Half my city is underwater. Here’s what’s on my mind:

I live in Canoas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where half the city flooded.

I’m fine, my family is fine. And if you’re reading this, you probably already know the basics about the flood. If you don’t, here’s the relevant article on Wikipedia. And here’s my report, in bits and pieces.

• Canoas feels like a beach town this week, and I’m not talking about the actual flood. Everywhere I went, there were strange cars towing speedboats, jet skis, dinghies, and canoes. People were packing up to leave their homes for a few days, loading up mattress-topped sedans with whatever they needed, or were afraid would be looted. With the water out and the unseasonable warm days, everyone is dressed a little more shabbily, everyone’s hair looks a little worse. With people fleeing the flood zone and rushing up for supplies, downtown is empty and there are traffic jams in relatively poorer areas of town.
• It also feels, obviously, postapocalyptic. I found a box of disposable cups and plastic plates in the back of the cabinet and felt like a millionaire. I saw an empty 5-gallon water jug on the trash and it took a lot of brain power and self-possession not stop the car. They’re handing out water at the mineral water company, but you have to take your own jug. That hunk of plastic looked like a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. I’m still thinking about it a day later.
• I shaved with pool water today, and I showered at a stranger’s apartment yesterday. When I entered her bathroom, I realized I had left my clean underwear in the car. Now I’m wondering if there’s a YouTube tutorial on how to make the most out of whore’s baths.
• The second disaster is real. Brazil is a low-trust society, so lots of people people absolutely refuse to donate money. They buy random products to donate, which volunteers then have to sort. At the supermarket, a woman was buying six tubes of toothpaste to donate, and she looked at me like I was crazy when suggested simply wiring the money to an organization. While I stayed on the other side of town, I talked to a man who had made 30 meals and then drove all the way across town trying to find a place to donate them — every shelter had too much food already. I know this man, the money he spent on that food will make a difference in his life. And yet, it was probably wasted.
• My first instinct is to try and set up something like a micro version of Give Directly, but I’m pretty sure no one would trust me.
• On the first night of the flood, I texted a cop friend to ask how he was doing. “Fudido,” he replied. “Fucked”. I’m pretty sure I know what he meant. That’s all the time he had to reply, he helping out with the rescue efforts.
• Brazil is grossly underpoliced. Everybody is back home because they’re afraid of looters, and stores are closing up early as much because half of their workforce is in shelters as because they’re afraid of being robbed. There are rumors that rival factions are gearing up to fight inside the shelters.
• I’m sick and tired of the war comparisons, especially people comparing it to Gaza. There are no sides to this thing. No enemies to negotiate with. And it’s even worse that no one seems to mention the one war crime it does resemble, aka, the Destruction of the Kakhova Dam.
• I mean, that empty jug was on the trash, not in the trash. It looked clean!
• I put my house on the market a few months ago — we want a bigger place, basically. Now I don’t know what the hell is gonna happen to our city’s real estate market. Will it crash, since so many people were wiped out? Skyrocket as half the city tries to move to the other half? Go bubblicious if the government offers cheap credit? Freeze up, as other sellers are afraid they won’t be able to buy a new home? Just generally flail about?
• I ran into another cop at the drugstore. I told him news about my case and reiterated my willingness to help out. “Yeah, I don’t know when we’re going back to working on cases like yours.”
• My wife is a school principal. It’s a small institution, established by my great-aunt 60 years ago. It’s less than a quarter-mile from the river, and on one of the lowest regions in our neighborhood. Our daughter goes there. Before the flood hit, I went to the school and helped her carry textbooks and computers to save them from the flood. While she was locking up, I went up to the sidewalk to look at her classmates’ homes and found a guest out front:

• The turtle swam away and we got into our car as the fire truck blasted an evacuation order. The water level rose a feet or two a few days later, and we’re counting ourselves pretty lucky.
• The weather forecast for this weekend is rain.

I published that on May 7th. Here’s some more:

• It doesn’t help that the mayor has been in and out of office throughout the last three years because of corruption charges.
• There’s a lot of fake news going around, and we tend to focus on the lurid stuff — rampant rapes at shelters, hundreds of bodies floating on the other side of town, but there’s a lot of the prosaic stuff too. For instance, someone decided to tell people to turn off the water to their houses because of dirt in the pipes when the water came back, and people bought it. Now the water is coming back in fits and starts and people desperate for water have turned their shut-off valves.
• So stupid. What, in 24 hours whatever dirt in the pipes was going to magically go away?
• Talked to my cop friend again. He’s exhausted. Volunteered for thirty hours. He didn’t fish any bodies out of the water, but he did help rescue a dog. There’s a video, it’s adorable.
• An acquaintance just announced she’s moving to another state for the rest of the year. Pretty sure she won’t be alone, and pretty sure the move is not gonna be temporary for a lot of people.

May 9, 2024. This is progress, actually.

• I originally wrote I wanted something similar to GiveDirectly, and apparently that’s what the government intends to do. The relevant sentence below says: “The committee managing donations to SOS Rio Grande do Sul has decided that each family (based on criteria to be defined) will receive R$ 2,000.00 [a little under U$400]”.

• It’s not much, a little under the average monthly income for people in our state. But it’s on the right track.
• In terms of preventing this catastrophe from ever happening again, I’m afraid people are going to think small. People were starting to realize Porto Alegre’s woefully inadequate floodwalls downtown should come down, but now they’re probably going to stay put for another 40 or 50 years. As soon as the possibility of building a channel was raised further South, the bien-pensant have decided it’s obviously stupid. Me, I want a whole mess of ideas — wider rivers, channels upstream, channels downstream, dry dams, decommissioned quarries, moveable floodwalls, whatever. I want Dutch consultants, Venetians, Thai. I want anything but for status quo bias to win.
• Instead, what we’ll get is this: More career civil servants hired, at the cost of further crippling capital investments. Cheap credit, but too little new construction, making real estate even less affordable. Maybe even rent controls, because our cities haven’t been devastated enough.