In Southern California, the Whittier Narrows Dam failed. The tempest exploded across the city of Pico Rivera, home to nearly seventy thousand people, most of whom, thankfully, obeyed evacuation orders. An eighteen-foot wall of water swept in, and every community from Pico to Long Beach experienced catastrophe. From the other end, the tidal surge blasted through the streets of Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, soaking the overdeveloped floodplain as far inland as Anaheim. Coastal highways were washed back to dirt trails, and hundreds of landslides sent walls of rock, mud, and debris burying all structures along with those inside. Orange County filled with five feet of chocolate water as the Santa Ana River spilled over its levees and inundated homes. In Santa Barbara, a piece of mountain sheered away, shredding through two neighborhoods and killing every resident in under a minute.
Up and down the coast, waterlogged bluffs and cliffs collapsed into the sea from the power of wave energy alone, taking hundreds of houses with them. Electricity cutoffs disrupted emergency services and telecommunications. There was no power, no internet, and data servers were wiped out. Silicon Valley was dark. Police, firefighters, and other emergency workers could not rely on power grids or telecommunications networks. Hospitals and wastewater treatment plants went without power for weeks. Damage estimates range from between $750 billion and $1 trillion statewide.
As Coast Guard rescues continued throughout the spring, the California National Guard, the Red Cross, and A Fierce Blue Fire’s mutual aid network descended on the state. So did militias, looters, and Xuritas soldiers. The ferocity of the looting cannot be overstated: frenzied dashes through department stores, malls, grocers, jewelry stores, electronics centers. What began as a perilous search for food devolved into all-encompassing scavenger riots. Months later, after disturbing reports of mob violence and militia lynchings, Xuritas is still there, securing infrastructure and distribution points for food, water, and medical supplies, exercising dubious authority, harassing the nonwhite for proof of citizenship. With local police departments overwhelmed, the security contractor, for all practical purposes, is the law in California now. An estimated two million people now live in homeless encampments and abandoned retail stores in the deserts of the southeast counties while Arizona and Nevada threaten “deportation” for those who’ve spilled across the state lines, an internal refugee crisis not seen in this country since the Dust Bowl.
It is hard to imagine how California will recover. The severity of the flooding has demolished a cataclysmic amount of infrastructure in the state’s two largest population hubs. Perhaps more importantly, California’s private insurance market, already rocked by the 2031 fire, has completely collapsed. There is no taxpayer backstop large enough to insure all the property at risk and the battle to drop coverage and deny claims by insurers has only just begun. Wall Street is whispering about reverberations in the wider financial markets.
Like the LA megafire, the catastrophe wrought comparisons to a Hollywood blockbuster. Images of high-stakes rescues from floodwaters and terrified people running from landslides dominated the public consciousness, and yet as horrifying as it seemed for those two weeks in March, in the context of our permanent emergency, ARkSTORM barely had staying power. It opened, the box office was good, and then it was gone from the news in a matter of weeks. Twenty thirty-six was just getting started.
ON MAY 2, A TROPICAL DEPRESSION STRENGTHENED TO A CYCLONE in the Bay of Bengal. Cyclone Giri ratcheted to a monster, bursting the seams of Category 5 designation. By the time Giri made landfall it was a four-hundred-mile-wide superstorm that simultaneously lashed the shores of India and Myanmar. With sustained wind speeds of 210 mph and gusts reaching 255 mph, it was one of the most powerful cyclones ever recorded. Giri swallowed the Bangladeshi coast from the western deltas to Cox’s Bazar. A high tide brought a storm surge of twenty-five feet, and whole villages were swept away. In the Sundarbans, the islands connected like muscle sinew by mangrove forests, clay dikes toppled and shrimp farms were eradicated. The soil, water, and yellowed mud of these coastal flats is home to over nineteen million people who now have little possibility of return or renewal. Khulna, one of Bangladesh’s key ports, was effectively wiped off the map. To say there’s nothing left is incorrect because there are splinters left. There is twisted metal and plastic piping and brick rubble and collapsed concrete and drowned wildlife. There are bodies. Thousands of them.
For forty years, experts warned that Bangladesh was an unprecedented calamity waiting to happen. There was the unnamed 1991 cyclone that killed 138,000. Before that, in 1970, a cyclone killed half a million people when it hit Bhola in what was then East Pakistan and prompted my grandparents to immigrate to Britain. Both cyclones were smaller than Giri. However, size doesn’t explain everything. It’s almost more important to look at what has happened within Bangladesh itself—the human components that made this horrible outcome almost inevitable. Even when my parents took me as a child, Bangladesh was one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. I recall Dhaka as a teeming, claustrophobic sea where the sound of car horns and the zing of rickshaw bells produced a 24/7 cacophony. City and country continued their astonishing growth, with Dhaka swelling to twenty-five million. Most of this was due to migration, rural farmers watching their land vanish as the seas rose and saltwater intrusion destroyed their livelihoods.
Dhaka lies between the merging highways of the Padma, Meghna, and Brahmaputra Rivers, and even as record floodwaters rose, wind speeds from the dying cyclone still proved too dangerous for most people to flee. Imagine watching the water surging into your home while outside the winds hurtle debris at speeds that can shred bodies in half. Fires began in the Tejgaon Industrial Area—chemical plants soaking and then exploding, but they quickly spread. The fire service couldn’t drive trucks through five feet of standing water, and aerial resources were limited. President Shirin Razzaq ordered refugees to the smaller, underprepared city of Jamalpur, because it was one of the only places in the country that wasn’t partially underwater.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates the initial death toll of Giri at 1.3 million, with at least another seven hundred thousand missing. This does not take into account the outbreaks of disease and starvation that followed. Speculation abounds that this may be one of the most rapid mass migrations in human history. They fled on foot and bicycle, automobile or bus if they were lucky. For months, caravans of people have plodded down drowned highways, traversing countrysides of ruin, dying of everything from dehydration to infection.
When I spoke with Defense Secretary Sarah Caperno, she declined to confirm that behind closed doors President Razzaq all but begged Victor Love for a full-scale American military intervention. The UN has asked for $600 million from the US for its Giri Action Plan, but the government has delivered only $150 million in aid so far. I asked why the Bangladeshi relief effort had been so insufficient to the scope of the crisis.
“We’re monitoring the situation, but as you know by now, food aid comes from Congress,” was all Secretary Caperno would say on the topic.
ON MAY 22 AT A RALLY IN PENNSYLVANIA, THE PASTOR DEMANDED that the US “not ship one more dollar, calorie, or MRE to a Muslim country condemned by God. This is justice for sin, plain and simple, and when I’m president, we will have the complete cessation of international aid. Americans will eat first.”
This led internet trolls to repurpose the Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as a campaign song: “Wim-AWEF, Wim-AWEF, Wim-AWEF, Wim-AWEF.”