Brad Littlejohn: More data isn’t the answer

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 1st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

In the nearly 20-years since Hurricane Katrina, gathering storm data has improved a lot. But data alone isn’t enough, as shown by the devastation left behind by Hurricane Helene.

BRAD LITTLEJOHN: Six months ago, I stood on Main Street in Chimney Rock, NC, marveling at this postcard-perfect southern Appalachian tourist town that had become a favorite family haunt. Flanked by towering blue-green mountain ridges, it nestled along a frothy whitewater stream where laughing children collected salamanders, and sported a BBQ joint, a magnificent ice cream shop, a gem store, and an array of little shops walking the fine line between kitschy and charming. Today, Chimney Rock is gone, wiped off the map—along with so many of the western Carolina towns and landscapes where I spent my childhood. As we watched the aerial footage of a valley choked with the fragments of upstream towns and shattered lives, my daughter wept silently beside me.

This week, the nation is slowly waking up to the scale of the apocalypse that Hurricane Helene unleashed over 8000 square miles of the southern Appalachians. Hundreds of thousands struggle to find food, water, cell service, or just a way out of a wrecked and twisted landscape where almost every road was turned into a raging river. Our broken political system has struggled to respond, with private citizens forced to organize helicopter rescues and insulin drops. Perhaps more than any disaster in recent memory, Helene highlights the increasingly yawning gap between our technical knowledge-gathering prowess and our capacity to act upon it. Our tech titans tell us all we need is more data. Appalachia begs to differ.

From a forecasting standpoint, Helene was a marvel, one of the best-predicted storms in history. New supercomputer weather models allowed forecasters to pinpoint the storm’s track, strength, and likely impacts days in advance—including the risk for high winds and historic flooding in the Appalachians.

But that is all data. People do not think in data. People think in pictures. It’s hard to form a mental picture of what it is like to flee a crumbling mountainside along a winding road choked with fallen trees beside a raging torrent higher than you have ever seen it. Forecasters warned of extended power outages, but it is hard to form a mental picture of being trapped with an ailing parent for days with no water, no electricity, no communication, and no way out because the roads no longer exist.

Two decades after the horror of Katrina, our technical, data-crunching, predictive capacities have advanced at the speed of light. But our practical, people-mobilizing, political capacities have, if anything, regressed. Most citizens did not—or could not evacuate—and most political leaders did not adequately urge them to. Most local governments didn’t stage in advance the massive disaster response resources the crisis would call for. It does not matter what the experts know if they no longer have the people’s trust. And if they don’t, politicians will hardly stick their necks out to mobilize for an apocalypse that may not materialize—not after COVID.

Even to say this, however, may be to point too many fingers. Silicon Valley likes to think that more information means more control. And to a certain extent, they are right; just ask the dam operators managing unprecedented flows on major rivers right now. But Helene shows us that decoding nature is not the same as mastering it…that the analog world cannot be bent to our will as readily as ones and zeros.

The power of places like Chimney Rock lies in how they emphasize our smallness and transience next to the great mountains. As they rebuild from this tragedy, may they continue to remind us that we live in a world that we do not control.

I’m Brad Littlejohn.

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