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July 1 - August 30, 2022
over forty thousand took refuge at shelters.
Among their main findings is that in times of crisis communities come together.192 Contrary to popular belief, we do not panic, loot, or descend into chaos when disaster strikes. Rather than widespread antisocial behavior, we see again and again that people respond prosocially.
The amount of assistance that arrives can be staggering, with researchers going so far as to call it a “mass assault” of help.195
because volunteers are such a fundamental part of how we respond to disasters, our lack of understanding about them and the work they do is a troubling weakness in our knowledge of emergency management.
Life-saving tasks can end in as little as a few hours, and rarely last more than a week, but, because it’s dramatic, response is what tends to capture a disproportionate amount of media coverage and our attention.204
There are many ways to categorize the people who volunteer during disasters, but generally we make a distinction between affiliated volunteers, meaning those working with a specific organization, and spontaneous volunteers—those who just show up to help on their own.205 Affiliated volunteers often work with well-established disaster nonprofits. As is the case in recovery, nonprofits fill the gap between what individuals can do on their own and what government does to respond to an unfolding disaster.
The Red Cross was first chartered by Congress in 1900, which put the organization in the unique position of being an independent nonprofit but also having the lead responsibility for response operations in the United States.236
Although their role in disasters has greatly diminished in more recent decades as they are no longer the lead response organization in the US, they are still expected to help. Long before a disaster actually happens, Red Cross officials often work with emergency management officials to establish what the organization will be responsible for during disaster. They train and prepare for responding to a variety of scenarios.
Among the disaster organizations that respond the Red Cross is arguably still the most prominent.
There is some variation from place to place, but generally the Red Cross is responsible for opening shelters and providing food and water to survivors during response.
Although efforts have been undertaken to implement standardization, it can look and operate differently from place to place. Further, it can be easily derailed and overwhelmed—the system itself is not always very resilient.
they made a point of emphasizing none of them were with the Red Cross.
This particular shelter had been a point of extensive discussion at the Red Cross headquarters the previous day. Those discussions, however, did not align with what I found once I was there
I was hit with the distinct smell of a thrift store as the doors opened.
In 1900, when news broke across the country of the hurricane in Galveston, help started making its way to Texas. One peculiar donation arrived—boxes of high heels for just the left foot. What luck for anyone in Galveston only missing one shoe! One hundred years later, these useless donations continue.
After the Sandy Hook shooting people donated stuffed animals to the children of Newtown, Connecticut, by the tens of thousands. There were enough toys to fill a sixty-thousand-square-foot storage space.241 These are extreme examples, but they reflect the fact that many donations, though often well intended, fail to match with the needs of survivors.
After Hurricane Mitch, for example, planes carrying aid to Honduras were unable to land on the runway because it was covered with piles of donated clothing that no one had the capacity to manage.
Assuming donated items do successfully arrive in the affected community, are timely and appropriate, and there is someplace to put them, someone has to organize and distribute them—which is what this volunteer in Texas was doing.
They were benefiting from the strategy that most disaster experts recommend—donate cash rather than things, so people on the ground can go buy exactly what they need.
but what about the people who needed help and did not have an ID?
Undocumented residents who had been affected by the flooding needed help, but they were understandably afraid to stay at the shelters with police standing outside, and had no government-issued identification. Volunteers slid them as many donations as they could and tried to direct them to organizations where long-term assistance might be found. None of the volunteers seemed confident, though,
Over and over again I heard from volunteers that there had been no plans for opening shelters, yet extensive sheltering plans had been developed by the Red Cross and local emergency management officials. Some of the plans were even available publicly online. This kind of disconnect is not only frustrating for all involved, but it can also complicate the response.
There will always be catastrophic events like Maria and Katrina and large-scale disasters like Harvey and Sandy, but it is the repetitive, smaller floods that communities are being forced to navigate more frequently that seem to be wearing us down.
In fact, there seemed to be even less help in the rural towns outside the city. I spent one afternoon driving around a recently flooded town with their emergency manager. He at first struck me as the stereotype of a Texan emergency manager—gruff and tough—but as we drove from street to street I also saw that he was defeated.
