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By Rose Lane Jenkins

 

POLK COUNTY—When Frank Graff, producer and host of the PBS show Sci NC, was covering the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, he met a woman in Swannannoa who had lived near the river for many years. Graff saw the water line inside her house, which had flooded to chest height. 

He recounts, “The night the storm hit, the fire chief was banging on her door. He said, ‘You gotta get out.” The woman was around eighty years old, and nothing like this had ever happened before. Still, she was prepared. 

Graff says, “For some reason, in the past year or two she’d decided to have extra medicine and things she needed in a bag sitting in a closet.” 

When the fire chief roused them from their bed, this woman and her husband were able to quickly grab their things and move to safety. Their home was devastated, and their belongings were ruined, but they escaped with their lives and they had what they needed—fortunately, since it would have been very difficult to obtain things like medicine in the days after the storm.

Graff says that all of us need to start thinking like this woman—ready for emergencies, including disasters brought on by the changing climate.  

Graff, a four-time Emmy Award winner, will be giving a talk at Walnut Creek Preserve in Polk County on Saturday, March 22, at 10:30 a.m., called “Lessons from the Field.” The talk takes place at the Anne Elizabeth Surratt Nature Center on the preserve at 179 Wood Thrush Lane, in Mill Spring.

He plans to share lessons he has learned from a decade of science and environmental reporting, as well as what he has learned from multiple trips to Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene. In a talk that may include clips from his work in television, Graff will talk about Helene and this new period of climate-change-charged weather, with some new advice about being prepared. He will provide scientific evidence and also encourage audience members to question science.

Graff has been the executive producer and host of Sci NC for eight years. He first pitched the idea because he saw a wealth of science stories to be told in our state—from discoveries made in universities to innovations at private companies to research from state and federal labs. Since then, he’s covered everything from seagrass to microplastics to health breakthroughs.

Climate change tends to come up a lot. “You can’t cover science without covering climate change,” he says. But his approach is pragmatic and constructive. “I don’t want it to be gloom and doom, the sky is falling. It’s like, okay, the climate’s changing. So, what do we do? How do we adapt to it?”

In Western North Carolina, that means being ready for weather events that would have been unlikely before. Scientists predicted that climate change would bring storms that are bigger and wetter, Graff says, which is what we saw with Helene.

“Both scientists and the folks I talked to in my trip out to the mountains said that we’ve entered a new climate reality,” Graff says. “Big storms are not only on the coast. Big storms can happen anywhere. They can take all kinds of forms, like tornadoes or floods—and you need to be ready for that.”  

Graff will be giving his talk in Polk County because of an invitation from Babs Strickland. Babs and her husband Bob Strickland own Walnut Creek Preserve and host a monthly environmental speaker series there at the Anne Elizabeth Surratt Nature Center, which is named in memory of Babs’ daughter. The preserve is located on 1,590 acres of private conservation land in Mill Spring. This scenic property is protected forever through a conservation easement held by Conserving Carolina. 

The event is free, but registration is required. To register, visit Conserving Carolina’s online calendar at conservingcarolina.org/calendar.

Strickland says, “I have been watching Sci NC on PBS every Wednesday night for years. Frank Graff is the producer and presenter. After the hurricane, he spoke movingly of having come to Swannannoa, Old Fort, Asheville and the surrounding area to see the devastation and to evaluate the effects of climate change.” 

Impressed by his reporting, Strickland reached out to Graff to see if he would present at the Walnut Creek Preserve speaker series, and he agreed.

Graff says that he hopes people come away from his talk on March 22 more empowered—empowered to understand and question science, and empowered to make their way in a changing climate.