For our first episode of 2024, we interviewed noted disasterologist and previous guest, Dr. Samantha Montano. We discuss the impact of climate change on disasters and the need for better disaster management and planning. We also explore the difference between emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes. And highlight the importance of community involvement in all stages of disaster management. We’ll wrap things up with a review of recent changes to FEMA’s individual assistance program and touch on the role of journalism in bridging the gap between public expectations and government actions in disaster response.
Resources:
- “Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis“
- Samantha’s monthly newsletter
- Samantha’s twitter
Episode credits:
- Hosted and produced by Tom Llewellyn
- Edited by Paige Kelly
- Theme Music by Cultivate Beats
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The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.
Interview
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Llewellyn
A lot of things have changed since the last time you were a guest back in 2019. At the same time, a lot of the structural issues related to pretty much every stage of the disaster management cycle remain the same, with a few improvements around the edges.
But as we’ve seen from last year, some of the main issues that arise during and after a disaster reared their ugly heads once again including 2023 having been the hottest year on record.
Can you unpack a little bit about what that means tangibly? What impact those higher temperatures had on the climate last year and on disasters in general?
Samantha Montano
As we start to see the climate changing, we are seeing that there is an increase in disasters in terms of their severity and the costs associated with them.
And last year was another year where we’ve seen higher temperatures, we’ve seen changes to hurricanes, changes to the conditions that facilitate wildfires. And at the end of the year, the tally from NOAA was that we had 25 billion-dollar disasters last year.
So again, in the trajectory of where we’re going with the climate crisis, we were right on track.
Tom
Those disasters seem like they were manyfold here in the Western United States, we were fortunate to have a pretty mild wildfire season and there was not as bad of a hurricane season as we’ve also had in many years recently. But there was still quite a bit of severe storms and flooding which caused, I think, the majority of those major disasters in the US. Can you talk a little bit about the diversity of disasters? There are regional impacts, but it also seems like there are disaster cycles where depending on various patterns, you get similar types of disasters across regions from year to year.
Samantha
One thing that’s important to remember when we talk about climate change is that climate change doesn’t mean that every year we’re going to have X number more hurricanes or more intense hurricanes. What we’re dealing with are averages. Some years, it’ll be a pretty easy hurricane season and there may not be too much that happens, which is great. Or like you said, a cooler wildfire season for the US west coast.
And then other years, it’ll be the opposite of that. And so, to your point, last year we had the fire on Maui. We had some kind of standout events in that sense. But we also just had a lot of smaller, no-name rain events, tornadoes, and other types of severe storms that led to a lot of damage across the country but didn’t necessarily capture the same kind of media attention that you might see with something like a hurricane.
Tom
You mentioned 25, I’d also read maybe as many as 28, billion-dollar disasters.
Samantha
At the end of the year, it takes them a while to tally it all up. It’ll be a couple over 25.
Tom
I think now they’ve said it’s the most billion-dollar disasters, accounting for inflation, that the United States has ever seen.
And this is up from 2017 previously. And so we’re going through these kind of cycles. But I think even that, what we mean by a billion-dollar disaster… the levels of disaster can be deceiving, especially when you break it down to a billion dollars or more. We can have a hundred-billion-dollar disaster.
For example, Katrina hitting New Orleans or Hurricane Maria hitting Puerto Rico. And sometimes those things are lumped together, right? And it’s hard to understand the severity of those. And I know that you first got turned on to this kind of disaster thinking about this and caring because of your experience going to New Orleans after Katrina.
What are the differences between a major disaster and now what disaster researchers, including yourself, are focusing on as catastrophes?
Samantha
This is a really important point.
It’s absolutely true that last year we broke that billion-dollar record in the US. But we did not have a catastrophic event last year. In the past 20 years in the US, we’ve had three events that I would consider to be a catastrophe. We had Katrina in 2005. We had Hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico. And then the COVID pandemic, of course.
The way that we approach this from research is when you look at this full spectrum of events, we have emergencies on the low end, which are events that may capture national attention, but the way that we respond to them, and deal with those life-saving measures, are handled at the local level using local resources. We’re not having to send in the calvary, so to speak, to address the needs that arise from that event. So things like a mass shooting, for example, many of these flood events would fall into that category.
Then in the middle, we have disasters when you have an event where you do need outside help to come in and that local resources are overwhelmed. So the fire in Maui would be a good example of that from last year. Looking back, the Joplin tornado would be a classic. Even something like the BP oil disaster would fall into that category.
So, within there, there’s still quite a range of what those events look like. But then there’s this third level of events, which we call catastrophes, which exceed the resources available at the state level for sure, but also start you start seeing a breakdown at the federal level in the US context. And you start seeing the response break apart, needs not being met for extended periods. And if you think back to the similarities between the response in New Orleans and Puerto Rico and with COVID across the country, you can start to see where the breakdowns were happening more at the federal level.
