It Was Unthinkable. Then It Happened.

In the aftermath of an historic hurricane.

Photo by Mishal Ibrahim on Unsplash

This weekend, children were among those who drowned in a hurricane that battered the entire southeastern United States. North Carolina experienced their worst flooding in more than a century. Cities like Atlanta were dumped with a foot of rain in 48 hours, the worst since 1878. Estimates for property damage alone have already run up to $110 billion, and it will probably go higher. Emergency workers have rescued hundreds of people, trapped on rooftops of homes and hospitals. Thousands are taking refuge in shelters. More than 2 million are without power. Many of them are also without food, fuel, or even water.

People all over the country pleaded for rescue workers to save friends and family from the rising waters, but they couldn’t reach them in time.

The death toll is running into the hundreds.

Floods have closed or completely washed away major roads and highways across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Roads are also closed in parts of South Carolina and Virginia. In North Carolina, nearly 300 roads are shut, including highways. Many of them will stay closed for months.

I have family in Asheville, friends in Boone.

People are trapped.

The floods in the southeast happened on the heels of devastating floods throughout central Europe, killing dozens and causing billions in damage. They weren’t just bad. They were the worst in recorded history, by far. As we speak, a typhoon with 200km winds is heading straight for Taiwan with rainfall expected to be as bad or worse as Helene. The entire world writhes in chaos.

While politicians send thoughts and prayers to victims and generate press by touring the disaster areas, it’s worth pointing out that Congress cut disaster funding out of their most recent funding bill. According to The Daily Climate, FEMA’s disaster relief fund “is in significant deficit, facing a $3 billion shortfall by February 2025 without additional funding.” As one expert said, disaster relief programs “have no money in the bank, essentially, to help people in supporting these long-term recovery and rebuilding efforts.” From Marketplace:

FEMA’s budget has to account for how much it needs to respond to emergencies in real-time, which includes expenses like evacuations, shelters, and food, plus the costs associated with longer-term rebuilding and recovery.

From Politico’s E&E News:

The federal government is facing potentially catastrophic shortcomings in its ability to pay for disaster response due to increasingly costly damage from hurricanes, flooding and wildfires — and the unwillingness of Congress to provide the money.

The head of Homeland Security himself began warning the government about FEMA’s shortfall earlier this summer. The office is responding to roughly twice as many major disasters as they were eight years ago. According to an article in Fortune, FEMA has denied relief to a growing number of cities and states, including Massachusetts when they experienced their worst floods in 200 years. Multiple experts have underscored the need to increase FEMA’s budget so that it can manage the surging number of disasters.

That didn’t happen.

In July, FEMA denied disaster relief aid to Michigan after a series of devastating tornadoes. Governor Gretchen Whitmer personally wrote Biden an appeal pleading for the money. Her letter says, “Damage reports continue to come in as people have lost their homes and businesses. I am appealing the denial of a presidential disaster declaration so we can deliver critical financial assistance to support our resilient families, businesses, and communities.”

She hasn’t heard back yet.

Frustration has grown over the last several years as FEMA denies more requests because they don’t meet the minimum threshold for a disaster declaration. They appear to be raising their cutoff. Given the record number of disasters with no corresponding budget increase, that only makes sense.

So while the news might be reporting that the president is authorizing disaster relief funding for Helene, those funds are running on empty. FEMA is having to implement what it calls Immediate Needs Funding guidance (INF). It enables them to fund emergency relief efforts while they pause longer-term mitigation and disaster recovery projects. It also allows them to continue paying funds out to survivors of disasters if their request has already been completed. So while FEMA can still operate, the truth remains that they don’t have anywhere near enough money to help these states rebuild what’s been lost.

There’s no clear information so far about what help awaits the survivors of Hurricane Helene. When you read accounts of survivors from prior disasters, you find many of them facing an absolute nightmare, filling out endless paperwork while grieving catastrophic losses, waiting months or years for payments to start rebuilding their lives. In the meantime, they have to survive somehow, often moving wherever they can find a job to get by.

