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Landslides buried parts of North Carolina after Hurricane Helene. It’s too dangerous for some homeowners to rebuild.
Katelyn Midkiff and her father, Bill, were at their kitchen table when a thunderous noise gave way to chaos. On the morning of Sept. 27, their home was consumed by a landslide in the wake of Hurricane Helene. It was one of more than 2,000 landslides in western North Carolina.
“There was a loud sound behind us,” Katelyn Midkiff said. “Then it was like we were getting thrown and pulled at the same time.”
Mud and debris from the landslide trapped them for three hours. Bill, a liver transplant patient, sustained severe injuries, including a broken neck and fractured back. He had no access to his anti-rejection medication in the pile of destruction that once was his home and land.
“The dishwasher hit me in the face,” he said. “The refrigerator would have killed me, but it’s up against the tree right now.”
The mud and debris were so thick, their neighborhood was cut off from the rest of the region. Bill and his daughter were eventually rescued by a Blackhawk helicopter.
Midkiff Family
The hill their house had stood on for 30 years was cut away by the power of the storm. The land washed down the river.
Their house was crushed against the trees and rocks, landing far downhill from where it was just hours earlier.
As the family recovers, they have learned they should not rebuild. The threat of future landslides makes it too dangerous.
The geologist’s perspective
Jennifer Bauer, a principal geologist with Appalachian Landslide Consultants, has been instrumental in mapping the landslides and assessing the risk of rebuilding. Bauer uses specialized maps to identify areas that glow in bright purple on her rugged laptop.
These “purple zones” show areas where landslides, known in geology as “debris flows,” are likely to start. The zones make up 13.3% of the mountainous counties in western North Carolina, which adds up to approximately 1,296 square miles.
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If all those areas were combined into one land mass, it would be nearly as large as the state of Rhode Island. This conclusion is based on advanced LiDAR scans taken from airplanes, satellite imagery and on-the-ground data, according to Bauer.
“It’s important for people to understand that there are lots of safe places to build and some that are not,” Bauer said as she toured impacted neighborhoods with CBS News.
The impact of climate change
Stronger and wetter storms driven by climate change are intensifying the severity and frequency of landslides.
“Since the 1980s, the hurricane record has shown a more active period in the North Atlantic Ocean,” according to NASA research. “On average, there have been more storms, stronger hurricanes, and an increase in hurricanes that rapidly intensify.”
Ed Williams, a retired water quality biologist, and his wife had hoped to build a home on their land in western North Carolina. They’re now changing their plans to build a smaller home on a different part of the property to ensure greater safety.
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“The last time a storm like this even came close to this much rain was in 1916, over 100 years ago,” Williams said. “We know now with climate change that a lot more storms are coming in from the Gulf of Mexico that we haven’t seen in the past. So those storms from the Gulf tend to be the ones that dump a lot more rain up here.”
The economic and emotional toll
For many, the financial and emotional toll of these landslides is insurmountable. Many homeowners are hoping FEMA will assist in buying them out, but it’s too early to know how much financial assistance they can expect. Some told CBS News that FEMA buyouts, while helpful, often fall far short.
In November, the Midkiff family met again with FEMA at an abandoned retail store inside a mall in Asheville, North Carolina. They filled out paperwork to have FEMA pay them fully for the home and land, but they may have to wait a very long time before they see a check that large.
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The Midkiffs, like many others, face the grim reality of abandoning their cherished homes. Often, this uncertainty leaves homeowners in limbo, unsure of where to safely rebuild.
“There are many homes below the purple zones that could be impacted by future landslides,” Bauer said.
Community resilience
Despite the devastation, the community is resilient.
“There’s something about seeing people come together, to work on rebuilding a place that means so much,” Williams said.
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As recovery efforts continue, geologists like Bauer are working tirelessly to identify safe areas for rebuilding. Still, the scars left by the landslides are a reminder of the risks of living on land that keeps moving in big rainstorms.
The landslides of 2024 mark the end of one chapter and the beginning of another for the Midkiffs, Williams and others.