That is one way to think about this range of events that we’re having to deal with. And the reason that’s important is because there are all of the implications for how we plan for those different types of events. The way we plan for an emergency is going to be different than the way we try and plan for a catastrophe.
Tom
Do you feel like it’s possible to plan for those catastrophes in advance?
Samantha
Planning is always going to have its limitations, of course. There’s always a moment, I tell my students, where we have to throw the plans out the window because it’s just not going to work for the situation that we have.
But, I do think that there is a lot more that we could be doing to ready ourselves to deal with catastrophic events. If you look at our national emergency management policy, the vast majority of it is not relevant to catastrophes.
It’s written for disasters, which is what we’re dealing with most, so that makes sense. But we’ve had three in the past 20 years. We know catastrophes are possible. We know this is something that we have to deal with. The impacts of catastrophes are immense. And from research and our experience with those events, we have a lot of insights that could be integrated into policy to better enable not just the federal government, but local and state governments and other kinds of stakeholders involved to ready ourselves for those bigger events.
Tom
On The Response we’ve done a fair bit of coverage of Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico’s recovery and the pandemic. But we haven’t dug that deep into Katrina, which is one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about because you talk about it extensively in your book, which I’ve been listening to, and it was such a key moment in your personal development and leading to your work. And so looking at Katrina as a catastrophe, and just to stay on this thought around preparedness, in hindsight, what do you think were some of the things that the Louisiana region as a whole could have done to be better prepared for the natural hazard that turned into a disaster that ended up leading to a catastrophe?
Samantha
I think it’s a very long list. I think may be most useful to think about this from a systems perspective. Something really important to understand in terms of the context of why the response to Katrina unfolded in such a spectacularly terrible way is that two years before Katrina, there was a massive overhaul of national emergency management policy in the wake of 911, related to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Those changes had a massive effect on the overall US emergency management system and unfortunately, some of them were not great changes. Some of them also had not had time to fully be implemented by the time Katrina hit. And so it was particularly bad timing.
Part of the reason you see such a breakdown in the federal response is that the system had just been shuffled all around and people didn’t understand, “Are we doing this the old way?” “Are we doing it the new way?” “Who’s in charge of what? There was an extended period where the folks at the higher levels didn’t know who was in charge of the response. Whether it was Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, or if it was the secretary of DHS, or if it was the president, who was even in charge?
Those are the kinds of things that should not be a question in the middle of a response. And since Katrina, we have tried to work on this a bit, but there are still moments where sometimes it’s not always clear in a response of who’s in charge. Those are the kinds of things that we completely are capable of addressing ahead of time.
They’re obvious things that could have a huge effect.
Tom
I think that question of one, what the protocol is and what the roles are, is interesting. Tthere can be pushback from having outside federal agencies come into various communities, especially when it comes to immigrant communities, where there may be undocumented folks and people of color. And we saw some of those negative effects, which you write about in your book, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina as well. The way that those that were most impacted were often seen through a lens of criminality or othering.
What aspect of emergency management response and what the relationship is between outside agencies coming in and working to support local communities with all of the nuances that exist?
Samantha
One of the main responsibilities of emergency managers is to ensure that all members of a community are represented in emergency management, that their needs are accounted for, and that they have a voice in how emergency management is playing out in their community.
And unfortunately, sometimes that does not happen in local communities, for a variety of reasons. And there are all kinds of consequences when that doesn’t happen. You have this kind of us versus them mentality sometimes that can emerge. You have decades, sometimes centuries, of social problems that have been boiling in the background, come to a head amid a disaster.
You have the repercussions of systemic racism and classism that help to manifest these differences in impacts and who can get resources. And this can all come together amid a response. It’s a whole other layer of challenges for folks that are trying to address the needs of that community.
And so that is something that I think is important for emergency management agencies to be working with ahead of time. There’s been a mentality, I think, or a perception sometimes, that emergency managers are first responders and falling into that sector of work. I don’t think that’s the right way to think about what that job is. It’s much more about community organizing and getting the community together, getting them on board, getting community buy-in for various projects, and helping the community understand the complexities of risk.
In some places, you’re starting to see a little bit of a shift in thinking among emergency management. But I think moving forward that is a critical path that we need to be going down.
Tom
You’ve talked about this before and I think this ended up leading to that recent op-ed you wrote for The New York Times, which is that what the public wants from government and disaster is different from what the government does in a disaster.
And that mismatch of expectations is a fundamental tension between the emergency management that the field seems to have no intention of addressing. Are there other things that you feel can address that mismatch? And what could be done to bridge the gap between those expectations?
