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When something awful happens to us or someone we know, it ceases to be an abstract item in the news.
Whether it's health issues or environmental struggles, our perspective changes when impacts hit close to home. It's not just someone else's problem; now it's ours, too.
"More and more people are getting an inkling that climate change is real, even if they can't articulate why, because climate change has started to jump out of the science books and into their lives," wrote Thomas Friedman in his 2008 book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded."
Just such an epiphany struck me last month when my sister's good friend from New Zealand found climate change literally knocking on her front door. My sister met Claire during a two-year employment stint in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1989. They have kept in touch and Claire and I had a chance to meet during a visit to the States in 2005.
Claire has lived in Auckland all of her 55 years and has enjoyed the pleasant climate, natural beauty and majestic beaches. Never far from the coast, she has seen her share of crazy weather, high winds and drenching storms.
On the margin of two crustal plates, New Zealanders often refer to their seismically active archipelago as the "Shaky Isles."
"We are no stranger to natural disasters, particularly earthquakes and landslides." But nothing compared to her experiences last month.
New Zealand's largest city was inundated for six days beginning on Jan. 25. It dumped a summer's worth of rain on the wettest day. Ten inches fell in four hours during the worst of the storm, surpassing what falls in January and February combined in an average year. January 2023 became Auckland's wettest month since records began in 1869.
With soils already saturated, the second storm the following week brought extensive flooding. Water began running into Claire's home on Friday and she was forced to wade through water up to her knees to get to the relative calm of her parent's home, a short walk away and a bit uphill.
The wastewater system and treatment plants were overwhelmed by stormwater. "This left the network that moves Auckland's sewage out to massive treatment plants unable to cope with the waste of more than a million people," Claire explained. "The damage has led to signs on Auckland's North Shore beaches warning swimmers of the health risk."
The worst was over for Auckland after that week, but the area near Napier, a five-hour drive north, was drenched by twenty inches of rain from Cyclone Gabrielle two weeks later. As the "Fruit Bowl" of New Zealand, the damage to orchards and other agricultural operations will impact food supplies across the entire island.
In all, 11 people died, 1,500 cars were damaged beyond repair, 1.4 million pounds of demolition waste was landfilled. Though the death toll was lower than many feared it would be, Claire noted that several of the deaths were, nevertheless, particularly sad stories.
"One elderly lady died in her ceiling space, trying to escape the water rising in her home and a 2-year-old drowned when she fell from her pregnant mother's shoulders, trying to get to safety."
My sister's old friend sadly concluded, "Seems nowhere is safe from extreme weather these days."
John Frederick (www.johnjfrederick.com) writes about environmental issues twice each month.