Memories of Disasters Past and…Thoughts About the Present
Disaster often walks with adventure whether we want it or not. Recent floods in Kentucky evoked old memories of previous disasters in the minds of one journalist. Old lessons revisited and new ones learned.
As the Kentucky floodwaters gradually recede, old memories rise. This time I watched from afar what I saw in person in 1989 when I joined a CNN news team covering what was then thought to be a 100-year flood in the state. While the interval between the two events is short, climate change has compressed our understanding of time and heightened the urgency of our natural predicament.
If you’re a reporter, you will arrive at destinations of disaster early in your career and visit often thereafter. I can recall many such unscheduled appointments: drought and fires in California, a tornado that flattened a tiny town in Wisconsin, Hurricane Gilbert, a category five storm that decimated Cancun, Mexico in 1988 and the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina in 1989 — then Hurricane Michael that flattened Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida in 2018.
All these occurrences suggest the power of nature and, to some extent, the folly of man. Why build structures and live in places that are clearly in harm’s way? Flood zones abide and violent weather increasingly ravages the landscape. While many cannot escape harm’s way, others find a reason to remain in the bullseye.
The likelihood that another category four hurricane or worse will hit Tyndall in the next decade is high. Yet the Pentagon is spending an estimated $3.5 billion to rebuild the base. Because it’s located on the Gulf of Mexico, Tyndall is one of few places with enough open-air space for the Air Force to conduct live fire drills. A “windshield tour” of the base in 2019 showed nearly all 600 structures at the facility were destroyed.
New storm-engineered buildings are rising that are meant to protect fliers and their vulnerable planes against such powerful winds and rain.
Tyndall Air Force Base, Panama City, Florida after Hurricane Michael 2018. Photo by Jeff Levine
In a report last year, the Pentagon acknowledged that climate change has emerged as an “existential” security threat: “The unprecedented scale of wildfires, floods, droughts, typhoons, and other extreme weather events of recent months and years have damaged our installations and bases, constrained force readiness and operations, and contributed to instability around the world.”
Disaster’s cost is not only measured in billions of dollars, of course, but most poignantly the suffering of individual victims. I still remember the aftermath of a 300-mile-per-hour tornado that hit Barneveld, Wisconsin in 1984. Nine were killed, hundreds injured. By the time I arrived little was left.
I approached a man standing by the ruins of his home and asked what happened. He told me his two-year-old son died during the storm. The statement was awful in its stoic simplicity. One person. One child. One life lost, the other upended in a tragedy writ large and small.
In Kentucky in 1989 more than 13 inches of rain fell in about a week killing five people with property losses in the millions. During the current storm, torrential rain mainly in the eastern part of the state has claimed dozens of lives and damages will no doubt run into the billions. Yet when we hear about four children from one Kentucky family dying, we’re shocked that this could be real.
The giant Cyclops of news arrives on the scene and casts its mournful eye on the aftermath of events raising awareness and generating empathy. Then other stories beckon, and the beacon goes dark leaving survivors to cope in its wake.
After returning home from Kentucky, I received word that then Governor Wallace Wilkinson had commissioned me and other CNN journalists as honorary Kentucky Colonels for our coverage of the flood. If we helped in some small way, it was gratifying.
Then to see the same story rewritten in capital letters is disheartening. Old lessons have been revisited and perhaps new ones learned. Memories again flood the mind, some sorrowful for others’ sufferings, but there are always signs that this time things will be different.
Quoting Hemingway, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
As the flood abates, we can hope that spirits will be lifted!