In his essay, What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes, the late Philip Gerard provides a step-by-step emotional account of the far-reaching implications of experiencing an extreme weather event. He writes about the nervous anticipation triggered when the weather warnings are issued for his Cape Fear community; the uncertainty as to whether and how to take mitigating measures to protect life and property; the dread that the full force of the hurricane will hit North Carolina’s shores at high tide; the constant, anxious, checking for updates as the clock counts down to impact – needing to know, “When, How Hard, How Long: the trigonometry of catastrophe.”