The Endless Devastation of Hurricane Season

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A year after Hurricane Harvey, as the anniversary of Hurricane Maria approaches, we're still assessing the enormous damage these storms wrought.

A new report this week estimates as many as 3,000 Puerto Ricans died because of Hurricane Maria.

More than 800,000 have left the island after the storm.

In Puerto Rico, in Houston, and elsewhere, politicians and agencies and insurance companies are still wrestling over how to help the many, many people whose lives were upended.

How will we address devastation we can't even properly account for?

What if these events are growing more likely?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

Here with me in studio is a voice that you'll remember, a previous Radio Atlantic guest, Van Newkirk, Atlantic staff writer.

Hello, Van.

How you doing?

Doing well, thank you.

Thank you for joining us.

And another guest whose voice you will remember, Elena Plott, staff writer at The Atlantic.

Hello, Elena.

Hey, Matt.

Hello.

Thank you also for joining us.

It is a pleasure to have you both, even if the subject that we are about to discuss is a real weighty one.

We're a year out from one of the most dramatic, deadliest hurricane seasons in recent memory.

Here in the U.S., we're still accounting for the toll of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

A new report out this week from George Washington University estimates that Hurricane Maria was nearly as deadly a disaster as the terrorist attacks of 9-11.

Residents in places like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Houston are still trying to create homes and neighborhoods to replace the ones they lost.

I grew up in Florida, so hurricanes were an annual threat for me.

And the thing about them is that they sweep over such a broad territory and they cause so much devastation.

And then everybody loses something, but there are these vast disparities in who loses the most, how those losses are assessed.

Even the accounting of the most significant losses that we can imagine, the actual human lives taken by the storm, becomes a mystery and a point of contention and a point of bureaucratic wrangling.

And

so now, a year out,

we wanted to look at the aftermaths of two storms, Harvey and Maria, and

talk a bit about what those storms revealed,

what we know of what was lost.

and how and by whom and what we still don't know.

So Elena and Van, both of you have reported in the places struck by these storms.

And so thank you again for joining us to talk about them.

Elena, I wanted to start with you.

You just reported a story in Houston talking about what you call the nightmare on loop that has been left in the aftermath of the storm.

Tell us a little bit about what you saw in Houston now a year after Hurricane Harvey.

I mean, I think the fact that I have to keep repeating to myself, it has in fact been a year since the storm, but there are so many places you walk around in Houston where you feel that it almost could have just happened two weeks ago.

There are a lot of low-income neighborhoods that I traveled to with the mayor, including places like Cashmere Gardens, where residents haven't even moved back into their homes yet.

And, you know, the mayor, call it a photo op, call it what you want, but he kind of had this mantra he kept repeating to residents.

I promise I haven't forgotten about you.

And their response was very candid.

They just said, well, we feel like you have.

There are places, upscale neighborhoods like Meyland, where it's really easy to track the progress, not just from contributions out of their own pocket, but from the federal government and the local government.

And there are these low-income neighborhoods.

I mean, I say this in my piece.

Hurricanes are equal opportunity in many ways, right?

Hurricanes don't discriminate, but the aftermaths are not equal opportunity.

And it was striking to me

see just how stark those disparities can come even a year after a hurricane as deadly as Harvey.

Yeah.

It was, you know, one of the things,

one of the stories that

was circulating in recent days

were

photo galleries of Houston before and after the storm.

And one of the striking things looking at those galleries is it's not just the aftermath and which homes were sort of restored to

a new version of their former splendor,

but also which buildings even are still around?

Like which buildings were,

what sort of preventative efforts, what sorts of resources there were in different places before the storm where homes were protected against some of the most damaging effects of the flooding.

And therefore there's still a shell to renovate.

I'm curious, when you were there in person,

what did you see?

Were there any differences in which areas seemed built or prepared for the storm and which areas were just completely reconfigured by it?

Well, I think this goes back to what we were just talking about in terms of

disparities that are a lot harder to account for.

A lot of people I spoke to who were in the floodplain, whose houses were totally destroyed, didn't even know they were in the floodplain.

They didn't have flood insurance.

This was not something that, you know, when they bought their home had been explained to them extensively.

And, you know, when you're a developer in a city like Houston, there is an incentive to make sure that, you know, you deliver the fine print and a contract, but you don't actually sit down with a resident to say, these are, you know, precisely the risks that come with owning a home like yours.

Whereas the former mayor of Houston, who was kind of an anchor for my story, he did live in a floodplain, but he also had $250,000 of flood insurance to account for that.

So it's not as though wealthy people don't live in floodplains in Houston.

I mean, Houston, if we really think about it, it's probably a city that shouldn't really exist

just in terms of its

you know, sea levels and whatnot.

But when you're wealthier, you know, you have more resources to kind of sit down with developers and whatnot and say, what can I do in a preventative sense to make sure that if and when a flood does hit, I can recuperate as best as possible.

When you are less educated, when you don't make as much money, those are questions you don't necessarily know to ask.

And because you're getting probably

a cheaper home than you would in a floodplain, than you would on higher ground, you might not think you even need to in the first place.

And developers are going to make sure that

you have less reason to ask those questions in the first place.

There's this sentence in your story, Elena,

where you talk about how the former mayor weathered the storm that I think brings home in this tangible kind of crisp detail what that difference is like.

You have just talked about a woman named Dorothy Rainey.

Tell us just a little bit about her to set the context.

Dorothy Rainey was a resident who had just moved into her home, but only a week before.

So this would have been essentially a year after the storm.

But I walked into her home.

She had nothing in there but curtains and a clock.

And she was one of the people that photographers were all crowded around for the mayor to say, don't worry, we haven't forgotten about you.

She was one of the blunt ones to be like, I don't have a lot of indication that that is in fact the case.

A nonprofit is the reason that I'm back in my home today.

So yeah, compared to somebody like the former mayor, she's miles away in terms of getting her life back on track.

Yeah.

So I want to quote these just to grasp from your story.

You say, Bill White, and and this is the former mayor, Bill White's living room is pristine, contemporary furniture framed by orchids, hardwood floors that gleam beside floor-to-ceiling windows.

That it was ravaged by floodwater just a year ago is almost inconceivable.

Of course, such is the difference between White and someone like, say, Dorothy Rainey.

A gutted first floor means months in a friend's guest house while private contractors restore it.

It does not mean year-long displacement or clinging to the hope that a visit from the mayor may yield more than a photo op.

I think that

difference just paints a small picture of how many different variables there are in two different lives affected by the storm.

Van, you also reported on Harvey as it was occurring.

And then you went and reported on Hurricane Maria and its effect on

on Puerto Rico and its effects on the broader region and the rest of the nation.

Now a new report is out this week from the George Washington University School of Public Health and the University of Puerto Rico School of Public Health.

Tell us a bit about what that report found.

So this is the third major report on the death toll in Puerto Rico.

It's the one that most people consider to be the definitive estimate.

It was done by George Washington University using official data from the islands health department.

They basically modeled what the average deaths should look like, the death rate should look like before

Maria, without Maria, and then they overlay what happened in the four months after Maria and say the sort of

excess deaths that happened over that baseline or what is attributable to Hurricane Maria.

And the number they came up with is somewhere close to 3,000 deaths.

And like you said earlier, Matt, it's a number that, if we compare it to other natural disasters, doesn't really have a parallel in modern American history.

The closest thing we get to is 100 years ago with the Galveston hurricane.

It looks similar in terms of overall magnitude to 9-11.

And when you think about...

what that does to an island of 3 million people, what that means on top of what the study also found was that about a tenth of the population of that island migrated after the storm.

You have a major disaster in an area that really is not equipped to deal with a disaster a quarter of that size and already dealing with major demographic shifts, already dealing with

losing tax base, losing critical pieces of its infrastructure.

even before the storm was in a pretty significant humanitarian crisis in terms of health care, in terms of public health, in terms of an aging population.

And then they have this happen.

And now a year after, it took us a year basically to understand the magnitude.

And it is

as significant a disaster as any that's happened in American history.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: It's so striking.

I mean, the process even of trying to assess the toll of human life after Hurricane Maria is incredibly striking.

The first number that we had from the Puerto Rican government, the fatality count from the storm, was I believe 64 deaths attributable to the storm.

And then in May, a study done by Harvard and published in the New England Journal of Medicine came out with an estimate that had this wide, vast confidence interval that found that anywhere between 800 and 8,000 people may have died as a result of the hurricane.

