https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/10/04/why-is-anyone-surprised/

Recency bias is hardwired into the human psyche. It is for this reason that stories abound about how Hurricane Helene is the worst disaster ever – some on social media claiming that it heralds the end of the world itself. But, without wishing to underplay the very real damage caused, Helene is neither the biggest, strongest, nor most costly hurricane to tear its way across lands adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico. Even limiting ourselves to the USA alone, Katrina and Sandy caused more damage, while Irma and Opal were bigger. In any case, looking solely at the hurricane means completely ignoring the other essential dimension of any “natural” disaster.

Consider Hurricane Maria, which struck Puerto Rico in 2017. Not only were Maria’s windspeeds (280 kph) stronger than Helene (225 kph) but, crucially, the infrastructure that it ploughed into was considerably less robust, resulting in a far greater death toll and a much longer recovery. Indeed, the same is true even when the natural element of the disaster is weaker. In October 1999, Eastern California was hit by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake which caused little damage, no deaths, and five people injured. A year earlier, Afghanistan was hit by two (February and May) smaller (5.9 and 6.5) earthquakes which killed 6,000-6,500 and injured more than 10,000. Buildings and infrastructure in California were simply more resilient to earthquakes (even the comparable 1987 Los Angeles earthquake only killed eight and injured 200) than their Afghan counterparts.

Like Katrina before it, Helene is an embarrassment to the American establishment because it tore through states and communities which, while not quite impoverished to Afghan levels, are among the poorest within what is meant to be the richest nation ever to have existed. The poorest districts of New Orleans never did recover after Katrina, and there is no reason to expect that the poorest places in Georgia and North Carolina will fare any better.

Around the time I was first talking to UK Home Office officials about planning post-disaster recovery responses (which they saw as a replacement for their Cold War military planning) Florida and Louisiana were hit by Hurricane Andrew. Like most people involved with emergency planning here in the UK, my assumption had been that a federal government which had just thrown trillions of dollars at the Star Wars defence system would surely take recovery from the hurricane in its stride. Instead, the response was late, inadequate, and poorly managed (although it would turn out to be far better than the later responses to Sandy, Katrina, and one suspects, Helene). That is, while “the USA” might be wealthy on paper, large swathes of its people and infrastructure are far less resilient, and its government far less able to respond, than that headline wealth might lead us to assume.

It is equally easy to frame this in terms of the broader collapse of industrial civilisation which is now evident across the western states. Except that Andrew and Katrina struck prior to the peak of conventional oil production which triggered the chain of events leading to the 2008 crash and the depression which has plagued us ever since. It is not so much that the failure to recover from these earlier hurricanes was unrelated to what we broadly call “peak oil,” but rather that they were among the inevitable problems that flow from the original “solution” to the first, US-only version of peak oil.

The oil shocks of the 1970s – in large part the consequence of the peak of US production in 1970 – resulted in two very different political responses. The first, cobbled together by Edward Heath’s administration in the UK and fleshed out under Jimmy Carter in the USA, was a kind of puritan response involving such things as driving slowly to save fuel, swapping big gas-guzzling cars for fuel-efficient minis, and wearing extra sweaters around the house rather than turning on the central heating. The alternative involved the wholesale destruction of the western working class in order to generate one last spurge of economic growth off the back of lower-paid workers in parts of the world where state regulation was more or less absent (allowing fossil fuels to be burned to excess) … in a word, neoliberalism.

It was, in its way, neoliberalism – at least the Thatcher brand of it – which drew me in the direction of recovery planning in the first place… having carried out research into the failed response to the North Wales flooding in February 1990. At the time, the various state agencies – military, police, NHS, local government, etc. – saw their role as only to rescue the thousands of people made homeless. Beyond that point – in keeping with neoliberal thinking – what happened to the flood victims was solely down to the “free market.” The state, it was argued, had no role in rehousing people or ensuring that communities were maintained. Instead – and inevitably in the real world – people fell prey to insurance scams, cowboy builders, and a raft of retail frauds. So that, when the heir to the throne visited a year later, hundreds of people were still homeless… not that he got to see them as, in one of the most cynical acts of all, the local council used charity donations to pay for the gardens and houses along the royal route to be rebuilt Potemkin-style to give the impression that recovery was complete.

There was, perhaps, still enough of the old post-war sentiment in the UK in the early-1990s to shame the authorities into excepting a greater role in the recovery process. The opposite was true in the USA after eight years of Ronald Reagan’s version of the free market. What should the victims of a hurricane expect from a president who famously claimed that, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Not, of course, that authoritarian state responses are any better. The Soviet Union’s response to the Chernobyl disaster, for example, caused thousands more deaths than the handful caused by the disaster itself – the anticipated epidemic of cancer among those exposed to radiation simply failed to show up, whereas the suicide rate among the forcibly displaced community went through the roof.

Nevertheless, it is surely only when disasters of one kind or another oblige us to look behind the glossy façade which the system usually presents to the world, that we get an inkling into just how far along the road to decline we have travelled. Within months of Chernobyl, the Soviet system was forced into the series of reforms which ultimately resulted in its collapse. The western states have fared better, enjoying that final burst of debt-based neoliberal growth in the 1990s and early-2000s. But across ex-industrial, rundown seaside and small-town Britain – and their equivalents across the western states – the process of decline and decay is ever present even as our lenocratic state apparatchiks – elected and permanent – prove unable to deliver such simple things as clean drinking water. It is highly unlikely that the UK state would be any better placed to respond to a major weather disaster than their counterparts in the USA are proving to be.

Furthermore, what we are witnessing – and will no doubt continue to see – is the post-peak undermining of the resilience that western societies once had. As the energy cost of energy increases – and thus the cost of doing everything else – our resilience is inevitably reduced. But that resilience is also being undermined by the political choices of the last half-century. Cutting emergency services, selling off public utilities, and taking away the workforce of local authorities may have lowered taxes (for the wealthy), but they have also removed much of the ability of communities to recover from disasters.

One might object that western states have no problem finding billions of dollars, euros, and pounds for war in Ukraine or the Middle East. But little of this is real money (and most of what is lines the pockets of middlemen long before reaching ordinary people). Rather, it comes in the form of credits with the arms industry, so that any money which does change hands goes straight from the Treasury to the arms companies. And as we saw at the start of the Covid pandemic, governments may have the ability to print or borrow currency at will, but they lack the emergency stockpiles to respond. The private sector just-in-time supply chains which also broke down during the pandemic also leave most western states without a warehoused buffer of basic supplies like food and bottled water to rush into areas affected by disasters. So that even if governments were still competent (most aren’t anymore) they lack the means to respond appropriately.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, waiting for the government to arrive is likely a fool’s errand. But what else is on the table? Upping sticks and trying to start a life elsewhere may work for the young and healthy but may turn out to be suicidal for those leaving a developed community behind them. Staying put in neighbourhoods that will be all but abandoned by state agencies and private corporations alike though, is a no better future. Then again, maybe that is merely an accelerated version of how the collapse that we have long talked about in theory will unfold in practice – each of us, as individuals, families, communities, regions or even whole nations, just about getting by until some kind of disaster strikes and only the fortunate few survive a descent into even more decay… and with each step down the ladder of civilisational decline, our increasing collective poverty serves to further weaken and corrupt the governments and corporations which feed off us… until that which cannot be done locally will no longer be done at all.