Dave Gomberg had been watching the wind, his concern mounting. A veteran fire weather specialist at the National Weather Service, he understood the high and low pressure systems that ginned up the infamous Santa Anas that blew periodically through Southern California. This wasn’t that. High in the upper atmosphere, powerful currents were forecast to align with the fast-moving air off the desert, threatening a rare supercharged windstorm — all this in a region that had seen less than a quarter-inch of rain over the last eight months. The National Weather Service held a conference call with Southern California fire and emergency management officials on Jan. 3, warning that a “truly historic event” was due in four days, with the possibility of fires that would spread with extraordinary speed. Even an amateur weather watcher was worried about the conditions: “Altadena, we have a problem,” he warned his followers. Yet neither days of lead time nor highly specific warnings from weather experts were enough to save Los Angeles from an inferno. The firestorms that would ravage the area would expose multiple weaknesses in the region’s ability to respond to an extreme weather event — even one whose timing was widely predicted — that was far more serious than the seasonal fire threats California had long endured. There was no all-hands news conference by public officials before the winds arrived, as happens in Florida before a major hurricane. There was no single local leader in the politically fragmented region taking to local television to warn residents of the extraordinary danger. County supervisors issued warnings, but mainly on their social media accounts. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, who runs the biggest of 88 cities in the county, was out of the country when the fires ignited. Gov. Gavin Newsom had driven down from Sacramento, not for the fires but for an unrelated news conference, and he was more than two hours away in the Palm Springs area when the first fire broke out. Los Angeles had spent decades preparing for a major earthquake disaster — the “Big One,” they call it — and the Big One was here. But it was a fire, and no one had a playbook for one this big. State and local leaders have called for a full review of the response, with Mayor Bass promising “a full accounting of what worked and, especially, what did not.” The New York Times examined the four critical days leading up to the disaster, reviewing internal documents, text messages, timelines and fire response guidelines, and interviewing dozens of emergency management, fire and government officials to map out the region’s preparations. The Times review found that California’s emergency management and fire systems mobilized for what seemed to be an extreme version of a familiar threat that comes when dry conditions and high winds create the risk of fire — a red flag day. Until recently, there were typically around a half-dozen red-flag days a year in Southern California. But this was not a typical red-flag warning. The National Weather Service was invoking a new category it has used as fire threats have become more extreme. And in Los Angeles, as in many other areas of the country, there was no stepped-up playbook to respond to one. The Los Angeles County Fire Department took the rare and costly step of ordering 900 firefighters to remain on overtime duty after the end of their shifts, even before any fire had erupted. The city’s fire department could have done the same, doubling the number of firefighters it had on duty to as many as 2,000. But it did not. Nor did the city department deploy engines in advance as aggressively as the region’s other federal, state and local fire agencies, a strategy that can be critical to containing wildfires, which in high winds can often be stopped only if they’re caught immediately. As it played out on the first day of the fires, perilous hurricane-force winds repeatedly grounded aerial firefighting equipment. Water systems failed in Pacific Palisades, one of the densest concentrations of wealth in the nation. Los Angeles city firefighters were caught short as brush fires fatally outran an inadequate early deployment. By the time the Altadena fire exploded on the other side of Los Angeles later in the day, the county fire department, responsible for that area, had already sent many of its firefighters to the Palisades to help the city, which had not deployed any extra engines there in advance. Later, many residents of the Palisades complained that they had never been told in advance which routes to plan to use for evacuations. In Altadena, an unincorporated area that lies in the county’s jurisdiction, even members of the town council said they had not understood the seriousness of the fire hazard. Officials in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties who oversee the alert systems had in fact heard a pitch from Weather Service officials ahead of the fires to consider issuing public text alerts of hurricane-level Category One winds. But the three agencies eventually decided against the idea at the time, saying it should wait until the wind had reached a certain sustained threshold. By that time, the fires were raging. “They did mention there would be red-flag warnings, but we get those all year round,” said Milissa Marona, a member of the town council in Altadena, where most of the 17 deaths that ultimately occurred happened in areas that did not receive evacuation orders until long after the flames were upon them. She said she had been in touch with Los Angeles County fire officials but didn’t fully appreciate the threat. “I wish we would’ve known the potential was there for a big fire.”Whatever reckoning comes as a result of the fires may wind up having broader implications for how communities from Hawaii to North Carolina think about wildfires. Fire experts say that the deadly mix of hurricane-level winds and bone-dry conditions increased the risk that firefighters would be overwhelmed, no matter the level of preparation, and that states like California may need to adopt an entirely new playbook for preparing for wildfires as climate change makes them exponentially worse. That includes the long-recognized need for better evacuation alerts and water systems, better management of brush and grasslands, and homes that are more fire-safe, as well as better technology to fight fires. It could mean a stronger, more unified response structure that brings multiple jurisdictions together during the planning stages in extreme fire weather. In the most extreme cases, cities in the West facing volatile fire conditions may be forced to consider the kind of advance staff deployments and public warnings that are already standard elsewhere in the country for hurricanes and tornadoes. Up until now, emergency planners have been reluctant to issue evacuation warnings ahead of a fire, even when risks are clear, because precise predictions of where a fire will ignite are impossible, and the potential for crying wolf could prompt the public to eventually ignore them. “I thought we were prepared,” said Los Angeles County’s fire chief, Anthony C. Marrone, a 39-year veteran of his department. “And we were prepared. As prepared as we could be. And it wasn’t even close to being enough.” Living With Wildfire To live in California is to live with wildfire. Preventive power outages. Smoke in one town blocking the