Disasterology: August 2025

This newsletter is a compilation of recent disaster ~things~ that I think are cool, important, or otherwise of interest to people who are intrigued with disaster (broadly defined). There’s a little something for everyone!

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Greetings,

Disaster anniversaries can serve different purposes. Sometimes they are an opportunity to mourn what was lost, sometimes an opportunity to celebrate survival. They can be a time for collective reflection, or a date that you want to erase from the calendar.

In another timeline, my newsletter about the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Levee Failure would be about the recovery progress in New Orleans. I might have written about the people who never returned, ideas about how we should rebuild our national disaster volunteer capacity, the defunct Evacuteer statues, or the city’s Comprehensive Recovery Framework.

Instead, the 20th anniversary of Katrina has arrived as a warning.

In just seven months, the Trump administration has ruthlessly unraveled twenty years of post-Katrina progress made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), leaving our emergency management system less prepared to respond to a major disaster than it was in 2005.

Two decades is a long time. Some people forget, some didn’t pay attention when it happened, others were too young or -- like my students now -- not even alive yet when Katrina happened. My younger sister told me that Gen Z has just discovered Katrina and are making TikToks about the Bush Administration’s failures (love them for this). If you need a reminder of what happened during Katrina, or are learning about it for the first time, I recommend watching the new Katrina documentary on Hulu. I think it generally does a good job. I also wrote extensively about my experience working on recovery in New Orleans in my book.

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The risk in New Orleans was created over decades, even centuries. In the middle of a hurricane, the consequences of racist government policy, capitalism, deep poverty, and incorrectly built levees collided. In a catastrophe like Katrina, it should have been FEMA and the rest of the federal government that were the final line of defense. And, yet…

Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failure submerged 80% of New Orleans in up to 20 feet of toxic flood water. Damages to oil refineries made Katrina (at the time) the second-largest oil spill in US history. The Mississippi coast was flattened and small towns across the south were left in shambles. In total, over 1800 people were killed and the costs tallied up to at least $200 billion (adjusted for inflation). New Orleanians swam through the streets, waved for help on their roofs, and pleaded for food and water for days in 100-degree heat. It made visible the legacy of racial discrimination in the South and reinforced systems of oppression. New Orleanians had to remind the federal government that they were Americans who had a right to be helped. The trauma not of the storm, but of the government abandonment, has reverberated through two decades and across the country. It reveals itself in the roots of the Black Lives Matter Movement, in the battle to preserve the social safety net, and in every disaster since.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina swept across the Gulf Coast and broke through the levees in New Orleans, President George W. Bush faced the nation from a backlit Jackson Square. He assured us that, “Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency,” and promised “this government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.”

The Bush administration found the Katrina response was a national failure “at all levels.”

While the affected communities worked to rebuild their lives, the country’s emergency managers also got to work rebuilding the U.S. emergency management system. For the field Katrina became, and remains, the event of record -- the moment where the emergency management system itself most dramatically failed (there is a slight but important distinction here when comparing the more recent failures of Maria and COVID). For many, including myself, Katrina was the impetus for working to create a more effective, efficient, and equitable emergency management system. The efforts to do so have not always been successful. Policy reforms have been slow and incomplete; politics have often not been on our side. Yet progress had been made. The FEMA of 2024 was a better agency than the one that existed in 2005.

While many seemed to be able to grasp the broad factors that had created risk in New Orleans, for people outside emergency management, understanding why FEMA failed was more complicated. For years, experts researched Katrina’s response failures with the goal of ensuring it would not happen again. Katrina became one of the most studied disasters in history as the after-action reports, empirical research, and investigations stacked up.

As it turns out, by the time the levees broke in New Orleans, the Bush administration had already laid the groundwork for FEMA to fail.

In 2005, FEMA had just been through a crisis of its own – swept up in the reactive post-9/11 policy changes, Congress and the Bush Administration had demoted FEMA from a cabinet-level, independent agency to just one of many within the newly created Department of Homeland Security. At the time, emergency managers and disaster scholars warned that this change would have dire consequences on the agency’s ability to respond to disasters.

The structural change revoked the FEMA Administrator’s direct access to the White House. It confused the roles and responsibilities of top leadership. Who was in charge of managing a disaster? The FEMA Administrator or DHS Secretary? There was also misalignment between the mission of DHS and FEMA. FEMA was meant to be an all-hazards agency – preparing for anything that could go wrong, but DHS’s focus was centered around terrorism. FEMA at first lost this ideological fight, and along with it, funding for all-hazards preparedness, including hurricane preparedness funding. FEMA staff did not take these changes well. A “brain drain” struck the agency, as many high-ranking officials left. The exodus of expertise was made worse by President Bush’s pick to lead FEMA, Michael Brown. He had no prior emergency management experience, formerly serving as the Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. These changes also led to confusion across all levels of government about who was responsible for what when a disaster struck.

