Disasterology: October 2020
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!
Happy Spooky Season!
The State of Emergency Management
The state of emergency management is… spooky (we have a theme this month).
Delta made landfall as the 10th named storm in the United States following largely the same track as Hurricane Laura. Zeta will arrive tomorrow and looks to be headed to southeast LA, Mississippi, and Alabama. Zeta is the seventh time Louisiana has been in the cone this season and it is, quite frankly, enough. Fires across California haven’t slowed down. More than 4.1 million acres have burned and as of last night, another 90,000 people were under evacuation orders. Fires in Colorado this month broke state records. COVID continues unabated across the country with the highest number of cases in a single day and nearly a quarter of a million dead. There is still no comprehensive national plan and the Senate adjourned last night without passing a relief bill. As Mary Annaïse Heglar summarized for Rolling Stone this month the crises are converging.
The Politics of Disasters
Election day is a week from today and things are feeling very 1932.
Disasters are inherently political. They are the product of policy decisions made by elected officials. Therefore, emergency management is political.
Our approach to emergency management is not set in stone. It changes all the time and one way we can help move that change along is by voting for people who care about disasters. These are the people who decide how we prevent and prepare for disasters. They have a huge influence over how we respond and they set the parameters for recovery.
When we act like disasters aren’t political, we give away our power to anything about them. When we act like emergency management isn’t political, we give away our power to advocate for our work.
This year, more than perhaps any other, we have seen the consequences of elected officials who do not take our risks– and our lives– seriously. Nearly a quarter of a million Americans are dead and there is no comprehensive national plan to get us out of the pandemic.
During the past year, you all have felt the consequences of the failed pandemic response – some more than others. Many of you have either lived through or worked the other disasters of this year – the hurricanes, the fires, the storms, and floods. Many of you have donated money or even volunteered to help the people in these communities.
Right now, if you are an eligible US voter, the most important thing you can do for emergency management is vote.
Next week we are voting for the people who will decide if we continue to increase our national disaster risk, if we will fund programs to mitigate that risk, if we will do things to prepare for next year's disasters, if we end the pandemic, and act on climate change.
The contrast among presidential candidates is vast. The current president’s record is marked by an exhausting four years of spectacle. Throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans as thousands died, threatening to withhold aid from California, dismissing climate change and withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement, and his abject failure to demonstrate anything approaching leadership during the pandemic. Joe Biden has a COVID response plan and a climate plan. There are certainly critiques to be made (and I’ve made them!) but undoubtedly a Biden administration will take science seriously and begin to rebuild the damage caused in the last four years.
Climate change, the pandemic, and other disasters have been brought up throughout the presidential campaign. Biden gave a speech in Delaware on climate change and recent disasters which you can watch here. At the VP debate, the relationship between hurricanes and climate change was raised. While many of my questions about federal emergency management policy have gone unasked and unanswered, Biden’s record and promises stand in clear contrast to the failed responses of the Trump administration.
It isn’t just who sits in the White House that matters, though.
Congress dictates our emergency management funding. They pass the laws that dictate the state of our infrastructure, our pollution regulations, industry oversight, etc. They approve the people who lead and provide the direction for the many agencies (e.g., FEMA, EPA, HUD, HHS) that influence emergency management.
Disasters begin and end locally so state and local elections also matter.
State legislatures allocate funding for state emergency management agencies. Local officials are the ones who make decisions every single day about things like land-use practices, building codes, and funding local emergency management offices. I've even met a few mayors who've run emergency shelters themselves! I’m reminded of this piece from Ciara O’Rourke on Lina Hidalgo, the county judge of Harris County, on how her decision making has been so vital during the COVID response.
I focus a lot on the problems with our emergency management system. We have an opportunity next week to actually do something about it. Voting alone will not fix everything, but it is a starting place for many of the major shifts that have to happen for emergency management to become more effective and just.
Of course, there are many people across the country who are prevented from or otherwise unable to vote – including some recent disaster survivors.
In last month’s newsletter, I did a deep dive on Hurricane Laura. In the time since Delta compounded the damage in southwest Louisiana. Residents continue to be passed around from one temporary shelter/ housing situation to another. It will be an exceptionally long recovery process. As you might imagine with so many residents displaced there are serious concerns about resident’s ability to vote given the voting policies in Louisiana. Surely this will be made even more difficult by Zeta’s arrival.
Carly Berlin has an excellent piece for Southerly that looks at how Black residents in Lake Charles are particularly impacted by the state’s voting policies and are having a hard time casting their ballots. In Calcasieu Parish, home to Lake Charles, the pandemic and back-to-back (-to back?) hurricanes are just the latest tactic in voter suppression efforts.
If this all sounds familiar it is because this also happened after the Louisiana flood in 2016. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found 20 polling places were changed in East Baton Rouge Parish. 26% of Black voters in the parish had their polling place changed in contrast to 15% of white voters. Voter suppression also happened after Katrina & the Levee Failure.
So, remember that you’re not only voting for yourself. You’re voting for current disaster survivors and future disaster survivors. You’re voting for everyone who is and will be impacted by climate change. And, you’re voting on how this pandemic will end.
