Disasterology: November 2024
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!
Hello My Little Emergency Management System Defenders!
A fascism inject?! Seems extreme but okay…
My 34 years of experience living as a woman in America has prevented me from being surprised by the election results, but man that did not soften the blow. Brutal stuff, y’all.
Susan Sontag said, “people take the news of their doom in diverse ways”. I spent Wednesday morning dissociating to that fantastic new Martha Stewart documentary and then started triaging my work to prepare for what is sure to come. We have a lot of work to do!
The Next Trump Administration
I feel steady and sure that continuing our mission of creating an effective, efficient, and just emergency management system is as needed as ever. This is the work that must be done. I’m fully locked in on navigating the staggering emergency management policy problems that likely lay ahead. I have spent the last 15 years publicly advocating for (i.e., begging) for comprehensive emergency management reform. I fear we are going to get it.
In the spirit of emergency managers everywhere (and Taylor Swift) let’s remember that if we fail to plan, we plan to fail, and failure is not an option here. Too many people’s lives, livelihoods, and communities are counting on emergency management. This is when we figure out how to double down.
I am spending the next few weeks continuing to figure out my strategy. If you can, you should too. How do I carry on the mission of creating a more effective, efficient, and just emergency management system? What does that look like given the new political context? How does the work I am doing (teaching, research, public engagement) need to change? How do we, as a broad emergency management community, not only triage the fallout of the next Trump administration but also still work to envision a better, safer future?
I am still ricocheting violently between normalcy bias and catastrophizing. As is often the case I suspect we will end up somewhere in the middle. I do have some initial (if not somewhat scattered) thoughts I will share in case you find them useful in helping to guide your thinking.
1. Educate Ourselves & Each Other
We know the monstrosities a Trump administration is capable of because we have been through it before. We know they do what they say. So, I read Project 2025 in its entirety (RIP me) to ensure that I am well-educated on what they intend to do. Reader, I have never wanted to be able to open my skull, remove my brain, and wash it off more than during the many hours I spent reading this 900-page horror. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that their wildfire mitigation plan is to just have the timber industry cut down trees (page 308). It is nightmare fuel for emergency managers, disaster researchers, and anyone who does not want to have their life destroyed by a disaster.
Not a single emergency management policy in Project 2025 will help minimize impacts and address disaster-related needs across the country. Not one. I want you to know that I looked really hard because we could all use a silver lining. I wrote a lengthy analysis of what Project 2025 proposes for FEMA.
Please read it. There will be a quiz.
I am in the process of writing a second blog post about the impacts to other federal agencies that will directly affect emergency management (e.g., the future of ASPR) and a third post about how the changes will overall increase our national risk. Give me a little time. Will share via socials when done.
Speaking of socials, I have made a reluctant return to TikTok to do a “crash course” on the U.S. Emergency Management System. These are meant to explain emergency management in the plainest terms possible. My goal here is to make learning about emergency management accessible to as many people as possible as we go into a period of great disruption. Just like last time there will be a need for actual experts to explain the consequences of the decisions being made by the administration. We have to go where the people are and they are on TikTok.
This election outcome has reinforced for me my long-held belief that the climate crisis will require us all to become disaster experts. I cannot encourage you all enough to take up space on social media talking about emergency management – even just sharing news articles when they come out. In an ecosystem so filled with mis- and dis-information we need beacons of disaster truth. (If you learned one thing from Helene please god let it be this.) We cannot expect the public to know facts from fiction if we are not giving them a place to find the facts.
2. Build Community
We need to continue to build community within emergency management. This month I attended the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) Conference in Colorado. I am not traditionally a lover of conferences but I will say it was comforting to be among hundreds of other people who were also freaked out about what is going to happen to our ability to manage disasters. I left with a list of ideas for what we can start doing to organize ourselves better and make progress outside of the government (more on this in the future).
I have also found a growing emergency management community this month on BlueSky. She really has become That Bitch. We love her. The scientists and journalists have moved en masse. I am also thrilled to report that EMGTwitter has largely made the move (find us all here) and several emergency management agencies have set up a presence (find them here). We are using #GreySky on there for funny, obvious reasons.
Of course, finding community where you actually live is also important. Now is a good time to connect with others in our field nearby and find other disaster/climate organizations to join.
3. Support The Next Generation of Emergency Managers
Many emergency management students across the country are subscribed to this newsletter. I want to tell you all the same thing I have told my students: I do not believe for one second that this new political context means you have no future in emergency management. Politicians can bury their heads in oil all they want but disasters are not going to stop happening. In fact, these policies indicate that they will be getting worse and more frequent. That means we will need to continue to have people who understand how to do mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
This is exactly why I so strongly believe that education (rather than training) is the necessary foundation for working in this field. The theoretical underpinnings of emergency management will not change – there is still a disaster life cycle and a hazard event scale. We will still need to do search and rescue and feed people. It is just that how we do that and who does that may change. If you have only done emergency management training and then the laws and policies shift, you may find that your training has quickly become out of date. It surely won’t lose all value, but you will be lost without an education to fall back on. So, to emergency management students, keep going! Just be prepared to be extra flexible. The job you had your eye on at FEMA might not exist by the time you graduate but there will be others. We need you more than ever right now. Truly.
