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Fahrenheit 122
The Thing About Floods and Climate Change
What you don’t get on the news
When you are sweeping out the dirty water from your house, throwing the damp carpet out on the street, it’s the smell that remains.
Somewhere between damp carpet, river mud and open sewage.
The smell. That’s the thing about floods you don’t get on the news. The smell. You can’t get rid of it. The smell, the smell.
A kid is mugging for the camera on a surfboard as he paddles past the tiled roofs of houses. A kettle is bobbing along in an eddy while a car floats past in orange water.
The houses are now shells of former homes. The walls covered in gagging mud of who-knows-what when the drains burst.
“Where’s the army?” the woman says as she throws out her furniture in a pile, “Where are they? I lived here twenty years and now look at it.”
The loud warnings for 2022
‘As infections move into older age groups, a large wave of hospital admissions should be expected,” — Metro, 24 December 2021
There are loud warnings for the planet this year, but did we hear them over the pandemic?
