Reckoning with the reality of a warming world

It used to seem to me, as a younger man, that life would always present a way for me to win.

On the afternoon of Sept. 5, 2017, the staff of the BVI Beacon, the paper of record on the island of Tortola, the largest island in the archipelago of the British Virgin Islands, got word that Hurricane Irma had intensified rapidly and was set to collide with us head-on at maximum strength. 

The conventional wisdom then was that most major hurricanes, aside from Andrew in the 90s, would lose strength on approach or only sideswipe the islands. Until Irma, there hadn’t been a glancing blow from such a storm that stopped the pulse of life in paradise there. The ground was still saturated and some damage was still apparent—buckled roads and broken tree branches—from torrential rain and wind we received in the weeks leading up to the hurricane. That weather had already flooded me out of the hotel room I had been living in as a cub reporter newly immigrated to the island and just starting my first job on a newspaper staff covering government. I thought I was already well-seasoned in bad Caribbean weather.

Twenty-four hours before Irma made landfall, its track moved slightly southward so that the center of the hurricane traveled directly through the middle of the BVI.

The closest I’d ever gotten to a monster was playing video games or reading a book. Now I’d be meeting one up close. I remember feeling a kind of sickening thrill at the grocery store picking up gallons of water for myself and some of the only food items left on the shelves (Pop Tarts) as by that point word had traveled fast. The people behind the island’s popularity as a tourist destination—the shopkeepers, the taxi drivers, the bankers, the porters, the administrators, the dock workers and their families—had hastily grabbed what supplies they could and prepared to take shelter as Irma barreled towards us. 

A neighbor kindly boarded up the sliding door of the apartment where I was renting a room. My plan was to hunker down on the couch in the living room by myself. I thought I would wake groggily to all the new stories I could tell for the paper. 

But it occurred to me that it would be more compelling to write about a stay with the most vulnerable residents of the island forced to hold out in the largest emergency shelter on Tortola, St. George’s Episcopal Church, which is located in the capital, Road Town. That night, the sign outside the building spelled out Matthew 16:24 in block letters: “Deny yourselves, take up your cross, and follow me.” 

Thinking of the assignment ahead of me, and nothing more, I went to St. George’s. With mere hours before Irma made landfall, I left my apartment with some essentials in a backpack thinking I’d return home the following day. 

The last SMS text message sent from the BVI’s Department of Disaster of Management, before the office was completely destroyed, went out at 11:34 a.m. as Irma made landfall in the daylight hours. It read, “We are in for a direct hit, a direct hit on Road Town! Move, move to safe room immediately! Move please to safe room immediately! Immediately! Move please.”

Irma was considered at the time to be the most powerful hurricane on record in the open Atlantic, almost supernatural, defying all reason and mathematical possibility as if it should not have existed. The storm made landfall on the island as a Category 5 with a whopping 180 mph winds and shearing rain. We took refuge in the old rectory hall behind its centuries-old stone walls. We felt safe until water began to pour in through the metal roof and our group had to take cover in a stairwell. Believing the roof would peel away in the outer bands of the storm, we emerged from hiding in Irma’s eye and surveyed the wreckage of our lives. 

I saw the debris of the town strewn around us. The hurricane had cut down the lush jungles covering Tortola’s hills and turned them all barren like the land had been cursed by a villain from a Disney movie. It flipped over cars and tossed yachts onto land. Irma’s winds filled every structure until it broke them all apart, their contents scattered all over. Approximately 85% of housing stock—over 4,000 homes—were damaged or destroyed, including the mansion of billionaire and business magnate Richard Branson, a resident of nearby Necker Island. 

You, the reader, can probably picture what the rest of the scene was like without seeing my photos and videos, which bring me right back every few years when I look at them again. You’ve most likely seen the horrific devastation caused by Helene and Milton in recent weeks from broadcasters on the news or shared by survivors while scrolling through TikTok, a few prominent names of hurricanes that have been as destructive as Irma, or even more so, since 2017. It just keeps getting worse. 

Dorian surpassed Irma in magnitude only two years later; Irma caused $60 billion in damage on the U.S. mainland when it reached Florida. Business Insider recently reported that Hurricane Milton might cost insurers up to $50 billion. According to PBS, Hurricane Helene is expected to cause property and economic losses of up to $250 billion.

After Irma, it took me a long time to get back on my feet, but eventually, I did. I guess that’s winning. I learned not to take any chances, not to take my life for granted. I don’t consider myself safe anymore from calamity. And I don’t think I ever will. I once deluded myself into thinking that I was safe from disaster by virtue of being me. I am not extraordinary. I do not have an infinite number of lives. I wish more people felt that way. Wired recently published an article about how the best and worst of TikTok were on display in the aftermath of Helene and especially Milton, highlighting people’s efforts to survive and aid one another, as well as their vanity and disregard for warnings and evacuations if it meant more viewers for their posts and live streams. 

Here we are in the Midwest, far away from the threat of hurricanes and in the midst of a once-in-a-century drought. The real story here is not about my survival, sifting through the rubble of a collapsed pharmacy looking for Vitamin Water and supplements, or treasuring the hospitality we were given by Saint George’s until it ran out, along with our food and water. 

I hope you never find yourself in such dire straits. But you might.

As the oceans continue to warm, storms such as Irma, Helene and Milton will become extraordinarily strong. Even us folks in landlocked states should pay attention to them. Helene ferociously slammed the Big Bend in Florida and lashed the southeast, but some parts of Indiana and Ohio were placed under high wind warnings or received wind advisory alerts as a result of Helene, which by then had ravaged the Carolinas and wiped some towns off the map. Changing weather patterns will mean severe drought here and in other places, and record rainfall in others. Every year is the global hottest on record. Climate change is happening everywhere, to all of us. 

It’s not a game. Nobody produced these storms in secret weather machines to fulfill a sinister political agenda. It is impossible to deny that life in our warming world is getting harder, even if we as Americans can no longer recognize or tolerate a shared reality, as The Atlantic posited this week. Our planet is demanding more from us, necessitating more innovative solutions, as well as humility and grace in the face of failure—failure from our leaders’ and our own failure. Don’t be stupid. Make your move.