sun in another. Admonitions to “harden your home.” Hundreds of thousands of Californians live in coastal and mountain areas of exceptionally high fire hazard, their lives a calculus of risk and stunning natural beauty. In these places, people come to learn how fire can start, and how quickly a stiff wind can explode it. And, once that happens, how nearly impossible it can be to put out. Two of the five largest municipal fire departments in the country serve Los Angeles and the flammable sprawl around it — one for the city of Los Angeles, and an even bigger one for the surrounding county — plus about two dozen smaller city departments, a combined force of at least 9,000 firefighters serving some 10 million people over an expanse larger than the combined states of Delaware and Rhode Island, not counting state and federal firefighters who are stationed in the area.The fires on Jan. 7 were not even the first this year to require a joint effort. Seventeen minutes into the New Year, a three-acre brush fire at virtually the same spot where the Palisades fire would erupt six days later nearly tripled in size before city and county firefighters, helicopters and brush crews contained it several hours later. Afterward, they counted themselves lucky. The wind had been light. Luck would not last. One warning came on the afternoon of Jan. 3, when the National Weather Service issued an official fire weather watch for Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Four hundred miles to the north that day, the state’s Wildfire Forecast and Threat Intelligence Integration Center notified Mr. Newsom’s office. Striding into an informal briefing with the Capitol press corps on his 2025 agenda, the governor mentioned in passing that wildfire, which ordinarily threatens in the summer and fall, was already a concern. With the first workweek of a new year and a new presidential administration looming, though, the ominous forecasts were just one concern among many. In Sacramento, Mr. Newsom was struggling to balance a deadline for presenting his state budget proposal with an invitation to Washington, D.C., for the memorial service for the late President Jimmy Carter. There was a news conference on Jan. 7 near Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley, where the outgoing president, Joe Biden, would proclaim two new national monuments. Los Angeles leaders had their own competing demands as they prepared to meet the weather warnings. Mayor Bass and the five supervisors who lead Los Angeles County were working on a new initiative to get homeless veterans into housing. On Saturday, Jan. 4, Mayor Bass was heading to the inauguration of the new president of Ghana, a quick trip made at the request of the White House. She was in the air as the weather warnings started to increase in urgency. As the weekend before the fires unfolded, the forecasts loomed larger. Fire weather doesn’t always mean fire, but the Los Angeles County fire chief, Mr. Marrone, had a bad feeling. Just a month before, a terrifying wildfire had roared through Malibu, not far from Pacific Palisades at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. The Franklin fire had destroyed 20 buildings before firefighters stopped it, a relatively small footprint, but the skies had been calmer. In 2018, the Santa Anas had kicked up a fire in the same place, the Woolsey fire, that had leveled 151 square miles and killed three people. “That’s the dickens,” the chief said. “The wind.” It is far from clear that any measure of planning could have stopped an inferno driven by hurricane-force winds. But experts say they expect a close assessment of whether more vigorous public warnings, better evacuation planning and deployment of more firefighting resources before the fires started might have lessened damage and saved lives.

Torrential rains unleashed flooding and high winds and generated warnings of landslides to Hawaii and Maui, the two largest Hawaiian islands, on Friday, all part of a storm system that has been sweeping through the chain of islands this week. On the island of Hawaii, known as the Big Island because it’s the largest in the archipelago, rain drenched the North Kona district from Keauhou to Kailua-Kona, the second largest community on the island and a center of tourism and commerce with a population of about 20,000 people. Up to three inches of rain was expected to fall along the island’s west side by the end of the day, the National Weather Service said. Flash flood warnings went into effect as streams rose rapidly, forecasters said. Thunderstorms and high winds reached the Big Island on Friday but were expected to weaken before Saturday. The storm had migrated southeast over several days along the chain of islands, from Kauai to Oahu and then reaching Maui, the second largest island, on Thursday, when heavy rainfall led to floods that inundated communities. Maureen Ballard, a Weather Service meteorologist in Honolulu, said that the storm system had been weakening, bringing fewer thunderstorms, as it moved south and down the chain. “We are expecting conditions to be improving as the day goes on,” she said. “What we are seeing in the islands is not exactly going to be reaching the mainland” across the Pacific. On Maui, the eastern region saw peak rainfall rates of two to three inches per hour, including along the slopes of Haleakala, a volcano. The Weather Service issued warnings of flash flooding for the entire island and of landslides for its steep terrain areas. The heaviest period of rain was forecast to come in waves, with wind gusts of more than 60 miles per hour felt through 6 a.m. local time on Friday, the Maui Emergency Management Agency administrator, Amos Lonokailua-Hewett, said on social media. The largest volume of rain generally doused the western side of Maui, where up to 10.32 inches had fallen in the 24-hour period ending at 7 a.m. local time, Ms. Ballard said.Wind gusts of up to 35 m.p.h. swept through lower elevations, where most people live, but the summit of Haleakala, a volcano that is in a national park, recorded readings of winds whipping up to 120 m.p.h., Ms. Ballard said.Sue LaChapelle, a resident of Kihei in South Maui, said in a telephone interview that residents had been posting videos of flooding and road damage on a community page that she oversees on Facebook. She said that residents were dealing with closed and washed-out roads as well as a water main break. “This is not uncommon,” Ms. LaChapelle said. “This is usually what happens in heavy rain. This area is known to flood. It came down so hard so it can’t drain anywhere.” One social media post showed a vehicle swirling in deep floodwaters in the dark. Chris Stankis, a Maui County Fire Department spokesman, said firefighters had escorted the occupants to safety after they had misjudged how deep the water was and tried to drive through it. The County of Maui said in a statement on Friday that there were no reports of fatalities, injuries or missing people, but the storm had caused “significant damage” resulting in road closures, water main breaks, and power outages. Power outages were also reported across Oahu, emergency management officials there said.Ms. Ballard, the meteorologist, said that separate storm systems, which were hundreds of miles to the north of Hawaii, were expected to merge and evolve in several days, potentially affecting the mainland United States.

