Abbreviated Return Time
How many climate blows before communities start to break?
All week, as I’ve helped cut storm-fallen trees, a phrase has been echoing in my brain. It came from an early insurance industry report on climate change, way back in 2005—really, before too much of anything had begun to happen. Swiss Re, the reinsurance giant, had hired a team at the Harvard School of Public Health to study what would happen if repeated disasters struck communities as a result of a warming atmosphere. It was a long report, and it managed to combine the language skills of academics and insurance salesmen, but if you read it carefully the bottom line was unmistakable. What they concluded was that
In effect, parts of developed countries would experience developing nations conditions for prolonged periods as a result of natural catastrophes and increasing vulnerability due to the abbreviated return times of extreme events.
I live in the northeast U.S., which has been dealt with less harshly by climate change than many other regions. But harshly enough to start to viscerally understand what they were talking about in that long-forgotten report. Once or twice you rise to the occasion; eventually, though, it starts to get a little overwhelming.
In Vermont last week, on the exact anniversary of the record flooding from 2023, a round of wild rainstorms—some places saw nine inches in a matter of hours which, given the state’s steep hills and narrow valleys, was enough to make sure plenty of places were underwater. It wasn’t as widespread as last year, but even worse in some places.
As it happened, I was set to cross Lake Champlain a few days later, to the Adirondacks of upstate New York, the wildest part of the east and the place I’m most at home on this planet. We were staying in the house where we lived for decades, way out in the woods—the house where our daughter was born, and where our grandson will have his naming ceremony in a few weeks. And late on Tuesday afternoon, after 48 hours of the most humid weather I can recall there, the most violent storm I’ve ever lived through suddenly erupted. It didn’t last longer than four minutes, but those 240 seconds were more than enough—instantly trees were bent double, and then broken. It looked like those hurricane shots from the Weather Channel, except that instead of palms bending in the wind there were giant pines and cedars snapping, or coming up from the roots; the wind was so high (over 90 mph at the nearest town with a weather station) that the deluge of rain was blowing up and across as much as down. When it was done and we went outside the damage was almost incredible: trees down on the roofs of the houses nearby, trees by the dozens across the road to town (which was entirely impassable for at least a day), wires dangling in every direction.
We’re okay—there’s not going to be power for a long time, I don’t think (I’m writing this from a town within driving distance where the damage was not as bad) but we have good friends and neighbors, who have the right tools, and we’re getting things at our house slowly back in shape. And our system retains enough money and momentum to, at least for now, make vigorous attempts at recovery—the power company has linemen in from all over, slowly trying to piece the system back together. (The guy I talked to last night was from Wisconsin; he had already been deployed to Chicago and Minnesota this week, basically following the same rampaging front across the country). We will survive. We don’t yet have ‘developing nations conditions’—save your sympathy for those developing nations, where the grief from something like this is far far worse.
But even here, in the rich world, all this starts to take a toll. The Vermont floods were the aftereffects of Hurricane Beryl, at one point in its journey across the Caribbean one of the earliest Category 5 storms on record. It crashed ashore near Houston, where it knocked out power for millions, the second big storm-caused outage in a couple of months. As J. David Goodman reported for the Times
Houston is no stranger to natural disasters, but living through two crippling power outages in two months has driven some in the city to consider what may be the ultimate evacuation plan: moving out.
The more powerful of the storms, Hurricane Beryl, devastated the power infrastructure over nearly the entire city. When it hit, thousands of people were already living in shelters and hotels, according to state officials, because they had been displaced by an earlier weather event, the spring thunderstorms that caused wind damage and flooding.
Driving around Houston, it can be hard to tell which of the storms that crashed through the city had mangled the highway billboards, torn out the fences or knocked down the trees still strewn along roadsides.
Everyone knows how long it took to get their power back from the first big storm — and when they lost it again. A second round of spoiled food. Of sweltering temperatures. Of emergency plans. In many cases, of repairs to homes that were damaged in the major May storm had yet to be finished when Beryl arrived as a Category 1 hurricane.
As the Houston Chronicle editors put it , “Beryl was the weakest a hurricane could be. Why does it feel like Houston isn’t the same?”
I think it’s that repeat factor, the blows that feel like they’ll just keep coming.
By the time Beryl reached Vermont it was just a massive rainstorm, but it had the same dispiriting effect on people. VT Digger, the state’s online news service, interviewed farmers who watched, again, as a year’s work disappeared in an hour.
Zach Mangione, owner of Cross Farm in Barnet, watched this week’s storm warily as it approached Vermont but thought he would be able to manage an expected 2 to 4 inches of rain.
A friend, who was pumping water from his own basement Wednesday night, prompted Mangione to look outside. At 9 p.m., he saw a river streaming into his barn, where he was keeping 500 week-old chicks.
He got on his tractor and tried to “move dirt and earth to reroute the water towards the brook,” he said. It was “just too late.” He lost 400 chicks.
After that, the storm kept Mangione up all night. He watched in disbelief as the smallest of three streams on his property caused so much damage that he’s now questioning whether he can continue farming the same land — or at all.
At the Intervale in Burlington—a revered local farmscape that serves as an incubator for young farmers starting out—three hundred volunteers gathered to try to help salvage what produce they could ahead of the rising waters. The state’s Ag department reminded farmers to collect photos and videos for what will presumably be a disaster declaration. In the wonderful town of Waterbury, first hard hit by Hurricane Irene’s floods a decade ago, volunteers have gotten so good at the drill that they had all the supplies needed for mucking out basements pre-assembled at town hall. This is the kind of effort humans make in a time of trouble—as Rebecca Solnit demonstrated in her classic book Paradise Built in Hell, it’s how communities always react, with a burst of volunteer energy. But what happens if San Francisco has a new Great Fire every year?
