When tragedy strikes at home
It's terrifying to hear about the impacts of severe weather and natural disasters, but it's even more heartbreaking when you or someone you love are caught in the middle of it. In July, I visited my grandma, who lives in a mountain town in western North Carolina. As Helene approached Tallahassee, Florida, where the storm made landfall as a category 4 hurricane, there were warnings about how bad it would get for everyone from there to the mountains of North Carolina. My dad even said, "remember Katrina." And boy, was he right.
See also: "From the city to the mountains, part 2"
Welcome back to Futurism. I waited to publish this until I knew that my grandma was okay. Her house is damaged, but the damage is workable. She's cooking for her neighbors who can't (she has a camp stove). The stuff in her basement freezer is still cold. The water is receding, the trees blocking driveways and neighborhood roads are being removed, and it's possible to get around a little bit now. The roads, where they still exist, are quite muddy, and although the normal routes are closed and washed out, there IS at least one way through there now. Other places weren't so lucky, like Chimney Rock.
While I need to convey the dark reality we live in, I wouldn't write this here without something actionable, or something worth fighting for. I also don't want to bash people who "should have known better," that's victim blaming and that's bad. (Except for Cybertruck owners.) This is one of the deadliest storms in recent memory, with at least 50 people confirmed dead due to the storm -- and far too many people still unaccounted for.
---
We've known that a nasty storm like this was bound to happen. Hurricanes are fueled by warm waters, and a warming climate definitely warms the waters. So I blame climate change, which is global warming, for Helene reaching category 4. However, if we had somehow decarbonized long ago, it would still have hit and caused massive damage, but it would not have been quite so bad and it would not have been category 4.
This is some of the worst, and most destructive, flooding we've ever seen. Almost biblical. Entire towns were wiped off the map; others were left severely damaged and totally isolated. Dams overflowing. Many roads, even interstates, washed away. Countless lives lost. Even more families left in fear.
There is going to be more of this, this won't be the last time.
Are we going to be prepared?
Okay, it's hard to prepare for a HURRICANE when you're in the Appalachian MOUNTAINS. You know, the one place least in danger from hurricanes. It's hard to prepare for tornadoes or floods, period. There are a few trailer parks up there, but all the houses I've seen up there are proper houses built with bricks, logs, and/or concrete, not the flimsy hollow ones with framework and drywall we get everywhere else in America. They are built to withstand the kind of extreme weather the mountains usually get, like blizzards and landslides, although usually that kind of building is pretty solid for tornadoes and hurricanes too. Until the rains come.
Look, I love a good small town as much as anyone else. Where my grandma lives is like a home-away-from-home for me. But it might be worth considering that too many people are spread out there. One thing that does help in flooding situations is having higher ground. If your only floor is ground level, a flood several stories deep is going to destroy your house and everyone and everything in it. If you have high ground, you can escape a flood. It might be possible to flood-seal it; in an apartment, you can seal off your whole apartment and move to a safe place on a higher floor.
There should be a mandatory public high-floor space suitable for evacuees, to give people somewhere to go in case of floods. To prepare for tornadoes, these buildings should have a suitable basement space as well. And if shit hits the fan, there should be places outside of this for people to go as well. And they should not be left houseless.
Suburban sprawl is not as bad in the mountains, sure, but there absolutely are suburbs of Asheville and other towns further from it. Plus, it's less "planned sprawl" and more "working with the terrain," because the terrain makes any building in the mountains quite difficult. Asheville seems to be built in a relatively level valley, although it is also in a valley, so flooding is a huge risk here, even just from when the snow melts.
In the era of climate change, it is absolutely critical to design your buildings and infrastructure for unusual phenomena, because they're about to happen a lot more. Helena shows us all exactly why this is important.
Trains
There should be a train system to connect Asheville with the various mining projects and whatnot. That train should be able to take the miners to the work site and back home at the end of the shift (and mid-shift runs, if possible, in case someone needs to go home early).