After multiple weeks without significant precipitation on the West Coast, an atmospheric river disrupted the spell of dry weather with rain and snow in Washington, Oregon and Northern California on Friday. A second system, also pulling in a stream of moisture, will arrive on the West Coast most likely on Monday, before the first one has exited. It is expected to stall over Northern California and bring continued rain and mountain snow to the region into next week. “These systems are right on each other’s tails, so in some places you might not get a break,” Julie Kalansky, deputy director at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, said of the storms’ impact on Northern California. Coastal areas of Oregon and Washington could receive three to five inches of rain from late Thursday into Saturday, while the coastal mountain ranges of Northern California are expected to be drenched with seven to 15 inches of rain over the next week, according to the National Weather Service. The northern Sierra Nevada could pick up over four feet of snow in the next three days. The first system pushed into the Pacific Northwest on Thursday night, and drifted south on Friday along the coast into Northern California, where it will linger through the weekend as the second system arrives. The second storm “is forecast to stall over California, wobbling up and down along the coastline,” said Roger Gass, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Monterey, Calif.Atmospheric rivers are ribbons of moisture carried by powerful winds. These storms have the potential to unleash deluges of rain when they reach land and especially when they push up and over mountains. But their paths are narrow, and it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly where they will line up and release the heaviest rainfall. This early in the forecast, meteorologists can confirm that a wet weather pattern will persist on the West Coast into next week, but they cautioned that the storms’ tracks could shift and the details of the forecast could change. There’s a slight chance for excessive rainfall that could lead to flooding in portions of the Northern California coastal mountains, the Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley and the northern and central Sierra Nevada from Saturday morning into Tuesday, according to the Weather Prediction Center. The risk also stretches inland across the Sacramento Valley and into the Sierra Nevada. Streams are predicted to swell in southwestern Oregon and Northern and Central California, and the greatest potential for flooding is expected in Northern California. “One of the more impressive things about this storm is how long it’s going to last in Northern California,” said Chad Hecht, a meteorologist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Here’s how things may unfold Friday: After beginning to affect the Pacific Northwest on Thursday, the system spreads south into Northern California, while rain and snow continue to fall over Washington and Oregon. The system starts pushing into the Sierra Nevada late Friday. Saturday: The system exits Washington early in the day and Oregon by later in the afternoon or evening, while Northern California continues to get hit with heavy rain and snow. Sunday: A chance for rain and snow continues mainly in Northern and Central California. Monday through Wednesday: A second pulse of moisture or atmospheric river brings more heavy precipitation to Northern and Central California and a chance for rain and snow to Washington and Oregon. While Washington, Oregon and Northern California had wet starts to the rainy season late last year, these areas have not received significant rainfall for multiple weeks. Seattle has recorded about 1.2 inch of rain since Jan. 1, compared with five inches for a typical January. With the two storms, Seattle is expected to pick up as much as an inch and a half of rain, with some of the precipitation potentially falling as snow. Kayla Mazurkiewicz, a forecaster with the Weather Service in Seattle, said that these storms aren’t big rainmakers for Seattle, but that “it’s a change since we haven’t had much rain in two weeks.” Editors’ Picks Help! How Do I Make Sense of All These Trends? Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Kristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too Nice San Francisco has not received any rain in more than three weeks and has had little rain in all of January, recording less than a quarter of an inch since the start of the month. In a typical January, the city gets about 4.5 inches. The dry spell is coming to an end though, with San Francisco predicted to record over four to six inches in the next seven days. Just to the north, the mountains of the North Bay could receive more than eight inches, with valley locations recording about half as much as higher elevations. The Bay Area got soaked by an atmospheric river in November, and Brian Garcia, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Monterey, Calif., said this system was not expected to be as nearly as wet. “That storm was something special,” Mr. Garcia said. “We picked up about a foot of rain in Santa Rosa in 48 hours. That corresponds to pushing a 1,000-year event.” Southern California has had one of its driest starts to winter ever, according to records going back more than 150 years. The dry conditions helped fuel multiple devastating wildfires across Los Angeles County this month. While the storm systems are expected to be focused over Northern California, the second one could bring up to an inch of rain to Southern California and Los Angeles County next week. “Some forecasts have the rain tapering off before the storm gets down there, and others show it lingering and bringing some rain, but not a ton of precipitation,” Mr. Hecht said. “That’s not to say things can’t change.”

Winter mornings begin at David Sibley’s Deerfield, Mass., household as they do at my similarly rural place 90-something miles to the west and south, across the New York line: with filling the bird feeders. “Baby, it’s cold outside” takes on a new meaning when many in your customer base weigh barely as much as a few pieces of pocket change. The sunflower hearts — shelled sunflower seeds — that we both offer are happily devoured, but they are not the key ingredient in the birds’ survival. What the American goldfinches, white-breasted nuthatches, house finches and the rest cannot live without in these coldest months is a suite of physical and behavioral survival strategies hard-earned over millions of years of evolution. These tactics, and the birds themselves, are the subject of “The Courage of Birds: And the Often Surprising Ways They Survive Winter,” the recent book by Pete Dunne, a prolific author about all things bird and former director of the Cape May Bird Observatory in New Jersey. It was illustrated by Mr. Sibley, a naturalist, author and illustrator perhaps best known for “The Sibley Guide to Birds.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Welcome to winter, nature’s proving ground,” Mr. Dunne writes, “where there is no prize for second place during these four months. Across the Northern Hemisphere, it’s ‘survivor take all.’”“Just walking through the woods this time of year,” Mr. Sibley said, “you can walk for an hour and not see a bird.” Many colorful species are absent or in dulled-down winter plumage (yes, blue jays and male northern cardinals, we see your defiant exceptions). Song, too, is at a minimum now. But in each sign of bird life out there, we onlookers are treated to a vivid display of resilience. Get out your binoculars and really watch. The birds are “meeting the season beak-on,” Mr. Dunne writes, and take note: A bird’s bill is not insulated. Nor are its legs and feet. So all those vulnerability points tend to be smaller in species that winter in cold zones — scaled down as a result of the natural selection process across countless generations.Mr. Dunne calls the feathers on these miniature, modern-day dinosaurs “the evolutionary edge.” Feathers are the first line of defense against weather, Mr. Sibley said in a recent conversation, and besides enabling flight, “they’re streamlining, waterproofing, windproofing, coloration — all those things.” And down feathers, the soft, fluffy kind closest to the bird’s body, he added, are “the most effective insulation known.” Using tiny muscles where their feathers attach to skin, birds can raise and lower them, thickening the insulating layer around their bodies, he said, “like putting on an extra jacket or getting into a sleeping bag.”Also thanks to feathers, a bird can tuck in its most vulnerable body parts, particularly overnight. Heads are turned so beaks can be buried into the shoulder-like scapular feathers atop a wing “to reduce heat loss and recycle warmth in the same way people do when breathing into cupped hands,” Mr. Dunne writes. By perching on one leg, the bird can pull the other up into safety, conserving more heat. