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July 1 - August 30, 2022
The environmentalism I grew up with was one of privilege, void of interrogation of environmental injustice or action related to environmental racism.
wanted to tell people about the work I was doing, but I started to notice as soon as I said the words emergency management, people’s eyes glazed over. I would go to a coffee shop or a bar in Fargo and someone would ask me what I do. When I told them what I was studying, they would give me a confused look and say something along the lines of, “so you’re a firefighter?” I didn’t know how to explain what I did.
It’s not like I could hit them with “the profession of emergency management is the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disasters”
my discipline studies “how humans and their institutions interact and cope with hazards and vulnerabilities, and resulting events and ...
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I needed a better way to quickly articulate what I did, so I started saying I was a disasterologist. No confusing definitions needed—peopl...
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Accepting the need to manage the consequences of climate change is not conceding that we are doomed. Instead, it is a recognition of the communities that are already living through the climate crisis.
The climate crisis looks like 2019’s Midwest river flooding, urban flooding in Houston, heat waves so severe that death tolls among vulnerable populations like the elderly are already rising, droughts that bring the end to generations-old farmland, and a wildfire season that is extended year-round. The disaster records are breaking so fast that in the time it’s taken me to write this book, I’ve had to entirely rewrite the following section.
Activism and local community organizing has long been the route to protecting our communities and the future will be no different. As disaster after disaster exposes the inadequacy of government response, survivors act to prevent their own suffering, seek justice, and rebuild their lives.
Dr. M seems to ignore businesses / private sector.
eventually co-opted into war.
The attack was a continuations of a war already declared and prosecuted against us.
There were no streetlights under which kids played, no porch lights left on for teenagers rushing home to make curfew, no blue-light glow from late-night TV, or twinkling lights on backyard patios.
The hurricane didn't cause that in this ward.
that the national media generally, and especially as compared to local media, often fails to adequately and correctly capture the complexities of disasters. This isn’t just frustrating, it is also dangerous. The media has an important role to play in how we respond to disasters, especially in a situation like New Orleans, when government is failing to meet survivors’ most basic needs.
An overwhelming 1.1 million housing units were damaged,30 accounting for about 70 percent of available housing in New Orleans.31 The number is staggering, but it does not tell us what the people who lived in those 1.1 million housing units needed. As I talked with New Orleanians, I learned how that number alone did not tell us how many of those homes were damaged to the point of being unlivable. It didn’t tell us how long it would take to repair each home or how much it would cost. It did not tell us if the owners could afford those costs. It did not tell us if the homeowners needed temporary
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Quantifying the damage is not the same as understanding what survivors need, which is where our focus should be.
What the public was correctly picking up on but did not have the language to explain (including sixteen-year-old Samantha) was that Katrina wasn’t a disaster. It was a catastrophe.
Catastrophe is the term disaster researchers use to describe the worst of the worst.32 You know them when you see them. (Think: the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and Hurricane Maria in 2017.)
What is most important to understand though, is that the way you manage a disaster isn’t the same as the way you manage a catastrophe. Catastrophes are not just big disasters. They are something different, something more complicated.
There were others who refused to leave. They were determined to ride out the storm at home as they had during Betsy, Camille, and all the other hurricanes for generations.
The curse of knowedge / curse of experience
In the end, 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater.
What percent of NOLA is below MSL?
The efforts of first responders were further hampered because 16 percent of the New Orleans Police Department did not report for duty during Katrina, which is a rare example of first responders abandoning their jobs during a disaster.37 Although, even if they all had reported for duty they may not have been much help. There were extensive criticisms over how law enforcement, as a resource, was used. NOPD patrolled the city for looters, rather than the many more pressing needs like search and rescue. NOPD leadership also perpetuated horrible rumors about violence at the Superdome
A defining characteristic of catastrophes is that local leadership is incapacitated. This may be because local officials are directly impacted themselves, or because they do not have the resources to respond, if not both. This was obviously the case in New Orleans.
We then got to watch federal officials learn an extremely obvious lesson in real time: the nation’s top emergency manager should probably have some emergency management experience.
local and state resources are overwhelmed. It can be assumed local government is not functioning and will likely be unable to request help in the traditional way.
multiple congressional investigations, dozens of books, hundreds of reports, and thousands of studies have parsed every minute of the Katrina response, all to determine what went wrong and why. The answer can largely be summarized as: decades of policy decisions made at all levels of government, including underinvestment in infrastructure, racist housing policies, backroom development deals, and ill-advised post-9/11 changes to emergency management collided with incompetence, bad communication, and poor planning to create catastrophe.
