On Friday January 14, 2022, blast was heard 2,000 km away in New Zealand and 3,300 km away in Australia. Boats crashed into a quiet harbor in Southern California, a remote island was battered in Japan by 4 foot waves and two women were swept to their deaths on a beach in Peru some 6,000 miles from an undersea volcanic eruption so powerful that the tsunami which it set off stirred ocean waters halfway across the globe.

But on Sunday, as reports of the volcano’s effect crowded in from far-flung countries, there was little word from Tonga, the island nation just 40 miles from the site of the extraordinary explosion. As concerns from all over the world grew, the nation of about 100,000 people remained largely cut off from the rest of the world, its undersea internet cables knocked out of commission by the volcano.

In Tonga on Sunday, many residents lost not only communication channels but electric power. Up to 80,000 people there could be affected, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies told the BBC.

New Zealand and other nations in the region pledged to give Tonga aid to recover. But with heavy concentrations of airborne ash making flights impossible, just like the Iceland volcano eruption in 2021, it was difficult even to know what was needed. Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister, said flights over Tonga were planned for Monday or Tuesday, depending on ash conditions.

Tonga has experienced a succession of natural disasters in recent years. In 2018, more than 170 homes were destroyed and two people killed by Cyclone Gita, a Category 5 tropical storm. In 2020, Cyclone Harold caused about $111 million in damage.

A month after Hurricane Katrina, I returned home in New Orleans. There lay my house, reduced to waist high ruins, smelly and dirty.

Before the trip, I’d had my car fixed. When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill, she noticed my Louisiana license plate. “You from New Orleans?” she asked. I said I was. “No charge,” she said, and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet. The next day I went for a haircut, and the same thing happened.

As my wife was studying in Florida, we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage (抵押贷款) on our ruined house. We looked at many places, but none was satisfactory. We’d begun to accept that we’d have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a while, when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kennedy in California. He’d read some pieces I’d written about our sufferings for Slate, the online magazine, and wanted to give us (“no conditions attached”) a new house across the lake from New Orleans.

It sounded too good to be true, but I replied, thanking him for his exceptional generosity, that we had no plans to go back. Then a poet at the University of Florida offered to let his house to me while he went to England on his one-year paid leave. The rent was rather reasonable. I mentioned the poet’s offer to James Kennedy, and the next day he sent a check covering our entire rent for eight months.

Throughout this painful experience, the kindness of strangers has done much to bring back my faith in humanity. It’s almost worth losing your worldly possessions to be reminded that people are really nice when given half a chance.

A Recipe for Avoiding Disaster

Every log cabin homeowner has had those “what if” thoughts. What if conditions become so dry that a wildfire starts near my cabin? What if the rain is so relentless that the lake outside my doorstep begins to overflow its banks? What if tornado-fueled winds threaten to destroy everything I’ve created?

【小题1】. That’s the bad news. The good news? There are ways you can use your landscaping to minimize the damage that extreme weather can cause and still have an attractive yard all at the same time. Here are a few tips for using your outdoor resources in a way that can lessen the impact of a natural disaster on your log home:

WILDFIRES: The key to keeping fires from damaging your home is regular maintenance with a focus on how fires spread. Begin by removing dead plants like trees and shrubs promptly and trimming (修剪) any branches that overhang the property or have close contact with the log walls. 【小题2】. It’s also a good idea to install irrigation in a 50-foot radius around your home to help create a fireproofing perimeter.

FLOODS: A massive amount of flooding that leaves your house and yard in standing water is a tall order in terms of prevention strategies, but more moderate flooding can be stopped with a few simple landscaping tricks. 【小题3】. You can create extra drainage (排水系统) through the use of strategically placed stones and bushes that direct water away from the foundation.

TORNADOES: To minimize the damage caused by the sudden gusts tornado weather brings, be sure to keep trees and shrubs trimmed. 【小题4】.