Now
I know how the Iraqis feel.” So said my mother
Friday, the day after Hurricane Isabel blasted
through Virginia.
“No electricity. No water. No wonder they’re so
irritable.”
Indeed,
Virginia’s
dance with natural disaster does engender empathy
for the misfortunes of those whose lives we
experience only through newspaper headlines and
video feeds. Like the Iraqis right after
the war, our phone lines fell silent. Cable lines
went down. No more CNN! For a while, too, Virginians
had to wait in gasoline lines. And, though it’s
hardly what you’d call a humanitarian crisis, we
even had food spoiling in our refrigerators.
Of
course, as even my mother would admit, we don’t really
know how the Iraqis feel. I doubt many Baghdadis
held block parties to consume their stores of beef,
sausage and elk meat before it went bad. Virginians
never suffered privation, and we were confident that
things would return to normal within days or, at
most, a week or two. But we have learned something
important: Civilization doesn’t consist of the
technology we equip ourselves with. It’s what’s
inside our heads: the attitudes and habits that
guide our actions, often unconsciously, when we
confront disaster.
For
the student of human behavior, what’s most
significant is what didn’t happen in Isabel’s
aftermath. When the winds stopped howling, there was
no looting. No one stole the Faberge eggs from
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. No one gutted the ABC
stores or 7-Elevens in the inner city. We certainly
didn’t compound our problems by stripping the
power transformers and electric lines from the power
grid.
Nor,
though there were ample opportunities for it, were
there any reports of price gouging. The day after
the storm, I was looking for gasoline to keep my
home generator going, cruising
Broad Street
in search of a gasoline station still pumping fuel.
With most of the city paralyzed, I could find only
one. Four lines of cars snaked up to the pumps,
drivers desperate to fill
not only gas tanks but red
plastic canisters for their generators and chain
saws. Word passed down the line that the gas might
run out. Some of us would have gladly paid double or
triple the normal price. Then one of the proprietors
came outside. Same price, she said, but no one could
buy more than $10. No one complained. It seemed the
right thing to do.
For
the most part, we Virginians handled ourselves well.
Suburbanites here in Henrico
County
pulled out their chain saws and cleared the roads of
fallen trees themselves. In the past five days, I
never saw one county road crew in my part of town,
but the roads in devastated neighborhoods were all
clear within days, logs and brush neatly stacked
along the side. There was no organization to the
clean-up, just neighbor helping neighbor – with an
occasional capitalist booster. Professional tree
trimmers were having a field day with the most
arduous tasks like removing fallen trunks from the
roofs of houses, but they weren't gloating.
“It
looks like you’ve hit the jackpot – enough work
for a month,” I quipped to one fellow.
He
looked genuinely rueful. “Enough for two
months,” he said. “But I’m sorry it had to be
because of this.”
The
flow of impressions, both from news reports and
personal observation, are almost uniformly positive.
Volunteers trucked in bottled water and sold it at
cost. The power company passed out dry ice so people
could keep their food cold. In my old Fan
neighborhood, the owner of Kuba Kuba fired up a
generator, brewed jugs of coffee and handed out
freebies to caffeine-deprived neighbors. As
electricity winked back online around the city,
people called in to radio stations reporting where
gas stations, grocery stores and other vital
establishments had reopened.
People
opened up their homes to one another. My
daughter’s best friend was sitting in her bedroom
during the storm when a tree sliced through the roof
into her room, missing her by a few feet. Friends
quickly took in the girl and her family. People
shared their food, their generators, their gas
stoves and hot showers. Those with power even ran
extension cords to the houses of their neighbors
without.
The
only objectionable behavior I saw was on the main
thoroughfares. Road rage, it appears, is a
deep-rooted psychosis that transcends times of
communal crisis. The storm knocked out most of the
street lights and, oblivious to state law that
requires motorists to treat dead stoplights as
four-way stop signs, most people acted as if the
right-of-way belonged to the prevailing stream of
traffic. Anyone trying to enter the main
thoroughfare took their lives into their hands.
Sometimes
I went with the traffic flow, but often I made a
practice of stopping at intersections on four-laned Parham Road
when I saw that other cars were stuck trying to get
through. Plenty of jerks flew past, but others would
stop eventually, letting cars plugged up in the
intersecting lanes slip through. The number of
inconsiderate drivers was appalling. One actually
got short-tempered with me when I stopped. A
middle-aged guy in an expensive, monster-sized SUV
honked his horn and gesticulated angrily. What’s
your problem, buddy, I thought: Late to your golf
game?
Good
thing the guy wasn't Iraqi. He might have fired off
a couple of rocket-propelled
grenades.