Heather Darby, a soils expert at the University of Vermont’s extension service, put it like this
Farmers have an “eternal optimism that next year will be better,” she said. When “next year” brings the same destructive flooding as the year before, “that makes it really hard to look to the future and feel like it will be different.”
“It’s not infrequent anymore,” she said. “So if somebody had a catastrophic event — like a fire, or a death, or an accident, or this random storm event, flood — people rally. But at some point, it becomes normalized, right? And it just becomes the way it is.”
Indeed, the state’s mental health officials were warning residents that the repeat events could easily be “re-traumatizing.” The state’s commissioner of mental health, Emily Hawes, said
Because this is not Vermont’s first flooding event, Vermonters should be aware that “the sights, sounds and even the anticipation of flooding can trigger memories and emotions tied to past trauma.” That means that, while it’s crucial to stay informed, it’s best to limit “constant exposure” to news and social media, she said.
But easier said than done, especially when it’s not on social media but right outside your door.
Barre Mayor Thom Lauzon recounted how quickly the waters of the Stevens Branch of the Winooski River rose and jumped its banks around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. As he thanked state officials, inducing Transportation Secretary Flynn, who met Lauzon at 1 a.m. to survey the damage, Lauzon choked up.
“It’s tough. It’s tough to watch folks in your community suffer and go through this again,” he said.
Eventually, too, the money (and even the rock) for repairing bridges and highways starts to run short. In a typical small Vermont town, for instance,
Town clerk Kristin Atwood said that the damage to roads was worse than that seen in 2023’s floods.
“The dirt roads in the town — a lot is just missing, and it’s taking longer to do the repairs because we need more stone to fill them,” Atwood said. “These gaping wounds in the roads are 8, 10 feet deep in places, and that takes a lot of material.”
You have to postpone those conversations, though, at least until everyone is safe and sound. As Dan Smith, CEO of the Vermont Community Foundation put it,
this round of disaster and recovery highlights the long-term issues of flood-prone structures and land use, but it’s not the time for that conversation. For now, he said securing people’s safety is the main concern.
“We’re hearing terrifying stories that people just continue to be isolated and on remote roads and things like that,” Smith said on Monday. “You know, they can’t get to and from their houses, can’t get up and down their driveways. People (are) stuck.”
One useful side effect of losing all power and internet is that I had a good excuse not to listen to Donald Trump last night. But I did just see a collation of his energy and climate remarks online. I don’t think he managed to mention climate change in his endless rant, but he did say “I will end the electric vehicle mandate on Day 1,” and renewed his now-standard promise to “drill baby drill.” Elect him again and we will be in this rinse-repeat cycle for all time; I’m eager to get power back so I can do what I can to keep at least that evil from repeating!
In other energy and climate news:
I haven’t a clue. Back to cutting trees!
I used to live in Houston, from 1998 to 2012. In that time, I experienced three hurricanes, and one tropical storm that drowned a lot of people. The first one was the tropical storm in 2001 that dropped about 30" of rain on Houston in 24 hours. People drowned in elevators, parking garages, and culverts. Next was Hurricane Rita in 2005, a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina in NOLA. Millions of Houstonians tried to evacuate in advance of Hurricane Rita, only to find themselves stuck on outbound interstates with no water and no gas. People died from heat exhaustion in that traffic jam, but the hurricane went east to Mississippi instead of hitting Houston.
A few weeks prior, I had experienced the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where my partner's father had been living. We cleaned out his house which had been flooded four feet deep. The father, who was then in his 80s, had been evacuated to a hospital, but the hospital lost power for days, and for a while, my partner did not know where his father was or if he was even still alive. It turned out he had been flown from a hospital in New Orleans to a nursing home in Alabama. The house had to be bulldozed: it was not salvageable.
Then in 2008, Hurricane Ike hit. By that time I had learned to leave by airplane well before the hurricane, and I went back to TN while my partner stayed in Houston (his choice). He had no power for more than a week. It was just lucky that the temperatures were moderate that September. But the roof blew off his office building and his office was flooded. The flooding on Galveston Island killed live oaks that were over a hundred years old.
A few years later, I left Houston to live in TN again. I had decided that Houston had become unlivable. The constant weather disasters, the intense heat, the huge bursts of mosquitoes that made it impossible to be outside, the toxic fumes from the refineries, the traffic, the long commutes, the noise from elevated freeways, the muggings: it was all just unbearable. There would be a few months in winter when Houston was fairly pleasant but the rest of the time it was like some form of hell.
My partner stayed, though, and he died of cancer in 2015, like so many of his friends had already.
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston. Tom was dead by that time, but other friends had to live through that. I'm glad I got out "in time." It's hard for me to understand why people stay, and why they are loyal to a city that doesn't seem to care at all about its human inhabitants. It was built for cars. Cars are the real citizens of Houston, and the humans are just there to service the cars and the refineries that run the cars and the hospitals that treat people who die of cancer because of the refineries and the cars.
Where I live now is not perfect: we've had intense heat this summer, and some storms that knocked down trees, and a drought in June. A few years ago, there was a tornado that killed some people on one side of town. But 90% of the time, everything is fine. In Houston, 90% of the time it was pretty stressful.
I suggest that, instead of spending our dwindling resources "rebuilding" to satisfy a nostalgic view of how things "used to be," we start planning for a future that will get steadily worse. I'm not an engineer, but rainfall and river flow can be directed. We could salvage more of our civilization that way.