Climate scientists predicted this.

In 2019, a study in Nature Communications said that the likelihood of catastrophic 100-year floods has essentially tripled. They can now happen every 30 years or even once every few years. A more recent study in 2023 indicates that these storms will happen every 9-15 years by 2050. That means we will see another Hurricane Helene anytime between now and 2060. We could see several. Toward the end of the century, they will likely become annual events.

My daughter is six.

If she makes it to her 50s or 60s, she’s going to live through a Hurricane Helene almost every single year. Even before then, she’ll live through one roughly every decade. Imagine the cumulative damage of five Helenes.

Let’s zoom out:

We’ve barely entered the age of consequences. FEMA has already started running out of money halfway through hurricane season. They’re already having to pause some operations to prioritize emergency operations.

Imagine what happens to infrastructure when states have to rebuild entire roads, highways, and cities every 5-10 years because they get flooded and washed away in storms that used to happen once every hundred years. We have the science and engineering to build structures capable of withstanding that kind of weather, but it’s expensive and takes time to deploy. Doing that would require a level of coordination that our leaders continually fail to demonstrate.

Congress already doesn’t care.

Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to announce billions more in funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Since 2022, combined aid to these countries has exceeded $200 billion. Compare that to FEMA’s annual budget of barely $20 billion, a small fraction of the projected cost of Hurricane Helene’s damage.

Our politicians are funding war while abdicating their most basic responsibilities to help their own citizens during times of chronic crisis, with millions of people now struggling without food, water, fuel, or shelter. It is a vast understatement to call this reckless and irresponsible.

It is evil.

As for the MAGA climate deniers, it’s nothing short of insane denial to call this chaos “weather.” It’s catastrophically deluded to post articles like Matt Taibbi did recently, calling for vague optimism with statements like “We’ll figure it out.”

We are not figuring it out.

We are floundering.

This has been happening for years now, and for years I’ve done my best to chronicle it. You cannot possibly say we live in a functional democracy, with leaders who care about human rights, while this obscene neglect continues. Americans cannot be expected to continually crowdfund each other’s salvation while giving a quarter of their livelihoods to a corrupt, warmongering government that drowns them in platitudes about hope and justice.

When government agencies predicted roughly twice as many hurricanes this year than the historical average, with a “strong and violent start,” climate deniers and even liberal optimists blew it off as more fearmongering.

The predictions weren’t just accurate.

They were understated.

On top of a negligent government, American culture has become a cesspool of toxic positivity, with a growing majority of the public increasingly concerned with vibes and contrived, forced normalcy that leaves everyone more vulnerable to tragedies like Helene. We can’t afford to keep going in this direction.

While our media and politicians focus on war, scandals, and feel-good moments, the world continues to subsidize the fossil fuel industry at $7 trillion. Our current government and their cheerleaders in the media brag about turning the U.S. back into a leading producer of oil and natural gas.

That’s also evil.

It’s downright shameful in the wake of genocide and historic floods to talk about which administration will be worse for the planet. True leadership would promise action and accountability now, not seek to alleviate their complicity and responsibility by pointing fingers at someone else.

This year, hurricane season will close at the end of November.

We don’t know what will happen next.

Some of us have wondered if there’s anywhere on this continent, or the entire world, where we could go to escape or at least forestall this nightmare. The mountains of Appalachia offered a little hope, if you could possibly afford to get there. It was unthinkable that floods from a hurricane would touch that area. Then it happened. This weekend, we learned definitively that no place is safe. We’re only as safe as the house that shelters us. If it falls, we’re only as safe as what we can carry with us when we have to flee, maybe never to return.

For the last several years, many of us have tried to generate a portrait of our future based on studies, statistics, history, and our imaginations. We’ve read books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for The Future and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of The Sower. We’ve watched shows like Snowpiercer. No matter how much we gathered, it was still hard to see. It was a little fuzzy.

After this weekend, we don’t have to imagine anymore.

We know.