Samantha Montano
I think the key group of people here who could bridge this gap is journalists. The public doesn’t understand how the emergency management system is set up. Even if you have been through a disaster, you still really only understand it from your perspective, which might be useful to understand some problems, but you still don’t necessarily have a big picture of how the system works or how it’s supposed to work.
It took me years of intentionally studying this even to begin to understand how this system works. So of course, the average person isn’t going to understand that. I think we have a lot of ideas about what the government does in a disaster and what they don’t do.
And, for some communities, we expect, “Well FEMA is going to show up, they’re going to hand us a check, I’ve paid my taxes. This is why we have government to help us in the midst of crisis.” And then when that doesn’t happen, they’re like, “Wait, what? This is so shocking to us.”
And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have communities where the government has not historically shown up for them. And so they are less surprised by that. And then you have the emergency management system and the government part of that system, in the middle here, doing some things and helping some people, in some very particular ways. But then also leaving all of these needs unmet in communities across the country.
And the theory has always been that nonprofits and mutual aid groups would fill those gaps. But we’ve seen that they have their limitations in terms of what resources they have and how well they’re able to meet those needs. And so you see this mismatch going on in this just complete kind of talking over each other and misunderstanding each side of things.
I think part of what needs to happen here is that there needs to be better education for the public about the emergency management system. I don’t think that we all need to understand every single emergency management policy, but I do think some helpful explainers would be useful here on just some of these basic points and even just having more than a handful of journalists across the country who understand the declaration processes or how individual assistance works so that they make sure they are accurately writing about that.
And their articles could potentially make a huge difference. On the other hand, too, I think the government here needs to take some responsibility for this. I think that they need to be listening to what the public is saying, which is, “We want more help when disasters happen.” The government is there to serve us, theoretically, so they should be making changes to the extent, within their legal bounds to make sure that they are effectively and equitably using the resources they do have to do a better job of meeting that range of needs that people have after a disaster.
It’s tough because obviously, journalism across the country is breaking down. But I do think they are in a very unique position to be able to address that need.
Tom
There are several major news outlets out there and TV news that really should be providing more resources knowing that there are so many of these disasters. There is a need for that kind of information and when one is going through a disaster, it is very hard to deal with the initial implications. For example, the roof’s been ripped off and then to have to figure out where and how to find information even about how to apply or how to go through that process.
This is something I went through last year. I’m in a disaster zone and we had four branches come through our roof, others take out a deck, and significant damages. The only reason why I even found out that there was some amount of potential support was because I happened to go to the library because I’d lost power.
And they had in the back room with the library, you had to go through a separate entrance, they had a whole area where they were taking people in. And I thought, “I’ll pop in and just see what’s going on.” But unless I had already been going to the library, I would have had no idea that there were services.
And I almost missed the deadline date because they were just about to wrap up. So several improvements need to be made there. And it sounds like maybe there’s a little bit of good news on that front with FEMA just announcing that they’re going to be making changes to the individual assistance program.
And I’m wondering if you can talk about what that looks like, what some of those key changes are, and how that will support people that are going through disasters.
Samantha
There have, for many years, been criticisms of FEMA’s assistance programs. Those are the programs that exist to give aid directly from FEMA to individuals as opposed to paying for things like fixing roads and bridges.
And so FEMA gives out money in very specific situations, right? This is not every time there is a storm. You have to be in a county that received a declaration and received approval for it. There are a lot of hoops that you have to jump through to even begin to be eligible for this money.
Nonetheless, there are millions of people across the country every year who are eligible for this aid. And what we’ve heard from survivors constantly for, again many years, is that even knowing this aid exists, let alone figuring out the process to receive this aid, is like solving a Rubik’s Cube.
It can be done, but it’s really hard if no one has told you how to do it. And I’ve written a lot about this. And as you mentioned a couple of days ago, FEMA announced that they were making some pretty significant changes to individual assistance to address some of these most common problems.
Probably the biggest change from a financial impact for individual survivors is that they are going to change the rules so insurance will not count towards the amount of money you can receive from FEMA. So there’s a cap every year of like how much a person can receive from FEMA. This year it’s $41,500.
So if you had some insurance money in the past, they would have counted that towards your $41,000. They are no longer going to do that. So that means if insurance only gives you $10,000, but you need, $20,000 or $50,000, you can go get the rest from FEMA.
Again, theoretically, if you meet all these other requirements. So that I think has the potential to mean a fair amount more money for homeowners. So I think that is good.
Tom
Because we’re in California and there are issues around insurance companies that are already leaving the state, threatening to leave the state, and policies getting terminated, we were afraid to make an insurance claim. And because we had not made an insurance claim, FEMA was unwilling to give us any money.
So we ended up just getting loans to be able to do this because we weren’t able to cover the cost of fixing the roof and everything all by itself. There was this fear around the loss of insurance. So it seems like another one of those things is that they’re going to make it so you no longer have to go to insurance first, in certain cases, I thought I read as well.
