FORMER Craven resident Graham Jagger has been living in the United States for three years; here, in his letter from America, he talks about hurricane season

AND there are those who don’t believe in climate change. After what I have recently experienced here in the US there can be little doubt that the climate is changing, and hurricane Helene was a big reminder of that.

This extreme weather event began down in the Caribbean and slowly made its way up into the Gulf of Mexico touching the Yucatan Peninsular and the west tip of Cuba before growing in size and intensity thanks to the energy in the hot waters of the Gulf.

By the time it reached the coastline of Florida panhandle or “the big bend” as it’s also known it was a Category 4 hurricane bringing with it a 20ft tidal surge. Before it got to this point, emergency declarations had already been made in Florida and Georgia where I live at both State and national level. The powers that be had already realised it was going to be bad. How bad, we were about to find out.

By now, I was tracking the route of the storm on my weather app and it showed where it was going to make landfall in Florida and where it was going after that. Much to my shock and horror, it’s predicted path took it right over the top of my house. I guess you’re thinking, “he’s exaggerating” but no, I’m not, it was headed straight for where I live. All the weather apps confirmed that.

Arriving in metro Atlanta was expected overnight Thursday into Friday morning, and all the advice was to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. The suggestion was that it would likely be a tropical storm by the time it was over us and that would bring severe flooding, lots of trees down, power lines cut, and communities cut off for long periods of time maybe up to three days.

So, prepare I did and bought a camping light, another flashlight and had the right food to get by for a couple of days if power went out. My cat Morgy was being accommodated for too and she would spend all her time right alongside me throughout this.

By now, the route of the storm was still showing as being directly over my house. The north coast of Florida got the Category 4 hurricane and the huge storm surge and hundreds of thousands of residents had been told to evacuate to safer places inland. Watching this all unfold live on TV was scary to say the least and thinking this is about to happen to me and my home.

As the Category 4 hurricane hit land its anticipated route adjusted slightly from the originally predicted route but not so much as to stop me from being concerned. You had to remember that by now the width of the storm was nearly 500 miles wide and 7,500 miles long.

In fact, the area it covered was bigger than the whole of the UK by now. Wind speeds were over 150mph, the storm surge was wiping out homes, roads, power cables, boats tied up in marinas and everything in its path. I had no idea what to expect other than it’s not going to be good.

So, as it got late into Thursday evening, I locked everything up having moved everything outside that might move to being inside and safe, or I hoped it would be. The advice was to close all window blinds and internal doors and have everything with you to get you through the night. You should have a place in your house as your “place of safety” just in case you need to hide yourself away from the worst of the storm.

Fortunately, I have an ideal place of safety downstairs in my house so I knew where I could go should I need to. My cat, Morgy and I retreated to the bedroom and watched TV for information on what to expect. A regular review of my weather app began to show the line of the storm moving slightly to the east of its original position. As the winds around the centre of the storm rotate anti clockwise it’s always best to be on the west side of the line of the storm. The faster winds are on the east side of the eye and are much slower on the west.

As midnight approached it looked as though the predicted line was slowly moving away from where I live and out to the east of here. At last, some potentially good news. By the time that the now tropical storm was parallel with Atlanta the eye was about 60 miles to the east of the city. But that didn’t mean that it missed us, far from that. In 48 hours, Atlanta got 11.12 inches of rain, more than it ever had since records began in the mid 1800s. Living where I did I often watched the Aire Valley fill up with water and Pale Lane get closed due to flooding but that was like a puddle compared to this.

As I live with very big trees on two sides of my house, I was concerned that one, or more, might be blown over and fall on my house causing lots of damage. There’s a stream close to the back of my house and part of my garden is in the one in 100 years flood line so flooding was a possibility also. But after a broken night’s sleep, Morgy and I woke up on Friday morning to find that everything was okay, and we had survived the storm.

Hundreds of thousands of others had not been so lucky though. Big parts of Florida and Georgia had been devastated and that was to be repeated in North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. It’s now known that 135 people have died, and hundreds of people are still unaccounted for. The cost of the damage has been estimated at over $95 billion. This has been the biggest ever storm event in the US and that says something. Helene is now etched into the history of this country. I thought over my years in the UK that I’d seen some bad weather, but this beats everything I have ever known. Climate change is real, prepare for more in the future.