Watching Hurricane Helene

We are watching the death of our past and our future

Hurricane Helene destroyed Asheville, North Carolina. If I wouldn’t have flown to the Atlantic coast of Florida, where I’m currently writing this while listening to the waves crashing during a seasonal afternoon storm, I would’ve driven through Asheville. The last time we drove back home through Asheville, we talked about stopping to see the Biltmore Estate. The Biltmore, the largest home in the United States, was built by the Vanderbilts - a family that birthed the industrial world we are living in and reckoning with today. We didn’t stop though. We couldn’t afford the ticket prices. We drove past the Biltmore and now I’m watching the house and the grounds trend on social media. It’s insignificant in the scope of what’s happening, but I’m sad at thinking I might never be able to stop there. 

If we come to Florida in the fall, we typically drive due to my worry of a hurricane quickly developing and knowing it’s less stressful to evacuate in my car than in a rental. We spent a night in a Holiday Inn in Asheville the last time we drove down. Actually, it might’ve been a Hampton Inn. I’m telling myself I’m not looking up the condition of that hotel because I don’t want to search through my emails to find the booking confirmation, but I know it’s because it doesn’t matter. Hampton, Hilton, Holiday. It doesn’t matter. They likely didn’t collapse. Maybe they didn’t even flood. Although, they likely did. Regardless, right now those hotel guests and workers are probably trying to guess how many hours they have left of their generators before they’re in the same situation as the rest of Asheville: no electricity, no wifi, no routes to escape. Roads washed away, and now these people are terrified that the helicopters might not come soon enough.

I’d been tracking Hurricane Helene for the past week. My partner laughs at me for my old-man hobby of watching weather forecasting YouTube channels. I love it. Watching the local weatherman telling you the forecast for the day and week makes you believe the weather is local - that our weather is made up of storms popping up a few miles away and disappearing when the local softball games resume 30 minutes after the last lightning strike. Local weather doesn’t show you how these systems form and move across continents and how the pockets of warm and cold atmospheres are always battling each other to our detriment and destruction. 

11 days ago, I watched Helene forming just off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.

6 days ago, they knew Helene would hit the Big Bend of Florida, maybe the Panhandle.

5 days ago, we knew Florida was going to be hit by a category three, but some were saying a four, and a few said a five.

4 days ago, there were warnings that Helene was building enough that it could still be a category two by the time it hit Atlanta.

2 days ago, Helene hit Florida and parts of western North Caroline and Eastern Tennessee were destroyed.

2 days ago, I watched it happen on social media while our power flickered off and on in Indiana.

The day before Helene hit, the local news station in Asheville warned its citizens that the upcoming storm could compare to the Asheville floods of 1916. The evacuation orders came with less than 24 hours before the city was destroyed. The warnings told people that this storm was a once in a thousand years storm event - just like the one that happened 108 years ago that no one remembers.

Social media was ablaze when a small influencer in Florida, Skylar Siegfried, went viral for ignoring the evacuation order to stay in her newly renovated beach house to try and salvage as much as possible. While showing the internet two boats crashed into her neighbors house and her cloud couch barely visible on her first floor, she tells over 20 million viewers she doesn’t have homeowners insurance. In a since deleted video, she’s complaining about being electrocuted as she walks around in crocs in two feet of water while the generator is still powering the whole house. Tens of thousands of comments making it past TikTok’s anti-bullying safeguards, many remarking on how this makes the “why-didn’t-you-evacuate” sentiment that trends after every disaster make sense. The audience has largely agreed those not evacuating are staying due to their own hubris and stupidity. And while that might be the case for Skylar during Helene, she might be stuck during the next storm because the most common reasons people don’t evacuate: poverty (because she lost her uninsured home) or disability (who knows what’s lurking in that electrified waters).

If I were home right now writing this, I might pull some books off my shelves to further explain the problems we’re facing. I could quote from the dozens of climate change books I’ve read over the past year. I might use David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth to explain how the devastation we are enduring is nothing compared to our future. Or, I could let Kōhei Saitō’s Slow Down or Naomi Klines This Changes Everything to explain how the cost of climate change is so incalculably large that the entire world’s GDP likely won’t be able to cover the destruction by the end of the century - that capitalism has created this monster that will kill us - and that our only hope to survive this coming extinction is to detach ourselves from this system as quickly as possible. Skylar’s story would lend itself perfectly for me to once again use The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle to explain how fragile the housing and insurance markets are and the psycho-emotional tolls these events take on survivors. The Asheville flood of 1916 would’ve been perfect for an explanation of Clayton Page Aldern’s chapter in The Weight of Nature on how our brains and memory are incapable of actually understanding the expansiveness of climate change. I could use a quote from Jeff Goodell’s book The Water Will Come to explore how when we talk about water’s relationship to climate change and only focusing on the nebulous idea of rising sea levels, we’re missing how and why our coastal cities might not survive this century.

But let me put down those books and quotes from journalists and scientists, and explain what happened in my own way: Helene was far more devastating than people were imagining. Mostly because we don’t understand natural disasters and our imaginations either aren’t informed or pessimistic enough to comprehend what happened and what will happen. At least, not anymore. 

The current scale of hurricanes is listed on a 1 through 5 level system. Let’s just ignore what will likely become the need to add in a 6th category in the near future, and talk about how this misinforms people on how bad a hurricane can get. There’s likely people that didn’t evacuate because they saw 3 or 4 on the scale, and said, “well, this isn’t going to be as bad as it could’ve been.” 

