Blackout
By: Christopher Schaberg
Tags: Environment, Hurricane Ida, Ecology, New Orleans, Climate Change

Power outages at 5:12pm, August 29—when my house still had power, shortly before the entire city was plunged into total blackout

Hunkering down in a supercharged storm

My son and I have been watching the Marvel “What If?” animated shows on Disney+. Each episode plays out an alternative scenario with a main Marvel character that would distort the sequence of events as we know them otherwise in the MCU. As we were watching the latest episode today—the first time I’d sat and zoned out since we started preparing for Hurricane Ida—it occurred to me that there was something familiar about the setup of the series: it reminded me of mentally plotting out the possible domino effects and probable outcomes that we faced as the storm got closer and swept over us.

It’s fun to imagine different possible scenarios when it comes to fictional superhero characters and elaborate plot twists. It’s not so much fun when it’s just your normal life, and the contingencies are determined by the spaghetti models of a looming hurricane. Robinson Meyer wrote eloquently at The Atlantic about the limits of hurricane preparation in the face of supercharged storms such as Ida. But while those 74 hours of bracing for the storm happened all too fast, the 12 hours of the actual storm slowed down and stretched out in weird ways. I’ve been thinking back on the details of those distended minutes when we were in the storm, and here’s what I remember:

First, there was the feel of the winds gradually increasing: it happens in fits and starts, each gust maybe a new normal, or maybe a fluke. But this happens over an excruciating duration, and you have to have external measuring devices to really gauge it across the hours. We have a willow tree in our backyard that we planted when we bought our house; it was the diameter of my thumb when I put it in the ground, a thin bare wand sticking out of the clayey soil. Now the trunk as wide as my torso, and its foliage covers our whole little 12' by 16' yard. I watched the willow dance and undulate in the intensifying winds. By watching this tree, we could infer the steady uptick in wind speeds. (We were also watching a huge pecan tree getting rocked a few houses away, in the background; that is, we watched it until it was uprooted and came crashing to the ground, sending a plume of waxy green pinnately compound leaves up and away.)

Things flew by. Signs, shopping bags, blue face masks, plastic shrapnel, trashcan lids, branches, UFOs, the rain itself in broad sheets—it was almost entertainment.

When not looking outside, we were watching our utility company’s outage map: green lines turning red like some weird alien invasion game on the screen. Our lights flickered on and off throughout the afternoon, to the point that our internet service became useless. We switched to a hotspot, connecting to our phones; those Ozymandian cell towers would last!

Improbably, we kept our electricity until around 5:30 in the evening—I snapped a screenshot of it toward the end, while we were feeling exceedingly lucky. Then the entire city blacked out. We had had our computers all charged for backup power for our phones, which were also plugged in up to the last instant. But all at once, it was just our little glowing phones in a dark house, and we quickly adjusted to not looking at them constantly. It was time to conserve.

The eerie darkness of a city in total blackout is something to observe—not that you want to see that, in the midst of a hurricane. But the sudden plunge into optical stillness—even in the middle of a hurricane!—is remarkable, because you realize at once how numb you’ve become to panoramic splotches of light, glowing symbols, glaring WORDS, and other miscellaneous illuminated visual signals. Looking out back after the blackout, it was just a blue gray landscape of oblique shapes and indistinct forms. It was somehow calming, even as the immediate meaning of the situation was that the storm had just dealt a definitive blow to the city and things would probably get worse.

This abruptly quiet monochromatic scene didn’t last; we live near a major streetcar station, and within minutes their emergency generators had kicked on, powering up their floodlights and adding a terrific roar to what was already a cacophony of sounds.

It’s the persistent howling of the wind that is really unnerving. I grew up in Michigan and am used to winter blizzards and “three day blows” that can dump feet of snow, or rearrange an entire coastline overnight. But those formative experiences didn’t prepare me for the bell curve of 12 hours of hurricane winds, like a celestial super-villain slowly turning up the level on a planetary-scale fan and then just as slowly turning it back down again. At its peak, a peak that lasted from about 8pm to midnight, the wind was shaking our house so much that we really wondered if the windows, roof, and walls would hold—this is not a comfortable comportment to maintain for multiple hours.

We got our kids to sleep. Except for using little lanterns and flashlights, and ignoring the creaking walls and obscure thumps outside, it was almost ordinary. We read some books, cuddled, left them to sleep in their bedrooms that we secretly feared could get sheared from the front of the house. In retrospect, we probably should have huddled together downstairs, in a safer space all together. But my partner and I were already exhausted from the long day, and knowing it would be a drawn-out night with any number of disasters ahead, we selfishly opted for the easiest thing: keep to our routines, maybe get a few hours of quiet—house quaking be damned.

After a fitful few hours of slumber I woke up alert; it was almost one in the morning. The wind was definitely dying down. We made it.

I looked outside at the murky urban skyline beneath racing clouds. Blackout. The hurricane had moved on; but now we were entering something else altogether.