It just seems in some ways unimaginable that there could be so much uncertainty about something that seems so important, how many people

we no longer have because of the storm.

But it's not at all new.

One of the storms that was brought back to memory was the 1928

San Felipe Segundo hurricane, also known as the Okeechobee storm,

that hit a similar band.

It started off the coast of Africa and wound its way through the Atlantic,

through Puerto Rico, through the Dominican Republic, through Florida.

And

the matter of who died as a result of the storm.

was this hugely in contention thing.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel wrote on the 75th anniversary of the storm.

In a quote from that story, they said, quote, 69 white people were buried in pine boxes at Woodlawn Cemetery in West Palm Beach.

Another 674 black people were dumped unceremoniously and without a sign to mark the spot in a 20-foot hole in the city's popper cemetery, forgotten for more than 70 years.

The number of known graves approaches 2,500, but more bodies were never found, swallowed whole by the Everglades muck, or left to the elements after the government called off the search for lack of money.

One of the things that's interesting

in the stories that both of you have reported in the aftermaths of these storms is how much the small bureaucratic elements matter.

A significant part of the report, Van, and I would love you to talk about this,

is about just

how deaths were certified in Puerto Rico after the storm and what training physicians did and didn't have to recognize what may have been a fatality that was attributable to the hurricane.

Why was it so important?

Why was that a factor in

the assessment of this toll?

Well, first, let's think about what a hurricane does, right?

So a hurricane is going to be one of the most

displacing disasters possible, right?

So immediately you have people who are going to evacuate, you have people who are going to be forced out of their homes, you have the immediate collapse of vital infrastructure.

One of the big stories in Puerto Rico and also in the U.S.

Virgin Islands when Maria hit was all communications went down.

Essentially, people were using ad hoc networks, standing on top of buildings.

We had no information in the week when Maria hit, essentially,

what happened, where people were.

Families went weeks without seeing,

without hearing what happened to loved ones.

And in places that are poor, that don't have as robust infrastructure like Puerto Rico, like the U.S.

Virgin Islands, that's going to be more profound.

So you have this extremely disruptive event that

is in a way designed to demolish the elements of bureaucracy, like you said,

that help us count the dead, that do official vital statistics,

that we think about sort of its background pieces in regular life.

And so when that happened, and this report shows that you have a bunch of people

who

maybe not on the day Maria hit, maybe a couple weeks later, maybe a couple months later, maybe they fell ill, maybe they're on dialysis.

And because of the electricity going out,

they couldn't do their dialysis and they passed away from renal disease.

You have people like that.

You have elderly folks who passed away because they didn't have air conditioning in where they had been moved.

You had people who died from illnesses, from infectious disease they picked up going through tainted water.

All these different people were coming into makeshift now, not necessarily the same health facilities that existed before the storm, into makeshift facilities with overstressed physicians and health professionals who had not been trained as to how to classify a death caused by the storm.

And

that's how the 64 number gets created.

Basically, the only people who were maybe crushed by debris or who died drowning in the flood waters were counted as deaths.

And then you had a huge lag.

You had people who, lots and lots of people for whom the actual cause of death was not quite as well well known.

And

been a week.

We don't know if it's directly attributed to the hurricane itself.

So you have all these different dynamics.

And essentially, I think what this report shows beyond just that number, that death toll number, which

we, I think, attach a certain significance to magnitude

that

I don't know if that significance really matches what the number means on on the ground and what actually the damage and devastation was on the ground.

The families who still may not have a confirmation of loved ones who were killed.

These are the things behind the numbers.

And the report does a good job at getting sort of behind the numbers and looking at how

essentially unprepared and

how the lack of infrastructure makes it impossible for an island like Puerto Rico to prepare for this kind of event.

And that's

if you look past that 3,000 number, I think you'll get to a lot of those things a year out.

Yeah.

I think one of the reasons, as you point out, we do tend to fixate on this number as though it is the sum total of,

as though it somehow summarizes

the devastation that these storms wreak.

But

I think about that number and

just that tremendous uncertainty, 64 deaths

to a final tally that approaches 9-11.

I just think about that as one indicator that reveals

how difficult it is for us to actually account for the damage of these storms.

And that has all these follow-on effects.