The hurricane scale is based on wind speed. However, the destruction of hurricanes isn’t based on the winds. It’s mostly based on water. The storm surge. The feet of rain that fall almost instantly. The flooding that leads to rot and carries debris wherever it flows. 

Wind can destroy some homes. 

Water can destroy a city, a region. 

We are warning people with a scale that tells them how scary the storm will be for a few hours. We’re not warning people with the idea that the entire infrastructure of their city can be washed away and, once it’s gone, the combination of insurance and bank loans can mean people won’t return.

The warming of the oceans makes these storms more frequent and bigger, but this is the point people are often missing: the warming oceans means these storms drop more water. 

Hurricane Katrina is a scar on our national emergency services because of the lingering flooding from criminally underfunded levees bursting.

Hurricane Harvey cost as much as Katrina. Inevitably, Houston will drown again and again. And at some point, they won’t rebuild the city - a city that never says no to the grotesque construction projects creating an impermeable megalopolis.

Hurricane Sandy hit New York City as a category 1 hurricane. It destroyed parts of the Greater Antilles at its height of a category 3, but nearly half the cost of the hurricane was felt as the storm died out in the Catskills.

Hurricane Helene hit Florida and destroyed Asheville - 600 miles away.

Our forecasts and imaginations aren’t designed for the future of climate change. Heat waves that last months strains our hearts, emotions, and intelligence until they burst and shatter. Burn wards in hospitals fill up when people trip on a sweltering summer day. Wildfires destroy the boreal forests that wrap as a halo around our world leading to children developing asthma more than a thousand miles away. In climate safety net states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the warming freshwater lakes birth cyanobacteria that slowly shuts down every body system and kill people and animals going for a swim to cool off on a hot day. 

Deaths in our climate apocalypse come in a million different ways, and we contribute to those deaths in a million ways. 

We google a local restaurant and now our searches use double the amount of energy to train AI systems. We drive cars to dinner on ever-expanding roads - roads that can’t soak up the rain and cars that continue to get bigger and eat up our resources. We take a video of our meal to show off on social media, and the cloud system and social media companies’ data centers in the desert siphon what little water we have and toxify the landscape. We delight in pistachio ice cream. The pistachios were transported from a farm owned by a family that uses more water every home in Los Angeles, and the dairy farm’s cows and fertilizers leak methane (80 times more powerful than CO2) into our atmosphere. Our video goes viral and the AC units in the desert whirl as thousands of comments flood the video and people google where to find pistachio ice cream within driving distance.

Hundreds of thousands were living that story right before the storms crashed against our outdated energy systems, leaving almost 90 million without power for a while. Our normal lives are filled with luxuries so mundane as to go unnoticed until their collective powers destroy communities.

Two days before the hurricane hit, the people of Appalachia were told there would be some storms as Florida took the brunt of the hurricane. In the days after the storm, these people are finding out they are climate refugees. And right now social media watches Asheville and many smaller communities across Appalachia to see how many are going to survive. Underfunded and often immobile emergency services might not arrive in time. We know they won’t for the disabled and elderly. They’re always the first to die.

The elderly and disabled die first because death by climate change happens in a million different ways. Because the elderly and disabled often have less mobility, including the social mobility needed to survive. The elderly and disabled die because the elderly and disabled are poor. They can’t access their medications. They can’t find a way to cool their bodies. The homes they can afford are built less sturdy. Their heat and AC units fail and are too costly to replace. They fall in a foot of water and can’t get up. They can’t make it up the hill as the waters rise. They can’t drive and are stranded as our transportation system buckles or vanishes. They don’t have the money to rebuild so they try to weather the storm.

In November 2016, a viral video took off across the internet and local news stations across the country showed an octopus squirming around a parking garage in Miami. A king tide flooded parts of the city, and millions of people gawked as one of our world’s most spectacular creatures found itself in danger after being washed away from its habitat. 

I don’t think the video went viral because we saw an octopus outside its environment. Octopi constantly wiggle their ways into places that aren’t where they’re typically found. I think it was viral because of the incongruity of seeing the octopus specifically inside one of the most profound monuments of our current insanity. The parking garage in Miami was constructed inside a metro area of 6 million people to house cars that are there because we lack public transportation. These monstrosities exist to add a layer of convenience to our lives to the behest and damnation of our planet. This parking garage will crumble bit by bit due to the weight of our large cars, the heat expanding and destabilizing the structural integrity of these steel and concrete bodies, and the constant water damage of floods slowly eroding the foundations. The company that owns the garage will inevitably lose interest or the ability to afford the cost in maintaining this structure. It will collapse. What remains standing will be there after all of its convenience has been used up. And it’ll be there after the people of Miami have been forced to migrate to another part of the country as the city vanishes into the ocean.

We won’t watch the parking garage’s death because it will be unremarkable. It will be just another thing we built that gets destroyed slowly by the heating of our planet. We will be too busy watching all the futures that we thought we’d watch happen to others happen to us.

If we don’t build a society that confronts what we’ve already built, we will watch the apocalypse happen until we are part of that apocalypse.

We watched Bush fly over the city of New Orleans two days after  Hurricane Katrina.

We watched the octopus in the garage.

We watched the floods submerge the home built with the wealth of the Industrial Revolution.

We are watching people fighting for survival in Appalachia.

We can’t help but watch.