The victims of Hurricane Helene deserve better than silly political arguments

My heart breaks for the people of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, whose experience with Hurricane Helene was a flood of biblical proportions. This is not an empty expression of compassion. It arises from the memory of the first time I walked through my home in New Orleans, which was flooded eight feet after the city’s floodwalls collapsed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The smell of water and rotting food in refrigerators and freezers. The soft feel of wet drywall and warped, soggy floors. The shock of seeing all sorts of fungus and mold growing on the walls – and somehow even on the ceiling fans. The pain of finding a lifetime’s worth of books, snapshots, and family heirlooms in a soggy heap on the floor.

While it’s not as bad as all of a person’s belongings rotting on the side of the road, there’s something scarier about a flood than hearing other people’s opinions about why you were flooded or what it all means politically. You’ve lived in a place that’s too low. They lived in a place controlled by the Republican Party. Or from the other side: They should have chosen a more conservative Christian place that God wouldn’t hit with a storm.

Such simple-minded arguments spread across social media this weekend and are depressingly easy to find. Comments ranged from people who said North Carolinians got what they expected because the state typically elects Republicans for president, to people who said Asheville got what they expected because it far is more liberal than the rest of the USA.

Regardless of the political persuasion that advances the argument, it is based on the idea that some people deserve catastrophe and that some people are smart enough to avoid such a catastrophe while others do not.

It is also based on the argument that flooding can only be expected in certain places – at odds with the reality that flooding is the most common disaster in the US – places that are easy for reasonable people to avoid.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, “Ninety percent of natural disasters in the United States involve flooding.” Consequently, floods cause more economic damage and loss of life and property than any other natural hazard.” Pew reported in 2022: “It has occurred since 2000 On average, the United States experiences at least one flood on almost 300 days per year. The NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] The database also shows that all 50 states and the District of Columbia experienced flooding in 2021.”

In January 2014, more than a year after Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey and New York and more than eight years after Hurricane Katrina, I stood with Tom Ashbrook, then host of the NPR show “On Point,” who was recording on a stage performing his show in front of a live audience in New Orleans.

When I noted that the subsidized National Flood Insurance Program was struggling and instead advocated for some kind of catastrophic insurance that would spread the risk and attract disaster-prone people from across the country, the moderator made an argument on behalf of the people who could join one oppose such a proposal? He said: “If you’re sitting on a mountaintop and thinking about the coast and thinking about how serious the threat of sea level rise is and what it might cost to underpin that, you might not want to pay for it.”

“There was a flood in Colorado last summer,” I said. “Just a few years ago there was a flood in Nashville, Tennessee. Flooding is the most common natural disaster in the United States, and I would like people to stop thinking of it as just a Louisiana problem.”

Although I already knew that a place as hilly as Asheville could flood, it was still shocking that a hurricane that first hit the Gulf Coast would be the cause. (I say “a” cause because a so-called 1,000-year storm had already dumped up to eight inches of water on Asheville before Helene arrived.)

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how scary it is that storms explode in strength before they make landfall. But I hadn’t considered that stronger storms hitting the coasts could lead to stronger storms and scarier rains far inland.

KD Minor, an organizer who launched a relief effort for people in her native Lake Charles, Louisiana, after that area of ​​southwest Louisiana was hit by two hurricanes (Laura and Delta) in six weeks in 2020, wrote on Sunday on X: “The climate catastrophe has no address.”

The climate catastrophe also doesn’t care who you vote for in November, or whether you’re gay, or whether you live at sea level or high above. It affects us all.

If that’s not a reason to try to heal the climate, I don’t know what is.