One of them is money.

If we can't even determine how many people have have been killed by the storm, then how do we possibly assess

what sorts of economic damage have been wreaked by the storm?

Elena, in your story on the aftermath of Harvey,

you touched on the wrangling around money that happened in the after, that is still happening in the aftermath of Harvey in Houston.

As you point out in the story, Elena, and you quote from, again, the former mayor Bill White, when he says, quote, there was, to my shocking surprise, no money appropriated for flood mitigation for months

where there was continuing resolutions in Congress last year.

After Katrina hit, the Louisiana delegation among senators would not permit there to be a continuing resolution without not only city money that could be used for rebuilding, but also Army Corps mitigation funding.

And then you're right, Elena, only earlier this year did Congress at last include mitigation funding in its spending bills.

Yet it remains to be determined how those funds will be allocated among Texas and other hurricane-devastated states such as Florida.

So large-scale projects such as building a third reservoir and creating more surface detention have yet to get underway.

I am curious, where do we stand now in the process?

From what you saw in Houston, where does that city stand in the process of trying to get these residents whole.

What did that process look like for some of the residents who, like Dorothy Rainey,

are just now getting into their homes?

For residents who haven't gotten into their homes yet, what sources of funding were they looking to?

And where are those sources of funding now?

So somebody like Dorothy Rainey is entirely, maybe not entirely,

but is in large part dependent on federal dollars in the aftermath of a storm like this.

It was so interesting for me to be on the ground in Houston because as somebody who covers Congress, I mean, I remember last fall, those funding battles when it came to Harvey relief because they essentially became a political football.

You know, for Republicans, it was if we include Harvey funding in the next spending bill, that means that Nancy Pelosi gets to claim a win in all of this.

And what does that mean for debt ceiling negotiations?

I mean, it's something we just talk about in the abstract, but to actually be on the ground and see what is the result of, you know, the seemingly endless delays of funding for

people like Dorothy Rainey.

The mayor was trying to encourage people that in his estimation, funding will touch ground in November.

But one thing I really wanted to look into is why is it that

we talk about passing spending bills with federal aid in the aftermath of a disaster, but residents can't expect to see it until over a year after the disaster actually happens.

And

there's a lot of red tape associated with FEMA and the Army Corps, which I am still in the initial stages of trying to understand.

But one of the reasons that Houston can even expect aid like this is because Congressman John Colberson, who represents a lot of the area,

was rewarded in a way as one of the few Republicans to sign on to Hurricane Sandy relief.

This was back when, of course, this superstorm hit New Jersey, New York, and the like.

And almost every single Republican voted down

relief aid for these places.

John Colberson was one of the few who said,

I imagine this will happen to Texas and I want to hope that you guys would, you know, hope to help assist us as well.

So because of that, the appropriations chairman said, I remember what you did for New Jersey, and I'm going to give you what you need for Texas.

So the fact that little things like that, you know, political favors being repaid in that way are sort of the pivoting points on which somebody like Dorothy Rainey can expect to get federal dollars to help was pretty alarming to me.

And another point I'll make, I know it's not incredibly sexy ever to care about the deficit, but if we assume that global warming is going to continue as it is and that these storms are just going to happen at increasing rates of frequency,

I mean, Hurricane Harvey Relief was one of the biggest federal aid packages for disaster relief in history, $500 billion.

And if these storms keep continuing as they happen, I'm wondering at what point do we just not have the money anymore to help these communities heal?

Yeah.

And I want to turn to the science more fully in a moment and

talk about the likelihood that seasons like last year's hurricane season will recur with increasing frequency.

Van, before I do that, I wanted to dwell on another bureaucratic battle in the wake of the storm that you focused on in Puerto Rico.

You did a series of stories about the struggle over power, electricity.

It felt in some ways wonky, right?

This step removed

from the reality of people trying to live their lives, not only in temporary housing, but with no power.

Once again, this was another aspect of the aftermath of the disaster that turned on this weird bureaucratic wrangling.

Tell us a little bit about what the struggle was over restoring electricity to the island of Puerto Rico and where that stands now.

So I've been covering Puerto Rico for years now,

well before Hurricane Maria, because

there have been some really significant and important and

perhaps dangerous political and economic things that have been happening to Puerto Rico since then.

