Wednesday Walk: My Hurricane Experiences
Rebuilding after Hurricane Helene is going to take a LONG time, plus some thoughts on the election
Welcome to Willoughby Hills!
Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…
Some Personal Hurricane Reflections
I have been struggling as I’ve seen the devastation from Hurricane Helene. While hurricanes hitting Florida is somewhat common, what I had not expected was how devastating this storm would be to inland areas.
Asheville, North Carolina, a city nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains some 2,000 feet above sea level and 300 miles from the nearest coast, was especially devastated.
I am no stranger to hurricane destruction, or in particular, the long road to recovery. While the destruction in Appalachia is in the headlines at the moment, the cleanup and rebuilding efforts will continue for years after the camera crews move on.
I saw this firsthand when I worked on a series with This Old House in New Orleans. The city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in August, 2005. We first began chronicling the rebuilding efforts nearly two years later, beginning in 2007 and running into 2008.
Much of the Lower Ninth Ward, a poorer and historically Black neighborhood that saw some of the worst flooding from the storm, had largely been abandoned. There were entire streets that two years earlier had housed densely packed shotgun style houses that were now mostly overgrown weeded lots with no sign that houses had even been there.
While scouting for projects, our director began recording interviews with people affected by the storm, which he ended up developing into the documentary New Orleans: Getting Back to Normal. It aired on public television in 2010. (I volunteered some time on this project, earning a producing credit and my first Emmy win).
During the filming of that documentary, we met people, many with severe needs and little means, who were still living out of temporary FEMA trailers two years after the storm.
Later in my career, I travelled to Houston to document the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey for a special episode of Ask This Old House. The goal that time was not to feature the rebuilding process, which can take several years, but rather to show how the immediate cleanup happens after a storm.
We were in Houston two months after Harvey made landfall. One of the projects we featured involved mucking out a house that had sat closed up with all of its contents soaking wet for that time. Mold was growing on nearly every surface and most of the home’s contents, from couches to the refrigerator to old family photos, had to be thrown into a dumpster.
While also in Houston, we met with an older Black woman who moved into a house built by Habitat for Humanity, not far from Bush Intercontinental Airport. Her entire neighborhood was underwater during the storm and she was forced to evacuate with her daughter and baby granddaughter in waist-deep water with no real plan or nowhere to go. Habitat, to its credit, was helping with the rebuilding process, but it begged the question of whether that neighborhood should have even been built where it was in the first place.
In both New Orleans and Houston, the injustice of climate change was always top of mind. Our downtown hotel was walking distance to the French Quarter and Bourbon Street. For the tourists and convention goers in these areas, the impacts of Katrina were minor and businesses quickly reopened. As we spent our days in neighborhoods that still were in desperate need of help two years later, it was incongruous to come back to a thriving tourist district each night.
Asheville will recover. It will be a long road ahead, but it will rebuild.
The sadder case is all of the smaller Appalachian towns which have been exploited then abandoned by big business over the last century. This hurricane may be the final blow for those places. The people who chose to stay over the years will lose whatever equity they had in their property and will be forced to settle for an insurance settlement (if their policy even covered flooding). If they can afford it and find a contractor, they may try to rebuild or they may have no choice but to look for greener pastures.
There’s no guarantee that those greener pastures won’t become the next site of climate catastrophe though. If a mountain town 300 miles from the coast can get wiped out by a hurricane, none of us are truly safe.
Humanity Amongst Helene
While I hope most of you reading this are feeling empathy for the 100+ deaths from this storm, the countless people displaced, and the millions still without power, I have seen many people over the past week who are not.
Our society seems to have a way of dehumanizing others. I think a part of this is rooted in capitalism (if we had to consider the laborer in China assembling our jeans or the farm worker in California picking our grapes, we wouldn’t be great consumers).
But another part comes from the notion that everything is entertainment. Reality TV started the trend and social media has continued it, but it’s easy to forget there are real humans behind these images.
I’ve seen gleeful finger pointing on both sides this week: Democrats whose homes are not flooded laughing at the red state governors who deny climate change or refuse to curb emissions, and Republicans who think that the blue dot of Asheville got what was coming to it.
Then there’s the push alert that I got on my phone from the Weather Channel app soon after the storm. Before talking about the hundreds of deaths or millions of people in harm’s way, this is what the Weather Channel thought would be of highest interest to me after a major hurricane:
Watching the rescue of a dog rather than worry about the human toll? Sadly, I think they knew people would click on this.
As the flood waters recede and the rebuilding starts, please remember your humanity. It’s easy to forget in this modern world, but it’s more important than ever.
The Election Diner
Sunday’s newsletter about the U.S.-funded Israeli assault on Lebanon certainly generated a lot of discussion! While many people expressed a similar frustration to the one that I felt about our involvement in these attacks, I also heard from a few people both publicly and privately that were worried that my criticism of the Biden-Harris administration (or rhetoric of that nature) will cause Trump to get elected.