The Red Cross never showed up so the local church had opened the shelter for people who needed a place to stay.
The plans were just sitting on a shelf in his office because they hadn’t been able to find any federal funding.
More likely, they couldn't come up with the non-federal share .
In the summer of 2003 a heat wave blanketed Europe. The warming forced the evacuation of people from the Matterhorn when melting triggered a rockfall, trains in London were shut down, and forest fires cut through parts of Spain, Portugal, and Italy.
Oof. Sounds likee 2022 or even 2016/17
evening temperatures are on average nine degrees warmer than they were in 1948.
A 2019 heat wave in Arizona killed 187, breaking the state’s heat-related deaths record.
In 2014, Atlanta succumbed to a snowstorm, dubbed “Snowmageddon,” which brought about two inches of snow and ice to the southern city.266 These exact same conditions in Boston would have been just another Tuesday, but in Atlanta it brought the city to a stop. Hundreds of accidents occurred throughout the city as people tried to get home on icy roads. Some children stayed at school overnight while other commuters had to take refuge in nearby stores and businesses that opened their doors. Atlanta didn’t have the equipment or systems in place to manage this kind of storm and so the impacts were
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Also late forecast .. Midday panicked release by mayor before the city and state had finished making their first treatment runs blocking those assets into logjams of traffic as more than a million cars hit the highways in the metro area
Following the Thomas Fire in 2018 a debris flow through Montecito, California, left twenty-three dead and hundreds of homes destroyed.286
A primary concern for me fire the 28 November 2016 wildfiire.
Our infrastructure wasn’t built to handle so much water, so fast—so it floods. Climate change affects the
Scientists have developed a methodology called “extreme event attribution” that helps us understand the relationship between any given weather event and the changing climate.
But climate change means that the behavior we have come to expect from these types of threats has changed, and if we want to protect ourselves, we have to change, too. We have always had to manage our risk and we have always had disasters, but climate change, along with other realities of our current world, have become entangled to create unprecedented risk across the country.
Climate change is so insidious because it intertwines itself with our existing vulnerabilities and amplifies them. It further threatens what is already fragile and at risk.
These changes, interacting with other factors like population movement toward high-risk areas, poorly written and enforced regulations, social and economic inequality, decaying infrastructure, and poor development decisions, create our risk. In other words, climate change paired with these demographic, regulatory, and policy factors are literally a recipe for disaster.
This
They do not wait in line to begin until the preceding disaster has ended, which means we do not go into every crisis at full capacity.
could
Should
Risk assessments have to be based on future projections, but it’s hard to fully know which projections to rely on, especially on longer timescales.
In a controversial New York Magazine article in 2017 writer David Wallace-Wells noted, “we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination” in how we talk about the worst-case scenarios.
The consequences of climate change—often disasters—are used as the basis for the argument that we must act to stem emissions. Pictures and video of devastating disasters and disaster survivors are used to justify climate action, but then those same people brush aside discussions of how emergency management needs to change. The climate conversation has to this point rarely included, or even acknowledged, the actual needs of the people who were affected by the very disasters they purport to be concerned about. It feels like a vestige of the old idea that climate change is just a future problem,
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not only need to reduce emissions, but also have to adapt.
The limitations of the emergency management system will become even more visible exactly when the resources to fix them will become scarcer.
You cannot fix decades (to say nothing of centuries) of bad policy in the hours before a hurricane makes landfall.
FiveThirtyEight334 and the Washington Post335 analyzed the coverage and their findings confirm the widespread media failures.
When help doesn’t arrive and government officials fail to respond effectively, it is the responsibility of media to illuminate their failures.
Give an example of this being fair or accurate thst doesn't involve Mike Brown.
Altogether this wasn’t surprising. A government that does not function in nondisaster times will not suddenly become effective when catastrophe strikes.
Even with a functioning federal government and a president who was interested in disaster relief, the situation in Puerto Rico would have been dire.
FEMA was assessing their effectiveness based on how much help they were giving, while everyone else was measuring FEMA’s effectiveness in terms of how many people still needed help.
the reason FEMA was unable to supply sufficient and nutritional meals was because their contracted vendors were already overwhelmed meeting the needs in Texas from Harvey.
