One Year Later After the Big Storm

We are one year later, after that big “storm” that inundated our city. At the time, I really didn’t want to reference the storm in my blogs because it was sooo frightening as we were going through it. I couldn’t watch TV or anything so I decided to just keep an eye on the weather news and not look at what was happening in a really deep way. But I was aware that I was surrounded by water with no way out if I needed to escape. There was just no way out.

It was not until later, when Paul Krugman tweeted a photo of our city that I realized that the storm was national news. The scenes of our city becoming one huge lake was breathtaking. The videos of people being stranded on the freeways as the waters rose around them. The videos of helicopter rescues of the people stranded on freeways. The videos of people coming out in boats to rescue others.

And now we are at the one year anniversary (actually it was probably two days ago but my machine was giving me fits and I was having problems posting my last post that I was not able to get around to posting this post). I still remember the dread. I remember trying to conserve my food since I never received the okay to leave work to get food, so I was down to the dregs, halving each food portion to make them last longer until the roads opened up. I remember it took about a week until enough water went down so I could go to the grocery store. And then it was another 4 or 5 days until I could actually traverse to work, even if it was the long way around the blocked roads.

I remember the stunning sight of piles of debris and fences knocked down. I remember my first attempt to go to work and it took 4 hours to reach maybe the roughly halfway point and I still was not sure I could pass a particular blockage. I remember watching the waters inch closer and closer to where I live and wondering if the sewers were going to spill over. I remember, I remember…

After this storm, I wanted to leave town but where would be a good place to go? Most places are being impacted by climate change and who’s to say that the next time, a storm will linger in the next new place of residence. The problem of this storm wasn’t the winds but the lingering of the storm. The storm slowly moved from the initial landing further south and west of us and slowly moved toward us, so that the rain kept coming and coming as it moved towards us. There was just bands of rain, hour after hour. Where I lived, we got sporadic rain but in other places, it must have been downpour after downpour. I don’t know if there is any good place to go. The storms are starting to linger in place, we have more flooding in various places, especially up in the north, and we have the fires, the endless fires in the west. The Midwest has their owning flooding and fires and droughts. So where can we go?

And we still have the climate deniers. If these storms and floods and fires and droughts and heat waves don’t convince them something is wrong, then there is no hope for them. They’re just in denial and will never admit until it’s too late.

And me, I’m just waiting to get through this year.