When Katrina overwhelmed local and state resources, and the Gulf Coast necessarily turned to the federal government, they found an emergency management agency already in disarray. Brown was unable to manage the response, and Secretary Chertoff did not move to take over the responsibility. It took almost two weeks for the White House to establish clear federal leadership.

Katrina produced a new generation of emergency managers and disaster researchers – people who saw the failures clearly but believed a different way of doing emergency management was possible. Some were themselves Katrina survivors who joined the field to ensure that what happened to their community did not happen to others. People who believed that it was possible to rebuild FEMA and regain the trust of the American public. To create a FEMA that was not a punchline for political cartoonists, but one that any community, on their worst day, could count on to show up.

To make the major changes necessary to improve emergency management, Congress needed to act. It has taken other disasters, in addition to Katrina, to move the needle, but legislation in recent years has made FEMA more effective. The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 was the first. Among its changes is a requirement for the FEMA administrator to have crisis leadership experience. The bill fell short of removing FEMA from DHS, but it did restore the administrator’s direct line to the President. FEMA was tasked with creating a National Response Framework to better delineate the roles and responsibilities of government agencies across all levels, nonprofits, and the private sector. There was field-wide acknowledgement of the need to be more inclusive of diverse needs in disaster preparedness efforts. FEMA was allowed to back off the tunnel vision terrorism focus and return to an all-hazards approach, with a greater emphasis on climate change in the past several years.

Although progress had been made, the emergency management system was not perfect. There were key failures in the Hurricane Maria and COVID responses during the first Trump administration. Criticism, especially of the complex, slow, and inadequate recovery system have been well-documented across administrations. However, until this year the agency was being led by competent and well-qualified administrators. t was clear in its all-hazards mission there was a cooperative relationship between the agency and the White House. Even most state and local governments had come to trust that even if FEMA would not solve all their problems, there would be federal resources to support them when it was most needed.

This abruptly changed when President Trump re-took office in January and targeted FEMA among the federal agencies he wanted to eliminate.

In just six months, the Trump administration has torpedoed the hard-won progress of the past twenty years. President Trump has failed to nominate anyone for the FEMA administrator position. Instead, he has put in place two acting administrators who lack emergency management experience. The first, Cameron Hamilton, a right-wing politician who helped spread disinformation about FEMA during Hurricane Helene, was fired after being given a lie detector test by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and testifying in Congress that he believed the agency should continue to exist. The second and current, David Richardson, has no prior emergency management experience. In agency-wide meetings, he has demonstrated a lack of awareness of the agency’s existing Strategic Plan, key federal policy guidance, including the National Response Framework, and the existence of hurricane season. He was missing in action during FEMA’s response to the Texas flood in July. There are signs that communication between FEMA and the White House are limited. Reporting suggests FEMA does not learn the President has declared a disaster until days later. The lack of leadership continues at the regional level, where the two FEMA Regional Offices that cover the majority of hurricane-prone states, including the entire Gulf Coast, are without administrators in the middle of hurricane season.

An estimated 2000 people have left, or were fired, since January. DOGE fired staff across the agency, and others have taken the buyout option. Many others have left on their own, recognizing they have no future in the agency or not wanting to be complicit in destroying the profession they’ve dedicated their lives to creating. FEMA’s CFO was fired for political reasons related to immigration funding. Long-time FEMA employees in key positions, including regional directors, the head of the national coordination center, the chief of staff, and more, have left, leading to another brain drain. FEMA’s vulnerability to becoming a political pawn has come to fruition as DHS moves from its terrorism focus to one of instigating mass deportations. We just learned some FEMA staffers have been reassigned to ICE.

Across the country, state and local governments are reeling from the loss of mitigation, preparedness, and recovery funding that had been promised to them and abruptly, and often illegally, taken away by the administration. There is perpetual confusion about what funding state and locals will receive from FEMA, and when, making plans for future mitigation projects, hiring staff, and starting recovery projects a gamble.

Taken together, these actions have turned FEMA into a reflection of its former self. It is 2005 all over again.

To make matters worse, in the last six months, some governors have further hampered their states' ability to effectively respond to a disaster. In Florida, Governor DeSantis has instructed the Florida Division of Emergency Management led by Kevin Guthrie to build and oversee a concentration camp in the Everglades – which not only introduces an exceptionally vulnerable population into a high risk area in the middle of hurricane season, but also risks devastating the area’s natural flood protection, destroys trust between emergency management officials and the public they are meant to protect, gives emergency management an inappropriate law enforcement mission, and detracts resources from preparedness efforts needed in other parts of the state.