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Watch for other protective behaviors: as birds turn their backs to the sun to soak in maximum warmth, for instance, or as they cuddle, clustering together to share warmth. Overnight, many birds roost in tree cavities, nest boxes or dense vegetation, sometimes together. Certain species, including the black-capped chickadee — a familiar bird in roughly the northern half of the country and in portions of Canada and Alaska — may get through a cold night by lowering their metabolism, respiration and heart rates, as well as their body temperature, even down to 50 degrees, to induce a hibernation-like state of torpor. Another cold-defying strategy of birds is shivering on demand to raise their body heat — that’s what chickadees do to emerge from torpor.Whoever came up with the expression “eats like a bird” really wasn’t watching. Oh, do they feed — especially in anticipation of nightfall or an approaching storm. Anyone with a wintertime feeder has seen birds swarming it in the hours before dusk or severe weather. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “They fuel up and then they can go find a nice, sheltered spot out of the wind and precipitation,” Mr. Sibley said, “and hunker down and maybe stay a day or two if they have to, just living off of the extra food that they took in.” Small birds lose about 10 percent of their body weight each night year-round while at rest, he writes in his 2020 book, “What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing — What Birds Are Doing, and Why.” Half is from burning fat and evaporating water, the other half from defecating. For perspective, Mr. Sibley cites one of the tiniest North American species, the golden-crowned kinglet, who despite weighing barely as much as a nickel can withstand temperatures down to minus 40 Fahrenheit.Its cold-season daily requirement of about eight calories? That would be like 67,000 for a 100-pound human, Mr. Sibley writes, or about 27 large pizzas or 26 pounds of peanuts, to get through a day. “Most of the day — up to 85 percent of daylight hours — is devoted to searching for food,” he adds. To his mind, one bird takes stocking up to an exceptionally impressive extreme. The Canada jay does not visit us; its year-round range is in the forests of northern North America, even into Alaska. “One of their tactics for surviving the winter is to spend all summer gathering food and hiding it,” he said, “thousands and thousands of hidden bits stuck in bark crevices and clusters of spruce needles. They hide food, and then go back and consume it during the winter.” The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website says that this food storage behavior — caching future provisions high enough in trees to be above the eventual snow line — may be what allows the jay to survive winters so far north. The species nests as early as February, which is exceptional in such a cold environment but means fledglings will be ready to forage independently by summertime. “They get pushed out of the adult’s territory in April, May, to find their own territory,” Mr. Sibley said, “but it also gives them the entire summer to gather and store food for the winter.”

For all the trouble it has caused, River Caney is an unassuming creek. The rustling strip of water meanders slowly, less than a foot deep in some parts, along a sandy bank behind a few dozen homes that occupy a narrow hollow in eastern Kentucky. But in 2022, a horrific flood tore through this quiet lane of green land, framed on either side by the Appalachian Mountains, killing 45. Sherry Mullins watched her double-wide trailer tip toward raging floodwaters before she and her neighbors were rescued by helicopter. Much of the land that had been in her family since the 1700s was eaten away by toxic, mud-soaked water. She can never build in the floodplain again, but she still owns a patch of lawn where her house once stood. “I don’t care if there’s six inches left,” Mullins told me. “We won’t sell it.” As I reported in an article published today, Mullins is one of many flood survivors that have relocated to new communities built on former coal strip mines that top the mountains surrounding her old hollow. From her kitchen window in the Blue Sky neighborhood, she can watch the construction of new houses where her old neighbors have also chosen to relocate. Others have chosen to stay. What happens to your community if it’s been upended by the kind of extreme weather that’s becoming increasingly common under climate change? That’s a question that River Caney residents have been facing since the flood and that tens of thousands residents in Los Angeles have been struggling with since fires destroyed whole neighborhoods this month. Since I began reporting on floods affecting my home state of Kentucky in 2021, there’s been a tension in the region between escaping the floodplain and honoring generational ties to the land. As communities across the country are being altered by extreme weather and climate change, financial resources, familial bonds and trauma often shape the decision of whether to stay or leave.Seven high-ground communities under construction by the state of Kentucky embody the complicated relationships between frontline communities and extractive industries. (Blue Sky, where Mullins lives, predates the 2022 disaster.) Eastern Kentucky’s connection to the coal industry has always been one of give and take. Almost every family I met during my visit had at least one member who’d worked for a coal company, from miners to mechanics to security guards. These well-respected jobs could earn upward of $80,000. But coal jobs have dwindled, creating a gaping hole in the region’s economy and making it difficult to keep schools, infrastructure and local government running. The burning of fossil fuels, like coal, is the primary cause of climate change, which causes more intense and frequent rainfall and floods. Down the street from Mullins, folks she’s known all her life, like her neighbor, Farmer Baker, and her niece, Heather Robertson, are buying new houses above the floodplain. Baker lost his wife, Vanessa, as they were escaping their home during the flood. Robertson lost her sister, Amy Henson, who was rescuing her horse from a barn in the backyard. Robertson, 38, said she was heartbroken to leave River Caney, the only place she’s ever lived. Her home wasn’t damaged in the flood, but she said she wanted a more secure future for her kids, ages 9, 5 and 2. “I wanted to get my children out of the flood zone,” she said.But even with the risks, not everyone can afford to leave the floodplain, and not everyone wants to. Since the flood, about three-quarters of the community has stayed, but the population has dwindled from relocation and death, Mullins, and her aunt, Deborah White, told me. White lives next to Mullins’s former home on River Caney. In late December, she stood on her front lawn in an old sweatshirt while her dog, a flood rescue named Liberty, ran at her feet. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT These hollows are stitched together by families who have often invested in their land and their homes for generations. White has tried to keep the tradition of close family ties alive by hosting weekly Sunday dinners where dozens, including Mullins, crowd into her modest blue home that’s often heated with coal. But even with a regular flow of visitors, she’s struggled with her mental health. “I don’t care how much therapy you get, it’s still in the back of your mind,” White said of the flood. Overhead, clouds gathered as we spoke. Rain, then hail, began to fall. “It may never leave us,” she said. Even for people like Baker who chose to leave River Caney, they remain bound to what they left behind. Down the road, I stopped by a memorial that Baker built for his wife: a wooden pergola adorned with wind chimes and statues of angels erected where his house used to stand. He spent the insurance money from the 2022 flood to buy an excavator, truck and trailer that he uses to search for her body. She’s the only victim from the flood who’s never been found. “I said I’d never leave River Caney until this happened,” Baker told me from his living room higher up the mountain in Blue Sky, a photo of his wife resting on his knee. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Now I don’t want to live there. Because I know it’s going to happen again.”

