When Weather Disaster Strikes, Picking Up The Pieces Takes Forever, Unfortunately

Damage from a huge hailstorm in Calgary, Canada
lingers four months after the storm. It shows the slow
pace of recovery typical of big disasters.
Photo by Helen Pike/CBC 

 We see it over and over again.  

A big, devastating storm strikes, and the media swoop in and cover the destruction, the heartbreak and loss, and then move on. 

It makes it easy to forget that the aftermath, the effort to pick up the pieces, often takes years.  You wonder if it will ever get done. Sometimes it doesn't. 

One example is a hail storm that struck Calgary, Alberta, Canada four months ago. The storm caused $1.5 billion in damage and severely damaged thousands of homes. A thick barrage of tennis ball sized hail wrecked so many walls, windows and roofs. 

Now, with winter setting in, most of the damage is still not repaired. 

It takes time for insurance adjusters to settle claims.  Then, thousands of people all at once compete to hire a limited number of contractors to fix the damage. Good luck getting anything done within a reasonable amount of time. 

Now winter is settling into Calgary.  This being Canada, it can get awfully cold up there. It often gets below zero there each winter, and the coldest it's ever been in Calgary is 46 below.

And now you have a lot of houses with damaged windows, roofs, and siding. Which allows cold and moisture to enter these houses, causing added damage. 

Making matters worse, the Alberta provincial government has provided disaster relief for flooding from the storm, but not hail damage, according to the CBC.  Just an example of bureaucracy not helping matters. 

The Calgary hail storm, bad as it was, didn't come close to the biggest calamity a town or city could endure. 

There's plenty of for instances.  The town of Paradise, California was practically wiped off the map by a deadly wildfire in 2018.  The town isn't close to being rebuilt.  Lots of people in the area have PSTD, made worse by nearby wildfires this year that choked the air in Paradise with smoke and briefly threatened to cause new destruction in town. 

A month before Paradise was literally lost, the town of Mexico Beach, Florida was flattened by Category 5 Hurricane Michael.  This is another town that hasn't recovered and won't anytime soon.  

Mexico Beach still has no gas stations, and the bank just re-opened early this month.  The town has so far only gotten half the money it needs to get its infrastructure back and running, as television station WFSU reports. A few houses have been rebuilt, but Mexico Beach is still largely empty lots. 

Here in Vermont, it really took at least five years to pretty much fully get the Green Mountain State back up to snuff after the extreme floods of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. 

The point of this post is to show that disasters are coming at a dizzying pace.  They dominate the news cycle for a day, a week, sometimes a month. Then we all forget, because the next catastrophe has hit. Meanwhile, the people in the earlier disaster zones are pretty much left to solve it on their own. 

I don't have a good solution here.  However, if the scientists are right, the pace of big weather disasters will continue to accelerate as the planet warms.  Which means more and more of us will find ourselves picking up the pieces and not sure if we have a decent future. 

Here's the CBC news piece that inspired today's post: