Our Strange New Way of Witnessing Natural Disasters

Destruction arrives not via solemn news reports but in a barrage of digital scraps — first-person views of what it looks like when the world changes.

My sister lives in western North Carolina, a few hours from our childhood home in east Tennessee. She evacuated just before Hurricane Helene arrived, but her roommates, friends, co-workers and neighbors — people I knew, people I’d been to parties and trivia nights and potlucks with — did not. Soon there was no word from them. Texts and calls went unanswered. Social media pages showed the earliest impacts of the storm — falling branches, ominously rising water — and then went quiet. At first, all we could find from my sister’s town, Spruce Pine, was a single photo, blurred with rain, that showed the downtown area entirely swallowed by the small river that usually flows placidly beside it. The mountain soils had already been saturated when the storm blustered in, its swirling clouds laden with some 40 trillion gallons of rain, and when the water fell earthward there was little that could stand in its way. Hillsides and light poles collapsed; trees lost their grip on the sodden earth and fell across phone and power lines. Sweet little burbling creeks, the sorts of places where salamanders and crawdads usually laze under rocks, rose up into monsters that swallowed houses and erased roadways. The region’s residents were cut off — from one another, and from the outside world.

Stuck on the outside, we started sending one another images and videos, whatever scattered scraps of digital information we could find. We searched for familiar landmarks and place names, trying to guess what some crumb of nearby news meant about the places and people from which no news was coming. There was a woman in the next town who posted a video of waterfalls cascading over the broken slabs of what used to be her access road. On a Facebook page for Spruce Pine residents, suddenly the only activity was from people like us: people who weren’t actually there. Person after person begged for any news of friends and relatives, until finally the number of posts grew so overwhelming that it was clear the problem needed to be corralled into spreadsheets. Several versions appeared, with columns for residents’ names and addresses and one for the vulnerabilities that made those who couldn’t contact them especially frightened: the people who were elderly and living alone, who needed oxygen tanks or dialysis, the ones whose houses were in bad condition already and located very close to a creek.

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