Realism vs Fatalism

A unifying theme of this year’s extremely active Atlantic hurricane season, which officially concludes on Saturday, has been the disbelief echoing from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Ozark plateau. “I had always felt like we were safe from climate change,” an Asheville, N.C., woman told The Times after Hurricane Helene. “But now this makes me question that maybe there’s nowhere that’s safe.”

To which the obvious rejoinder is: You’re right. Nowhere is safe.

But some places are less safe than others. Atop the list of unsafe places is New Orleans. But unlike the other major cities that appear on such lists (Phoenix; Norfolk, Va.; Tampa Bay, Fla; New York), New Orleans has a striking competitive advantage. It knows that every hurricane season poses an existential threat.

I’ve never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise — and hurricane fatalism. You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.

The National Hurricane Center advises those in the path of a storm to have an evacuation plan. Most New Orleanians I know have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient.

Saul Bellow wrote that “no one made sober decent terms with death.” But cities can. New Orleans has. What does it mean, for a city, to make sober decent terms with death? It means living in reality. It means doing whatever it can to postpone the inevitable. It means settling for the best of bad options. But it does not mean blindly submitting to fate.

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