I was in Venice on Thursday 16 June. The city flooded unexpectedly, disrupting regular activities, and I imagined that that day was the last day for Venice to exist. I have heard that in contemporary times, people imagine the apocalypse and end of things more commonly than people in other times. The end of Venice was my fear and fantasy.
I wrote this when I was there on the day of the flood.
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So people say, the flooding season is from November to January, and it is unexpected that Venice should be flooded now. The effect is that buildings and public infrastructure are flooded and that usual business is disrupted. I am sort of joking about today being the last day, but too often lately too many people keep commenting on the strangest weather ever. I wish to talk about climate change.
Venice is a city of islands in waterways. I am staying in a apartment share near the canal. I do not understand how an apartment like this would be built, but it is actually under the water level. It has a window high in the room, and standing from the window, I can look out and see water to my waist on the other side of the apartment wall. One step outside the front door of the apartment is a drop into a canal. To get to my apartment door there are interior stairs up to the outside. Is such a design common in Venice? For a city which floods, why would there be basement building design?
Fabian and I arrived yesterday and our host put us in this apartment. We had not expected to see her again until check out. Today, I was in the bathroom, and I happened to notice that the bathtub was half filled with water. I asked Fabian if he somehow filled it and forgot to drain it, and of course he said no, and came to look also. When he stepped into the room, the drain in the bathtub dramatically began to propel water up also with silt or dirt or sewage into the bathtub. I began to message the host and found that 30 minutes earlier she sent me a strange message to “pull the alarm.” I had no idea what that meant, and as I discussed with Fabian, there was a knock at the door. We opened it and a man asked to be invited in without introducing himself. His English was not good and our Italian is horrible, but we presumed he meant well. He jumped into the storage to grab an odd looking board with fittings and, after putting that aside, began to move our bed. Behind the bed was a large pipe with a handle on it, perhaps a sluice gate if that is the correct term, that he pressed down with a mechanism that seemed to create a barrier to movement within the pipe. Then after he took the board outside and began to adjust fittings on the outside of our doorway. At this point we realized that in Venice such buildings install tall barriers in front of front doors, so that if water rises 2 feet over the bottom of a doorstep then still water will not enter a doorway.
Our host arrived and explained that this man was her father. Some minutes later her boyfriend arrived also to assist – apparently this was an emergency, and unexpected. I am only in Venice for a few days, but she told me that I could install an app on my phone to alert me of floods. Everyone here, she said, used this alert service. The water was higher than I had seen it in the last day, and even to my inexperienced eyes seemed higher than the building was designed to regularly manage, but things did not seem so urgent to me yet. Fabian and I decided to go out for a walk. Soon in the streets we saw flooding everywhere.
Some walkways were a little wet, then we saw shops had flooded interiors. Imagine any store you like, but with water on the ground to cover one’s feet. Soon we reached the limit of where we could walk without becoming wet, and a street hawker approached us to sell us boot covering to the knees. I was happy to remove my shoes to store in my bag, and roll up my pants. Fabian was not keen on the idea of walking in sewage water and said that he neither wanted waterproof boots nor to go around barefoot. I think it was an afterthought, but later this evening, he told me he was concerned about some scratches on his leg. I went ahead to explore a bit and Fabian went home.
Saint Mark’s Square was totally flooded. Earlier in the day we had seen pigeons, and now there were seagulls only. There were people splashing around in the strangeness of the situation. The coffee houses in the square were closed except Florian’s, and there, the musicians were playing to an audience sitting in courtyard chairs that had water just below their seats. When I saw this I thought that today could be the apocalypse for Venice – from today forward, the weather changes will make the city too expensive to maintain.
Climate change is discussed continually everywhere that such discussions can happen, and such discussions can happen almost anywhere. Lately in the present United States presidential election cycle there is a candidate running on a platform that includes denial that any climate change is occurring. To say that a presidential candidate would emphasize such a point is to say that approximately half of Americans might believe such a thing, and I think it is true that many or most Americans or people in general do not recognize climate change as a serious issue.
In 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit Southeast Texas and Southwestern Louisiana, which is the region where I spent my childhood. Everyone I knew there was affected by this storm. A strange part of the experience for me was that in the media cycle, all reports that I saw talked about how the storm affected New Orleans, which was the major city in the region. However, damage of the sort that happened in that city also happened in every other city in the region, but small cities do not get media coverage, and the people in those cities get less support. Most people who would watch the news just think about the city in the reports. People from New Orleans and the surrounding area traveled hundreds of miles east to my own hometown, perhaps looking for work or to start over by settling there, and perhaps not hearing in advance of the damage everywhere in the region. A friend from my youth, Adam, had extensive damage to his home in the storm, and insufficient insurance for this. Some years later he committed suicide. He had various problems in his life, but certainly, having damage to his home equal to at least a year of his salary is a stressful, life-changing event. Years after the storm the financial obligations which the storm put into his life were a contributing negative factor to the general loss of pleasure in life and diminished his will to live. A worrisome part about that hurricane has been the fear that it would happen again, and perhaps that such storms could happen regularly. People will have the will to rebuild and start over if it seems that there can be a bright future, but if there is climate change, and regular storms of this sort are a likelihood, then rebuilding in the same place in the same way would not make sense.
From about that year to the present, weather in Seattle has warmed, and so far as I know, most people like this. I am not sure that anyone says about the effects of warmer weather on wildlife in the region. The sakura festivals in Seattle have seemed to be mis-timed, because the blossoms never seem to happen when the festival is scheduled. Has it always been difficult to predict when plants will bloom?
In 2012 I was living in New York City when Hurricane Sandy hit. The Long Island beaches were disrupted. New Jersey was flooded, and I even visited the downtown areas with my boyfriend Marcus of the time to do disaster tourism. There is a sort of spite in New York that the Long Island beach houses are vacation homes for the rich, but I am not sure if that is true, and that New Jersey in general can tolerate any misfortune, but I think that bad weather affecting anyone in a region really affects everyone in the region. The major problem in New York City was the unprecedented flooding of the subways. If NYC did not have subways, then NYC as currently imagined could not exist. If the subways flood once then that is probably okay because New York finds a way to manage. Could climate change make subway flooding more regular? Could NYC tolerate floods like this every few years?
If it could happen that a slight weather change could have some effect on public infrastructure, like for example, suppose that Venice, Texas, or New York flooded once every 10 years instead of once every 50, could that make an entire city unlivable? Natural disasters are expensive and not something for which any city has budget. When scientists talk about climate change, is this what they mean? A small bit of water coming in when it is unexpected, and over a matter of water covering one’s feet, an entire city might shut down?
Venice is a lovely city. I hope it remains intact another thousand years.