Disasterology: May 2023
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!
The State of Emergency Management
Canada has been on fire this month— first throughout western Canada and now Nova Scotia. The smoke made its way across the northern half of North America with the east coast being hit particularly hard.
A few days ago an apartment building in Davenport, Iowa partially collapsed. Local journalists reported the city was going to demo the building while somewhere between 2-5 residents were still missing. In fact, they found one woman alive after they had said they cleared the building. The local community has been out protesting and pleading with city officials to confirm the location of all residents before the demo. It’s very unclear what is going on but from the communication perspective, I had flashbacks of East Palestine. We need robust local emergency management agencies so that the right people are in these positions when emergencies like this happen. Probably more on this next month.
There was a terrible Dust Storm in Illinois that led to a deadly pile-up on the highway. The satellite image of Typhoon Mawar crossing Guam made my stomach drop. Speaking of Guam, a quiet article came out last week on a Chinese Malware attack. Cyclone Mocha hit Myanmar and Bangladesh and flooding took a toll in Italy and Somalia.
We also experienced one of (the?) first inventions of a full-on fake disasters based on an AI-generated photo. Love this for us. Rumors spread that the Pentagon had been attacked. The false image was pretty easy to spot if you zoomed in but it still spread quickly. We’ve arrived at this reality and emergency management agencies need to be ready to deal with it.
Although, perhaps the biggest news is that the COVID declarations ended this month in the US after 3 years and 2 months. While COVID definitely is not over, legally, the pandemic is. I updated my original disaster declaration blogpost if you’d like to review the full timeline.
A National Emergency Management Strategy
I’ll be honest, I’m about to go on a lengthy rant so before I lose some of you, I wanted to bring your attention to an idea presented in this article: Creating a National Emergency Management Strategy (that doesn’t suck). This will especially seem like a good idea if you do brave what is below.
We have gotta be moving in the same direction towards some achievable goals instead of just swaying around in the breeze. And, we need to be telling other people and agencies what they should be doing. I see this as a stepping stone to broader, comprehensive emergency management reform.
On The Misidentification of a Problem
Each month, just as I start to worry I might not have anything to complain about analyze for you all, like clockwork, someone out there makes a dubious disaster decision. Around five tweets deep into a curse ladened teardown, I stop and save the brooding for the newsletter.
Last week Representative Thompson (D-MS) introduced H.R. 3626 the “Emergency Management Support Act”. Support? For Emergency Management? Sounds promising!
Spoiler: it is not.
The bill garnered an immediate negative gut reaction from myself, and seemingly all of Emergency Management Twitter. I did have to laugh at how quickly Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) let us all know that he did not sponsor the bill.
Alright. So, what is the issue? Well, for one, we don’t have a copy of the full bill. Just a three-paragraph, three-bullet point Fact Sheet. It’s been a full week. I think it’s irresponsible to drop this kind of vague proposal without the specifics of the bill being made public. As we know, any time Congress says “EMPG” everyone starts flapping. Love this for us.
My interpretation is that the bill would require “training” for local emergency management directors, it appears, to be eligible for EMPG funding. (Others have walked through the basic concerns with what’s being proposed if you don’t want to listen to me.)
Let’s start at the beginning: What problem is this bill trying to solve? Well, according to the fact sheet, during Hurricane Irma mutual aid requests were effectively met because local emergency managers had done training. Admit it, you just did the Scooby Doo head tilt. Therefore, the fact sheet says, the federal government should require additional training for local emergency management directors. It’s giving Wynona Ryder doing math.
Tim Riecker went to track down this AAR that made this claim and, kids, there’s simply no evidence provided that this is true. There are, obviously, many factors that would influence effective mutual aid. Perhaps it is true that training is one of those factors, but we should absolutely not be setting a national standard off of a single unsupported sentence from a single AAR?
Honestly, the fact sheet really isn’t clear what problem they are trying to solve but I’ll be generous and interpret that they probably are trying to argue that local emergency managers across the country are not adequately prepared to respond to increasing risk. Their proposed solution is to try to enforce increased training.
