Mexico Beach, Florida after hurricane Michael
Credit: sun-sentinel

When I sat down to write this essay, Hurricane Michael had just devastated the West coast and pan handle of Florida, and for the media it was the A-block story. Within that great noise, like a drowning man’s head bobbing up and down in the water, I began to see a secondary story line, one that I had first become aware of less than a month earlier when I was reading, and viewing on cable news, accounts of how people behaved during the catastrophic flooding that accompanied Hurricane Florence. In the Guardian newspaper I came across an interview with a 57-year-old man in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina who was asked by a reporter why he had stayed in his home when he could have gotten out. His answer, “It’s too expensive to move out to a hotel, I could be out for days and I can’t afford to leave my home behind.”1

With Hurricane Michael I was looking for these stories, and […]

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