IN LATE OCTOBER 2012, the 80 mph winds of Hurricane Sandy pelted the tiny suburb of Pennington, New Jersey, where Brian Watson worked. Watson’s job as a fraud analyst for Bank of America Merrill Lynch required him to be on call 24/7 despite the severe weather. And so he worked — even as utility poles buckled under the storm and transformers exploded in its ferocity.
Parts of Mercer County lost power for an entire week. The disaster caused an estimated $70 billion in damage and prompted Watson’s company to look for a place that was safe from severe coastal weather. “The company discovered that they didn’t have an adequate response to the power going out or natural disasters in general,” Watson told me. Executives at the company chose Phoenix, far from the coast — and chose Watson, who led the New Jersey office during the storm, to establish an additional hub in the sunny Arizona city.
Watson, 37 at the time, moved to the Phoenix area in January 2014. He was apprehensive about the heat — he’d read about the city’s increasingly hot and deadly summers — and about moving to a city where he’d be one of a relatively small number of Black residents. But his anxiety was tempered by the fact that Collette Blakeney, whom he’d just started dating, would join him and that they’d navigate their new city together. “As long as I have her,” he told me, “I’m good.”
When Blakeney — “Coco” to her friends and family — first arrived, she felt daunted. The city was