I’m tempted to say, yeah, okay sure, but truthfully, I’m not so sure. Is training the solution to the problem of local emergency managers not being prepared? It’s likely a factor, but I do not at all think it’s the primary problem. At the risk of being caught agreeing with Pete Gaynor, I actually don’t think that just more training is the answer.
There are some massive underlying assumptions that researchers are playing around with that bring into question the entire approach to the emergency management training enterprise. “Training” encompasses so much that the term alone has been rendered almost meaningless. Training, education, and experience are three different things, y’all. Plus, there are much bigger problems facing the lack of preparedness among local emergency management agencies – like, oh, I don’t know, a lack of funding and staff.
There is a desperate doubling down among some in emergency management right now — it will all be fixed if they just grind harder, train more, and yell at their subordinates. Some of you are trying to fight back against systemic problems by pulling the profession of emergency management up by the bootstraps. But, you cannot train yourself out of a lack of education. You cannot train yourself out of a lack of funding. You cannot train yourself out of a lack of staff. You cannot train yourself out of a lack of authority. You cannot train yourself out of the climate crisis.
Training is something but it’s not everything and I don’t even think it’s most things.
Hypothetically, let’s live in a world where Congress says local EM directors have to do more training to be eligible for EMPG. Okay, what training? Are we talking about adding more FEMA IS courses to the EMPG requirements? Are we talking full-on weeks in Emmitsburg? Something in the middle (this is in progress)? Something new?
Based on the information made public, we don’t know. But, we can still talk about it because (here’s the fun thing): It doesn’t matter which scenario it is because, in every single one, there is an immediate, massive problem for low-capacity communities who, as we all know, are the ones most in need of support. (Incidentally, this month our research team published an article about EMPG and how it is being dispersed at the county level.)
If the approach is more IS courses, then this requirement is unlikely to have a meaningful impact. We’re all adults here. We know that a lot of people are just Googling the answers to the IS courses. Especially the people who are very busy and the people who are emergency managers in name only. (Not to mention that many of the IS courses are absolutely terrible. Just blatantly wrong information in some of them! They also don’t do what they say they do. Also, sorry to be a professor but from a pedagogical standpoint… whew Lord. I digress.)
But, okay, so more IS courses. Whatever. Maybe some low-capacity communities will be able to knock those out quickly but every time an additional requirement for funding is added, no matter how seemingly trivial, some jurisdictions will be removed from eligibility and lose access to critical funding. Then there’s the question: what problem have you solved?? We’re not going to have well-trained local emergency managers. We’re just going to have a bunch of fire chiefs who passed a multiple-choice quiz. Another meaningless box to check. It’s all theater, babe.
Let’s go to the other extreme — you want to do (better, probably) training and bring everyone to EMI? (I don’t think this is what they mean but humor me). Let’s assume FEMA keeps its current funding model and basically pays for this. You still, then, have the limitations of time and space. There are tens of thousands of governmental emergency managers in the United States. Guess who doesn’t have the time (or desire, frankly) to do that?
None of this addresses the issue that there are foundational problems that supersede the training issue. When I think about what makes local emergency management unprepared I have to start with the many counties and towns that effectively DO NOT HAVE AN EMERGENCY MANAGER.
If Congress were serious about helping local emergency management, they would simply require states to have a non-federally funded full-time emergency manager (at least) in every county or town in order for the state to be eligible for public assistance dollars. And then, for good measure, they’d quadruple EMPG funding and also amend the law to give EMPG funding directly to Tribal governments.
The actual problems in emergency management have actual solutions, they just aren’t politically popular.
Ideally, I suppose, this bill lands us in a middle-ground training model for which a few people have some ideas about. Before we launch something like that nationally and attach it to goddamn EMPG we maybe might want to test it out and do some research to make sure it’s actually effective and accessible. Otherwise, it’s giving post-9/11 unfunded training mandates that further disenfranchise low-resource and low-capacity agencies.
