Extreme weather takes a big toll

The storms unleash their fury and we gawk at images of the wreckage. In the days that follow, damage reports are prepared and monetary losses calculated. The bigger the figure, the higher the presumed toll.

Such analysis is a necessary but rather bloodless exercise. It provides valuable data needed to get state and federal reimbursements but disguises the deeply personal impact of extreme weather, the reality that behind every picture of destruction is a person or family or community whose lives have been upended.

We need to remember them when we think about how and why and whether to act to stop the devastation. We also should recall the emergency workers who dutifully responded, and the municipal officials who have to make critical decisions in the first 48 hours and the next 48 weeks. The cost of these disasters is not measured only in dollars and cents.

That’s not to say that cataloging and better understanding the number of billion-dollar extreme weather events is not important. It is. But it also is essential that we look beyond the money and consider the fates of people who in some sense are now adrift.

A major part of the toll of a storm is the trauma it creates in its victims, and trauma has a long tail. The storm departs, but the anguish lingers.

Long Island has experienced this before, most profoundly of late with Superstorm Sandy in 2012, when most of the devastation was on the South Shore. The region experienced it again last weekend when spots on Suffolk County’s North Shore were inundated with more than 9 inches of rain.

CATALOG OF DESTRUCTION

The photos and videos accumulated as quickly as the waters rose.

There were the parts of houses washed away.

There were the dams and roads destroyed.

There were the homes teetering on the edges of eroding bluffs.

There were the cars engulfed by water or buried in mud.

There were the trees that brought down power lines and caved in bedrooms and garages.

There were the ponds and lakes drained by obliterated dams, their thick mud littered with the carcasses of dead fish, their ducks and swans disoriented and huddled around the remaining pools of shallow water. As centers of local ecosystems and magnets for hikers and nature lovers, they made the communities around them special.

There were the college dorms evacuated, and the students scattered.

There was the library in Smithtown where basement flooding damaged precious historical records and artifacts.

And we stared in awe as we always do, and perhaps counted our blessings that we did not experience the same level of wrath.

But we all should stop for one minute longer and think about the people who often are not in those pictures, the ones who have to deal with all that devastation.

Consider the homeowner whose insurance won’t cover all the needed repairs. The worker who no longer has a way to get to their job. The couple whose morning exercise walk now traverses a park that looks like a war zone. The family that no longer has a place to live or clothes to wear or mementos to cherish. The business owner who faces debilitating costs for repairing their store and replacing their stock. The retiree who wonders whether living next to a shoreline or creek or pond is the bit of heaven they presumed it to be.

FAR FROM THE ‘BIG ONE’

In considering all that human pain, it’s also worth remembering that this was essentially a rainstorm, not even a minor hurricane and far from “the big one” that inevitably will visit Long Island someday.

And adding to the entirety of this uneasiness is our growing understanding that what experts say is a one-in-a-thousand-years storm is no longer that at all. Those actuarial tables are outdated, based on decades of data that no longer accurately chart our times. The storms lashing us these days come more frequently, and with more impact, leaving us ever more uncertain. And they seem to come with a randomness that is unsettling, striking here one day and somewhere else another, leaving pockmarks of devastation that have a cumulative impact that collectively should spur us to action.

Thinking about the personal toll of extreme weather should increase our urgency to take the needed steps both large and small to minimize it. Part of that is preparation before the storms. Part of it is planning what to do when and after they arrive. Part of it is the long game of making big adaptations to reduce the intensity and frequency of extreme weather.

Part of it is getting past the arguments over what to call what’s happening. It’s time we all acknowledge that things are changing, and in ways we have not seen, and that these changes have created the uncertainty that gnaws at us before the storms arrive and the anguish that levels us after they depart.

As we wrestle with what to do and how to move forward, let’s think about those who have suffered the brunt of nature’s wrath. Their loss must be the fuel for us to act.