It hit me this morning. Go here to watch this video. You’ll see the destruction, confusion, and grief in Marshall, NC. I paid particular attention to what she was expressing starting at 19:35. Keep in mind she is on day 6 and still trying to make sense of what has happened to her community.

Be patient. Listen to her words. 144 hours prior, their life was ‘normal’. She does an amazing job processing out loud. What got me really thinking is when she said, “When there’s a hurricane, it happens- then you go clean it up, and that’s it,” and then she says this: “This is just different. It’s so layered with struggles. The no water, the no resources, the no access, the no roads that exist, the no bridges that exist anymore…” She finishes that thought by saying, “We just don’t have a place in our brains to explain what’s happening.” Woah.

I heard broken networks.

I heard vulnerable dependencies.

I heard human suffering.

If that isn’t the definition of catastrophic, I’m not sure what is.

She mentioned all the “layers.” All of their networks are temporarily disconnected. Their human network, their engineered network, and their neural network are all off, simultaneously. No water, no power, no gas, no internet, no TV, no cell service, no roads, no bridges, no friends, no family…. For a moment in time, they were completely and totally cut off from the outside in every conceivable way.

Alone. And for some, in Hell.

Water caused this. 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen. The very chemical compound we depend on for life caused so much destruction.

The irony.

40 trillion gallons of rainfall in Helene. 60 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. 619 days of constant water flow over the Niagra Falls. I’m going deeper.

40 trillion gallons - spread 20’ deep would cover an area of 9,616 square miles. That is roughly the size of Vermont. It’s also 1/3 the amount of water in Lake Erie.

So Climate Change?

Because the Earth’s temperature is increasing, the amount of water vapor is increasing. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas (along with aerosols) in the troposphere. (first 12km of the atmosphere). Increased water vapor plus increased UV intensity gives us more moisture and humidity. Our clouds get fat and slow, and storms become longer and more intense. The science is out there - and it has been for decades. I wrote about earlier this week here.

Our natural networks and our engineered networks are related.

Rebecca Costa wrote about this in The Watchman’s Rattle. Our systems are evolving at a rate that is faster than our ability to think…all of our systems. Technology, social networks, infrastructure, economics.

Unfortunately, this is the beginning, not the end.

We have to rethink our systems. We have to rethink our infrastructure. We can no longer afford to go about our daily lives without awareness and consciousness.

The cost of supporting legacy systems is coming at the expense of innovation.

If we isolate the signals and listen through the noise - it’s omnipresent. The discussion about education, centralized banking, capital markets, return to office, inclusion, the environment, global unrest….more more more.

Nothing in nature grows in perpetuity except cancer.

Yet we push our engineered systems way beyond their capacities. It’s more for the sake of more without consideration of better.

We need to do better, not more.

I’m recruiting an army of #tinygiants over on LinkedIn. #tinygiants are making tiny decisions, consistently and over time, to get a compounding (and hopefully beneficial) result.

This is how that looks:

Song pairing - Billy Joel We Didn’t Start the Fire - 1989 (yep, it’s been 35 years)

Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash