As rain poured down Wednesday outside the Terry Sanford Federal Building in downtown Raleigh, Congresswoman Deborah Ross convened state officials and experts inside to discuss what North Carolina needs to prepare for and recover from flood events.
The roundtable met about a month after the remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal drenched central North Carolina, killing six people and causing millions of dollars in damage. That storm, which caused historic levels of flooding on the Eno and Haw rivers, came just days after remnants of another tropical storm caused flooding that killed at least 135 people in Texas.
Ross was particularly interested in assembled experts' thoughts on enhancing the ability of warnings and finding ways to help people who are likely living in harm's way stay safe in the event of a disaster.
That latter scenario, Ross said, is like someone who has a 12-year-old car that's paid off that they're trying to keep running for as long as possible because affording a new car will be difficult. Keeping that car — or that community — as safe as possible for as long as possible becomes a key priority.
"How do we get resources to people so that they can shore up what they have?" Ross said.
The roundtable included N.C. State Climatologist Kathie Dello, a pair of experts from Duke University, three representatives from Southeast Raleigh's Partners for Environmental Justice and N.C. Weather Authority's Ethan Clark.
Lydia Olander, a Duke University professor and former member of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, said part of the problem is that flood models are not giving communities a true picture of the risks they face. Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment has worked with Creswell, a 200-person town in Washington County, to show how rising groundwater and the Scuppernong River are shaping flood risk there.
"We've reviewed the reports that are coming out. They're not really answering the questions that the communities need answered to make decisions about how to make them more resilient," Olander said, noting that Chapel Hill has faced similar issues with its flood modeling.
Ross, a Democrat who represents North Carolina's 2nd Congressional District, agreed that accurate information is vital. She rued that the U.S. House of Representatives took a recess without reauthorizing the U.S. Weather Act.
"That bill was pulled right before we left town, you know, because of the whole Jeffrey Epstein stuff. But it was negotiated — bipartisan, bicameral, four corners negotiated — to make sure that we reauthorize the National Weather Act in a way that's going to protect everybody," Ross said.
The bill includes measures like improving precipitation forecasts, modernize hurricane forecasts and steps to make weather warnings more useful. Ross and Congressman Tim Moore, a Republican who represents North Carolina's 14th Congressional District, were among the legislation's 17 co-sponsors.
'We're just not getting a break'
In the wake of the Texas disaster, a significant amount of attention turned to flash flood warnings and how the National Weather Service and other meteorologists can make sure they reach the people who face the most risk from rising waters.
As of July 15, 2025, the National Weather Service had issued the most flash flood alerts of any year on record, according to the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.
Dello, North Carolina's state climatologist, said North Carolina is full of new residents and people vacationing who may not understand what a flash flood warning means for their area. Others, she said, are either numb to alerts or willfully ignore them.
"We know that people disable the alerts on their phones, and we need to stop them from doing that because it is really critical information. We don't need to reinvent an alert system, we have a good one. We just need people to use it," Dello said.
Dello also addressed a sense of fatigue from severe events that is setting in across North Carolina.
Just two weeks before Helene hit western North Carolina, Dello recalled, a storm dropped as much as 20 inches of rain on Brunswick County and the Pleasure Island area of New Hanover County, causing severe but localized damage. While significant, that storm didn't quite reach the threshold of being a named system and so is still known as Potential Tropical Cyclone Number Eight.
While cleanup from that event was still going on, reporters were calling Dello to ask about drought in western North Carolina. Helene hit a few days later, with torrential rainfalls and strong winds causing $60 billion in damage across the region and killing at least 107 people.
Even now, Dello said, the trees that Helene felled are drying out and contributing to increased fire risk in the mountainous region.
"You have these compounding disasters and hazards happening here in North Carolina. We just can't keep up. Too much water, not enough," Dello said.
To that end, Dello noted that the NWS forecast for Chantal had a flood watch for the storm on the first day, followed by excessive heat warnings on the ensuing six days.
When Gov. Josh Stein visited a Chapel Hill apartment complex that had flooded days after the storm, he insisted on moving himself and reporters out of the hot sun before answering a question that had been posed to him.
Then, once Stein had found shade, apartment complex employees nearby scrambled to find water for a woman who seemed to be suffering from heat illness.
"We're just not getting a break from these compounding disasters and hazards," Dello said.
Pace of federal funds in Helene recovery
Matt Calabria, the director of the Governor's Recovery Office for Western North Carolina, stressed that disasters exacerbate pre-existing problems that communities face. Western North Carolina, for instance, had a housing supply problem before the storm that was made worse by the storm's impact to homes across the region.
"Everything from housing to food security to you name it is impacted (by disasters), so the solutions to these problems have to be similarly cross-cutting," Calabria said.
North Carolina is pushing, Calabria said, for the federal government to release funds to the state that have been earmarked for the Helene recovery
Calabria described about $135 million in federal public assistance funds awaiting approval from Homeland Security officials and $90 million in Hazard Mitigation Grant Program projects the state has approved, mostly for buyouts of homes that flooded during Helene.
"We are writing letters to the Trump Administration, we are joining in bipartisan efforts, that's the best way to do it and we are just basically saying we've got to get this money," Ross said.
