I really have nothing smart to say. I have nothing thoughtful to say. I don’t think this will be a long or well-written essay. I feel completely heartbroken and sick, watching footage from Southern Appalachia right now in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Families trapped inside their houses while floodwater climbs, using the last of their phone battery to broadcast a cry for rescue. Whole homes floating by on a river that used to be a road. Towns and cities filled to the brim, surreally, the green tops of the mountains poking their heads above water. People outside the region turning to the internet to ask if anyone has heard anything from their mother or father or best friend, who lives in Asheville or Boone and has no service and has not been heard from in two days. People in the region, turning to social media to warn each other that this road or that exit is washed away, this valley filled with water. And soon, what news coverage there is will disappear, and these people will be left to rebuild their homes or to rebuild their lives somewhere else, to assess the damage, to sort what is salvageable from what isn’t.
When a destructive hurricane hits, a certain number of people, like clockwork, always decide to ask: well, “why didn’t they just evacuate?” Some people ask this question with sincere confusion. Others with simpering self-righteousness: well, it’s terrible what’s happening, but in the end they really should have taken proper precautions. Some people do it cruelly, vengefully, gleefully: didn’t those stupid hicks get what they deserved? Another version of this commentary gets aimed at the Gulf South. Appalachia will likely avoid it, purely by virtue of the fact that they were supposed to be safe from this kind of thing. This version goes something like: “Why do you even live here? Isn’t it your fault, for daring to have a home in this place?”
If you are one of these disaster scolds—one of these people who scarcely waits for the eye of the storm to pass before somberly intoning “they should have evacuated,” or “Well, they shouldn’t live in a place that floods”—then I have to tell you, with all the kindness I can possibly muster: shut the fuck up.
First, you sound like a total asshole.
When you hear about human beings who are stuck and scared and in some cases dead or hurt, and who have no service and no home and no drinkable water, who don’t know if or when they will have jobs or schools or roads or towns, it is patently insane and deeply inhuman to turn around and gloat and tut-tut and moralize.
Nobody is beyond criticism, god knows—but what, exactly, do you hope to achieve with this particular criticism, other than cruelty? (Luckily, at least, many of the people at whom it’s aimed cannot hear: even if you take to social media to be a sanctimonious weirdo, hurricane survivors are saving any phone battery they have).
Maybe you witness this kind of human suffering and your first instinct is to issue a correction for the sufferers. I don’t know. I don’t care what happens inside your mind. Be as sadistic and smug and puritanical as you want to be, in your own head. It’s none of my business. But keep it inside. Nobody—not me, not the survivors you’re mocking, not their families, not the internet, not your friends or family or coworkers, not a damn soul—needs to hear you say it out loud.
Second, you sound like an idiot.
Of course, I happen to think you have a god-given right to say what you want, if you happen to be pointing out something meaningful or true. Maybe it’s nice to modify your tone a little, to be tactful about who you say things to, or how you say it, or to wait until a little time has passed. But it’s my belief that telling the truth matters most, that we should say things that are correct instead of things that are pleasant and easy to hear.
But here’s the thing about disaster scolding: it isn’t fucking right. It isn’t right! It comes from a place of ignorance and misinformation, bolstered with a strong dose of undeserved moral superiority. People who do this think they’re issuing some harsh and sober truth, but it’s quite the opposite. They’re letting slip a bit of misinformed bullshit because it makes them feel safer, smarter, and better. It’s superstitious and steeped in Christian morality. The implication (sometimes it’s more than an implication) is that people in Appalachia are being punished, because they’re conservative or stupid or something. It sounds uncannily like the televangelists who announced, after Katrina, that God was punishing New Orleans for being a den of sin.
Maybe it feels nice, for you, to ask why some desperate family in Tennessee or North Carolina didn’t evacuate. Maybe it makes you feel like you would never be stupid enough to be in their situation. Maybe it makes you feel like this would only happen to people who really deserve it. But you’re wrong.