Earlier this month, Drew Wallace started paying the cooks, bussers and the rest of the 20 or so employees of his restaurant the Bull and Beggar, in Asheville, N.C., for the first time since two feet of river water flooded its dining room in September. “It’s a really victorious feeling,” Mr. Wallace said, his feet planted on a floor that had recently been buried under several inches of fine brick-colored silt. He seemed a little surprised as the words came out of his mouth. “It’s strange to say, ‘I can’t wait for payroll to kick back in.’” Payroll is one of the biggest expenses in operating a restaurant, but it can’t be funded unless there’s a restaurant to operate. In that sense, the Bull and Beggar is among the lucky ones. If it starts serving dinner again on Jan. 31, as Mr. Wallace hopes, it will be one of the first restaurants in Asheville to reopen after taking on water on Sept. 27, when Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina. President Trump’s visit to Asheville on Friday brought a fresh round of media attention to Helene’s devastation in the state, estimated at $60 billion. The storm washed away buildings near the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers. It also toppled what Stu Helm, who has led culinary tours of the city since 2016, likes to call the “three-legged bar stool” of Asheville’s tight-knit food community: “the growers, the makers and the eaters.”While the lights are back on in most of the city’s bars and restaurants, those in the low-lying River Arts District and Biltmore Village neighborhoods are still dark. Bottle Riot, a wine bar next door to the Bull and Beggar, closed permanently, along with El Patio de Guajiro, the four-month-old brick-and-mortar site of a beloved Cuban food truck. Dozens of other trucks, bars, smokehouses, breweries and bakeries are gone. Gourmand, a nearby farm-to-table restaurant — the phrase is almost redundant in Asheville — was knocked off its foundation weeks before it was scheduled to open. The owners now aim to have it up and running next year. Eda Rhyne, a distillery that flavored its fernet and other spirits with Appalachian forest plants, and Plēb Urban Winery, which fermented grapes from Appalachian vines, were destroyed. So was the pottery studio that made the expressive little ceramic pigs that hold toothpicks on every table at the downtown tapas restaurant Cúrate. About 90,000 people live in Asheville, but over the past decade or so its food scene has drawn the kind of national spotlight that typically shines on cities that are many times larger. Its farm-to-table restaurants and their chefs — Katie Button of Cúrate, Silver Iocovozzi of Neng Jr’s, John Fleer of Rhubarb, Meherwan Irani of Chai Pani, Ashleigh Shanti of Good Hot Fish and others — are regularly noticed by the James Beard awards, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, Esquire and The New York Times. For several years its craft breweries won it the title Beer City USA in a drinkers’ poll run by the brewer and writer Charlie Papazian. As the eating and drinking scene has grown, so has tourism. Almost 14 million visitors came to the city and surrounding Buncombe County in 2023 — about 154 people for each resident. According to the local Chamber of Commerce, leisure and tourism make up the second-largest business sector in Asheville’s economy, after health care and education.The outsize role that food and drink play, a source of strength in good times, made Asheville especially vulnerable to Helene. Damage to the reservoir system left the city without potable water until the middle of November. Even the many restaurants that weren’t flooded were unable to operate unless they could afford to buy clean water delivered by tanker trucks. One restaurateur who did, Mr. Irani, said private water cost him about $7,000 a week for each of his three Asheville restaurants, an amount that would have been far out of his budget a decade ago, when he owned just one small Chai Pani location.For almost two months last fall, local officials asked tourists to stay away. Not that there was anywhere for them to stay, with most of the area’s roughly 90 hotels closed. The county’s unemployment rate spiked to 10.4 percent in October before falling slightly in November to 7.2 percent, according to the state’s Department of Commerce. Although the quality and quantity of Asheville’s places to eat and drink are striking for its size, in many ways it is typical of towns and cities across the United States that fell apart after World War II but are thriving in the 21st-century service economy, led by restaurants and other small businesses. This new order, though, is remarkably fragile, as seen in the pandemic, the Los Angeles fires and countless major storms. Mass closings of restaurants can ruin their owners, destroy jobs and ripple out to dozens of vendors, who are often small, independent operators themselves. “Every dollar that comes in our door goes right back out to our suppliers — local honey, cheese, eggs, our cleaning service,” said Ms. Button, the chef and owner of Cúrate. Since September, she has permanently laid off more than 50 employees of her company, which includes a wine club, a culinary travel program, a line of charcuterie and a second restaurant, La Bodega, which she said may not reopen. Her insurance company