It is a position of enormous geographic, economic, and vertically housed privilege to experience a historic weather event through the screen-protected pane of your phone, and that’s where countless Twitter users found ourselves last night as we witnessed the remnants of Hurricane Ida turn into New York’s very own local climate tipping point in real time. For all the doomscrolling we’d almost begun accepting as part of our baseline through the Trump administration, an armed insurrection, a pandemic, and a number of wildfires, hurricanes, and derechos—and that’s just in this calendar year—nothing quite prepared those of us in the New York area for the shock of our city’s first flash flood emergency in history, as documented via a steady barrage of video snippets: of the glassy pool inside Newark Airport, of the half-submerged bus, of the truck, of the rat, of the hookah guy, of the “car wash,” of the food-delivery worker carefully walking an e-bike through waist-deep water. For a city accustomed to seeing itself as the public imagination’s go-to disaster-movie set, it was somehow exactly what we’d pictured all along.
I first came across the videos during a casual evening Twitter check; I’d walked home from dinner with a friend and was discussing with a colleague whether we’d try to make it to the office in the morning. I was aware of how rain before Tropical Storm Elsa had flooded parts of the Bronx and Manhattan earlier this summer, but I was also thinking of Hurricane Henri’s anticlimax from last week, so I took my colleague’s comment about potential flooding as a joke. The first video I saw depicted a literal cascade of floodwater pouring onto a Manhattan subway station. Next, an aerial view of a block near my neighborhood, which I’d just walked through a few hours ago.
As more videos filled up my timeline, I found myself obsessively watching them all, then checking local news accounts, the usually useless trending-topics bar, and random hashtags for more. Once I started seeing repeats—again, the privilege at play to even write this sentence—I started checking TikTok and Instagram (the former had more new content, while the latter had better carousel roundups). Anything that wasn’t a video of fast-churning water or dread-inducing depths got ignored, save for the occasional tweets articulating the surreal experience of seeing all of this online: “It’s not doomscrolling it’s catastrophe refreshing,” tweeted Times editor Dodai Stewart. Or, more succinctly from @TheCosby: “We really be tweeting through it.”
By around 1 a.m., I was still listlessly dragging my thumb down to refresh, knowing logically that I was not improving my mental state in any way. But outside of checking in with friends and neighbors—first to see if the ones with ground-level apartments were okay, then to see if anyone else was awake and wanted to trade all-caps texts and videos with me—watching everything on Twitter felt like the only deserving use of my time. Chalk it up to some overstretched journalistic impulse to bear witness, holdover millennial slacktivism, or simply the modern reality where global catastrophe looks uncannily like a Hollywood production on your screen, at least until the next morning, when the terror is made real and the death toll begins to arrive: So far at least 12 in New York City alone have been killed by the storm, with nearly all drowning in basement apartments.
I want to think that what drove my fixation to watch every possible Hurricane Ida video until I finally passed out last night still has to do with the novelty of the platform, the immediacy of our ability to share our individual realities. For context, Hurricane Sandy happened more than two years before you could post videos to Twitter. I have to acknowledge, too, that there was something compulsive about witnessing floodwater. You’re used to seeing the destruction after the fact, or the 10,000-foot aerial view, but not the water bursting into apartments [insert your favorite disaster-movie reference here]-style, or the rippling waves overtaking the BQE. There’s cinematic potency to the way the water ebbs and churns and brings to mind a countdown clock ticking away as the actors fumble toward escape. And in a way the flood videos offered something almost like validation: After carrying the psychic burden of a past year spent terrified of unseen air particles and intracellular mysteries; of the sanctioned unraveling of fundamental rights behind closed doors; of the systemic racism and abuse baked into the structure of our society; of increasingly imminent planetary deadlines, the ability to witness the arrival of such a visual horror was almost a change in routine. You could see the waters rising up in real time.
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