Evacuating is not simple. Many tropical depressions form every hurricane season. Some number of them will become named storms and some number of those will become hurricanes and some number of those will become big hurricanes, and you will sit and watch on TV to see where the meteorologists place the cone of uncertainty, and you will try to do the math, figuring out how big this thing is going to be and how close it’ll come to you and how likely it is that you’ll lose power, all the while waiting to see if school and work are canceled. If you do decide to evacuate, or are ordered to do so, it happens suddenly. After all, most of the time, the storm is nothing. Most of the time, you have a night or two without power, maybe a broken window. These days, the whole process, the whole calculation, all happens very very fast. Hurricanes accelerate in ways we have not seen before. There used to be more warning. You used to know how big a storm would be, roughly. A category one was a category one and a category five was a category five. Now, the thing metastasizes from barely-there to monstrous, and sometimes there isn’t even time to order an evacuation. There isn’t even time to get everyone physically out. The processes that have to occur—bureaucratic, infrastructural, whatever—cannot be completed.
Let’s say there is a mandatory evacuation. Some people will leave. And, sure, some number of people are just stubborn and will refuse. It’s not like those people don’t exist. But many people cannot evacuate. I will say that again. Many people CAN NOT EVACUATE. They cannot evacuate because they do not have cars. I need you to get this through your head. If you do not have a car, you have very limited means for getting out of town. In a mandatory evacuation there may or may not be some kind of municipal scheme using buses or similar—I certainly wouldn’t count on it. It might leave you worse off than if you just ride the thing out at home. And you can’t exactly rent a car, when the whole city is preparing to either hunker down and ride it out or evacuate. Maybe you can hitch a ride with someone who does have a car—but what if you have a family? A wheelchair, an oxygen tank, a dog? Is there room for everyone?
Maybe you do have a car. Great. Pack a bag. Pack pajamas and a toothbrush and a change of clothes and hope you’re not gone longer than a couple of days. Throw it all in the trunk. Now: do you have gas money? You’ll need a lot of money for gas, because you are likely to be in the car for a long, long time. Evacuating does not mean driving an hour or two to the next town. It means driving out of the path of the storm, through traffic like you have never, ever seen in your life—genuinely, I promise, if you have not evacuated a big hurricane you have never seen traffic like this. And meanwhile the outer bands of the storm, in some cases, are starting to lash at your windshield. It may or may not be safe driving conditions. I have been stuck in hurricane traffic so bad that, mathematically, it meant we would never make it: we’d either be stranded in the car when the hurricane hit, or stranded back in the house, and I know which one I’d prefer. I have been stuck in hurricane traffic that turned a five-minute drive into an hour-long drive and a five-hour drive into a fifteen-hour drive. This can be true, by the way, even if you evacuate the smart way, in the dead of night.
I hope you’re not hungry, on your very long drive, and I hope you don’t need a bathroom. I hope you don’t have a crying baby who needs to be changed. I hope you’re not pregnant. Because for as long as you’re in the path of the storm, alongside thousands of others who are also trying to get out, it’ll be very hard to make a stop. Not just because of the traffic, but also, of course, because every town along the way will be boarding up and shutting down too. If you do get a chance to stop and get some food and chat to the other evacuees in the insanely long bathroom line, you should, of course, make sure you actually have the money to buy food, for yourself and perhaps your family. In fact, you and your family are probably going to have to eat at restaurants of some sort for several days. Hope that’s not a financial strain for you!
And then, of course, where do you go? A family or friend’s house if you’re lucky, but what if that’s not an option? It’s very likely that all your nearby friends and family live in the path of the storm. It’s going to be hard to find a spare hotel room. Your entire city, maybe your entire region, is desperately looking for a spare hotel room at a moment’s notice. Let’s say, eventually, you find one. It’s not going to be cheap, especially at the last minute, especially if you have a family. And I hope you don’t have pets. Oh, god, do you have pets? Well, you’re going to need to find a hotel that lets you bring your barely housetrained puppy, or your hamster in its cage.
So, to review: you’ll need a car. You’ll need at least one driver but ideally two, because you will very likely be driving for many, many hours with few opportunities to stop, and the drivers should be confident driving in dangerous conditions. You’ll need several hundred dollars, at a very low estimate. You should avoid having pets and also avoid having children or elderly people in your care. Does all of this apply to you? Then evacuating will be a long and patience-testing and deeply unpleasant process, but you are one of the lucky ones who can do it without too much difficulty.
Unless, of course, you’re incarcerated. Or are in a nursing home. Or are a patient in a hospital. Or unless you have a job that requires you to stay put. Are you a healthcare worker? You might be on call. Do you work for the city in any capacity—sewage, mayor’s office, firefighter? Are you, perhaps, employed by one of the aforementioned jails or nursing homes, as a cook or a nurse or a cleaner? Do you work at the zoo? Or are you, like many people, working for an employer who—illegally—threatens to fire you if you fail to show up? If so, you might not be permitted to leave town.
