Image courtesy of FEMA
The 2017 hurricane season set a record of three separate Category Four hurricanes hitting the United States. It was also the most costly hurricane season on record. The hurricanes plus wildfires in the western states pushed the federal government’s emergency response to the limit of its capacity. The management of Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and Harvey demonstrates just how ill-prepared the agencies in charge of handling consecutive disasters were -- not to mention the inequality in the allocation of resources and the inherent danger of politicizing a catastrophe.
Now, on top of a pandemic that has halted the world economy and has claimed more than 200,000 lives in the US, we are experiencing the most active hurricane season in recent history, as well as the most disastrous wildfires in the history of our nation. We are witnessing in real time how little the federal government has learned from past lessons about managing multiple disasters at the same time.
With climate chaos already impacting millions of US residents, we urgently need to revamp our state and federal agencies dealing with disaster response and disaster preparedness. We need them to be better equipped to face the challenges of climate chaos -- not just with the big costly tragedies like the West Coast wildfires but also with the smaller, less visible incidents so many people across the nation are experiencing this year.
Climate chaos doesn’t look like the typical Hollywood disaster flick, where calamity is unleashed over two hours with just enough time for us to develop empathy for the main characters. It is more like a lobster in a pot: When we realize it is too hot to survive it is already too late. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is woefully ill-prepared for the compounding dangers of a deadly pandemic and a particularly busy hurricane season. Hurricane response involves mass evacuations and relocation of people, an influx of emergency responders to affected areas, and crowded communal shelters -- all factors that increase the risk of transmission of COVID-19 according to a recent study.
The politicization of emergency management is another thing we should all be concerned about. In the past the Trump administration used emergency funds for his non-emergency border wall. This year, history will repeat itself as farce as Trump signs an executive order robbing disaster relief funds to boost unemployment benefits. To make things even more ridiculous, FEMA is taking a page from Trump in handling the COVID-19 crisis. Rather than a coordinated federal response, the administration left states alone to navigate management of the pandemic. That put us in a situation where states competed for scarce resources such as test kits and personal protective equipment (PPE). In Illinois, the state comptroller had to conduct a $3 milliontransaction for PPE in the parking lot of a McDonalds. So we are just one big disaster away from states competing for bottled water, meals, and other disaster response needs that would translate into unnecessary suffering and even avoidable loss of lives.
FEMA’s COVID-19 Pandemic Operational Guidance offers little beyond its guidance for typical circumstances. Much like the rest of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, this FEMA plan primarily relies on local authorities to develop emergency plans while failing to outline where the resources for virus response in a disaster (such as PPE, or socially distanced public shelters) will come from. The plan points to the CDC advising hurricane victims to stay at least six feet from people outside of their household while in public disaster shelters, advice that can hardly be followed in overcrowded shelters that are few and far between.
FEMA’s guidance fails to address issues that have already arisen in previous years. For example, the new guidance recommends support for “remote inspection processes” and “remote preliminary damage assessments,” which imply victims of disaster need to contact the agency by electronic means. This ignores the fact that following Hurricane Maria more than 90 percent of Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million inhabitants had no electricity, phone, or internet services. Why are we still relying on a plan that has been proven impossible or useless in the past?
At the heart of the dangers of this hurricane season is the outsized threat to low-income communities across the US, and to Black and Brown communities who have been subjected to chronic underresourcing, redlining and other forms of housing discrimination, state-sponsored police violence, and more than their fair share of pollution. The pandemic has laid bare the grave inequities in our social systems -- from health care to housing -- as Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at three times the rate of white people. Moreover, communities of color and low-income communities are on the frontlines of climate change as they have been geographically sequestered in high-risk disaster areas.
Moreover, the unequal distribution of emergency resources was also in stark relief in Puerto Rico in 2017, when following the devastation of hurricanes Harvey and Maria, federal agencies provided millions of dollars to areas that were heavily populated by Trump’s voter base, while the president threw paper towels at Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico. Now, in an election year, aid is even more likely to be driven by political decisions -- especially in Puerto Rico and other communities of color where residents have been historically underrepresented or outright excluded from the electoral process.
We need to update our disaster response and emergency preparedness to reflect the reality of climate change. We have rapidly changed the way we respond to disasters in the past. It took just months for the US government to establish the Department of Homeland Security in response to the September 11 terrorist attack. Even if we transition tomorrow to a fossil fuel-free economy, we won’t stop the climate-driven cycle of disasters. And communities historically burdened by environmental justice will continue to be first and worst impacted. The longer heat waves, the sudden floods, the frequent wildfires, and every-year-earlier hurricane season should be a wake-up call for our representatives in Washington, DC, to save lives and protect the economy by acting on climate now.