has so far not reimbursed her for most of her business’s losses, she said, an all-too-common experience that has angered many restaurateurs in the city. “It’s truly a fraudulent situation where the business-interruption insurance that everybody’s been paying for is not coming through,” said Molly Irani, chief hospitality officer of the Chai Pani Restaurant Group, which she founded with her husband, Meherwan. None of their establishments received business-interruption insurance money, either. Federal programs to help small businesses survive natural disasters mostly take the form of loans that restaurateurs and other entrepreneurs with slim margins are reluctant to take on. “This cannot happen anymore,” Ms. Button said. “Something has to change.” For Asheville, the storm could not have come at a worse time, just as the mountain slopes around the city were starting to light up with scarlet and gold. Millions of leaf-peepers make October the busiest month of the year for the hospitality business. Thanksgiving and the weeks around Christmas are almost as profitable. Then come January and February, when the city is quiet even in normal years.Neng Jr’s, on high ground in the West Asheville neighborhood, did not flood, but it stayed closed until mid-December. Its first few weeks back in business have been healthy. “You kind of ride that wave of the holidays for a while and then people start to go down into their caves,” said Cherry Iocovozzi, who is married to and owns the restaurant with the chef, Silver Iocovozzi. “That’s my underlying anxiety right now, how slow will the next few months be.” The Iocovozzis have delayed the opening of a Harmony, a small wine shop and bar down the hall from their restaurant, originally set for October. Bottles of natural wine are stacked up, and a complete set of the classic wine-cult manga “Drops of God” lines the shelves of a cabinet bought from a River Arts District antique shop that was destroyed by the storm. “Once we realized we were going to stay open we thought, ‘Let’s dig in our heels here,’” Cherry Iocovozzi said. In part because of the money the restaurant lost last year, Neng Jr’s is likely to drop its à la carte menu in favor of a fixed-price model. Silver Iocovozzi hopes the more predictable cash flow will allow him to spend more on regional farmers, who already supply about 60 percent of Neng Jr’s ingredients. “I only want my money to go toward western North Carolina right now, and see everyone survive after this,” he said. “And see us survive.” For the region’s farmers, the pain came from many directions. A landslide killed Brittany Robinson, the owner of Four Winds Farm in Boone, N.C., at age 36. Rushing waters drowned livestock, washed away whole fields and spoiled crops in the ground. On Evan Chender’s farm in Weaverville, winds tore apart the steel frames of four of the eight plastic-covered tunnels where he grows mizuna, purple-leafed Padovano broccoli and several rare varieties of radicchio that can be found in the kitchens of Neng Jr’s and a handful of other restaurants. In 2023, Mr. Chender sold $635,000 worth of produce. All of it went to fewer than two dozen restaurants within 30 miles of his land, some of which have been buying from him since his first week, in 2013.Before September, “I felt like I had finally figured it out,” he said. Local restaurants “were getting their quantity and their quality, and we were making a lot of money. Now it’s really hard to say what the future looks like.” The storm also destroyed the home of one of the city’s oldest and most popular farmers’ markets, in the River Arts District. The vendors have moved to a parking lot on a windswept hill on the campus of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, but the crowds seem not to have followed them yet. On a frostbitten Wednesday afternoon, Gwen Englebach stood behind baskets of shaggy lion’s manes, amber-colored chestnut mushrooms and other fungi she and her husband grow at Black Trumpet Farm in Leicester, N.C. She said sales for the month at the new site were about 75 percent what they were at the old market last January. Mushroom purchases by restaurants have taken a hit, too. “They’re just doing what they can to stay afloat,” she said. In West Asheville and other areas outside the flood zone, business goes on as usual, although downtown is so empty on weeknights that on one recent night men were racing toy remote-control cars in the middle of the street. To spread the word that it’s safe to dine in Asheville again, the visitor’s bureau is spending $700,000 to air a TV ad, “Be Part of the Comeback,” with footage of smiling chefs and a couple drinking at one of downtown’s rooftop bars. The bureau is also working with the James Beard Foundation to sponsor a food-policy symposium in April, the Chef Action Summit. Asheville Restaurant Week was just produced by the Chamber of Commerce in January as usual, with more than 50 establishments offering discounts or deals, but this year the chamber is repeating the promotion in February. Everyone you meet in Asheville will tell you that the storm changed them, and most say it has made their commitment to the city stronger. “I guess we’re all feeling like there’s nothing to do but survive,” said Mr. Helm, the tour guide. “If we want to live here, we have to fight for it.”