Maybe none of that applies to you. Great! Do you have a family member who is in jail? Do you have a family member who is a doctor? Have you ever had a child in the NICU or a relative in intensive-care? Do you have some elderly neighbors who might not fare very well in an extended power outage? Have any of these conditions ever applied to you? If so, you might have to decide whether to leave these people behind, or leave without them. And people make both decisions, regularly, and people regret both decisions, regularly. There is not always a right answer.
If you have ever shaken your head and lamented the stupidity of some disaster survivor because they (stupid) did not evacuate, while you (smart) would have done so, then I hope you have a car and lots of money and that you’re healthy and a good driver and that you have children and that you aren’t close with any old people or sick people and that you don’t have pets and that you do not have one of the many, many jobs and commitments and obligations—both prestigious and non-prestigious—that might require you to work during a hurricane. I sincerely hope that for you! But even if that’s the case right now, it won’t always be. Most of these obstacles apply to some person, at some point in their life. It’s just bad luck, if they happen to apply when a disastrous storm hits.
And even if you’re safe right now, well out of the path of this hurricane or any other, shielded from disaster, you will very likely not always be. I’m sorry. I’m really, really, truly sorry.
This Is Your Problem Too.
After Hurricane Katrina, my family, like so many New Orleanians, wound up in Houston. Katrina hit on August 29th and, after roving around uncertainly for a few weeks, we went to Houston and stayed until around Christmas, at which point we were able to go back to New Orleans and stay in a friend’s apartment until our house was livable in (if my memory serves me) May or June. We were in a better position than most: house damaged but not wrecked, able to evacuate.
But the future was still precarious, and we were able to face that precarious future because the city of Houston was kind to us. A family we’d never met took all of us in sight unseen (though they couldn’t take the dog: some out of town extended family had to do that). The schools of Houston opened their doors. A public school dropped whatever rules and class size limits it had to let me and my little sister and some other Katrina kids in, though the school year was already well underway. My older sisters wound up at a Jewish high school which let them attend free of charge, along with some friends who weren’t even Jewish. Everywhere we went in Houston, people were kind to us. People dropped off bags of clothes and toys, because nobody had any. Even these days, when you drive around New Orleans, you can spot bumper stickers reading “THANKS HOUSTON.”
And yet—though we were very, very, very grateful—we were a little resentful. We were resentful because Houston, for all that it had been good to us, chiefly served to remind us that we were not home and could not go home. Houston was very safe and prosperous and a good place to take refuge, which, in a way, made us feel more resentful. Home felt like a beautiful fragile longed-for irreplaceable gem clinging for its survival onto the ragged fraying edge of the Louisiana wetlands while Houston, big and rich and safe, felt like an indestructible concrete behemoth of a city in an indestructible concrete behemoth of a state.
Why am I talking about this? Why am I talking about myself at all, when right now, entire towns in the Appalachian South are wiped out? I am talking about this because, in the intervening years, Houston has been bashed and battered by huge, dangerous storms. The place that symbolized invulnerability and solidity, for me and so many other New Orleanians, has been revealed to be vulnerable. When Hurricane Harvey made its catastrophic downfall there in 2017, I thought, stupidly: but that’s not possible. Houston is where you evacuate to, not where you evacuate from.
But, increasingly, there are no longer places you evacuate to and places you evacuate from. Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee aren’t supposed to deal with things like this. The gaps between mountains are not supposed to fill up with floodwater. But here we are. Everywhere, now, is Louisiana. Everywhere is Puerto Rico, everywhere is the Bahamas, everywhere is the Philippines.
It no longer makes sense to ask, with easy superiority, why don’t they just evacuate? It certainly does not make sense to ask why do you even live there anyway? I could ask you the same question, though of course I won’t. So we can either act from a place of humaneness and rationality and knowledge, or we can act from a place of stupidity and meanness and self-defeating, unproductive ignorance. It’s up to you. Whatever path you decide to take, you’ll be on the receiving end of it soon enough.
I'm from Western NC and thank you for this!!! You basically said everything I've been thinking! I also think it's worth mentioning that local news was hardly covering the storm until it started getting bad. I had no clue it was going to get as bad as it did and I don't remember anyone saying anything about evacuating.
This made me cry. Beautiful and excruciating.