The island has not been in great shape financially for quite some time, for the majority of the last two decades.

They have not been in great economic shape.

They racked up

billions and billions of dollars of debt.

And

as a not-quite state, you know, as a territory that is still governed by essentially colonial law, they don't have the authority that municipalities on the mainland might have to deal with debt, to end their bankruptcy, to be able to handle debt.

Because I think the U.S.

government has essentially realized that

you can't really allow municipalities and states to default in a way because it ruins everything.

But Puerto Rico, sort of,

through federal policy, was never allowed the mechanisms on its own to deal with its own debt.

They have a special situation

with their utilities.

They're state-owned.

So the Power Authority, PREPA, is owned by the Puerto Rican government.

And

its debt

is a very inefficient utility.

The method in which they generate power is totally

not 21st century.

They essentially ship over, oftentimes, lots and lots of oil and burn it.

on the island.

And that's how a good portion of that island's energy is generated.

That's not a winning way to produce energy.

It's not good for the environment.

It's definitely not good for the utilities debt.

So you have a,

well before Hurricane Maria during President Obama's term, you have second term, you have a major debt crisis in Puerto Rico.

You have a couple votes on statehood and independence that were really significant.

You have a government that is almost entirely consumed by what's happening with the debt.

And

there are a couple options that come on the table.

One could just be the U.S.

government could cancel that debt.

They could provide debt relief.

They could actually provide Puerto Rico with the tools on its own to deal with that debt, to make them look more like a state.

They choose none of the above.

They choose to create the bill that went through Congress is called PROMESA.

And essentially that creates a

federally appointed board.

So it's not affected by Puerto Rican voters, has nothing to do necessarily with the Puerto Rican government that handles most of the island's finances, that handles its obligation to creditors.

And so that's the backdrop here.

That was sort of getting on,

getting rolling as Hurricane Maria hit.

They had not gotten around yet to reforming PREPA.

The grid, like I said before, is sort of,

the grid in Puerto Rico still,

it looks something similar to what steady yacht grids were in 1950 in the mainland.

It's essentially all the power there is transmitted by one line that comes from a power plant miles and miles away from San Juan.

And it's terrible.

Something goes down, something breaks, that's it.

So lots of things went down, lots of things broke during the storm.

And

I'd say if I were to guess based on the people that I talked to, based on the experts, based on the people in other places of critical infrastructure and healthcare, what caused the most deaths after the storm actually hit, it would probably be the fact that people did not have power for months and months after.

And there were people who didn't have power until this summer.

Even still, there's an island sort of that's a small island connected to the big island.

It's called Viekis.

And they still do not have completely reliable power a year out from the storm.

Wow.

After we taped a Radio Atlantic live show at the historic Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C.

last year, a young man came up to me and pressed into my hand a Puerto Rican flag.

He was a Radio Atlantic listener, and he thanked me for the show and

encouraged us to remember Puerto Rico,

which was then in the midst of

just the immediate aftershocks of the hurricane.

I called up that young man, J.I.

Cruz,

who

was then studying at American University here in D.C., but has since returned to Puerto Rico where he was born and raised to live.

And I asked him a little bit about

what the aftermath of the storm revealed to him and how he reflects upon it.

And I wanted to play a bit of what he said.

With an aging population that's also reducing in numbers,

that is mainly

losing its

young people who are highly educated,

who has a government that is in massive debt and who's losing its taxpayer base, and who now is waiting on Congress Congress to get some sort of relief

fund to rebuild a lot of the still weak infrastructure of the island.

Puerto Rico is a crisis situation that belongs to the history of the United States, but because of our awkward position within this country, it is not being seen for what it is, which is essentially the slow decay of a nation.

or of a state, dependent on how you've seen it.

He said one more thing that I wanted to dwell on,

which is about the fact that the hurricane was the exacerbator of a confluence of crises on the island.

And it brought for him into relief the reality of these crises hitting all at once.

We're facing the reality that there's a jurisdiction of the United States that's having a huge identity crisis at the same time that it's having a huge fiscal crisis, at the same time that it's having a huge

natural disaster crisis.

And

it is a perfect storm.

And,

you know,

Roseanne was more popular in the news,

Roseanne and her tweets than we were.