The bill is going to be whatever it’s going to be, and we’ll deal with it if it passes but this bill exemplifies a much bigger, much more persistent problem in emergency management. This is, after 1200 words, what I actually want to address. [I cannot believe any of you are still reading this.]
A favorite line of my Twitter reply guys is, “it’s easy to point out problems, it’s harder to point out solutions”. First, that’s not true. It is actually extremely difficult to accurately identify problems in a complex system. People are very bad at doing this and it causes all kinds of problems. Second, I do actually talk about solutions all the time but everyone (men) just glaze over because the solutions are often boring. Sorry bro, you don’t need funding to hire a robot to dig through rubble. You need funding to hire a community outreach person with a background in social work and community organizing. Boring.
I’ve spent most of every single day for the past 18 years thinking about the problems in emergency management. I talk about these problems with anyone and everyone. I ask emergency managers, disaster journalists, policymakers, NGO workers, volunteers, and survivors what their problems are and what they think other people’s problems are. As I learn about these problems I re-think my previously held assumptions and evolve my thinking as I am presented with new information and hear new perspectives. I research these problems. I teach about these problems. Guys, I wrote a book about these problems.
The reason I wrote my book was to create a space to clearly articulate the breadth and depth of problems within the US emergency management system. Understanding the problems in emergency management is hard because it’s a living, breathing, system. It changes. And, when you change one part of that system, it influences other parts of the system. Sometimes those changes are expected and good. Other times those changes are unexpected and bad. Often those changes cause more problems. It’s whack-a-mole.
I have said this before in various places, but we have a tendency in emergency management, and many other aspects of life, to skip ahead to solutions before fully understanding the problems. Just because something is a problem in your emergency management agency, does not mean it’s a problem in every emergency management agency. This is why we need to make decisions based on generalizable research and not random AARs. But, of course, nearly the entire history of the field of emergency management is rooted in policy and law that was created by people who misunderstood (intentionally or out of ignorance) the problems.
This doesn’t just happen every now and then in emergency management. There is a constant stream of people pushing solutions that do not solve the actual problems. And, even more so, people creating bad solutions to problems that are actually the main problem that we need to be finding a solution for! It makes me feel crazy. As is often the case with this newsletter, it would be funny if it were not detrimental to the future of this country.
Everyone wants to swoop in and save the day. They don’t want to put in the exhausting and difficult work of tearing apart the system to understand what the problems are and how they’re connected to one another. There are people who have spent decades thinking deeply about these problems. If you’ve parachuted into emergency management and come up with a solution to a problem after giving it 15 minutes of thought, you actually haven’t created a solution, you’ve simply created another problem that we’re going to have to deal with five years down the road. Love to lie in our web of unintended consequences.
If emergency management wants to be taken seriously as a profession, then we need serious people working on these serious problems. That work needs to be based on empirical research, not the experience of one emergency manager in one emergency management agency. It needs to be bringing together coalitions of stakeholders – including local advocacy organizations – to write comprehensive national emergency management reform. To me, anything less is a failure.
And I know some of you are sitting there thinking, “yeah but the people coming up with solutions mean well”. I don’t care. I don’t remotely care about members of Congress writing and sponsoring bills out of good intentions. I care that they are creating laws that provide the outcomes that we need. I care that their laws are grounded in reality. I care that the decisions they make do not harm communities across the country.
There is some real egregious crap going on inside and outside our field. If only a fraction of it comes to fruition, we are going to have much bigger problems than we do now. It does not feel good to constantly be shitting on everyone’s work, but it feels a whole lot worse to be standing in a place that’s just gotten fucked by a disaster because our field hasn’t done what it should and we didn’t fight back.
My research partner and I work by one rule: We cannot be wrong. It’s an impossible standard that we’ve set for ourselves – everybody is wrong at some point – but not being wrong is something we do need to strive for in emergency management. When we don’t have to, we shouldn’t be making decisions on a whim. There are consequences to the decisions we make – whether that is publishing bad research, writing bad policy, or failing in practice. Real people are affected by our work.
