Disasterology: May 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!
Good Evening to the (definitely more than) 20% of you getting in the way!
I’m sitting here with my cup of tea and stubby pencil… no I’m kidding. That was SO WEIRD. This guy is a freak. We’ll get to it.
The State Of Emergency Management
Month five has come to an end, and it was another doozy. Will we ever have a month that is not a doozy again? Hard to say. Some highlights:
Cameron Hamilton was fired. Bye, girl! I like to think my bullying in last month’s newsletter greased the wheels. The circumstances of his firing remain a bit unclear. Reporting indicates there was tension following Noem giving him a lie detector test several weeks ago. However, his testimony in Congress, where he said eliminating FEMA would not be in the best interest of the American public, seems to be the official reason. Because of this, some people who are unfamiliar with him have attempted to frame Hamilton as some kind of resistance hero. I very strongly disagree. He accepted a position he was not qualified for and spent months overseeing the illegal dismantling of key elements of FEMA to the detriment of the public. Does everyone need a reminder that he was one of the far-right politicians using his platform to spread disinformation about FEMA funding during the Helene response? Good riddance!
In his place, Noem scrounged up actual disaster movie villain, David Richardson. Go ahead, Google him. You’ll see what I mean. He has no previous emergency management experience but has written a sexist semi-autobiographical novel and painted an offensive portrait of AOC which he claims is worth $90,000. Burning books is wrong, but sometimes a book accidentally falls off a cliff into the ocean, and then, like, what are you supposed to do?
He has quickly become known for his deranged all-hands meetings, which I have heard described as being a fever dream, written by ChatGPT, a walking Onion article, and an SNL skit. I concur. Everything about him is antithetical to what makes for an effective emergency management leader. He also, frankly, appears to be quite dumb. For example, today’s news is that he revealed he didn’t know hurricane season existed. Cool, cool, cool.
Some select quotes as further evidence:
“…there's somewhere south of 20% that decide that they are going to get in the way of change. You can ask anybody, that those 20% of the people are a problem. And they have to be sidelined. So, don't get in my way, if you're those 20% of the people. I know all the tricks, Okay? …Obfuscation, delay, undermining. If you're one of those 20% of the people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not because I will run right over you.”
On the various tasks FEMA is responsible for: “some of those tasks will be kind of orange-like tasks. And by orange, I mean the fruit orange, but they might be tangerines, they might be blood oranges, it just might be maybe a little bit of grapefruit. All those will go in one bin. Then you have all of the banana type things, whether they're plantains or they're big bananas or small bananas, they go all go into another pile. Okay, so you get about 7 or 8 piles of similar but not the exact same things. And they will constitute our mission essential tasks.”
“I was chatting with my girlfriend, she's from Texas. She's got like huge red hair. Like, she's from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up.”
“I think there's probably 6 or 7 laws or acts that guide FEMA. Within those laws or acts wherever they are, Stafford Act, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and there's others, the post Katrina, I think it was a bill or an act, I can't remember.”
If you think I am exaggerating, you can read the full transcripts of just these two meetings. Seeing him on camera further underscores the dread we are all feeling with this guy. While I would not normally recommend you watch this far-right podcast, his interview on it is representative of his ineptitude.
Some other issues:
FEMA is ending door-to-door canvassing. This will lead to more inequitable recoveries.
The White House doesn’t seem to be letting states access Hazard Mitigation Grant funding. This will lead to greater disaster impacts because we are not mitigating our risk.
DHS staffers are taking over FEMA. They do not know what they are doing.
In general, the vibes at FEMA are extremely bad (*waves to any of you still there*).
There is another disaster newsletter in town (Welcome!!). I recommend it. Alt-FEMA is an anonymously run newsletter reporting from inside FEMA. This post has a particularly good write-up of the history of FEMA.
Speaking of disaster newsletters… we have crossed the 100-day mark of this administration, and Andrew Rumbach has a good summary of the disaster policy changes.
MEME BREAK
I thought I was the only one in emergency management allowed to make fruit references that people get mad about (see: The Cherry Tomato Incident of 2024)!
Consensus Points
Someone asked me recently what I have been up to, and the answer is talking on the phone. I do feel like I have talked to almost everyone I know in emergency management this month. Some people have alerted me to new bad things going on that I hadn’t yet heard about, but for the most part, I have been interested to see that there are some clear points of consensus.
No one knows exactly what is going on or what the Trump administration is going to do. I’ve talked about this before but there are warring factions within the administration, and although they all have bad ideas about emergency management, they do not necessarily have the same bad ideas. It remains difficult to know which of these factions are the decision-makers for FEMA on any given day.
Richardson is worse than Michael Brown, the FEMA administrator during Katrina and the Levee Failure. From my book, if you need a reminder:
Michael Brown, a college friend of Bush’s campaign manager, had been appointed to lead FEMA in 2003 just as the agency was being moved under the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Despite having no prior emergency management experience before his arrival at FEMA in 2001, Brown was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. 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 .
While Brown was infamously unqualified to lead the agency, he had at least worked at the agency for a few years. In this way, they somehow managed to find someone even more unqualified! A reminder that Congress literally passed an entire law to try to prevent this from happening again, which the Trump administration is currently circumventing by giving Richardson the ridiculous title of “Senior Official Performing the Duties of FEMA Administrator”. You may not have agreed with certain things that Fugate, Long, Gaynor, or Criswell did, but they were all completely qualified to lead the agency. This guy is not, obviously.