And so that it irks me the wrong way as someone who identifies as an American and also a Puerto Rican.

I wanted to touch on the politics a bit.

What

is Van, from your vantage point?

Both of you sit on our politics and policy team at the Atlantic, and both of you, Van and Alina, cover politics.

And

Van,

I'm curious about the aftermath of the storm politically and what it's revealed to you about the politics of the situation.

And

as just one strand of that aftermath,

8% of the island's population, about 800,000 people,

have joined the diaspora of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S.

mainland or elsewhere.

And that, of course, is going to have significant effects on

politics in a state like Florida, for example,

where a lot of new residents are now residing.

So there's a way in which

our political deficiencies or inabilities to

grapple with

storms like Hurricane Maria

before they happen,

as they're happening, after they've happened.

All of us suffer from those effects.

I'm curious what you've seen politically in the aftermath of the storm.

Well, first, I think it's important to remember that American politics has always been a politics about migration.

It's always been the way we think about winnable states, the way we think about swing states, has been almost solely shaped by migration.

The fact that the Democratic Party is a national party, not a southern party, has been shaped by black migration.

These are things that we think about as sort of static in our political analysis, but they are always changing.

You see a gradual shift of voters back toward the south now, and now you see one of the most significant movements is a Puerto Rican diaspora that is entering, not just Florida, but entering New England now, that is moving further into the deep south.

And that will, I think, drastically shape maybe not some statewide races or profiles right away, but definitely will shape some districts, will affect the way some state houses are considering how they are dealing with

say housing people who are coming from Puerto Rico.

These are major political issues that will be changed, will be influenced over the next couple years.

And I think it's hard to tell right now what the magnitude of those changes will be, but there will be changes.

To dwell on one piece of this,

for a long time,

scientists have been reticent about drawing a linkage between any particular extreme weather event and the broader phenomenon of climate change.

In recent

years,

folks seem to have been less and less reticent to make those linkages.

But I'm curious, Van, as someone who also dwells a bit on the science of this, what do you know of the likelihood that seasons like this devastating, horrible hurricane season are going to recur?

So the thing about hurricane season and the thing about

what we know to be an average rate of increase in global temperatures and the temperatures of our oceans is

things are so very complicated that we don't quite know that it's meet that it means we're going to have every hurricane season is going to be more and more intense right you know we may have some very quiet seasons we may have some very we may have some regular seasons but I think what most of the science shows now is that there's going to be increased volatility there's going to be a much a much higher we use the term confidence interval already there's going to be a much higher range of what's possible much larger range and and you do see sort of the more extreme events become more and more probable.

You see Puerto Rico, strangely, doesn't get hit by a lot of hurricanes.

They get hit by two last season.

And you see this sort of increased

predominance of what we call Cape Verde hurricanes, which are the ones that originate off the coast of Africa, take sort of a crescent curve down into the Caribbean.

Usually

100 years ago, they would usually make their way just off the coast of Florida.

They wouldn't hit the mainland U.S.

Now we have regularly Cape Verde hurricanes hitting the mainland United States.

So this is what I think people, when people think about climate change, they usually get the sort of global warming version, which is it's going to be hot, more hot in the future.

It's going to, oh, we're not going to have winter anymore, you know, whatever.

But

what

I've seen from the science is really there's going to be much more heat in the system overall

on average, which means we're going to get much more volatile sort of ups and downs, gonna have more dangerous weather, gonna have some calm times in between.

But when you look at what that does to a place like Puerto Rico, to the most vulnerable places in the country that are not equipped at all for anything, any type of dangerous weather whatsoever, if you increase the chances ever slightly of having floods, of having catastrophic weather, of having catastrophic drought, those places,

this is when we see disasters form.

You know, this is a place Maria was not that powerful, right?

It was a category three,

which is a moderately strong hurricane.

We have those hit the mainland pretty often.

And the fact that we had two storms that hit sort of in the constrained timeframe, and the fact that there was no preparation on the island and from the mainland government for a category three storm, we have a disaster.

And that's really what's

that's what happened with Katrina.

That's what happened with Harvey.

We have regions that are just not prepared for this increased volatility.

Aaron Powell, there's this sort of fractal pattern that seems to apply to all of these, all of these situations, no matter how far down you look

or how wide you draw the lens.

