental tenet of the changing climate — it is coming for all of us, sooner or later. Coastal Mexico, 5,000 feet up in the Himalayas, the streets of Budapest and Vienna, a temperate mountain town in Appalachia — one place may be statistically more likely than another to flood in any given year, but those statistics aren’t what they used to be, and they’ll be something else tomorrow.