There’s been a lot of focus on the number of staff leaving FEMA (somewhere around 2000 people), but the bigger problem is who is leaving. There has been a massive “brain drain” from the agency. The federal bureaucracy doesn’t move by itself when a disaster happens; it has to be moved, and most of the people who know how to do that are gone. The last time this much expertise left the agency was post-9/11 in the lead up to Katrina (are you sensing a theme yet).
FEMA needs to be taken out of DHS. While emergency management experts have argued the need for FEMA to be an independent cabinet-level agency since it was demoted post-9/11, the situation has become politically untenable. Moving the agency when its very existence is under threat may seem like rearranging the deck chairs (I think I’ve even recently said this). At this point, though, I do think that given the sheer hostility from DHS and disinformation about FEMA’s role in sheltering migrants, there is no effective path forward for the agency without it being removed from DHS. Incidentally, doing so has bipartisan support in Congress. There is a bill! Even Michael Brown thinks this needs to happen.
FEMA will very likely fail during the next big disaster. Although there have been several smaller disasters around the country in the past several months, we still have not had a big disaster since Trump took office. If you have followed my work for any amount of time, you may have noticed that I do not play around with evoking Katrina. People jump to Katrina incorrectly all of the time. How many times did we hear “This is Obama’s Katrina”? This is a real pet peeve of mine. What I have noticed, however, is a shift in emergency managers’ language over the past month from “if we have another Katrina” to “when we have another Katrina”. I don’t think they are wrong.
I have said some pretty terrifying things here. I think it is important that we all have a clear understanding of the current situation and our likely near future. Frankly, I am not too sure what to do here. The Wall Street Journal tried the national security argument again this month to no avail. I am fully off the humanitarian appeal after Joni Ernst shrugged and said, “we’re all going to die”.
Although we ultimately need a functioning FEMA for there to be even a chance of us meeting the extent of need associated with disasters the size of Helene or Harvey (by their very definitions big disasters overwhelm state and local resources), there are other parts of the emergency management system -- state and local government, the private sector, nonprofits and community groups. State and locals need to be ramping the hell up. They usually do that anyway, this time of year, but many of them have also lost money and people in the past few months, so this one is tough. Appealing to state and locally elected officials right now and helping them understand the new realities of our risk is critical. Individually and within our own communities, we should, of course, as always, be thinking about what more can be done.
Hurricane Season
Speaking of Hurricane Season. Hi, hello, happy holidays. The Atlantic Hurricane Season, for those unaware, runs from June 1st through November 30th every year. There are all kinds of estimates about the number of storms that we can expect to see this year. My response to that is always, “all it takes is one”. There are approximately 50,000 articles about hurricane season, but I recommend this one for a straightforward summary of the issues.
The likelihood that the next big disaster is a hurricane is quite high, but it could also be something else. Lest you forget, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyberattacks, chemical explosions, and all sorts of other bad things love to pop up when least expected. It is that next big disaster that I have my eye on. That, I think, is going to be what determines the future of the U.S. emergency management system. What happens, when, where, and to whom will matter, but the single biggest factor will be who captures the popular narrative.
I think the hurricane season articles and the stories warning that FEMA is not in a position to effectively manage the next big disaster are helpful in the long term. They are laying a strong foundation of evidence that it is the actions of the Trump administration that are breaking FEMA. These receipts will matter, I hope. Admittedly, I am quite worried that the current media ecosystem is insurmountable and that we have already lost. Perhaps it was just seeing NBC/ MSNBC pushing the idea that Kristi Noem (of all people!!) is the one trying to save FEMA. Trying to save FEMA? She’s the one trying to get rid of it!! Something about it felt like a final nail in the coffin to me. Still, we try.
Disaster Research News
I haven’t really mentioned this because there has been other, more pressing news, but the future of the discipline of emergency management is very much up in the air right now (very bad)! One thing you can do is be extra nice to disaster researchers when they ask you to fill out a survey or do an interview.
Oh hey, here’s a chance to do just that!
Julie Elliott is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware and a former Texas emergency manager. She’s studying burnout in disaster management, which is something I know y’all have opinions on. So, if you work or volunteer for an agency/organization that does disaster management, please fill out this quick survey!
Other News of Interest
A woman is suing oil companies over the death of her mother related to the 2021 heatwave. Godspeed.
Emergency management really needs NPR and PBS to continue to exist. They are critical resources in disasters.
The government has really not mastered relocating entire communities related to climate risk. Isle de Jean Charles was, of course, the example of record, but now Newtok is checking in.
The Mayor of Tulsa has announced a $105 million reparations plan in relation to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. As emergency management theory says, “recovery has no end date”.
I liked this post from Balanced Weather about the relationship between meteorologists and emergency managers.
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.
Other places to find me: Blog. BlueSky. Instagram. TikTok.
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Unrelated, related: housing crisis. FEMA IA applicants qualifying for HUD housing. HUD is not tequired to assure itself that disaster housing is RECIEVED while simultaneously “claiming” Coordinated Entry (HEAT scores) are the DEI of housing access. I am having difficulty rationale to HUD ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY where disaster housing “awards” are mere suggestions to local county housing authorities. WA State 56% increase homelessness 2023-2024 per HUD NATIONAL PIT 2024. While no FEMA HUD employs accountability to applicants or FEMA IA HUD housing award recipients to known lessons learned poor & housing. Coordinated Entry HEAT scores make no effort “disaster related” housing needs. HOW TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUE FEDERALLY AT STATE OR AT COUNTY LEVEL for those who have experienced NATL DISASTER???