The impact and response of a disaster is, and particularly a climate natural disaster

like Harvey or Maria,

is disparate.

It can be locally disparate within a city like Houston, where some neighborhoods see a degree of impact and then a narrowing of attention in the aftermath of a disaster that is striking.

It can be a regional disparity,

like the one that we see

between

what might be a minor hurricane that occasions a big response in the U.S., but affects

an island like Puerto Rico, which is easier for mainlanders to treat as out of sight, out of mind, in a much more substantial fashion.

We even see a version of that, as J.I.

Cruz pointed out to me,

in how

in the aftermath of Maria Puerto Rico

drew

more attention than Dominica,

which saw potentially even a worse impact, but is about a 50th of the size of Puerto Rico in population.

But the one that I'm particularly curious about is the global disparity.

It seems reasonable to expect that as climate change takes root,

more

and more of the impact

will be felt in places that aren't the continental U.S.,

even as America has been a big driver of the forces that have promoted climate change, and that relatively little of our attention will be cast on those parts of the world,

Indonesia.

island chains off of the coast of Africa, places that are seeing

current population displacements

and consequent migration that's affecting our politics here in the United States and elsewhere.

That pattern that happens on the local level, that happens on the regional level, seems set to take shape on the global level in a big way.

Elena, as someone who covers politics, I'm curious what you think about the capacity of our political system to address a global challenge like that.

I hate to sound like a pessimist, but I don't see any hope of that happening anytime soon.

And let me use the prism of the 7th district in Texas to maybe explain that a bit further.

So John Culperson, who I mentioned was pretty instrumental in getting federal aid for Houston, is up against Lizzie Fletcher.

It's his probably most viable Democratic challenger in the 18 years that he's been in Congress.

And I think that if she wins this race, it will be because of the response to Harvey.

She's a lifelong resident of the district, and one of her main attacks against Colberson was that he was not there in the aftermath of Harvey to help, you know, clean up, be a presence and whatnot.

There are some things that are misguided about that criticism, of course, if you actually understand at a granular level kind of what he did on the Appropriations Committee to ensure that the district got the money it needed.

You know, the aftermath of a hurricane is emotional.

It's not just people waiting for the mechanics of funding and whatnot.

It's one of the times they actually want to see their leaders on the ground to comfort them face to face.

He was not somebody who did that.

And I think that's something that she's going to get to play on quite well to potentially win this race.

And I guess where I'd like to draw the connection from that to how prepared is this country to address these things like this at a global scale.

The reason I say not so well is because I talked to so many members of that district who,

you know, even Republicans who were excited to vote for the Democrat in that race just because of Harvey.

And these are not people who in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy might have said the same thing because nobody thinks federal funding matters really until they're the ones who need it.

And because of that, I find it hard to believe that if we already have a federal government and a system where

people are unwilling to vote to aid those just north of them in this country, just because their district may not, in fact, need it.

I have no idea what it would mean if the Ivory Coast suddenly needed oversight from the leader of the free world

with regard to these issues if Republicans in Texas can't be expected to

help take care of those in New Jersey and vice versa.

Well,

I'm going to leave this conversation with that thought.

Sorry, y'all.

In a minute, we're going to come back and I'm going to ask you guys the question that I ask at the end of every Radio Atlantic episode.

Stick with us.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre junk.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

Honey bunches of votes la forma perfecto dependency

So, at the end of every Radio Atlantic episode, I ask the question: I ask about your keepers.

What is it that you have heard, read, watch, listen to, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

I posed that question to J.I.

Cruz, the young man from Puerto Rico that you heard from earlier, and here was his response.

You know, I'm trying to think of something Puerto Rico related because that's why I'm here.

But really, the last keeper that I can actually think of is

I'm at Stanford right now, and I just recently had a

lecture, a presentation from a strategist that works for Google X.

And he gave everybody

a piece of paper with a phrase on it and asked people to count the Fs.

Then he tallied

how many Fs everyone in the room counted and the diversity in answers was astonishing.

And then he forced people to count again and he asked people, hey,

how many of you are absolutely sure of your answer?

And a lot of the fours brought their hands up and he essentially shamed them publicly when we demonstrated that there were seven Fs in the phrase instead of four.

