It happened again.
On the night of Thursday, September 26, as Hurricane Helen was hitting the Florida coast, social media feeds began filling up with keyboard warriors blaming those who didn’t evacuate as victims.
A video of a young man trapped in waist-high water in an upstairs bedroom after Helen’s waves tore through his windows and rampaged through his home has drawn thousands of comments.
“Why didn’t he evacuate?”, “He wanted to make a video and get likes”, “I can’t empathize with him this way”, “Typical American overconfidence”, “He’s a first responder “He should have left.” ”
Of course, I wanted to say he should have left, but did he have a choice? Has he left?
While sitting on a friend’s couch in New York City who was visiting for work, we watched news footage of Helen pounding, blowing, and raging in the ocean. I thought about him.
I imagined his fear. Did he think he was going to die and was recording his last moments of life? Did he see the waves rising and moving inland against the wind, lapping and slamming against marinas, roads, and houses, dislodging streetlights and traffic lights from their moorings? Did you hear the trees bending and snapping and slamming into rooftops and highways, their branches latching onto power lines and dragging them into the tangled mess?
Maria Smilios/Angeline Fornov
As he huddled in his room, standing in waist-high water, Helen continued to roar north up the East Coast, 822 miles in diameter and a 370-mile wind field. She moved further inland to Georgia and South Carolina, but her eyes were set on the most unlikely of places: Western North Carolina (WNC), where I live with my husband, daughter, and rescue dog. I was firmly fixed on the mountains.
Asheville is under a tropical storm watch, not a hurricane watch, so I called my husband concerned.
“Helen is a storm monster,” I said.
Despite the rain, thunder and wind that Helen brought to WNC, he, like thousands of others, wasn’t too worried. The main concern was power outages. So he took precautions, stocking up on food, filling pots of water and checking the batteries in his flashlights. Afterwards, he and his daughter had dinner with friends. At that point, no one believed that Helen would be a disaster.
“If they were really in danger, the city would have warned them,” my friend assured me.
But I couldn’t shake the image of Helen’s gigantic size and 100 mph winds, or that WNC is packed with flowing water: streams, rivers, canyons, canyons, lakes, and waterfalls. The entire neighborhood nods to the streams in and around it, including Haw Creek, Bent Creek, Avery Creek, and Hoopers Creek.
The winding two-lane roads that wind through these neighborhoods are followed by small trails that lead to sinkholes, coves, and small mountain communities, where trailer homes perch on slopes and valley floors with babbling small streams. Many people live in various places, including villas.
When Helen came, that beautiful little stream, dotted with brightly colored freshly fallen autumn leaves, turned into a raging river, rushing down the steep terrain, rushing into rapids, crashing into houses, into mountainsides. tumbled down.
France’s Broad and Swannanoa rivers crested above flood stage three times, flooding bridges, roads and interstates and causing devastating landslides. Tens of thousands of people were cut off from the rest of the world as power, water and mobile phone services were cut off. Hundreds of people, like the young man in the upstairs bedroom, were trapped and swept away. As of today, the death toll is over 100 and will undoubtedly continue to rise in the coming days.
WNC experiences heavy rain and occasional flooding, but the possibility of Helen was never considered. NOAA’s storm rainfall probability map suggests Helen dumped a once-in-1,000-year amount of rain over WNC in 48 hours. Events of the year. It was historic and unprecedented, and many people never had the chance to escape.
Even if authorities thought the ground, already saturated after two days of continuous rain, would provide enough fuel for Helen to issue an evacuation order, how many people could have been evacuated?
Leaving – it seems so simple.
Some of today’s news channels are telling you that evacuation is easy, just pack your suitcase, take yourself, your family, and your pets, get in your car, and run away from your belongings, your home, and anyone approaching you. I think that’s what we’re led to believe. storm. For some people, this may be the case. But for many, it is a far-fetched fantasy, an impossible reality.
Yet, rather than showing sympathy for those forced to stay, we demonize them, calling them a “waste of resources” and “inconsiderate”. “I’m stupid,” he says.
