The toll and scope of disaster, whether from the projections of actuaries and the hand-wringing of emergency-services or surveying the aftermath through the most empathetic lens, is never really compartmentalized, never fully reckoned and consigned to the past. Reconnaissance that brings tragedy and all its frightfulness cinematically close and is filled with superlatives, historic records to be broken, can make it seem like we are hurdling one closed catastrophe after another—with a process of rebuilding and recovery allowed but discussed little.
The stupendous damage done from the Caribbean up the eastern flanks of the US and Canada also, I think, is something we are tempted to contain but is as resistant to that as any other hardship survived and then forgotten, only reminded by almanacs and dizzyingly unreal heights of high water marks, not only because every stern warning of calamity has come to pass (mostly heeded to and fatalities were mitigated) but also due to the chilling effects of preceding wreck and ruin: the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the chaos of Fukushima and most recently the incarceration of Italian geologists for underestimating the severity of the last earthquake to strike the north of the country. For all the closeness and willingness to share, live and as it happens as well as thoughtfully remembered and recorded, society as a whole, I think, tends to permit the coping and the healing of a natural disaster, as opposed to something wholly prosecuted by man, to bleed into the present, after a seemly period of silence, for comparative purposes and to set new benchmarks. I hope that episodes with this sort of destructive power and worse do not become so commonplace and frequent as to force commiseration, but I fear that pollution and imbalanced has made the weather unpredictable and balky and any of us could come up against such challenges at any time. Reclaiming one’s lives and livelihood is a private matter—again, something that society would rather leave buried, perhaps because of an inarticulate fear that should such experiences become too ubiquitous, recovery for anyone becomes a prospect too far gone, the tipping point breached. Regardless of how we try to move on, the people affected by this disaster, however, should know that they don’t suffer alone and that their plight is not merely a rehearsal. 