A slow-moving rainstorm system was bringing a reprieve to Southern California on Monday after a lengthy dry spell, but also caused some mudslides in areas scarred by this month’s wildfires, forcing road closures and making driving hazardous. The storm had dropped about half an inch of rain in downtown Los Angeles by early Monday morning, the most the city has received in about nine months. The rain was easing, and the threat of flooding and mudslides was expected to decrease as the day went on, though some isolated showers were expected into Tuesday. The precipitation had caused some damage and hazards. The Los Angeles Fire Department said there had been “debris flow” and “vehicles in the mud” in Woodland Hills overnight. Local news media showed images of mudslides in Pacific Palisades. The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District said its schools in Malibu would be closed on Monday because of dangerous road conditions and challenges accessing the schools. Schools in nearby Santa Monica remained open. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Snow in the Tejon Pass, northwest of Los Angeles, forced the closure of a portion of Interstate 5 on Sunday evening, California’s Department of Transportation said. The highway section, which includes a steep mountain pass known as “the Grapevine,” was reopened on Monday. Part of Canyon Boulevard at Pacific Coast Highway was also closed for safety, the Department of Transportation said. Topanga Creek overflowed, scattering debris across the boulevard, the agency said on social media. The National Weather Service had warned of a 10 to 20 percent chance of significant mudslides in several Los Angeles County burn scars, sensitive areas where fires burned through trees and brush. In the burn scars, the charred soil could act like slick pavement when soaked by rain, creating the conditions for mudslides, said Marc Chenard, a meteorologist with the service. “You just don’t get any absorption of the water,” Mr. Chenard said. “It just all immediately turns into runoff.”The burn scars include areas scorched by the Palisades fire in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles; the Hurst fire near the Sylmar area of the city; the Sunset fire near West Hollywood; the Eaton fire near Pasadena; the Hughes fire near Castaic Lake; and the Franklin fire near Malibu, among others. Burn scars outside Los Angeles County had a 5 to 10 percent chance of experiencing mudslides, the Weather Service said. Residents were urged to stock up on supplies and protect property with sandbags. The Los Angeles region had endured a brutal drought for months, feeding this month’s devastating wildfires, which burned across thousands of acres and displaced more than 100,000 people. The two largest fires were nearly contained on Monday morning, with the rain further helping firefighters. The largest blaze, the Palisades fire near Malibu, was 94 percent contained, and the Eaton fire was 98 percent contained, according to Cal Fire. Before Saturday, there had been no measurable rain in downtown Los Angeles this year, said John Feerick, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. He described the rain as welcome news. “In general, this is beneficial rain,” Mr. Feerick said. “It should help with the fire situation immensely.” “Now, with that comes the risk, because there are burn scars,” he added.

The Santa Ana winds that have fueled wildfires for weeks in Southern California finally stopped blowing on Friday, and an unusually long period of dry weather was on track to end in Los Angeles County as a cold storm arrived late Saturday. The system was expected to deliver light to moderate rain that will fall intermittently through Monday. The weather will give the arid landscape and withered vegetation a much-needed soaking and benefit firefighting crews. Still, the forecast showed a small risk that bursts of heavy rain could cause flash floods and mudslides around areas of Los Angeles County recently scarred by wildfires, including the northwest (Hughes fire), east (Bridge fire), southwest (Franklin and Palisades fires) and especially the central area where the Eaton fire burned. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for those areas from 10 a.m. Sunday to 4 p.m. Monday, when there is the highest chance for rain and risk for thunderstorms. Kristan Lund, a meteorologist with the Weather Service, called flooding the worst-case scenario for the conditions in Los Angeles, where there is up to a 20 percent chance that debris flows could damage roads and structures. “What we’re telling people is to avoid the area during the watch period,” Ms. Lund said. “Use sandbags to protect your property, and if residents decide to stay, make sure to stock up on supplies in case road access is blocked.” The Los Angeles area has seen its driest start to the rainy season on record and has not measured significant rainfall since last spring. Since May 1, the Weather Service’s gauge in downtown Los Angeles has measured just a little more than a quarter-inch of rain. This weekend’s expected storm has the potential to bring nearly four times that amount. The burn scars in Los Angeles County, where trees and brush were devoured by flames, are most likely to benefit from the rain. “If we get gentle rains, it’s going to help make those burn areas recover and re-vegetate,” said Jayme Laber, a hydrologist with the Weather Service. The first drops of rain began to fall Saturday night, with showers expected to increase Sunday into Monday. Most locations across the county, including downtown Los Angeles, are expected to record up to an inch of rain in the storm. But isolated showers and thunderstorms could bring rain that falls at three quarters of an inch an hour, and the heavier rains could lead to debris flows Sunday afternoon through Monday afternoon. The thunderstorms could also kick up strong, damaging winds, drop small hail and cause water spouts over the ocean, the Weather Service said. The weather is expected to temporarily lower the risk of wildfires, but this one storm won’t fully end it. “It’s only going to help things out for a couple weeks,” Matt Shameson, a meteorologist with the U.S. Forest Service, said of the storm. “If we get another one or two decent systems, that will help us out significantly.” The good news is that another set of showers could come over the region sometime next week, Mr. Shameson said.

After a rare winter storm walloped the southern United States with record snowfall, the region faced dangerous icy road conditions and a bitter chill on Thursday that raised the possibility that some streets may remain impassable until the weekend. From the swamps of Louisiana to beaches in the Carolinas, the conditions left officials in much of the South delivering a similar message. The effects of the storm were not over, they told residents, and driving remained a hazard on untreated roads still frozen with slippery ice. While temperatures briefly rose above freezing in parts of Louisiana, southern Alabama and Mississippi, nighttime temperatures plummeted in areas including Georgia, northern Florida and coastal communities in the Carolinas, causing snow and ice to refreeze on roads. Morning commuters faced an increased risk of black ice, the slick patches that can form unpredictably and almost invisibly because they blend in with the asphalt. “Ice is ice, and it will present a hazard to motorists if they’re not prepared,” Richard Bann, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said. That pattern — of ice partially melting, only to refreeze at night — was expected to continue for much of the South until at least Saturday morning. The threat is worse in a region that is unaccustomed to severely cold weather, and where snow plows are not regularly well stocked. Temperatures as low as 12 degrees Fahrenheit were possible on Thursday morning in parts of Southern Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Florida panhandle, according to the National Weather Service, which issued an extreme cold warning for the area through midmorning. The storm has already