I still think a high-speed rail to connect all of North Carolina's major cities would be awesome. It should be able to offer an early morning direct train from Asheville to Wilmington and one back in the evening. You should be able to go from Raleigh or Charlotte directly to Wilmington or Asheville in the same way (you can make a day trip out of it!). The route I drew up has a bypass track between Charlotte and Fayetteville, but the "main" line hits Greensboro (near Winston-Salem) and Raleigh as well. All in all, this unfortunately-hypothetical line would connect: Asheville, Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Fayetteville [and therefore Fort Liberty/Bragg], and Wilmington. Best paired with connector light-rail networks to connect Greensboro to Winston-Salem, maybe High Point, maybe Thomasville, and Lexington; Charlotte to some of its surrounding towns (I'm completely unfamiliar with that part of the state); Raleigh to Morrisville (RDU), Durham, Chapel Hill, Zebulon, Clayton, Knightdale, Cary, Apex, Holly Springs, Fuquay-Varina, and maybe Angier and Rolesville; Wilmington to the Outer Banks and beaches; and Asheville to Boone, and other places.
A set of illustrations depicting this train map and all its major stops.
The top map depicts a rough physical layout, which I overlaid Google Maps on to get the positionings right. The middle map is a more typical "map" of the system's stops. The bottom map depicts some of the potential Raleigh-area light rail circuits. The green circuit near Greensboro connects to Winston-Salem and Lexington, which aren't labeled.
Using electrified trains instead of electrified cars means that, not only do we have less tanks out there and less possibility of them being used to commit excused murder, but we have less carbon emissions and higher efficiency, the latter of which is super important in case of evacuations. In advance of a hurricane at the coast, or another Helene in the mountains, some trains can be reassigned (particularly the mountains-to-coast tourism ones) so that there are a few dedicated trains for getting people the fuck out of the Danger Zone.
Proper urbanization altogether provides myriad opportunities to mitigate risk and avert or escape danger.
Disaster roaming
A few years ago I thought that the WEA on phones, particularly that you didn't have to be registered for a mobile service to use it, was entirely voluntary by service operators and OS manufacturers. Turns out it wasn't, and neither was fucking 911. And both of those -- and disaster roaming, which I only found out about today -- had to be mandated by the federal government.
In case you're just as unaware as I was, disaster roaming lets people connect to any network that's available, no matter what network they're on. It's really important in cases like this, where only one cell service works. People want and need to contact the outside world, to let their families know they're okay, to document the damage, or to ask for help or resources from the outside. So in a situation where there's only one cell service available, you should be allowed to connect to that service.
Shouldn't that be normal anyway? Like, shouldn't you be able to use other networks' infrastructure when your network's is not available somewhere? I know I ended up roaming in some places in the mountains, not sure whose network I was connected to (probably AT&T), but companies won't do it without paying each other for it, and so they only do it for certain areas.
We've really got to rethink our networking, too.
Futurism Meta: Footer change
I've closed down the federation.quest VPS and the XMPP server I hosted on it, so the alternate XMPP address blake@federation.quest is no longer available. Please use me@blakes.dev either on XMPP or email to reach me instead.
---
I hope to someday see a world that's built to be more resistant, more resilient, where cities are a lot denser, and suburbs pretty much cease to exist. I long for the day when free travel and hospitality mean people have a lot less to worry about when they need to evacuate, and allow them to move away from a place that's hostile to them. Let's advocate for better cities and less suburbs, and let's get people out of bad places. Let's fight global warming. Let's work towards a better future, where this kind of devastation can be mitigated and avoided.
---
If you have the ability to donate or volunteer, please check out these links, which outline a whole lot of ways we can help out the people in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and Appalachian South Carolina dealing with the aftermath of Helene.
WRAL: How to help: Western NC residents devastated by Helene
Email me: me@blakes.dev (or DeltaChat)
Chat with me: me@blakes.dev (XMPP)