As I stated on Sunday, I am not in favor of Trump in any way.
But the fear of another Trump term is not enough to motivate me to turn out for Harris, especially since it doesn’t feel like she’s done enough to earn the vote of progressives and leftists.
The best analogy that I can think of is that a new restaurant opens in a town where there’s only ever been a McDonald’s. The new restaurant seems good in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t quite appeal to me. Maybe the menu doesn’t have what I want to eat on it, or maybe there’s something about the sourcing of the ingredients or the method of preparation that doesn’t work for me.
All of my friends and family keep going to this restaurant. They’ll tell me things like “Sure, they use feedlot beef, but it’s the only place in town to get a decent salad.” Or “If you don’t support this local restaurant, they’ll go out of business, and McDonald’s will be the only choice.”
This all may be true. But if that prediction comes to pass, who is to blame?
If the local restaurant doesn’t succeed, is it because the patrons didn’t go there or is it because the restaurant didn’t adapt to the needs of the community? The local restaurant needs to work to earn our business, either by creating an appealing menu, paying attention to customer requests, having great service, having great ambiance, or something else.
But if the menu isn’t appealing, or worse, includes something that I am greatly opposed to that everybody is trying to cover up and say is okay, I’m not going to eat there.
While everybody wants to frame the decision as McDonald’s versus the local restaurant, there are other options too. There’s getting sushi from the local grocery store (Jill Stein I guess) or a bag of chips from the local gas station (Claudia de la Cruz?). Neither one seems especially filling or destined to take over the local dining scene, but they are technically options.
Or more likely, I’ll opt to stay home and cook. In the analogy for president, this means not voting, while also working at the local level to try to enact change in my community. It may not solve everything for everybody, but it’s not nothing.
Here’s the last part of this for me: the time to try to change the menu at the local restaurant is right now, before we give them our business. We can call them and ask where their beef comes from or which local farms they use. We can ask for nutritional or sourcing information. We can demand that they use pastured eggs instead of the cheap food service ones that come from caged birds.
Once the meal has been served and the bill arrives, we’re on the hook. There’s no chance to make changes. Chances are once we’re in, the menu will continue to decline in quality to save a few bucks here and there.
If Harris feels like our votes are locked despite her record on Israel and other issues (like how she proudly talked about being a gun owner to a shocked Oprah), she will feel no need to change. But if she’s worried that McDonald’s or the sushi bar or the gas station may take our dinner dollars, you can bet she’ll pivot. So let’s not just hand her our vote, let’s ask her to earn it and show us she means business.
Some of this may read as privilege; by not supporting Harris I am also turning my back on women, LGBTQ+ people, minorities, immigrants, and others who are more vulnerable than a cis, straight, able-bodied white man.
But as I’m watching children blown to pieces in Palestine and Lebanon, as I’m watching school shootings continue to happen with no meaningful gun laws proposed, as I’m watching North Carolinians struggle for their lives right now without adequate food and water while armed police guard a supermarket to prevent “property damage,” I wonder if anybody’s rights are truly safe. We have a Democrat in the White House now, and while Biden and Harris may be willing to discuss women’s rights or gay rights, it’s pretty clear to me that they all of us are incredibly vulnerable, regardless of who’s in charge.
I live in a reliably blue state, so who I vote for or whether or not I vote this year is a tad moot. But for others living in states where one vote can truly swing the election, think long and hard about what you’re voting for. And if you’re not happy with what’s on the menu, please ask for something else.
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
“But the fear of another Trump term is not enough to motivate me to turn out for Harris…” is troubling statement. I am married to a Muslim immigrant, have two children who carry Muslim names, one of whom is also gay. I read that statement as completely dismissive of the very real fear my family feels! And, frankly, also of every person at risk in the Middle East, Sudan, Kenya, Ukraine, Central America et.al. Again, I’m married to a Muslim, so we have had MANY conversations about Israel’s actions and America’s role in supporting them. And, I’m certainly not happy with the approach of the American government. But, I know, because he’s already shown us (remember the Muslim ban?) that another Donald Trump presidency could have serious ramifications for anyone not of a privileged class (read white, native born, Christian-even if only tangentially) living in the US. And, again, his foreign “policy” will be an utter disaster and most likely make a bad situation, particularly in the Middle East, even worse. I want to be clear that if we had a standard?, normal? Republican running who would simply hold the status quo that Harris is likely to hold, I wouldn’t feel so strongly about this…but I also don’t think you would frame the argument that way, which in itself should be telling.
As usual all of this is spot on. I’m struggling between invoices at this point, but I am still 100 % in support of how you plan to approach this, especially being in a hard Blue state. If I was home, it would be different.
And being in a hard Blue place where stuff is taken for granted is hard. But I’m committed to doing my part.