disrupted the region, with scores of schools canceling classes this week, airports delaying or canceling flights and travel becoming nearly impossible. Hundreds of flights were canceled through Thursday morning and several Southeastern airports paused operations. But by Thursday afternoon, airports in the region were largely resuming operations, including in Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, S.C., and Tallahassee, Fla. Fueled by a whirling mass of Arctic air, the storm has also killed at least 10 people in Texas, Alabama and Georgia. And cities received record amounts of snow: Mobile reported 7.5 inches; Pensacola, Fla., received 7.6 inches, breaking its three-inch record from 1895; and New Orleans saw eight inches, more than Anchorage got this month. In the Charleston, S.C., area, many roads would likely remain dangerous and filled with ice and slush through Friday because of frigid temperatures, the authorities said.In Georgia, the State Patrol had responded to more than 3,000 calls, including 370 vehicle crashes, since Tuesday evening, the agency said in a statement. In North Carolina, where eastern coastal communities received as much as six inches of snow, the State Department of Transportation deployed more than 1,300 trucks to clean roads. “It is important to remember that below freezing temperatures will remain for the next few days. Any snowfall that does melt will refreeze each evening,” Will Ray, the director of the state’s emergency management office, said. Several officials and utility companies urged residents to help conserve power. “We are not out of woods yet,” Baldwin EMC, an electric utility in southern Alabama, said in a post on social media. In Mobile, a port city on Alabama’s coast, residents’ initial jubilee about the snow morphed into concern about travel, as many roads have been deemed impassable. “The snow has been beautiful and fun, but there could be a lot of problems hiding under all this snow and ice,” Eddie Tyler, the superintendent of the Baldwin County Public Schools system, wrote in a letter to parents after canceling school for the remainder of the week. In Tallahassee, Fla., police officers used pepper balls to disperse a rowdy snowball fight. In a statement, the Tallahassee Police Department confirmed its officers had arrived to the scene of the wintry chaos after people had complained of being hit in the head with snowballs. In a statement, the police confirmed officers had used the tactic after they, too, were hit in the face, and the crowd refused to stop. In Louisiana, the state’s transportation department said that parts of Interstate 10 would reopen Wednesday night between the Texas border and Lake Charles, but a major portion of the highway remained closed in both directions on Thursday morning. The Georgia State Patrol said that it had responded to more than 100 vehicle crashes. In DeKalb County, Ga., more than 100 vehicles were stranded on icy roadways and “obstructing emergency response efforts,” the authorities said. Progress to clear the roads, officials said, had been slow because of freezing temperatures. Even some fire trucks had become stuck. “This is a serious situation,” Lorraine Cochran-Johnson, the county’s chief executive, said. “We are asking for everyone’s patience and cooperation as our teams work around the clock to ensure public safety.”

Thousands of homes remained without power on Saturday after a fierce storm knocked out service for hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and Scotland, the aftermath of a weather pattern that previously delivered bitter cold and record-breaking snow to parts of the United States. The storm, which is named Eowyn, brought damaging gales throughout Friday, and 625,000 homes and businesses in Ireland were without power by the evening, the power supplier ESB said in a statement. On Saturday, the company said it was still assessing the extent of the damage. The storm also knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes in Scotland, and prevailing winds made it nearly impossible for engineers to restore power to some regions, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, a regional energy supplier, said. On social media, the energy company said that “it’s simply not safe right now for our teams to climb and carry out repairs to damaged poles and overhead lines.” As it worked to restore power to roughly 48,000 homes, the company offered hot meals to affected communities on Saturday. By early Friday, the storm had already brought record winds to the Irish coast. At 5 a.m., a gust of 114 miles per hour was recorded at Mace Head, County Galway, beating a previous national record of 113 m.p.h. set in 1945. The winds were so strong that they apparently disrupted some efforts to report them: “Severe winds have interrupted data supply from our stations in Belmullet, Mace Head and Markree,” Met Éireann, the Irish weather service, said on social media. ESB Networks, a state-owned power company, said on Friday morning that “extreme, damaging and destructive” winds had caused widespread disruption to Ireland’s electricity network. More than 560,000 customers were without power as of 6 a.m., it said. That is almost a quarter of the around 2.4 million total customers ESB Networks lists on its website. The intensity of Storm Eowyn also prompted Britain’s Meteorological Office to issue its most severe red wind warnings for Northern Ireland and central and southwestern Scotland. It warned of “very dangerous conditions with widespread disruptions and significant impacts.” It was the first red wind warning issued for Northern Ireland since the Met Office moved to impact-based warnings in 2011.Paul Gundersen, a chief meteorologist at the Met Office, said, “We reserve the issuing of red warnings for the most severe weather which represents a likely danger to life and severe disruption, and that is the case with Storm Eowyn.” The Irish meteorological service had issued equivalent top-level wind warnings for all of Ireland on Friday. The Met Office has been naming strong storms during the autumn and winter seasons since 2015 along with Met Éireann and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. This storm’s designation, a name it shares with a “Lord of the Rings” character, was chosen by the Dutch weather service, which took suggestions from members of the public. The stark temperature contrast created by the arctic blast that has gripped the United States in recent days and the warm moist air in the Gulf of Mexico intensified the jet stream, a high-altitude current of fast-moving air that drives global weather patterns west to east, and often plays an active part in the weather of Ireland and Britain. The speed of the jet stream is usually 190 to 220 m.p.h., but this past week, it strengthened to about 260 m.p.h. This strengthening deepened Storm Eowyn rapidly in the Atlantic, steering it toward Ireland and Britain with heightened ferocity. Eowyn is the most severe storm to hit Ireland since 2017, when one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the northeastern Atlantic killed at least three people. The last time Britain experienced a storm of this strength was at the start of December with Storm Darragh, which was also influenced by a strong jet stream. Wind speeds for that storm reached 93 m.p.h. in Wales. The jet stream is also known for powering trans-Atlantic flights, which pilots sometimes use to speed up journeys and save on fuel. On Wednesday, the ground speed of a flight from Las Vegas to London hit 814 m.p.h., close to the subsonic speed record of 835 m.p.h., which was set by a flight from New York to Lisbon last February. In the United States this past week, the bitter arctic air mass plunged much of the country into dangerously cold conditions, delivering record-breaking low temperatures not experienced in decades, and life-threatening wind chills. Eowyn is expected to clear into the Norwegian Sea on Saturday, allowing a brief lull of drier and calmer conditions for the day. Another storm system is forecast to bring similar hazards for Britain on Sunday and Monday.