It may be Time to Rethink the Columbus Day Storm

Last month Hurricane Ida blasted Florida, and its remnants moved north, causing massive flooding.

Washington Post last month

Yesterday for its 60th anniversary the paper looked back at the remnants of Typhoon Freda as the Columbus Day Storm of 1962.

History column yesterday

A comparative stance risks lapsing into simple whataboutism. The equivalent to category 3 hurricane winds is no small thing.

But as we consider the "mindboggling" impacts of that remnant typhoon here, it may be time to do more about considering it relatively rather than absolutely, to do more for placing it in context - not merely the context in 1962, but the context in our changing climate and the context with other disasters nationwide, including prospects for future disaster.

Three days at TB Times; Washington Post
on intensification from climate change

The iconic status of the Columbus Day Storm isn't exactly nostalgia, no one is really longing for a return to that particular moment in the past, but isn't it still being offered as a disruption to the normal fabric of a simpler, better time? The toppled Circuit Rider Statue is a key image and seems to express a threat to our Oregon myth of origin.

This approach to the anniversaries may also impede our ability to think critically about likely forms of future disaster. With climate disruption, we are likely to have to face some future remnant typhoon whose impacts are much worse than that storm. We still see the Columbus Day Storm as an off-the-charts outlier, but as with our 117 degree heat dome episode last year, and the orange skies in early September of 2020, exceedingly improbable and rare events are growing less improbable and rare.

With our carbon pollution Mother Nature is just laughing: You ain't seen nothing yet.