And I've been thinking about that all today, about how we can all look at literally the same thing and see something completely different and how sometimes we can't see what's right in front of us.

So that's what I've been thinking a lot about in the past few days.

And that's my keeper.

I really wish I knew what that phrase was.

I could count the F's.

Elena, how about you?

What do you want to keep?

When I was in Houston,

as you all know about life on the road as a reporter, you're often eating alone, seeing movies alone and whatnot.

So before I went to dinner one night, I went to Barnes ⁇ Noble and I bought At the Stranger's Gate by Adam Gopnik.

It says a memoir about he and his young wife moving to New York for the first time and seeking citizenship.

And I'm sitting at the bar and within three pages, and this is so Adam Gopnik to do this, there's already a line that I had to write down.

And he writes that every story is an apology for something.

And that just really hit me hard as I was sitting there wondering, why do I write?

Why do I report?

And what is the driving force of every piece that I care deeply about?

And I think my keeper is that I'm not sure I can write a story from here on out and wonder what I might be apologizing for.

Wow.

What a thing.

I don't know what it is about Adam Gothnik memoirs and travel.

I had the delightful experience of reading his memoir about

the time that and his wife lived in Paris,

which was a joy to read.

It's called Paris to the Moon as I was experiencing that city for the first time.

Van, what's your keeper?

So my keeper is something that's really, I think, tightly related to the conversation we just had.

It's a book by Susan Scott Parrish, and it's called The Flood Year 1927.

It's about the great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which is one of the, again, one of the biggest disasters in United States history.

Lots of people have never heard of it.

It's one of the sort of, I think,

introductory disasters to our modern industrialized age.

And it really, what she talks about there with the disparities

in class and race and how people recovered from this major catastrophe has lots of,

I think, resonance and importance in our conversations today.

The keeper for me is there's an image she presents there of,

you know, there were people who were just completely swept away, washed by the floodwaters from the Mississippi.

And some of the earlier Red Cross airplanes, some of the earlier sort of independent airplanes in 1927 were flying over the area, basically just trying, you know, they were journalists flying and trying to see what's happening.

And one person saw a, he said it looked like ants.

He saw them in a 10-foot across circle surrounded by water, holding on to each other, surrounded by water.

And I think that image of people holding on in this small circle is something that's going to stay with me.

Wow.

Yeah, what a thing.

In my research for this episode, I was reading back up on the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane,

San Felipe Segundo.

I was reminded that the storm

that is the catalyst for the culmination of their Eyes Were Watching God, the immortal Zorneal Hurston novel, was that hurricane, the Okeechobee hurricane.

The literary legacy of these storms is also

quite a thing to grapple with.

My keeper is that I got to spend the weekend with

a couple of my dearest lifelong friends.

We were reminding ourselves that we have known each other for a quarter century, for 25, 26 years.

Friends and old friends,

they are,

one of the functions that I find that they have in my life is that, you know, we

are different versions of ourselves in our different friend.

communities, right?

We,

for friends like these, who I have

knew best and spent most time with in middle school and high school, the version of myself that I was then,

they offer me a connection back to that time.

Only it's a connection through

the lens of the intervening years and decades.

So I can look back at the selves that we were at that time in our lives and think about about those selves in light of who we are now, in light of what we've learned about the world since then.

And that connection, the ability to reconnect with an earlier part of your life

and to assess the distance since, I think is just an incredibly valuable one.

It was a wonderful weekend to spend with old friends, understanding what the passage of time has enabled and done.

And I want to hold on to that.

Wow, that was beautiful.

It really was.

Thank you.

It was a rich, you know, this whole conversation was a rich one.

And

I am sad to end it, but also sad to have to have it.

So thank you both for coming and sharing it.

Van, thank you once again for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Elena, thanks to you as well for joining us again.

Always a pleasure.

And I look forward to the next time that we can reconvene on this show.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

Thanks as always to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Thanks also this week to the Atlantic's A-Staff writers Elena Plott and Van Newkirk for joining us.

And once again, special thanks to Kim Lau for production support and to John Batiste for our immortal theme music.

What is your keeper?

Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information.

I can't tell you how much I enjoy listening to your keepers.

Check us out at theatlantic.com slash radio, catch the show notes in the episode description, and if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

May you live a life full enough to honor what you lose along the way.

We'll see you next week.