We tend to forget about natural disasters that happen in places where we don’t live or want to vacation. But three years ago, a heat dome settled on the Pacific Northwest. Portland, Oregon, registered high temperatures of 108, 112 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit for three days. Rubber melted off power lines. Ever since, I’ve been unable to forget about a quip I read on Twitter: What a wonderful infrastructure we’ve built for a world that no longer exists.
That world was still there last week for the residents of Western North Carolina. Then Hurricane Helene, engorged by a warming planet, emptied what seemed like half the water of the Gulf of Mexico on southern Appalachia. Floodwaters consumed roads and bridges, sections of interstate and even whole towns. Any dream of safety we might still conceive is now matched by file footage somewhere of it being washed away like a sandcastle. There are no more climate refuges, only climate refugees.
Like recent devastating blizzards, derechos or (coming soon!) EF6 tornadoes, Helene was described as a “generational” event. This seems beyond dispute. Hurricanes don’t generally drop 30 inches of rain over 400 miles from landfall and generate inland floods of such astonishingly destructive power. Whether the word “generational” means anything anymore, however, is anyone’s guess. As long as betting markets are poisoning everything else in this country, you should probably put all your cash on “no.” Once-in-a-century tragedies have become annual events, like McDonald’s putting the McRib back on the menu, but with its cataclysmic effects applied to everything around you.
What a wonderful infrastructure we’ve built for a world that no longer exists.
From an insurance standpoint, we are still calling these things acts of God — something we can neither prevent nor control. But while it is tempting to imagine some kind of wrathful God behind storms like Helene — a demonstration that there are no dams or levees He cannot overcome and no power lines or foundations He cannot uproot — this designation carries twin perversities. Aside from ignoring the fact that man has indisputably intensified such events, it feeds a narrative of justice and blame most comforting to those most responsible for this age of mega storms. The newly homeless people on CNN wouldn’t be drowning if they hadn’t bought land in Gomorrah County, near the Jericho Wall — on the good side.
That’s what you get for living there is a narrative borrowed from Exxon to make sure someone else is holding the bag for climate change. It was on you — yes, you there — for buying irresponsible real estate and not immediately doomsday prepping. You should’ve recycled harder, too.
The truth is that no single person in the Southeast — besides maybe Joe Manchin — could have undone the circumstances that incubated Helene. All of the region’s concerned citizens could not have put Manchin’s coal and Exxon’s oil back in the ground; could not have put our child-murdering behemoth cars in reverse to see them disassembled in Detroit; could not have rewound the concrete filigrees of a world paved and paved again for vehicles, could not un-extrude all the plastics back into a formless blob and then back into oil.
If we had all been driving electric-powered Minis, the storm would have come anyway, and our cars would still be burning underwater, melting to death in their own flames. Nobody in Asheville could’ve recycled their way out of this; and if they were recycling plastic, it probably just got burned anyway. Climate change is like bankruptcy: It happens incredibly slowly, then all at once. The guardrails, securities and illusions overwhelmed in minutes by an implacable new reality.
There used to be a dune on an island near where I lived in the Florida Panhandle, one so tall and so white that for decades locals called it the Matterhorn. In one hour in 1995, Hurricane Opal flattened it and all its neighbors, smearing them across Highway 98 until the road disappeared under feet of sand, and the whole island shone like fresh snowdrift.
I wasn’t there. By then, I’d fled north, evacuating somewhere safer than the coast, and by the next morning, I was driving home on clear roads to see the damage. Returning immediately felt like our right. Now, even that feels like luxurious entitlement — like watching a movie from the 1990s and seeing how much space there used to be between airline seats, a relic of a world gone so gradually that you never noticed it disappearing.
Nobody in Asheville could’ve recycled their way out of this.
If there is still a subconscious desire to blame the victims of climate tragedy, those victims are now “asking for it” everywhere on the map. The Midwest has blizzards and tornadoes; the Plains have both, where they sometimes (historically) become dust bowls. The Eastern Seaboard gets the hurricanes that don’t drift into the Gulf — and did you hear that the long tail of their destruction probably kills 7,000 to 11,000 people, not an average of 25? California has earthquakes and fire and drought and floods. You could move to Alaska instead and drink in the melting permafrost that is acidifying the water and giving it a crisp hint of mercury.
The lesson to be learned from Hurricane Helene is that you can no longer outrun learning it. There is no aftermath that doesn’t have you in it. There is nowhere else to go.
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