Hurricane Harvey is a terrorist attack staged by nature. The devastation across huge swaths of Texas reminds us of humanity’s vulnerability to sheer rain and wind, and around here it provokes memories of a storm we once considered powerful that now seems kind of puny.
Remember Hurricane Isabel? It struck 14 years ago but seems more distant and docile the longer we see the awful pictures out of Texas.
Isabel gave us flooding in Fells Point that went all the way up to the Broadway Market. South Baltimore basements were filled with water, and so were living rooms. People were kayaking along cobblestone streets completely covered by the storm.
But compared with Hurricane Harvey? Not such a big deal.
In the aftermath of Isabel, hundreds of people lined up, day after day, at a relief center I covered out on Back River Neck Road in Baltimore County. The Salvation Army supplied meals. The flood victims swapped stories about the devastation and their frustrations dealing with insurance companies and government agencies, and they wondered how they’d pay their bills while they took time away from their jobs.
But compared with Hurricane Harvey? A tiny fraction of the tragedy.
In the aftermath of Isabel, I went out to Bowleys Quarters in eastern Baltimore County and walked through rubble that had been people’s homes just a day or two earlier. Oil tanks floated through a family’s backyard and an air conditioner lay on a grassy patch with living room curtains wrapped around it like a funeral shroud. A woman pointed to a 2-foot-high watermark in her kitchen. The kitchen was on the second floor.
Some of Isabel’s wrath looked like Hurricane Harvey, but you saw it only in patches. Down in the Lone Star State, the devastation seems everywhere. It reminds us of how fortunate most of us have been.
But remember this, too: the scientists told us Harvey was coming, and they were right. (They were right about Isabel, too.) And the scientists have also told us about climate change, and what it means not only about the melting of the polar ice caps but about changes closer to home – about the increasing intensity of storms, about earthquakes and floods and tornadoes hurled about by the forces of nature we’ve been tormenting for generations with our man-made pollutants.
And we now have an administration in Washington that sloughs off the dire reports and warnings from the scientists, that walks away from environmental accords agreed to by the rest of the planet’s worried inhabitants.
And so we watch the devastation out of Texas with anxious eyes, and we remember how we once thought Isabel had been so terrible, though we barely remember it now.
Is the day far off when we’ll look back at Hurricane Harvey and think, “Gee, that wasn’t so bad compared to our newest devastation, is it?”
Top photo: People making their way out of a flooded neighborhood after it was inundated with rain water from Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Tex., Aug. 28, 2017. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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