Midwest Storms

I and those in my home are quite lucky to be with power and without damage to our house, trees, yard, car, chickens, etc., after a truly fearsome storm rolled through the region the day before yesterday. The storm hit mid-morning and basically didn't stop until the evening, with high winds reaching over 90mph and heavy rainfall flooding low-lying areas. In Columbus, where I reside, a car on the highway was picked up and flipped over by a gust of wind as if a hand had simply batted it aside. On the south end of town there is unsubstantiated talk of a low-powered tornado (and apparently on the north side, too), and damage throughout the city is significant enough that whether one really hit the city or not is immaterial. Trees are down everywhere, neighborhoods are blacked out, people were hurt and at least one person killed in the region.

Considering the severity of this storm, people I know and people like me are wondering, hey, where was the tornado warning? When weather gets this tough, we hear that chilling tornado siren–that's life in Ohio. Weather nerds will tell you this storm likely didn't actually produce any tornados, did not present as the sort of storm that would, and therefore no siren, no alarm on phone. That's not comforting though, right?

The thing to wonder about here–because it is a little soon to cast outright aspersions–is whether there was, in fact, a tornado, and if so is the fact that we kneecapped the NWS and NOAA part of the reason why it wasn't detected? And, alternatively, should we probably get the same sort of alerts for storms with the same destructive capacity regardless? I won't ponder this for very long, because ultimately that's the sort of thing an Alex Jones-adjacent writer would do–get mad at a thing they made up in their own head. And it's enough that we know these services were dramatically cut. That happened. Whether it hurts us with this storm or the next, that's just in the mail. And I won't belabor the cost/benefit analysis of doubling the times your phone blows up because winds in your county get up above 60mph. I'm not a wonk.

But as climate change continues to strengthen, and strengthen, and strengthen, weather only gets more unstable. Unstable weather yields storms, more and stronger storms. This is a hard and fast equation: the madder Hulk gets, the stronger; the hotter the world gets, the more unstable its weather becomes. And hotter is all we've got left.

I'll remind you that it's difficult to pin the severity of one storm to climate change–storms happened before that and they will happen when this rock has settled back down in about 300,000-3,000,000 years or so. But this has been a hot summer, the hottest July the US has ever seen, it's a safe bet that some anthropogenic heat bumped this storm up.

So I Texted My Friends

We lost power for the briefest blip when the storm first hit, but here in my neighborhood we got it back fast. Some of our friends weren't so lucky, with their power well and truly out into the early afternoon. I debated how many texts in a row was too many to send, but told our closest friends to expect the outages to extend, for things to get worse before they got better, go get some ice and prepare and all but link them to the newsletter. Lo and behold shortly thereafter the power company posted their first update for restoration to their neighborhood on the near east side: Friday.

I left the house yesterday for the first time since the storm hit to take one of our dogs to our near and dear vet. Not even quite a block away, the traffic signal at a busy intersection was out, and the corner store didn't have power. Half a mile further, the next signal was lit. Driving back, I saw trees and power lines down not far at all from my neighborhood. It was pure luck that kept our lights on. Two streets down, yellow tape blocked the way, as did a whole enormous tree. My point is that this storm–that I didn't have on my metaphorical radar as more than "thunderstorms tomorrow,"–was enough to cause widespread damage across the whole city. Luck should not be the thing that keeps a whole city from danger.

This is an August storm, too, which is a little bit–but not very–odd. We should be drying out here, summer winding down. Instead we got 7 inches of rain this week. It should go without saying, but that's what we've been talking about, folks; this is climate change, and this is our world now. We can only look back on the days when we knew what a season might bring, what a month usually felt like.

There is a pithy quote that everyday Romans saw the fall of their empire as a bridge collapsing one day, and nobody coming to fix it. That is how things will be here. Repairs will come less often, be worse, and eventually stop. Fewer and fewer threads will hold together our safety nets. A storm like this will, eventually, cut power for you for days, weeks, months. You may one day never get it back. My vet may pack up and move to a different part of town, where the grid is sturdier. Your grocery store may fold up overnight. The cops you see may start looking and acting a little meaner, may wonder what you're doing out on the street, may need their palms greased just for safe passage to find that, yes, the grocery store is in fact picked clean.

Something simple, like planting a late garden (there are plenty of cold crops you can start before the season is out) or taking a Stop the Bleed course, are the kinds of skills we will need on hand as collapse settles in, and our luck worsens. More than that are the bonds of community: the people who, after a storm, are clearing your driveway of a downed tree limb before you could so much as fuel up your chainsaw. The sooner you make these relationships, and cement them, the better–you don't want to be the last person left on your block when a storm hits.