Before Hurricane Helene began ravaging swaths of the southeastern U.S., Amanda Wright had expected a little rain and maybe some flooding to hit the area around Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lives.It wasn’t until friends more than two hours away in Asheville, North Carolina, started posting warnings to Facebook that Wright realized how dangerous the storm could be.“It seems like you just never really know who to believe,” Wright, 32, said. “There’s so much information out there that you don’t really know who to trust.”Wright and millions of other Americans face an information ecosystem far different from the 1950s, when the U.S. government started making public predictions of hazardous weather. And despite advancements in the science of forecasting and the introduction of smartphones that can deliver accurate warnings directly to users, the urgency of such warnings can often get lost in rapid-fire social media feeds or be undercut by widespread skepticism of the government and the media.Hurricane Helene’s deadly path took shape days before the Category 4 storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region late on Thursday, Sept. 26.Scientists with the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center began sounding the alarm as early as Sept. 23. In a YouTube video posted that morning, the National Hurricane Center’s deputy director, Jamie Rhome, described a tropical cyclone that would “briskly develop” into a hurricane. Monday night, the Na …
