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July 1 - August 30, 2022
Acknowledging the regularity of disaster recoveries shifted my perspective. If disasters happened so frequently and communities had to recover so often, why were we so bad at it? And why did people not seem to know disaster survivors were being put through this? On a church floor in Joplin, where we slept, my body was exhausted but my mind raced as I wondered how we could continue to allow people to go through this turmoil again and again, without doing anything to make it better.
the disasters were happening faster than we could rebuild.
Often we talk about recovery as something that happens to a place—but really, recovery becomes the place.
not only can the trauma of living through a disaster contribute to mental health impacts among survivors, but the stress of the recovery process itself can as well.
These deaths, and others indirectly caused by the disaster, often go unrecognized in official death tolls.
much research there is about disasters and how little of it has made its way into practice. A century of disaster research is just sitting here, and yet changes in the field, based on this work, are rare.
Our approach to recovery is rooted in America’s dominant political ideology—that the government should limit its involvement in citizens’ lives.
People who have the time, ability, and resources to navigate the recovery process can find some help through SBA loans or FEMA’s individual assistance programs. But this does not work for everyone.
We may now have a glossy National Disaster Recovery Framework,117 but the underlying bootstrap approach remains—complete
Years of policies have funneled the economically poor into physically vulnerable areas. A lack of money and institutional support has exacerbated this vulnerability as people are unable to afford mitigation or preparedness efforts like raising their homes to prevent flooding or buying insurance. So when a hurricane comes along, it is these areas with higher physical vulnerability that bear the brunt of the storm and suffer the most severe consequences.
It is a ruthless cycle steeped in centuries of racist and classist policies and that is out of line with a proactive approach to minimizing community vulnerability.
It was not always the intent. Too often, perhaps, but not always.
but in a country where the education system, healthcare system, and criminal justice system are all designed to uphold white elitism, why would the emergency management system be any different?
Dr. M misses an opportunity to not blame , but to illuminate the problems and the underlying policies that exacerbate them and to help chart a different path.
Despite the flooding in Camp Ellis, the storm was far from the worst-case scenario. Across the state thousands lost power, a few streets in downtown Portland flooded, and flights were canceled, but there wasn’t enough damage to warrant a Presidential Disaster Declaration. There were no FEMA checks. The national disaster nonprofits did not descend. Donations were not collected. The national media didn’t pick up the story. Mainers
EVERY DISASTER YOU have yet to experience in your lifetime has already begun. The threads of risk are spun out over decades, even centuries, until they crescendo into disaster.
The decisions individuals and institutions make manufacture disaster134 and across the country our risk is growing.
The story of Saco reflects a familiar, global reality: naturally vulnerable places are often located where people need or want to live. And today, there are simply more people living in more dangerous places.
as recently as 2019 there were proposals to build new luxury apartments—aptly named The Waters—and businesses right at the river’s edge despite the obvious flood risk.
Flooding is to be expected when you live beside the ocean. For some, ocean views and the ability to walk to the beach outweigh that risk. Others stay because it is where their families have always lived, or because the water is tied to their livelihood and way of life. As someone who grew up along the shore, I get it. You can show me all the flood-risk maps in the world but the coast is home. It sounds ridiculous but I felt claustrophobic living in landlocked states.
The development of these places where people want, or need, to live has itself increased our risk. Unchecked development and industrialization has led to detrimental impacts on the environment, including the destruction of ecosystems like the dunes in Camp Ellis that once served as natural mitigation.
In the past, when Camp Ellis did flood, residents could quickly rebuild their homes, but today’s recoveries are more complicated.139 The costs and technical skill required to rebuild modern homes can elongate the recovery period. Washed-out roads cannot simply be replaced with new dirt. Instead, repairing damage to roadways, wastewater, sewage, and electrical systems can take months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. This complexity contributes to the rising costs of disasters.
The presence of complex infrastructure and technology means more can go wrong, in more ways, and with greater consequence.
Disasters happen when we fail to manage risk, and when decisions are made that increase our vulnerability.
In a response to French writer Voltaire, Rousseau argued, “nature did not construct twenty thousand houses of six to seven stories there, and that if the inhabitants of this great city had been more equally spread out and more lightly lodged, the damage would have been much less and perhaps of no account.”142
This was a good sign, because often when mitigation projects are not implemented, it is because they lack community participation.
