West Virginia

People drive into it.

More than half of all flood deaths are vehicle-related. It takes twelve inches of moving water to carry off a small car and eighteen to move a larger one. It is almost never a road you do not know — it is the one you have driven a thousand times, where you cannot see how deep it is or whether the road is still there underneath.

The storm is not the emergency. The outage is.

What kills people afterwards is the generator. Portable generators cause roughly 100 unintentional carbon monoxide deaths a year in the United States, and they cluster in the days after a storm when the power is out. Carbon monoxide is odourless, and by the time you are confused enough to notice, you are too confused to act. Outside, far from the house, never in a garage with the door open.

Underestimated because of the name.

The rain and the outage do the damage, not the wind — which means the same generator and floodwater failures that follow a hurricane follow this too.

This is the one that leaves you dark for a week.

Ice brings the lines down across a wide area at once, so restoration runs into days rather than hours. That is what makes it dangerous — the longer the power is off, the more likely somebody brings a generator or a grill somewhere it should not be.

The illness is not the whole emergency.

In June 2020, 41% of US adults had avoided medical care because of COVID concerns — 12% skipped urgent or emergency care and 31% skipped routine care. The households that struggled were the ones with a prescription, a chronic condition or a caregiving duty and no plan for any of them.

It follows the fire.

A burn scar sheds water instead of absorbing it, so the slide arrives in a later rainy season — often after everyone has stopped thinking about the wildfire that caused it.