Bacon's Rebellion

James A. Bacon

Ill Wind

Virginians acquitted themselves well after surviving the worst storm in a generation. But the question lingers: Was some of the damage and disruption preventable?

Now I know how the Iraqis feel.” So said my mother Friday, the day after Hurricane Isabel blasted through Virginia. “No electricity. No water. No wonder they’re so irritable.”

Indeed, Virginia’s dance with natural disaster does engender empathy for the misfortunes of those whose lives we experience only through newspaper headlines and video feeds. Like the Iraqis right after the war, our phone lines fell silent. Cable lines went down. No more CNN! For a while, too, Virginians had to wait in gasoline lines. And, though it’s hardly what you’d call a humanitarian crisis, we even had food spoiling in our refrigerators.

Of course, as even my mother would admit, we don’t really know how the Iraqis feel. I doubt many Baghdadis held block parties to consume their stores of beef, sausage and elk meat before it went bad. Virginians never suffered privation, and we were confident that things would return to normal within days or, at most, a week or two. But we have learned something important: Civilization doesn’t consist of the technology we equip ourselves with. It’s what’s inside our heads: the attitudes and habits that guide our actions, often unconsciously, when we confront disaster.

For the student of human behavior, what’s most significant is what didn’t happen in Isabel’s aftermath. When the winds stopped howling, there was no looting. No one stole the Faberge eggs from Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. No one gutted the ABC stores or 7-Elevens in the inner city. We certainly didn’t compound our problems by stripping the power transformers and electric lines from the power grid.

Nor, though there were ample opportunities for it, were there any reports of price gouging. The day after the storm, I was looking for gasoline to keep my home generator going, cruising Broad Street in search of a gasoline station still pumping fuel. With most of the city paralyzed, I could find only one. Four lines of cars snaked up to the pumps, drivers desperate to fill not only gas tanks but red plastic canisters for their generators and chain saws. Word passed down the line that the gas might run out. Some of us would have gladly paid double or triple the normal price. Then one of the proprietors came outside. Same price, she said, but no one could buy more than $10. No one complained. It seemed the right thing to do.

For the most part, we Virginians handled ourselves well. Suburbanites here in Henrico County pulled out their chain saws and cleared the roads of fallen trees themselves. In the past five days, I never saw one county road crew in my part of town, but the roads in devastated neighborhoods were all clear within days, logs and brush neatly stacked along the side. There was no organization to the clean-up, just neighbor helping neighbor – with an occasional capitalist booster. Professional tree trimmers were having a field day with the most arduous tasks like removing fallen trunks from the roofs of houses, but they weren't gloating.

“It looks like you’ve hit the jackpot – enough work for a month,” I quipped to one fellow.

He looked genuinely rueful. “Enough for two months,” he said. “But I’m sorry it had to be because of this.”

The flow of impressions, both from news reports and personal observation, are almost uniformly positive. Volunteers trucked in bottled water and sold it at cost. The power company passed out dry ice so people could keep their food cold. In my old Fan neighborhood, the owner of Kuba Kuba fired up a generator, brewed jugs of coffee and handed out freebies to caffeine-deprived neighbors. As electricity winked back online around the city, people called in to radio stations reporting where gas stations, grocery stores and other vital establishments had reopened.

People opened up their homes to one another. My daughter’s best friend was sitting in her bedroom during the storm when a tree sliced through the roof into her room, missing her by a few feet. Friends quickly took in the girl and her family. People shared their food, their generators, their gas stoves and hot showers. Those with power even ran extension cords to the houses of their neighbors without.

The only objectionable behavior I saw was on the main thoroughfares. Road rage, it appears, is a deep-rooted psychosis that transcends times of communal crisis. The storm knocked out most of the street lights and, oblivious to state law that requires motorists to treat dead stoplights as four-way stop signs, most people acted as if the right-of-way belonged to the prevailing stream of traffic. Anyone trying to enter the main thoroughfare took their lives into their hands.

Sometimes I went with the traffic flow, but often I made a practice of stopping at intersections on four-laned Parham Road when I saw that other cars were stuck trying to get through. Plenty of jerks flew past, but others would stop eventually, letting cars plugged up in the intersecting lanes slip through. The number of inconsiderate drivers was appalling. One actually got short-tempered with me when I stopped. A middle-aged guy in an expensive, monster-sized SUV honked his horn and gesticulated angrily. What’s your problem, buddy, I thought: Late to your golf game?