~MEME~ Break:
The Book of the Month:
I have a ~spooky~ novel for you this month.
“Leave the World Behind” by Rumaan Alam
Several months ago, I saw Rachel Syme tweet about a “deeply accurate urbane vacation shopping list” in a new novel she was reading by Rumaan Alam. I strongly identified with the grocery list and pre-ordered without reading what the book was about. (I just really trust Rachel Syme.)
When it came in the mail, I read the inside flap and was shocked to find: it is a disaster book. That’s right folks. In an extremely on-brand turn of events, the book I bought to read for “fun” turned out to be a disaster book. (I wish I could say this is the first time this has happened but it is not.)
I don’t want to give too much away so here’s a brief summary:
“it begins with an upper-middle-class white family vacationing at a luxurious Airbnb in the Hamptons. In the middle of the night, a wealthy Black couple show up, declare that they are the homeowners, and bring news of a mysterious apocalyptic event. When they ask to be let in, the uncomfortable prejudices lurking beneath the guests’ nice white liberal façade rise to the surface.”
Leave the World Behind is a literary thriller about contemporary life and, since contemporary life is currently a disaster, the book itself crosses into the disaster genre.
It does not follow the usual disaster narrative though. Disaster fiction almost entirely is from the perspective of the “hero”. This book instead captures the perspective of the random, regular people who know a disaster has occurred but have no inside information.
It is a book written to be a movie. Netflix already picked it up and Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington are set to star in it which means we are getting a disaster movie starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington and for that we should all be grateful.
The Disasterology Monthly Newsletter gives this 10/10 stars.
You can read more about the book here and buy it here.
Important Disaster Related Media Coverage This Month:
Response
Disaster historian, John Barry, weighed in on the absolute cruelty of a “Herd Immunity” approach to managing COVID. In this New York Times op-ed, he debunks each of the pro-herd immunity arguments.
While the rising death toll understandably remains the focus, there is a growing understanding of the long-term effects of COVID and they are horrifying. Brianna Sacks looked at long-COVID in millennials for Buzzfeed and David Tuller wrote about a 12 year old who has been struggling with the long-term consequences for The New York Times.
Jan Wesner Childs goes through some of the challenges of collecting post-hurricane COVID numbers.
There’s a new documentary on Hulu about Jared Kushner’s COVID task force which will be of interest given the FEMA connection.
Speaking of FEMA (and disasters being political), Buzzfeed looked into the Russian ventilators that FEMA threw out.
In weird emergency management news: the White House denied California’s latest round of disaster declaration requests. Within hours, and without a formal appeal filed, the President reversed the decision. This led to confused journalists asking equally confused emergency management experts what the heck just happened.
In disaster nonprofit news Gail McGovern gave this interview to the New York Times.
Preparedness
I have the ultimate preparedness article for you this month. Don’t be fooled by the flashy $500 Pottery Barn (POTTERY BARN!!) preparedness kits, there are important insights in the second half of the article about individual and household preparedness.
An important factor for individual and household preparedness is having an awareness that you’re even at risk of a given hazard. This is why flood/ fire disclosures for homeowners and renters is so important. NPR looked at how piecemeal laws across the country have left many in the dark about the risk they face.
Mitigation
Venice successfully used the controversial floodgate system, MOSE, to prevent a flood this month.
ProPublica looked at how housing policy is contributing to the significant wildfire impacts across the state.
Speaking of housing… this Miami Herald article looks at the impending housing crisis that awaits Miami.
This is a must-read: A conversation with tribal leaders from Louisiana’s Gulf Coast
Recovery
There are new numbers out on the cost of the Derecho in Iowa which brings further validation to the frustration of Iowans as state/ federal aid was slow to arrive.
Disaster researchers Felicia Henry and Scott Knowles wrote about equitable COVID recovery.
Gabrielle Gurley, for The American Prospect, wrote about the concerns of residents in Southwest Louisiana who are worried about FEMA’s ability to meet their extensive recovery needs.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General released a new report that found FEMA lost 38% of its commodity shipments to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. You can read the full report here and analysis from Nidhi Prakash at Buzzfeed.
Weird Disaster Thing
I regret to inform you all that someone is selling a Sharpie Gate bobblehead.
I will not be purchasing one because, to be honest, having this in my office will give me nightmares. It does seem fitting though to capture this very strange moment in weather/ emergency management history in an equally strange way. So, I am alerting you to its existence and you can do with this information what you want.
The End Bits:
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Finally, this newsletter is ~FREE~. I plan on keeping it that way because eliminating barriers to disaster knowledge is important. However, several people expressed an interest in financially supporting this work. I’ve created a “paid subscriber” option for $5 a month or whatever you’d like to give. The only difference between a free sign-up and a paid subscriber option is that you’ll be able to see the full archives of the newsletters. Really, this is just a way for those who want (and can) to support the newsletter. I’ll use the money to cover administrative expenses, do things like buy books to review, and maybe one day hire a research assistant to help. Thank you to everyone who has already supported financially!