The science behind how a Florida hurricane devastated North Carolina

Two walnut trees more than 30 meters high fell a few dozen meters from Godfrey's house. Another tree smashed a neighbor's car.

Communications systems have also performed worse than Godfrey expected.

“We have no idea what’s going on out there,” Godfrey said in a telephone interview during a visit to a weather station he runs at UNC Asheville. “The only reason you caught me is because I’m on a hill looking over Asheville. Down in the valley there is no internet, no Wi-Fi, no cell service and not even text messaging.”

Asheville has been called a climate paradise in some reporting because it is removed from coastal threats like sea level rise and its relatively high elevation keeps temperatures low.

But almost nowhere on Earth is protected from natural hazards, and few places have taken steps to adequately prepare for increasingly common extreme weather. Seattle was once considered a potential climate haven until a 2021 heat wave sent temperatures soaring to 108 degrees Fahrenheit in a place where most people didn't have air conditioning. And parts of the Midwest that were considered climate paradises also experienced extreme rainfall.

“Climate change is affecting different communities in different ways, and while mountain areas have been a refuge from extreme temperatures, as we have found, they are not necessarily a refuge from the threat of devastating floods,” Winkley said.

It is a reminder of the far-reaching consequences of a warming world, he said.

“Typically a hurricane is thought of as a coastal issue, but now we're finding that these events – these large, climate-driven events – can make the weather farther away from the typical impact sites more intense than one would think,” he said.