Responding after Hurricane Helene: Rapidly Estimating Impacts to Environmental Health Services in North Carolina

Hurricane Helene caused catastrophic flooding and infrastructure damage across the mountainous regions of western North Carolina. Responding agencies had to make real-time decisions about emergency response, infrastructure repair, and aid allocation. Here, we describe how our decade-long transdisciplinary research program supported data-driven recovery decisions in the days following a storm through the development of a novel emergency response decision support system (DSS). Integrating publicly available and geospatial data sets, we estimated that 4% of the total land area across the initial 25 disaster declared counties was flooded during Helene. While some areas did not experience a 100-year flood event, others had more severe flooding. We estimated that approximately 19 600 private wells, 34 300 businesses, and 500 fire stations were flooded. This type of real-time information was critical for supporting local health departments (LHDs) and state governments in their requests for emergency relief funding and their planning for emergency needs and assistance. Lessons learned through this effort highlight the importance of codeveloping knowledge and resources and providing actionable data and insights to enhance future disaster response efforts. Overall, our rapidly conceptualized and executed DSS demonstrated how providing actionable intelligence to responding LHDs and state governments can enable more effective distribution of real-time emergency resources.