“I can’t really, can’t think of anywhere else that I’d want to live,” Williams said. “So, we’re going to figure out a way to do it. There’s a lot of great places out there, but this is home for us, and this is where we want to be.”
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading medical research agency.
Trump, in a statement Tuesday evening, said Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.”
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” he wrote.
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The decision to choose Bhattacharya for the post is yet another reminder of the ongoing impact of the COVID pandemic on the politics on public health.
Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.
The document — which came before the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and during the first Trump administration — promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building up immunity to COVID-19 through infection. Protection should focus instead on people at higher risk, the document said.
“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March 2021 during a panel discussion convened by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Great Barrington Declaration was embraced by some in the first Trump administration, even as it was widely denounced by disease experts. Then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called it dangerous and “not mainstream science.”
His nomination would need to be approved by the Senate.
Trump on Tuesday also announced that Jim O’Neill, a former HHS official, will serve as deputy secretary of the sprawling agency. Trump said O’Neill “will oversee all operations and improve Management, Transparency, and Accountability to, Make America Healthy Again,” the president-elect announced.
O’Neill is the only one of Trump’s health picks so far who brings previous experience working inside the bureaucracy to the job. Trump’s previous choices to lead public health agencies — including Kennedy, Dr. Mehmet Oz for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and Dr. Marty Makary for Food and Drug Administration commissioner — have all been Washington outsiders who are vowing to shake up the agencies.
Bhattacharya, who faced restrictions on social media platforms because of his views, was also a plaintiff in Murthy v. Missouri, a Supreme Court case contending that federal officials improperly suppressed conservative views on social media as part of their efforts to combat misinformation. The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in that case.
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he invited Bhattacharya to the company’s headquarters to learn more about how his views had been restricted on the platform, which Musk renamed X. More recently, Bhattacharya has posted on X about scientists leaving the site and joining the alternative site Bluesky, mocking Bluesky as “their own little echo chamber.”
Bhattacharya has argued that vaccine mandates that barred unvaccinated people from activities and workplaces undermined Americans’ trust in the public health system.
He is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an economist at the RAND Corporation.
The National Institutes of Health falls under HHS, which Trump has nominated Kennedy to oversee. The NIH’s $48 billion budget funds medical research on vaccines, cancer and other diseases through competitive grants to researchers at institutions across the nation. The agency also conducts its own research with thousands of scientists working at NIH labs in Bethesda, Maryland.
Among advances that were supported by NIH money are a medication for opioid addiction, a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, many new cancer drugs and the speedy development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
President-elect Donald Trump announced a slew of nominations Tuesday, including international trade attorney Jamieson Greer to be his U.S. trade representative, Kevin Hassett as director of the White House National Economic Council and Vince Haley as director of the Domestic Policy Council.
In announcing Greer’s nomination, Trump said in a statement that Greer was instrumental in his first term in imposing tariffs on China and others and replacing the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, “therefore making it much better for American Workers.”
Greer previously served as chief of staff to Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former trade representative who is deeply skeptical of free trade. Greet is currently a partner at the King & Spalding law firm in Washington. He was not immediately available for comment.
If confirmed as trade representative, Greer would be responsible for negotiating directly with foreign governments on trade deals and disputes, as well as memberships in international trade bodies such as the World Trade Organization.
The selection comes after Trump on Monday announced plans to impose sweeping 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% tariffs on all imports from China as soon as he is inaugurated in January.
Trump said the tariffs would remain in place “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”
Meanwhile, economist Kevin Hassett was named director of the White House National Economic Council, bringing into Trump’s administration a major advocate for tax cuts.
Trump said in Tuesday’s announcement that Hassett “will play an important role in helping American families recover from the inflation that was unleashed by the Biden Administration” and that together they would “renew and improve” the 2017 tax cuts, many of which are set to expire after 2025.
Hassett, 62, served in the first Trump term as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He has a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and worked at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute before joining the Trump White House in 2017.
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