Disasterology: October 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).

This month’s newsletter is just a New York Times alert.

I wrote a guest essay for the New York Times on what it is like for disaster survivors across the country who are trying to recover. I also pointed out some of the most needed recommendations for changes to the emergency management system which could make this work more effective, efficient, and equitable.

A fun little fact is that this newsletter is the reason that this piece even exists!!

Back in April, Eliza Barclay, the Climate Opinion Editor at the Times read a somewhat off-handed comment I made in my newsletter and thought we ought to turn it into an entire article.

“what the public wants from government in a disaster, is different from what the government actually does in a disaster. This mismatch of expectations is a fundamental tension between emergency management that the field seems to have no intention of addressing."

Since I have never once turned down an opportunity to talk about how we need to reform our approach to recovery, I said yes!

We already have a very good idea of what’s wrong with how we do recovery from the decades of disaster research on recovery so I had a good sense of what I would find. Still, it’s important to check in with survivors to hear firsthand what they’re experiencing.

One of my longtime criticisms of how recovery is covered in the media is that journalists take a case-study approach. It is very rare to find recovery articles that synthesize recovery experiences across disasters. Incidentally, we also have this problem in disaster research! I understand why. Recovery is so complex that it is extremely difficult to fit everything about one disaster into an article — let alone cover multiple disasters!

But just as disaster researchers have taken that next step to synthesize those case studies, journalists should too. Doing so is critical because it enables us to see where the problems in recovery overlap from one disaster to the next. Once you see how remarkably similar the experiences of survivors are from one disaster to the next it becomes glaringly obvious that the problems in recovery are systemic.

As I always say, that’s actually good news!! It means that many of the problems in how the US approaches recovery can be addressed through changing the system rather than needing to address unique problems in each community.

So, for this article it was really important to me to highlight as many disasters as possible — we were able to include seven: the Carr Fire, the Pajaro flood, the Texas Freeze, Hurricanes Laura/ Delta, the Iowa Derecho, the Kentucky flood, and Hurricane Maria. I was shooting for diversity of geographic location, hazards, and timing over the past six years. I interviewed survivors – and people who are helping them – to hear more about the current state of individual and household recovery.

As many of you reading this already know, it is very bad. Very bad.

We’ve known for a long time that the approach we’re taking to recovery isn’t working and every day the inadequacies of our recovery system grow as our risk increases.

This article is just one small peek into the world of disaster recovery. (If you want the longer version of the article – check out my book – and specifically the first 100 pages which focus on recovery.) Still, I am hopeful it reaches a new audience who maybe hasn’t thought of this before – especially those who might be in a position to make changes to our system (*waves to Congress*).

I also hope it makes other survivors feel less alone – and judging by the messages I’ve already received; it is doing that. Even if it can’t tangibly change their current situation, I think just understanding that what’s happening to them is not their fault, and they are not alone in this experience, can bring some comfort.

So, anyway, THANK YOU to all the people who talked to me for this piece. I talked to many more people than we had room to include and we didn’t have the space to include everyone’s full stories. There are also thousands of other survivors I could have talked to who all have equally important stories to share. As always, I’m grateful to have ended up in a position to highlight the lived experience of survivors across the county, in the context of the research, all in an effort to advocate for the change we need and deserve.

If you’re left wondering what you can personally do to try and make this situation better, here are some suggestions based on some of the major categories of people who subscribe to this newsletter:

• Emergency managers: I know the resources to prepare for recovery are few and far between, but we have to do it. I saw this post on LinkedIn which I think has some good advice.

• Journalists: Please, please, please keep covering recovery. Especially in the long-term. Especially in underserved communities. Especially pieces that make the links between disasters. Especially investigative pieces to hold government, nonprofits, and businesses accountable.

• Researchers: We need more research that can help inform the most effective ways to help communities through recovery. We do not need case studies, for the love of God. We need generalizable studies that can help inform national policy changes and we need open access to basic recovery data.

• Everyone: Email this article, or your own recovery stories, to your representatives in Congress or post it on socials and tag them. They’re ultimately the ones who have to make the big changes here.

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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.