As I sat stranded in a friend’s Manhattan apartment, watching nature make a mockery of my plans, I had a hard time tearing myself away from local Channel 4’s coverage of what New York's Governor has called “Sandy’s fury.” Sopping beachfronts were swarming with reporters barely able to stand in the wind; governors, mayors, and officials of all sorts were giving press conferences, detailing what was closed where, whom they’ve talked to and when, and what they’d done to manage the fallout of a historic storm. When they weren’t giving pressers, they (or their minions) were tweeting about the latest developments: a gust here, a flood there. ConEd, provider of the city’s power, robocalled my friend and just about everyone on Monday morning, to warn them that, at some point in the near future, the lights might go out. The city government sent SMS alerts to warn people to get inside–that is, it had not evacuated from the lowest lying areas.

To everyone around me, this seemed absolutely normal—to be expected, even—but to me, it was—well, it made me want to weep through an off-key rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

Two years and two months ago, you see, I was stranded in an apartment in a different city and watched nature wreak havoc around me. It was the Moscow of early August, 2010, and, after a hot, dry summer, much of Western Russia caught on fire. By morning on August 6, the smoke from the peat bog fires around Moscow reached the capital. It was toxic smoke, full of harmful particles, with levels of carbon monoxide reaching nearly seven times the allowable limit. According to the country’s chief pulmonologist, breathing such air does “damage to an average of 20 percent of red blood cells in a human body, which equals to the effect of two packs of cigarettes smoked within three or four hours.” The smoke was visible from space, and scientists said they had spotted pyrocumulus clouds, which appear during volcanic eruptions and nuclear tests. As the toxic cloud hovered over the city for days, morgues overflowed with old people who weren’t up for the pulmonary challenge and healthier people reported headaches, the first sign of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Through it all, the Russian authorities and the official Russian press were largely silent. Russia has never been a transparent place where information flows freely, but when it was most needed, information became hardest to find. Should we leave the city? If so, where were the areas clear of smoke? How could we get there, and what was happening with the airports and train stations and roads? If we stayed, what precautions should we take to minimize inhalation and death? And, if you’re out in the regions and there’s fire approaching, what do you do? Russians (and I) were left to figure this stuff out on our own.

But, unlike the efficient, rational things that are theoretically supposed to happen when government gets out of the way, things just spiraled into dog-eat-dog chaos. There was a run on the pharmacies for facemasks, a run on the train stations and airports for a way out. Imported air conditioning units that could filter out the harmful smoke were hoarded by the corrupt border authorities until their price skyrocketed, making them far out of reach for those who needed them most: the elderly barely getting by on their pensions. And instead of trying to find ways to save the rapidly dying elderly, Moscow authorities merely pretending there was nothing amiss. Or worse: there were reports of doctors being sacked for talking to the press about the overcrowded morgues and a death rate that had suddenly quadrupled.