4. Use Your Power
If, like me, it is your belief that to work in the field of emergency management is to help create safe communities within which all people can thrive you will find yourself in constant and direct conflict with this administration. (If this is not your belief, will you please comment why the heck you are in this field?)
Our responsibility as people who work in the field of emergency management is not to be beholden to the specific organization or agency for which we work, but instead to the public. As I have said, my mission is to make emergency management more effective, efficient, and just. Who the president is does not change that mission. It does, however, change the way in which I need to work to fulfill it. I hope you too have a personal mission statement that is divorced from the specific organization for which you work. Our loyalty should not be to our institutions but to our communities.
There is sure to once again be immense turmoil within many federal agencies – and beyond– worse than last time I must imagine. During the last administration, those who stayed at FEMA have since shared the many things they were told to do for which they did not agree. I think that some of you staying and using the power you had to subvert those instructions saved lives. I also understand the decision to leave and not enable the actions of the incoming administration.
I know that many of us (myself included!) are worried about whether or not we will keep our jobs throughout the next administration (not to mention other personal impacts). Depending on what your job is and who you are this will look different. Many of the people reading this newsletter are in federally funded positions, or at least partially federally funded positions. Some are fellow academics who center their disaster research within the climate crisis and equity/ justice. There are very legitimate reasons to be coming up with backup plans. Gotta pay rent!
We should always be using our positions to protect and advocate but doing so now is even more important. Fighting back will look different for each of us. I think it is likely we will all be told to do things we do not agree with, and I hope you will commit with me to not doing them. For example, when ICE shows up at your community disaster shelter (which per Project 2025 would be legal) I hope you to tell them to fuck off.
5. Envision An Alternative
Everyone reading this knows that our emergency management system has problems. I have long argued that because of the urgency of the climate crisis, we do not have time to tear the whole system down and start again. Instead, I have argued that the path forward was to comprehensively reform that system. Maybe that is still true, but we should also consider that if the policy proposals in Project 2025 are implemented wholesale we will effectively be in a position to “start again”.
What does our own Project 2025 look like? If we are starting again what can we do differently? What is our ideal emergency management system? How does that relate to our ideal form of government? And, how do we implement it? The last section of my book is a call for a movement of disaster justice. I still believe that is the guiding light forward. But I need to do more – and I hope others will join me – to figure out how we get on that path because right now it feels like we are lost at sea.
MEME Break
Monthly News Round-Up
This is also a time to double down on supporting good disaster journalism and keeping ourselves educated on what is happening around the country in regard to emergency management. So, to that end, some news you may have missed over the past two months.
Mitigation
North Carolina Lawmakers Eroded Building Code For Years Before Helene Hit from WBTV
Preparedness
The Americans Prepping For A Second Civil War in The New Yorker
A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History for The New York Times
New York Isn’t Ready to Fight More Wildfires in New York Focus
Inside The Patchwork World of Emergency Alerts in Rolling Stone
Response
Hurricane Helene’s Black Survivors Face Floods, Disinformation, and a Threat to Their Vote in Capital B
When the Hurricane-Relief Worker Turns Out To Be a Neo-Nazi in The Wall Street Journal
Russian Propaganda Exploits US Hurricane Response to Undermine FEMA and Ukraine Support from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue blog
Haul Water, Rescue Pigs, Help Neighbors: How My Students Confronted Climate Chaos in a Horrific Hurricane Season in The Revelator
An Idaho Health Department Is Barred From Offering COVID shots in The New York Times
Brush Fires in Brooklyn, Throughout the NYC Region Bring Haze and Smoke-Tinged Air in the Gothamist
An Amazon Alexa Error is Sparking Conspiracy Theories About Hurricane Milton on TikTok from Media Matters
Spain Introduces Paid Climate Leave After Deadly Floods in The Guardian
Recovery
What We Need After Hurricane Helene are Chainsaws in Hammer & Hope
North Carolina Republican Pleads To End Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories About Helene Disaster Recovery in Huffington Post
How The Climate Is Changing Your Energy Bill in High Country News
Extreme Weather Events Are Affecting Whether and How People Vote in Teen Vogue
The End Bits
I would love it if you’d forward this to your friends, post on social media, and undertake any other form of newsletter sharing you deem appropriate.
In case you signed up for this newsletter without knowing who I am (a bold choice!) you can read my book Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis to catch up! You can read a USA Today review here, order it here, or get it as an audiobook here. You can also find more from me on my blog, listen to this episode of Ologies, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram where I impulsively narrate my every thought.
Finally, this newsletter is ~FREE~. I plan on keeping it that way because eliminating barriers to disaster knowledge is important. However, I’ve created a “paid subscriber” option for $5 a month or whatever you’d like to give if you’re interested in supporting this work.