The Next Natural Catastrophe Is Inevitable Because Humans Gonna Human
The Beauty versus Risk Dynamic; Maximum Upside versus Maximum Downside
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Four, Issue 10
It can't happen here
Everybody's safe and it can't happen here
No freaks for us
It can't happen here
Everybody's clean and it can't happen here
No, no, it won't happen here
I'm telling you it can't
It won't happen here
Bop-bop-ditty-bop
I'm not worried at all, I'm not worried at all
Plastic folks, you know
It won't happen here
You're safe, mama
You're safe, baby
The Sunday Reader, July 20, 2025
That early July morning it rained and rained and rained until the Guadalupe river burst its banks. The river rose 29 feet in just hours; flash floods roared through a summer camp while counselors waded through again and again, forming human chains as they desperately tried to rescue the children.
They mostly succeeded, thankfully. But 10 teens died that summer of 1987.
No, this month’s tragedy in Kerr, Texas, was not the first flash flood to claim lives along the Guadalupe River. It wasn’t even the first time a summer camp was swept away.
How could this happen again?
How could we forget? It’s not like 1987’s tragedy took place a century or more ago. There are lots of folks alive today who remember that terrible summer when 10 teens died.
How could there be a children’s camp in the Guadalupe flood plain four decades after such a tragedy?
It was there for the same reason we’ll watch wild fires burning homes, come the next wild fire season.
It was there for the same reason we’ll watch beach front homes collapsing into the surf, come the next storm season.
It was there for the same reason we’ll read about wilderness skiers dying in avalanches, come the next snow season.
Bad things happen. But they happen to other people.
It can’t happen here. Even when it has, over and over and over again.
And it’s not as crazy as it sounds. How many children have safely enjoyed summer camp over the last four decades?
They took the bet and won. But sooner or later, the flood waters rise, the storms sweep ashore and wreck the coast, fires run wild, and someone loses that bet.
How much risk is beauty worth? Adventure? Excitement?
Life is risky, and no one gets out alive. How much risk is the right amount?
It’s not zero. You can survive a very long time, in a bomb shelter by yourself, wrapped in bubble wrap, eating sterilized food and breathing scrubbed air. But that’s surviving, not living. And not 100 percent safe: food supplies and air scrubbers fail, there are earthquakes…
The first time I thought about this I was a teenager halfway up a cliff face overlooking Sand Beach in Acadia National Park, Maine. I’d gotten tired of the brutally cold water of the Labrador Current. The Gulf Stream famously keeps England warm by bringing the warm waters of the Caribbean north. All that warm water displaces freezing Artic water, which then flows south in the Labrador Current.
Which is still stupid cold by the time it reaches Sand Beach.
So I’d given up on trying to swim through the leg cramps from the cold, and taken to rock climbing. Half way up I realized I’d worked my way over from the sand; if I fell I’d land in a pile of jagged boulders. And I thought 30 minutes of enjoyment rock climbing is not worth risking death.
That led me to my rule of thumb for this stuff: Maximum Upside/Maximum Downside. If the maximum downside is death, the maximum upside cannot be 30 minutes of fun or one more delicious beverage.
No, if the maximum downside is death, the maximum upside needs to be something like Saves Family. Or Opens New Frontier for Humanity.
This doesn’t make me a genius. It makes me my father’s son. My parents always dreamed of living on the water, so my father the home builder built us a house in Hampton Bays on the South Fork of Long Island, New York.
Hampton Bays is home to the infamous Shinnecock Inlet, which cuts through the Dune Road barrier island to connect the North Atlantic with Shinnecock Bay. It’s infamous because of its shifting shoals, and because it points into the prevailing winds while the rising and falling tides empty and fill Shinnecock and Peconic bays, causing currents that can reach 20 knots.
The inlet can be smooth as pond when the current and wind are going in the same direction. Then the tide reverses, and in minutes enormous waves are crashing on the jetties. Many a small boat has easily sailed out to sea and lost track of the time, only to find themselves cut off by enormous waves waiting to grind them on the rock jetties.
Houses on the barrier beach have spectacular views, and tend to be large and enormously expensive.
They also tend to disappear regularly during storm season. There’s hurricane season every year, of course. But Nor’easter storms are more frequent, and quite likely to consume an entire hamlet.
No one can be surprised by this. The Shinnecock Inlet exists because the Great Hurricane of 1938 blew a hole a quarter mile wide through the entire island.
Why would anyone be surprised that smaller storms would regularly consume smaller chunks of the barrier beach, with or without houses?
So my dad did not build our house on Dune Road. He did not even build it on Shinnecock Bay. He bought land on a little arm of the bay called Smith Creek, on a dogleg canal at the back of the creek, up at the end of the canal on a small rise.
In the half-century since that house was built, through countless storms, Nor’Easters and hurricanes alike, water has never once reached that house.
Maximum Upside: live on the water for years and years, with boats tied up in the backyard and fishing every day after school.
Maximum Downside: Storm damage; even the strongest storms would at worst flood the house.
We all judge the tradeoffs between risk and reward, pain and pleasure. Some of us do it consciously; some subconsciously.
Some think they ignore risk entirely, which in fact is its own judgement.
Also, it doesn’t help that there seems to be a vicious cycle that always forms around notification systems. Notifications go out; people ignore them. In response the notifications become even more apocalyptic; when the world doesn’t end, the notifications are regarded as a joke.
Perhaps the ultimate example is hurricane notifications, which are now used by dive bars up and down the coast as invitations to Hurricane Parties!
We each find our own fit with risk.
These days I drive a Camaro convertible, which does not make my family happy. It’s not a tiny car, and I do think it is safe enough.
But somedays when I’m driving with the top down dodging as a truck sprays chunks of tire, or someone runs me off the road because they don’t see me because my 16-foot, 1.6-ton car has a low profile, I wonder:
How in the blue hell does Jim Brown manage to drive these roads on a motorcycle?
So I grieve for those lost in the floods, and those who lost homes and lives in this year’s wildfires.
And I’m sure warning systems will be improved, and Action Will Be Taken!
And I know:
It can happen here. Again.
And it will.