When the rain stops, the same news channels return to the area again and start bombarding us with stories about the storm. Some reporters stand in front of destroyed communities rattling off the death toll of those who “refused” to evacuate, while others interview evacuees who have returned to find their homes flooded or damaged.
But despite the loss of property, the message we receive is: “Those who left are still alive.” Unlike those who survived and drowned, they are able to unite and rebuild.
In the days following Helen’s WNC frenzy, while I sat in New York, hopelessly stuck, unable to contact my husband or daughter or return home to Asheville, I I was asked many times. Why don’t people leave?
The truth is, some people have quit. Either they were more prepared, or they just had the money, the destination, and a full tank of gas. For my husband, a lack of gas, roadblocks, cash, and our dog meant he and many others were trapped for almost a week without running water or cellphone service.
It is easy to ask people to evacuate, but behind that request there is an assumption that everyone has the means and physical ability to comply with the request. it’s not.
Those who have been evacuated know that evacuating is a complex dance that involves more than just packing up and saying goodbye. For millions of people, being in the path of an oncoming storm means first and foremost securing their homes, which takes time, money, and sandbagging. Requires an able-bodied person with the tools, knowledge, and stamina to lift, drill, and lay.
Many working people, especially those in hourly or contract jobs, don’t have the time or option to take time off from work to stay home or leave days in advance. For them, taking time off work means not getting paid, or worse, potentially getting fired. So they have no choice but to stay and risk their lives to ride out the storm.
Even if you can escape, you will often be faced with the harsh reality of how to do so.
Like hotels and supermarkets, airlines will also start raising prices, so if flights are available, the price of a ticket could double or triple. Driving is touted to be the best option, but if you’re leaving multiple days in advance, you’ll need a license, a full tank of gas, and somewhere to stay for potentially long trips. .
But not everyone has a place to go.
A study by Harvard University’s FXB Center found that not knowing where to go was the most common reason people didn’t leave their jobs. Add language barriers, children, pets, seniors, disabilities, and illnesses to the mix, and things get even more complicated.
we were lucky. Five days after Helen, my husband was able to find gas so he, our daughter, and our dog were able to leave. They drove to Atlanta and he ended up staying there with our dog. My daughter will fly to New York and we will both stay at a friend’s house indefinitely until we can get water, which we are told could take anywhere from three weeks to several months. However, there are thousands of people unable to go out because their homes have been destroyed or they have nowhere to go. They are forced to stay and endure.
We live in a country where classism is so unchecked that it’s hard to believe that people can’t take shelter, but this same classism is also affecting many things, especially our response to climate change. It has permeated recognition.
Helen’s devastation is an example of this structural arrogance, and we should see her devastation as a clarion call that climate scientists have been warning about for decades. As the Earth heats, rainfall becomes more dangerous and extreme, to the extent that it was once considered a storm. ” In a place like Asheville, 2,100 feet above sea level and 300 miles from the nearest ocean, “extraordinary events” occur regularly.
Recognizing this, we must face these climate change challenges at the national level. In addition to rebuilding new infrastructure to withstand these massive storms, we also need a federal effort to help people evacuate without worrying about money, transportation, or a place to stay. FEMA provides disaster relief, but it does so after the event. But most people need it in advance.
One solution is to provide emergency coupons for gas, lodging, food, airline tickets, bus and train tickets, or rental cars before the storm so people can evacuate. There should also be a federal requirement that employers not fire or pay people who comply with evacuation orders in the days before a hurricane. There’s no more time.
It is essential to take action now and reevaluate the meaning of evacuation. Otherwise, because of our indifference, storms like Helen will continue to engulf entire cities and towns, including the people who live in them.
Maria Smilios is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and adjunct instructor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She holds an M.A. in American Literature and Religion from Boston University, where she was a Luce Scholar and a Presidential Scholar. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, Narratively, The Forward, Lit Hub, Writers Digest, and The Emancipator.
Her book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis (Putnam, 2023) won the 2024 Christopher Prize, which honors work that “affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” . It was also a finalist for the prestigious Gotham Book Award and a 2024 NPR Science Friday Summer Read.
All views expressed are the author’s own.
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