Emergency management policy should not be and does not need to be, an experiment that we are running on the American public.
Meme Break
This Month’s Disaster News
The disaster articles were flying this month with some pretty major stories related to preparedness.
Preparedness
Employee held at gunpoint during unannounced active shooter drill at Michigan psych hospital files lawsuit from ClickonDetroit
Boots on the Ground: As FEMA struggles to keep up with climate disasters, extremist groups see an opportunity in Grist
FEMA Is Losing Employees at an Alarming Rate in Government Executive
State Farm will no longer offer homeowners insurance to new customers in California amid growing wildfire concerns from NBC News
Backup Power: A Growing Need, if You Can Afford It in The New York Times
Flood insurance rates are soaring in New Orleans area. The West Bank is ground zero from Nola.com
Making public tornado shelters more accessible in Spectrum News 13
Response
There’s No Escape From Wildfire Smoke from The New York Times
Adams wants FEMA to stop giving money to cities that use funds to send migrants to NYC from CNN
As a monster tornado bore down, many in the Mississippi Delta had no chance of finding a shelter from NBCNews
Recovery
Invasive and Incomplete: How flood cleanup left eastern Kentucky feeling violated and vulnerable for Louisville Public Media
‘They’re sacrificing us’: a California town feels ignored months after flood in The Guardian
Wildfire’s Toxic Legacy Leaves Children Gasping for Air Years Later in Bloomberg
PG&E Must Pay $150 Million for Role in Deadly 2020 Fire in Bloomberg
Demystifying disaster agencies: SBA edition in My World’s On Fire
Norfolk Southern to set up home value reimbursement fund after Ohio derailment in Reuters
Mitigation
Can Climate Change Bring Wildfires to the Northeast? in Atmos
As odds rise of a Sandy-like storm here, so do the chances the T could be pretty much wiped out, new study finds from Universal Hub
Extreme heat will take an unequal toll on tribal jails from Grist
As California attempts a ‘managed retreat,’ coastal homeowners stay from Grist
Disaster Museums
I’ve been on vacation for the past few days. As I passed through Belfast I had to stop by the Titanic Museum. As you probably know, the Titanic was built in Belfast so as you’d expect an entire tourism market has sprung up around it. You can even stay at the “Titanic Hotel”. I did not do that but even across town, my hotel room décor featured “White Star Line” posters.
The museum itself was quite well done. Mostly trauma informed which is great to see in a disaster museum. They focused on the building of the Titanic and then really focused on the memory of the victims. I thought the best part was a great display that helped visualize the various factors that led to the disaster. There was a Disneyworld-esq ride inside which really could have crossed a line but remained focused on what it was like to work in the shipyard in the early 1900s.
However, reader, I regret to inform you they were selling Titanic underwear in the gift shop. Why. I just… imagine wearing 9/11 underwear. We all agree that would be inappropriate and we wouldn’t do that, right? Okay, it’s the same thing. Don’t do that.
I shared this on Instagram and got a few comments saying, “there is more than one Titanic museum???”. And yes! I can’t find a comprehensive list but here’s a list of 10 to get you started. I’ve been to the one in Pigeon Forge, TN. There’s of course the Molly Brown Museum in Denver which is trying really hard not to be a Titanic museum until you get to the gift shop. For years there was an exhibit that was traveling around the US – I saw it in New Orleans and Maine. Then there are all the Titanic-related memorials – DC, New York, Halifax, Southhampton. I saw mention of one in Australia recently.
Gift shop antics aside, I do recommend the museum if you’re ever nearby.
"Not to mention that many of the IS courses are absolutely terrible. Just blatantly wrong information in some of them! They also don’t do what they say they do. Also, sorry to be a professor but from a pedagogical standpoint… whew Lord."
Which IS courses are the bad ones vs the good ones? Where can amateur disasterologists get accurate information/training about emergency management?
It’s giving ✨Wynona Ryder doing math✨. Love it!