A little under two weeks ago, Quartzsite, Arizona was hit by a massive thunderstorm that snapped 17 power poles like pencils and left residents without power for two days. A local volunteer organization set up a “cool house” -- a generator and air conditioner – and the power company quickly supplied dry ice for the two-day outage in desperately hot and humid weather. That same thunderstorm triggered one of the largest haboobs – dust walls – that Phoenix, Arizona has ever seen. Where events of these magnitude actually kill people, they are remembered in monuments and historical markers.
Across the country, such markers remind us of tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and tsunamis – of weather behaving “badly.” Some happened so long ago that there was no hope that anyone would come to the rescue other than one's neighbors, yet that's the hidden message: In times of disaster, people do pull together. In 1771, a massive wall of water flooded down towards Richmond, Virginia and inspired a monument that was later referenced in a historical marker on the same topic. The sight of flood waters 45 feet higher than normal must have been as terrifying as Mississippi's recent floods and the Katrina floods, and with just as little chance of reprieve. Such events leave “traces of violence that will remain for ages.” It is proper to remember them.
In 2007, the North Carolina Office of Archives and History raised a historical marker to Hurricane Hazel that killed 19 people in 1954. On the West Sacramento side of the Sacramento River is a sign explaining flood control measures taken to prevent future disasters; if the levee system in the California Delta failed, it would be one of the nastiest things to happen in California in centuries. Quite a lot of that Delta is below sea level and it's possible to walk beside the river and look down on fields and towns.
It's hard to tell whether the weather's more extreme because it's more extreme, or because there are more of us to be affected, living in increasingly harsh environments. (Chances are it's a little of both.) But one thing is clear. When the weather behaves badly, we will remember those lost, and the historical markers will serve as a reminder and inspiration to never stop looking for ways to help people escape extreme weather. And we can look around us at rebuilt communities with few physical scars left, and know that it is possible to rebuild and to move on.
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