A Tale of Two Disasters: Hurricane Helene and the 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires

It’s hard to believe that Hurricane Helene, the most devastating and costly hurricane since Katrina, made landfall just four months ago. Meanwhile, we don’t even know the full extent of the damages that will be caused by the Los Angeles wildfires that began two weeks ago. Both disasters raise important questions about risk management, hazard mitigation, community preparedness, and the continuing spiral of economic costs due to such catastrophic events at the local, state, and national levels.

California Wildfires: Patrick Fallon, AFP

Risk Management and Hazard Mitigation

Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region on September 26, 2024, as a Category 4 storm and caused catastrophic flooding and infrastructure damage across seven states. Conversely, the Los Angeles wildfires erupted from brush fires in Pacific Palisades on January 7, 2025, expanding rapidly due to dry conditions and the Santa Ana winds.

Helene was much more unexpected than the LA wildfires. Many counties in the Helene Impact Zone (HIZ) had very low percentages of flood insurance, often less than 1%. Total insurance payouts throughout the region will be between $4-7 billion, mostly due to wind damage claims. LA insurance claims could exceed $30 billion on a very narrow base of companies, and if hazard mitigation policies don't change, will likely lead to another round of insurance carriers leaving the California market.

Residents in both areas have expressed concerns that not enough was done to promote area resilience ahead of time whether in terms of making insurance more accessible and affordable, mitigating hazards, enhancing preparedness, and adequately funding first responders.

Death Toll and Human Impact

The human cost of both tragedies has been significant. In Hurricane Helene, over 200 lives are known to have been lost, with more than half of the fatalities occurring in North Carolina. Conversely, the wildfires have claimed 27 lives so far, many of whom were attempting to protect their homes. The emotional and psychological toll on the communities affected is profound in both cases. This element of disasters often gets short shrift, but the anguish, grief, anger, confusion, stress and other mental hardships take a huge toll. There are some things you cannot put a price on – the loss of family photographs and heirlooms, the home where you put down roots and built up lovingly. The natural beauty of your surroundings. These losses are not just about money, it’s about everything that went into the journey along the way. In a profound way, disasters affect both individual identity and community identity, as we are seeing play out in real time in LA and the Helene Impact Zone.

Economic Implications and Community Capacity

Make no mistake, the economic ramifications of both disasters have been substantial. Initial estimates for Hurricane Helene place economic losses at more than $50 billion, primarily driven by property damage and loss of infrastructure. Similarly, the wildfires’ total economic losses are expected to reach $50-80 billion. These estimates probably undercount the ripple effects on the regional, national and global economy.

The differences are stark when it comes to community capacity. In most disasters, the residents of a directly impacted community typically evacuate to a receiving city. In North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia rural residents in the HIZ evacuated to Raleigh, Charlotte, and Atlanta. Los Angeles is so big, residents simply evacuated to another part of the city. Los Angeles county has 88 cities, almost 1000 business support organizations and countless nonprofits. Many different funds and GoFundMe drives have already been set up. Although perhaps as many as 15,000 houses may be destroyed, LA has a 1.7 million unit housing base. The air of normalcy around so much of the city while infernos twice the size of Manhattan continue to burn is shocking to an outsider.

On the other hand, counties like Yancey, Mitchell and Avery Counties in North Carolina, each have fewer than 20,000 residents. They don't have the population base to support huge governments, and the emergency manager might wear three other hats and be stretched thin across all of them. They won't be able to respond to everything or finance all of their capital needs. As a result, Helene will have a huge transformative effect, even if the numbers don’t seem that big. A $5 million loss in some of these rural counties might have a bigger impact on the community fabric than a $500 million loss in Los Angeles.

What Happens Now?

 The communities in the HIZ are already experiencing the downside of the Anderson Cooper Effect, so named because of the withdrawal of the intense attention disaster-stricken communities receive when the networks focus on them and then leave for the next big story. Josh Stein, the incoming Governor of North Carolina has set up his team and issued a number of disaster recovery executive orders to expedite temporary housing and the repair of roads and bridges and the North Carolina legislature is working on a disaster recovery bill that should pass in the early weeks of the session. Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida also have set their recovery machinery in motion. However, all of these things take time.

The timing couldn't be worse because this period between when the emergency response winds down and the long-term recovery processes get up and running is particularly difficult. Residents are facing personal or family medical challenges, job losses, housing losses, freezing cold, stress, trauma, and anxiety, critical infrastructure losses, and a myriad of other issues that result from a lifetime of building things up only to having them all knocked down in a matter of days. 

Meanwhile, Los Angeles is still in crisis response and will be for a while as the Santa Ana winds continue to fan flames, upcoming rains turn arid, dry hills into mudslides, and other copycat fires get started. At the same time, it is already activating for the humanitarian and relief response, and the Together for LA regional coalition for small business (of which ISD is a proud co-founder) has already activated www.togetherforla.com. Multiple small business relief funds have been set up, including by the LA Chamber which will start releasing grants in early February.

We Need To Improve Resilience and Disaster Management At Every Level

In summary, Hurricane Helene and the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, though differing in their manifestations—one as a ferocious storm bringing water and winds, the other as wildfires consuming land—share core similarities in their devastating impacts on human lives, economies, and the environment. While Los Angeles has the lion’s share of attention now, it is important that the HIZ not be forgotten as it goes through the “disaster after the disaster” of having to figure out how to rebuild and recover from everything that was lost. 

While local and state responders race to upgrade their capacity, both disasters showcase the need for a dialogue to overhaul the nation’s resilience and disaster management framework too. This is urgent, because as a country, we cannot keep doing what we've been doing and expect different results.