In Louisiana, Governor Landry and the state legislature signed a law returning the structure of state emergency management to its pre-Katrina state. After Katrina, it was found that a state emergency management agency that reported directly to the governor was more effective. (Incidentally, a recent national study came up with a similar finding.) Yet, Governor Landry has ignored this research and experience in favor of “DOGE-ing” his own government and moved the function of emergency management back under the National Guard. As of this writing, GOHSEP is operating with only an interim director (the assistant adjutant general). While he has an extensive military record, his bio does not indicate any emergency management experience.

The President has said, and Project 2025 affirmed, that the responsibility for emergency management will be shouldered by state and local governments. Yet, research on the capacity of emergency management at these levels of government show a lack of ability to do so. The very purpose of FEMA is to intervene when locals and states are overwhelmed. Eliminating a comprehensive, all-hazards approach to emergency management at the federal level puts American lives at risk, threatens our economic prosperity, and our national security.

The administration is dismantling nearly every system, agency, and program whose mission is to keep us safe, all while implementing policies that increase our risk, such as the rolling back of environmental regulations and climate mitigation policy. The public health system is in shambles. The removal of US funding from the international humanitarian system is estimated to kill 14 million people in the next four years -- impacts that will be felt at home too. The budget defunded key parts of our social safety net, like Medicaid, which increases overall social vulnerability. Our hazard-science agencies, including NOAA, NWS, and USGS are under constant attack. Without them, emergency managers cannot effectively issue warnings or give recommendations to the public on sheltering and evacuation. The EPA, Chemical Safety Board, and others that provide oversight and accountability to industry face constant existential threats.

Added to this is the general chaos of the Trump administration, which as we know from last time, increased the impacts of Hurricane Maria and COVID. The guardrails that might normally intervene are affected too. The current media ecosystem facilitates the spread of disinformation in disaster even faster than twenty years ago, an issue that has gone unaddressed since it slowed the Hurricane Helene response. There was no journalist yelling at a sitting U.S. Senator live on-air during the failed Texas flood response, as Anderson Cooper did in 2005.

Nearly every lesson made post-Katrina has been abandoned by the Trump administration, leaving the nation more vulnerable than at any other point in my memory. President Trump, his administration, and Congress have decided that the physical safety and economic security of Americans across the country are not their responsibility. They are putting our lives and our national security at risk.

We could change course at any time. The President could nominate a qualified emergency manager to lead the agency. Congress could vote to remove FEMA from within DHS and return it to its pre-9/11 status as an independent cabinet-level agency, an idea with bipartisan support, and prevent the agency from being used inappropriately and unethically to advance the administration’s (often illegal) anti-immigrant agenda. Funds for mitigation, preparedness, and recovery projects could be released to state and local governments. FEMA could re-hire the emergency management experts who have left the agency. A new Senate-confirmed administrator could begin to quickly repair the strained relationships with state and local officials. The President and Secretary Noem could stop threatening to eliminate FEMA and populate the FEMA Review Council with a diverse range of emergency management experts who have a goal of creating a more effective emergency management system for all Americans. Our National Preparedness Strategy does not have to consist of crossing our fingers.

They could.

I can’t imagine they will, but they could.

But, hey, maybe we’ll get lucky. Despite warnings from meteorologists that we can expect an above-average hurricane season, due in part because of climate change, the storms might end up not being so strong. They might not make landfall in the most vulnerable areas. Local mitigation efforts, combined with a few remaining well-tested FEMA staff, may be just enough to keep it together. Maybe there won’t be a devastating earthquake or a massive chemical plant explosion. Maybe we can make it a few more years without an infrastructure-debilitating cyberattack. After all, if the levees hadn’t broken in New Orleans, it could have been a long time before we fully knew just how much the Bush administration had damaged FEMA.

Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe.

The 20-year anniversary of Katrina arrives as the warning: we know what happens when FEMA does not show up -- people die, lives are destroyed. We are facing the very real possibility of a future without FEMA -- a safety net that we have come to expect in times of crisis -- a safety net that we need and was promised to us in the shadow of catastrophe.

So, here we are, twenty years later, and our response to Katrina remains a national failure.

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The End Bits

It’d be cool if you forwarded this newsletter to your friends, post it on social media, or undertake any other form of newsletter sharing you deem appropriate. I’ve heard some of you print out the memes to hang in your emergency management offices! Incredible.

In case you signed up for this newsletter without knowing who I am (a bold choice!), you can listen to this interview with me on Ologies. If you really want to dive in, you can read my book Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis to catch up (here’s a USA Today review). You can order it here and get it as an audiobook here.

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