The government failure to lead recovery loomed large over these talks.
one horror story after another of being stuck in an endless loop of red tape. Through our dust masks and over lunch breaks, homeowners explained that FEMA does not just show up with a check. Survivors had to work their way through a series of complex program requirements before they could be eligible for aid.
Even once they did get some help few expected it would be enough to rebuild, let alone make them whole.
Those programs intentionaly are not designed to make survivors whole.
The binders changed color over the years as they were dragged to meetings and became covered in construction dust and specks of paint. The rings would eventually break as they became too full to close. If you asked nicely, homeowners would proudly show you the organizational system they had designed to keep all their paperwork straight.
they were “Recovery Binders.”
It turns out, that just like the binders, the experience of survivors post-Katrina wasn’t actually that different from what many people go through post-disaster.
In 2015, a study found that 46 percent of Americans said they cannot afford a $400 emergency.67 They were talking about everyday emergencies like an unexpected car repair or unexpected ER visit.
There are a number of major issues with the NFIP like the accuracy of flood maps, incentive structures, and premium costs. Reform is needed, but the existence of the program is a lifeline for homeowners across the country who need help recovering from flooding.
Despite all this, as of 2018 there are only around five million flood insurance policies, suggesting that as a country, we are dramatically underinsured.
In New Orleans the lack of flood insurance took a particularly insidious turn as many homeowners were told they did not need to have flood insurance—because they were protected by the federal levees.72
Only around 75 percent of disasters that are requested are actually granted a declaration by the president, which underscores that it is only the very worst disasters that receive federal help.75
As part of this application process survivors needed to provide paperwork that proved they owned their home—paperwork that, for many, had been destroyed during the flood.
The same barriers that people face in accessing these types of government assistance on a good day are amplified post-disaster.
The way the SBA disaster loans are approved is a good example of how systemic racism is built into US recovery programs. Loans are given out largely based on the basis of the applicant’s credit score, which, for many Black New Orleanians, was affected by the racial wealth gap created by decades of systemic housing, education, and policing discrimination.
An analysis following Hurricane Matthew found that in a majority Black area of Jacksonville, Florida, the SBA approved 26 percent of applicants compared to 84 percent approved in the majority white community of Ponte Vedra Beach.84
result was that many people were not back in their homes, schools were not reopened, businesses remained shut down, and the streets were falling apart for a long time.
three months after the storm, there were still 4,500 people living in temporary shelters, not even temporary housing. Five months later, 85 percent of schools, two-thirds of hospitals, and most food services and transportation routes remained closed.
They couldn’t hit Pause on their lives for years to try and figure out these complex and ever-changing programs. The entire process was exhausting in its absurdity.
Part of the formula used to determine how much a homeowner would receive was based on the home’s pre-Katrina value, rather than the cost of actually rebuilding. This meant that homeowners in Black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward were receiving less than homeowners in white neighborhoods like Lakeview, even when their home had comparable damage and costs to rebuild.
More often, though, technical expertise remained elusive and we improvised.
There should have been resources to hire people with training and expertise that could rebuild homes correctly, quickly, safely, and more securely than they had been before the flood. There should have been enough money for screw guns.
came to understand the terms build back better, windows of opportunity, and blank slates as the language of disaster capitalists. These phrases are meant to manipulate. They are a palatable articulation of disaster capitalism created from the co-opted hope of disaster survivors. It is rhetoric used to persuade the public of neoliberal agendas.
without a clear signal from government it is hard for survivors to make informed decisions.
Recovery is a dance and in New Orleans no one knew the choreography. They weren’t even listening to the same song.
Developing green spaces as a way to minimize flooding is a legitimate mitigation strategy, and implementing mitigation during recovery is appropriate. However, what the green dot map showed was that some property, often belonging to marginalized residents, would be sacrificed.
After the storm, a federal program was developed to give tarps out to homeowners whose roofs had sustained damage. The idea was that installing tarps would prevent further destruction to the home until a new roof could be built. A Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation by the Times-Picayune found that the federal government was paying up to $5,000 to have a blue tarp installed on a house, while the workers who were actually installing it made only a fraction.105 One company received the federal contract and they subcontracted to another company, which then subcontracted to another company, which
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Disaster survivors don’t just have to survive the actual disaster; they have to survive the recovery too.