As
the days dragged on, I must confess, the novelty of
going without basic utilities did wear thin. In a
rare example of felicitous forethought about two
months ago, I had installed a back-up power
generator at my house to guard against temporary
black-outs caused by thunderstorms or ice storms. My
goals were simple: Keep the refrigerator and freezer
going, the house lit, and my home office humming. I
never reckoned on a hurricane that would knock out
the cable lines, too. The lack of Internet access
– my lifeline to the world -- made it impossible
to work. That, dear reader, is why Bacon’s
Rebellion missed its regularly scheduled
publication date this Monday.
Americans
are impatient. We want instant results. So, it
should surprise no one that seven days after the
hurricane passed, the grumbling has begun. Why
isn’t my power back up? Where’s my
cable service? Why’s my
telephone phone still jinky? We’ve cleaned up our
neighborhood, getting half the job done ourselves.
Where are the repair crews?
People
are asking questions now. Sure, Virginia Dominion
stockpiled power lines, electric poles and
transformers, and, yeah, it lined up a workforce
eventually reaching 11,000, including contractors
and crews from other utilities, and, admittedly,
these guys are working 12 hours a day – a lot
harder than most of us. We can understand that it takes
a long time to fix the massive, widespread damage. But how come it got
so bad in the first place? How is it possible that a
storm, which quickly lost force as soon as it burst
ashore, caused 80 percent of all Virginians to lose
their power?
Isabel
was losing steam by the time it hit Richmond.
We’ve had worse rains. I’ve seen more ferocious
winds. Occasional gusts would send the treetops into
a froth, but the air seemed eerily calm down at
ground level. According to the Richmond
Times-Dispatch, sustained winds measured around
40 to 60 miles per hour. Frankly, as hurricanes go,
Isabel was a wuss.
In
the time-honored American tradition, we now seek to
apportion blame. How did such a wimpy hurricane
cause so much devastation? Should we pin our
travails upon months of excessive rainfall that left
the soil waterlogged and soft? Does the fault lie
with us: a cultural preference, perhaps, for certain
shallow-rooted species of tree? Could it be, as I’ve heard
said, a proclivity for irrigating our yards, which
inhibits trees from developing the deep tap roots
that anchor them in the winds?
Or,
more darkly, are malevolent corporate forces to
blame? It's hard to fault Dominion's post-disaster,
clean-up, but one can't help but wonder if previous
policies left Virginia unnecessarily vulnerable to
widespread outages. Did Dominion, perhaps in some profit-driven
imperative to curtail capital investment, fail to
sufficiently “harden” its infrastructure? Was
the company remiss in keeping its power lines clear of
threatening branches and trees?
The questions need
to be asked, for the losses not only of property but
of time and productivity, seem all out of proportion
to the severity of the storm.
It is downright terrifying to think what would have
happened had Isabel hit the shore as a Class 3
hurricane: Not one telephone poll would have been
left standing!
Dominion,
to its credit, publishes some fascinating numbers on
its website. Here’s how the company summarized
damage Monday. (The numbers undoubtedly have been
updated since then, but I could not find them.)
Region |
Damaged
Poles |
Damaged
Crossarms |
Spans
of Wire Down |
Northern
Virginia |
163 |
216 |
790 |
Shenandoah
Valley/Western Piedmont |
49 |
138 |
312 |
Richmond/Tri-Cities |
944 |
1,329 |
2,424 |
Southside
Virginia |
105 |
122 |
459 |
Gloucester
/Northern Neck |
112 |
89 |
614 |
Tidewater |
457 |
1,060 |
1,455 |
North
Carolina |
481 |
945 |
1,319 |
Tidewater,
presumably referring to the Hampton Roads region, is
a sprawling metropolitan area of roughly 1.5 million
people; Richmond-Petersburg a somewhat more compact
region of only one million inhabitants. The
hurricane slammed almost full force into Hampton
Roads, but had spent some portion of its energy by
the time it hit Richmond-Petersburg. Both regions
have been soaked with rain all year, so it's hard to
argue that the ground was any more water-logged in
one region than the other.
Why,
then, does Richmond/Tri-Cities show so many more
damaged poles, crossarms and spans of wire down? The
disparity cannot be due to random happenstance. I can think of only two explanations: either
different patterns of infrastructure hardening
and/or line maintenance on Dominion’s part, or
different patterns of development -- more
"old" suburbs with tall, aging trees,
perhaps -- that leave
Richmond
neighborhoods more vulnerable to
the rain and wind.
We
are better off knowing which. Forewarned is
forearmed. Otherwise, like the Iraqis, we may be
destined to endless bouts of irritability and angst.
--
September 25, 2003
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