A road can be part of someone’s daily life for years and still become a road they should not take tomorrow. There is something difficult about accepting that. Familiarity gives us a useful confidence, until conditions change and the confidence carries on unchanged.
The Guardian reports that coastal communities in California are preparing for flooding, with the National Weather Service warning of significant coastal flooding in San Diego and Orange counties through Thursday. Roads could close and homes and businesses could be inundated. Residents have been advised to avoid beaches at high tide and leave more distance between themselves and the ocean. These are forecasts and warnings, not confirmation that all the anticipated damage has happened.
For anyone outside the affected areas, this may remain a story about unusually high water. For someone trying to decide whether to go to work, open a business or make a familiar journey, it is also a demand to interrupt ordinary life before there is visible proof that interruption is necessary.
That is an awkward bargain. Act early and, if the worst does not happen, the inconvenience can seem pointless. Wait for certainty and some of the useful choices may already have disappeared. We cannot judge the sense of a precaution solely by whether the feared event eventually occurs.
But there is a complication in telling people to change their plans: some have much more room to do so than others. A missed day’s work does not cost everyone the same. Advice can be perfectly sound while remaining difficult to follow. Any serious understanding of preparedness has to make room for that difficulty, rather than treating every failure to act as carelessness.
This is where responsibility becomes quite ordinary. If we employ someone, depend on someone or have made arrangements with them, our response to a warning can either give them room to act or make acting harder. Insisting that everything carry on as usual is itself a decision, with consequences that may fall on somebody else.
There is no need to make the sea into a lesson. The practical question is enough: when conditions change, are we willing to release each other from yesterday’s arrangements? A cancelled appointment or a closed door may be inconvenient. Sometimes allowing that inconvenience is the most useful thing we can do.