Dr. Thomas Birkland has studied how some disasters lead to the implementation of mitigation or other policy changes. These disasters, known as “focusing events,” must capture the attention of both the public and policymakers, be sudden and dramatic, relatively uncommon, and affect a concentrated geographic area.149
There was one final slap across the face. The Corps would agree to the spur project, but in exchange the town would have to agree to relieve the Corps of all future responsibility.
This seems like some OMB shenanigans here.
it is not climate change alone that creates our risk, but instead weakens what is already fragile.
Experts including disaster researchers, firefighters, government officials, and journalists were quick to correct him.161
It is these risk assessments that form the foundation, at least in theory, for what a community can do to minimize or prevent disaster, what we in emergency management call mitigation. Successful mitigation requires us to correctly identify the source of our risk.
Most disasters are preventable, or their severity can at least be significantly minimized. Learning how to do this is a fundamental part of emergency management.
hot water heaters,
Water heaters
A study from the National Institute of Building Science found that for every $1 the federal government spends on mitigation, $6 is saved in response and recovery.
The problem is that there has not been enough mitigation fast enough to make a difference.
Camp Ellis is the poster child for a community that has spent decades working on the same problem with no permanent solution.
The process of identifying a community’s risks, sorting through the technical options for how to mitigate those risks, organizing local leadership, getting community buy-in, and securing funding, through actual project completion does not happen quickly or easily.
Efficiency and timeliness are fundamental to the successful completion of mitigation projects. Disasters do not stop while a community figures out how to navigate mitigation programs, and every minute a project is not implemented is one where the community remains vulnerable.
We know timing matters, but unfortunately that runs in direct opposition to the process of applying for federal funding, which is complex and time-consuming. The longer it takes to implement mitigation, the greater the likelihood that more damage is done. Further, the longer a community goes without the needed changes, the more difficult it can become to find a technical solution.
The town could implement land-use policies that would prevent future construction where the neighborhood once stood. They could turn the neighborhood into green space, an extension of the neighboring public beach or nearby state park. This would permanently eliminate the flooding problems in Camp Ellis and have the added benefit of extra protection for the homes that sit farther inland—an important consideration, given that sea level rise threatens to bring the shore closer to these other properties.
People move when all other reasonable options are exhausted—when there is no other choice.
Politicians often talk of managed retreat as though it is a new strategy that will need to be used only in rare circumstances in the far-off future. In reality, it is a strategy we have a long history of using and are already actively doing. What they call “managed retreat” is what we in emergency management call “buy-outs” and the federal government has been funding them for decades. Since 1989 FEMA alone has funded forty thousand home buy-outs across the country.
It is easy to sit at a think tank in Washington, DC, writing policy recommendations that houses along the coast should not be rebuilt because the seas are rising, but it’s much harder to stand in front of the people who live in those houses at a town hall meeting and tell them that they have to abandon home.
In 2019, the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) released a report that found buy-out programs take an average of five years to complete.
In the years between their home being destroyed and knowing they will be bought out, something that is not at all a guarantee, homeowners struggle to make recovery decisions. Should they spend their money on rebuilding their flooded home, even though it could be torn down in a few years? Or should they not rebuild and cross their fingers that a buy-out eventually comes through?
If they choose not to rebuild, where will they live until they actually get the buy-out money? If they decided not to rebuild and then the buy-out falls through, then what do they do? Start the rebuilding process years after the disaster? Abandon the home?
Even once the government signals they will agree to a buy-out and it looks like there will be funding, more questions must be addressed. How much money will people receive? Exactly which houses will be included? When will people need to move? Where will they move to? When will the properties b...
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There are also discrepancies in who has received buy-out funding. An NPR investigation found that FEMA disproportionately funds buy-out programs in white comm...
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This is particularly frustrating because often it was housing, transportation, and development policies that pushed people of color and marginalized groups into these more physically vulnerable areas in the first place. Then, the risk in these neighborhoods is further compounded as they receive less investment in mitigation measures (e.g., drainage, infrastructure maintenance).
By 2040 climate change is expected to contribute to repetitive flooding in fifteen hundred communities along the US coast, including major cities like Miami and New York City.
What about the innumerable communities that are flood prone but not coastal.
175 In the past thirty years FEMA has moved only forty thousand households. Can we effectively, and justly, scale this up? And soon? This is why when politicians are asked what they will do about sea level rise, shrugging and saying people will “have to move” isn’t a sufficient or realistic answer.
For a moment, it’s like being haunted by ghosts who are not yet dead.