Samantha
That might be buried in there, I might’ve missed it. I know that you don’t have to go to SBA first anymore. It’s a similar hoop that people were having to jump through, which is you were having to go to the Small Business Administration and apply for a loan, which for some people, they said, “I’m not going to be able to pay this back. I don’t want to take a loan out. ” And then, other people were just doing it as a box-checking thing, right? “I just have to go get denied and then I can come back to FEMA.” So it was just adding more layers there, more frustration, and more confusion because it’s the name of the administration that throws everyone off.
There are some relatively minor changes like that where it doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but I think it will help facilitate more people being able to access aid. The trick with all of this, though, is that it all depends on how this is implemented in practice.
And that is something that we just have to wait and see. If you read through the full press release of changes, all of the changes in there, I thought were positive changes. There wasn’t anything in there that I thought was bad. There are some potential consequences to some of these things, but I think we can manage them. It all comes down to, ” Well, how useful is this change going to be once we roll it out in a disaster?”
And for that, we have to wait and see. Going back to insurance, I do think part of that I’m seeing as FEMA’s attempt at a Band-Aid over the insurance situation across the country right now. There’s not much that FEMA can do on its own to force insurers to stay in states or to deal with the accountability issue of insurance companies not paying out as much as they should be.
So I think this was FEMA’s attempt to try and do what was in their power to address this problem until broader insurance reforms hopefully come to fruition at some point.
Tom
Here in California, one of the things might, or at least my limited understanding is that it’s grandstanding by the insurance companies because they’re in a battle with the state regulators around the amount that they can charge for premiums and per when a claim is made and so it’s not necessarily a federal thing at this point, but it’s a state thing.
But it’s squeezing out a lot of people and the impact is real for many, as we have more and more disasters. The fear of not being able to get insurance and being underinsured is going to have some pretty significant ramifications for society as a whole. We’ve seen when people lose their homes and can’t move back to a place and aren’t able to be part of what that kind of reimagining and rebuilding looks like.
We’ve been talking a lot about kind of the national government side of things, emergency management, FEMA, all of that.
But we’ve yet to jump into kind of what it takes to build more collective resilience within our communities. And I’m wondering if there are a couple of things, still staying on the response recovery side, but are there things that communities can do to be better prepared, be organized for when a disaster happens? Not just to support themselves in the immediate aftermath, but to be better prepared as a community to navigate things like FEMA funding and what that recovery looks like.
Samantha
There are a lot of things that we could be doing.
So one of the major things is doing recovery planning before a disaster even happens. So one thing that we know from research is when communities have a pre-existing recovery plan, they’re able to move through that recovery process more quickly, right? Because they’ve already thought about what are the areas of our community that we need to prioritize getting fixed? What changes do we maybe want to implement?
Since everything’s broken, we’re going to change things as we rebuild. So they’ve already negotiated out some of those bigger questions. You then have a group of people in your community who have already been thinking about recovery and have a better chance of potentially being able to navigate that recovery process.
So recovery planning is something that local emergency management agencies can do, and some of them do. But it’s also something that community organizations can take on or even like a city planning office, right? Other people in your community could be really engaged in that process.
The more people and groups who work on that the better. The other thing that I would say is organizing for more investment in your local emergency management agency. So most communities across the country only have a part-time emergency manager. When you have a part-time emergency manager, it’s probably unlikely that they are an expert in recovery.
They probably lean more towards the response side of things, which is important, but I think every emergency management agency needs at least four people, one for each phase of the disaster. And so to have a dedicated recovery person in your emergency management agency is a huge deal.
And so from a community organizing perspective, advocating for more funding for that agency so you can hire somebody to be in that position is important. And then existing groups that are in your community tend to evolve into disaster groups when something happens.
So if there’s any kind of outreach to be done among just any existing nonprofits or existing groups in your community ahead of time to even get them oriented towards thinking about, “Hey, this might be your role if we get into the situation of being in a response or a recovery,” I think is useful.
Tom
I’ve been asking a lot of guests this recently, with everything going on in the world, politically and socially and also environmentally, where do you find joy? What still excites you despite everything else that’s going on?
Samantha
My answer for this tends to be my students. I am a professor in an undergrad emergency management program outside of Boston and I have 200-plus students who are all disaster nerds and want to be involved in disasters and do climate change-related work for their entire careers. They’re walking into very daunting fields for sure.
But a lot of them have really good ideas and cool ideas and are excited to get started on this work. Seeing their willingness to jump into this fight with us is something that keeps me going.
Tom
Thank you so much for sharing that. And where can people find your work and follow you?
Samantha
Probably the best place is on Twitter. It’s @SamLMontano. And then you can also find links to my books and articles and all of this kind of stuff that we were talking about on my website, which is disaster-ology.com.
