SLEEPING ON THE TRAIN TRACKS

Hurricane Milton is about to make landfall on central Florida’s west coast, where millions of people live, between 7 PM and midnight PST. The state of Florida is flat and most of it is barely above sea level, including the west coast, and a storm surge as high as 15 feet is expected to slam into the coast and move halfway across the middle of the state. Update: At this writing, the storm already covers the entire width of Florida and is dumping tons of rain along with high winds.

Add to this a horrendous amount of rainfall over an extended period of time, and the flooding is going to be massive. People have been trying to evacuate the area since early yesterday but now there’s massive traffic jams, hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in them and running out of gas, and many gas stations have run out of gas. A lot of these people are very likely to die.

So are all the thousands who chose to stay and hunker down, expecting to ride out the storm, when even the mayor of Tampa told everyone that if you stay, you will die. Period.

It used to be that major natural disasters were very rare in human history, and this was because even the largest cities didn’t compare to the Mega-metropolises that exist now. Even small towns have become big, and now we have tens of thousands living at the bottom of future landslides, in valleys downhill of dams holding back massive reservoirs of water, and every once in a while, entire towns are destroyed along with much of the population. The latest one was Paradise, California. Bulldozed out of a forest and heavily populated, and entirely destroyed by a fire. The true death count was never revealed but it was likely well over a thousand who didn’t escape the flames that advance at 40 miles an hour and melted entire cars into puddles of iron.

Now a wall of water is going to hit Florida, plus winds currently at 135 MPH, virtually constant lightning strikes and pouring rain. The destruction is expected to be colossal and over 3 million people live there. After the storm is past, the roads will be gone, there will be no electricity, no fresh water, no food, no medical or emergency care, and people will continue to die that weren’t killed outright when the storm hit.

This is what happens when there’s too many people. If there were a lot less, there would be no traffic jams. But when you’re stuck in a car with lightning striking all around and maybe striking your car, and the water starts rising, 2 feet, 3 feet, 4 feet, you’re going to drown in that car and you can’t sit on top of it because the high velocity winds will pick you up and play with you like a toy.

The more of us there are, the more of us are going to die when some disaster strikes. We used to value human life but the more of us there are, the less each of us is worth. I liked it better the other way, personally.