Good thing the guy wasn't Iraqi. He might have fired off a couple of rocket-propelled grenades.

As the days dragged on, I must confess, the novelty of going without basic utilities did wear thin. In a rare example of felicitous forethought about two months ago, I had installed a back-up power generator at my house to guard against temporary black-outs caused by thunderstorms or ice storms. My goals were simple: Keep the refrigerator and freezer going, the house lit, and my home office humming. I never reckoned on a hurricane that would knock out the cable lines, too. The lack of Internet access – my lifeline to the world -- made it impossible to work. That, dear reader, is why Bacon’s Rebellion missed its regularly scheduled publication date this Monday.

Americans are impatient. We want instant results. So, it should surprise no one that seven days after the hurricane passed, the grumbling has begun. Why isn’t my power back up? Where’s my cable service? Why’s my telephone phone still jinky? We’ve cleaned up our neighborhood, getting half the job done ourselves. Where are the repair crews?

People are asking questions now. Sure, Virginia Dominion stockpiled power lines, electric poles and transformers, and, yeah, it lined up a workforce eventually reaching 11,000, including contractors and crews from other utilities, and, admittedly, these guys are working 12 hours a day – a lot harder than most of us. We can understand that it takes a long time to fix the massive, widespread damage. But how come it got so bad in the first place? How is it possible that a storm, which quickly lost force as soon as it burst ashore, caused 80 percent of all Virginians to lose their power?

Isabel was losing steam by the time it hit Richmond. We’ve had worse rains. I’ve seen more ferocious winds. Occasional gusts would send the treetops into a froth, but the air seemed eerily calm down at ground level. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, sustained winds measured around 40 to 60 miles per hour. Frankly, as hurricanes go, Isabel was a wuss.

In the time-honored American tradition, we now seek to apportion blame. How did such a wimpy hurricane cause so much devastation? Should we pin our travails upon months of excessive rainfall that left the soil waterlogged and soft? Does the fault lie with us: a cultural preference, perhaps, for certain shallow-rooted species of tree? Could it be, as I’ve heard said, a proclivity for irrigating our yards, which inhibits trees from developing the deep tap roots that anchor them in the winds?

Or, more darkly, are malevolent corporate forces to blame? It's hard to fault Dominion's post-disaster, clean-up, but one can't help but wonder if previous policies left Virginia unnecessarily vulnerable to widespread outages. Did Dominion, perhaps in some profit-driven imperative to curtail capital investment, fail to sufficiently “harden” its infrastructure? Was the company remiss in keeping its power lines clear of threatening branches and trees?

The questions need to be asked, for the losses not only of property but of time and productivity, seem all out of proportion to the severity of the storm. It is downright terrifying to think what would have happened had Isabel hit the shore as a Class 3 hurricane: Not one telephone poll would have been left standing!

Dominion, to its credit, publishes some fascinating numbers on its website. Here’s how the company summarized damage Monday. (The numbers undoubtedly have been updated since then, but I could not find them.)

Tidewater, presumably referring to the Hampton Roads region, is a sprawling metropolitan area of roughly 1.5 million people; Richmond-Petersburg a somewhat more compact region of only one million inhabitants. The hurricane slammed almost full force into Hampton Roads, but had spent some portion of its energy by the time it hit Richmond-Petersburg. Both regions have been soaked with rain all year, so it's hard to argue that the ground was any more water-logged in one region than the other.

Why, then, does Richmond/Tri-Cities show so many more damaged poles, crossarms and spans of wire down? The disparity cannot be due to random happenstance. I can think of only two explanations: either different patterns of infrastructure hardening and/or line maintenance on Dominion’s part, or different patterns of development -- more "old" suburbs with tall, aging trees, perhaps -- that leave Richmond neighborhoods more vulnerable to the rain and wind.

We are better off knowing which. Forewarned is forearmed. Otherwise, like the Iraqis, we may be destined to endless bouts of irritability and angst.

-- September 25, 2003