This past weekend marked the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, which claimed more than 250 lives — 108 in North Carolina — and left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days to weeks. In Asheville, the largest city in the western part of the state, the storm left residents without drinking water for 53 days.

Part of what made the storm so devastating to the region when it hit, 400 miles inland from where it made landfall, is that the Appalachian Mountains’ typically porous soils were already saturated by recent rainfall. The rainwater hit bedrock and raced down steep mountain slopes like water on a slide. It overran the banks of normally shallow creeks and rivers, carrying the earth above it. One in 4 of those who died from the storm in North Carolina did so because of mud and landslides.

I’m a reporter with the North Carolina online magazine The Assembly, and my stories have also covered natural disasters in California, Arizona and Texas, where I was a data reporter on ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative team. In my recent story for The Assembly and ProPublica, I wrote about how a gap in federal flood policy is putting mobile home residents in harm’s way again and again, allowing people in North Carolina to move onto the same lots where homes previously washed away.

Joe Rogers moved into a riverfront mobile home park in Haywood County in 2006, his front door less than 100 feet from the river’s banks. At the time, the flood maps showed that the land the park sat on was at risk but didn’t have his home in the 100-year floodplain, which would have required expensive elevation. The lot was empty, and at $200 a month, the rent was affordable. Rogers reckoned he had at least 40 years until another storm came........

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