Ologies with Alie Ward - Disasterology (DISASTERS) with Samantha Montano

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

Floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, explosions, hurricanes, oil spills, bombings, BAD THINGS: Why do they happen? What can we do to prepare? What is a disaster vs. a catastrophe? Who makes it their life's work to go help? Professional Disasterologist and Emergency Management expert Dr. Samantha Montano sits down to talk about disaster movies, the addiction of helping others, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the floods, looting, doomsday prepping, keeping calm under pressure, climate change, governmental budgets, cathedrals vs. islands, the myths of disasters, looking for the helpers, and how humans tend and befriend each other in times of chaos. Dr. Montano's website: disaster-ology.comFollow Dr. Montano on Twitter @SamLMontanoSponsor links: calm.com/ologies; Trueandco.com/ologies (code: ologies); kiwico.com/ologiesA donation went to: billandersonfund.orgMore links up at alieward.com/ologies/disasterologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesFollow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Okay, it's room temperature cheese, which you always forget is better than cold cheese. Ally Ward, back with another episode of oligies. You know, every week I worry, will I make a good enough episode for you? I'm not gonna bungle it. This one is a disaster, and I'm happy to report it's a disaster in the best way. I'm gonna get a few formalities out of the way up top. I want to thank the patrons at patreon.com for making the show possible, for as little as a buck a month you can donate. I thank you to everyone wearing oligies merch from oligiesmerge.com. Thanks to everyone who tells a friend or lover about the show and who rates it

and subscribes to keep it up in the charts and most importantly perhaps reviews because you know on days when I'm eating peanut butter and hotel room for dinner I read them and I smell like a creep with a warm heart. Such as for example this one by Tumblr mobile who says not to be dramatic but listening to oligies has been helping me slowly climb out of the depressive funk I've been in for the past six months. Thank you dad Ward for being curious and insightful and socio-cathy hello to your inner curious science kid from my inner curious science kid and the rest of the oligites so thank you for your reviews

everyone I read them all I read all of them proof there you go okay disaster ology let's get into it this one has got to be made up right no shut your mouth how dare you it's in fact a very real ology and as it turns out it's a pretty vital one so this field of study was pioneered by Dr. Samuel Henry Prince pretty much after the 1917 disaster in Halifax Nova Scotia who I just read about this in which a French vessel full of gunpowder caught fire exploded in a harbor it leveled buildings for half a mile sent a shockwave that instantly killed 1,600 people and injured nearly a thousand more 300 folks later died from

their injuries this was a catastrophe so huge so tragic it wiped out 22% of residents including a neighboring Mi'kmaq community which perished in the resulting tsunami caused by this blast this was huge so Dr. Sam Henry Prince sociologist began studying why disasters happen how to mitigate them how to respond and recover so a hundred years later and there are now whole research arms dedicated to these fields and when I first heard that disaster ology was a thing I want to sit down and I want to talk to someone who as their life's work focuses on making death and chaos into prevention and recovery so I googled

disaster ology and the first one million results were about a San Diego pop punk band called pierce the veil and their song disaster ology which seems to be from what I can surmise about getting wasted and having girls crawl out from under your bed however there is a very sweet screechy refrain that goes if it's the end of the world you and me should spend the rest of it in love and you know it's not wholly inaccurate I thought this episode would focus on your splitting havoc discomforts like a pierce the veil song but really it left me with a faith in humanity and love and neurobiology so this ologist you're

about to meet has a BS in psychology and an MS and a PhD in emergency management from North Dakota State University she is an assistant professor of emergency management and disaster science at University of Nebraska Omaha y'all her website is disaster ology disaster dash ology comm she has the domain name I had to meet her so on a rainy April afternoon I traveled thousands of miles from home to meet her on campus at North Dakota State University and we pulled up a few chairs and dug in to what is a disaster what is a catastrophe what risks do responders take what are some of the worst historical disasters what can we

do to protect ourselves do doomsday preppers know what's up which disaster movies suck the most should we be afraid of the big one should you donate money or get your ass down to a hazard zone how much looting happens when the shit hits the fan and why keeping calm is one of the safest things you can do so bat down the hatches get cozy in the cellar for emergency management professor and professional disaster ologist Dr. Samantha Montano of all of all the episodes I feel like this is going to be the hardest one to pick because you're like oh yeah there's there's some charities when I found out

you were in North Dakota I was like oh I'm coming for you and now how long have you been a disaster ologist well it depends on how you define disaster ologist I've had my doctoral degree in emergency management for two years now and then before that I was in grad school for five years and I did four years of disaster related work before that what does disaster related work entail so I got my start in disasters right after Hurricane Katrina and the Levy failure in New Orleans I was in high school at the time so side note this was in August of 2005 and Hurricane Katrina was a category five storm that hit Florida and

Louisiana so New Orleans which sits below sea level was protected by miles of levees and flood walls in which over 50 breaches and major leaks occurred leaving 80% of the city flooded after the hurricane so over 1800 lives were lost Sam who's originally from Portland Maine went to New Orleans in the aftermath and I there was like a group from my high school going down to New Orleans to help got homes and rebuild and so I went on that trip to volunteer for a week and I kind of just got what we call the disaster bug and so I ended up moving to New Orleans when I graduated and I lived there for four years doing all

different kinds of recovery work with different non-profits in the city and then it kind of just spiraled from there while I was there the BP oil disaster happened along the coast and so I did some work with that and different organizations then I took a group of volunteers to Joplin, Missouri after their tornado and I just kind of kept going until I went to grad school and when you say that you got the disaster bug as they say you're not the only person who calls it the disaster bug no I don't know who started that but it's definitely a saying particularly among like practitioners and people who do a

lot of volunteering during and after disasters what is the disaster bug um it's just kind of this uh I don't know it's like this like draw you're like being drawn towards disasters when they happen I think you just notice them more frequently you especially when you are going to a disaster during the actual response and into like the very early days of recovery it's like this very kind of unique feeling within a community that's going through that um and so getting the disaster bug is kind of like liking not liking that feeling but kind of being drawn towards that.

Okay so I don't I couldn't find the exact origin or first usage of this phrase but it's definitely in parlance in the disaster community so in one 2017 Disasterology Workshop titled Preparing for the Future of Disaster Health Volunteerism Sean Casey who's an acting director of an emergency response unit said that many volunteers quote get the bug to complete more disaster response deployments this did not satisfy me though so like a woodland creature I decided to burrow into google screaming why

but why the bug into an ever deeper trench and I found the research of UCLA social psychologist Dr. Shelley E. Taylor who for decades has studied the role of the hormone oxytocin in stress response and she theorizes that oxytocin leads us to quote tend and befriend in times of chaos or disaster so the disaster bug it is a thing and it may also be chemical. Is there something about the unity that happens after a big event like that? Yeah so Rebecca Solnit has written an entire book about this actually it's

called The Paradise Built in Hell and that's basically the title of that book is what is kind of describing that feeling that a community goes through it's like this paradise because there is this sense of unity and despite what Hollywood movies tell us about disasters people are actually really pro-social and come together when disasters happen and so there's like this sense of unity within the community that kind of feels like a bit of a paradise but then of course there's this disaster happening around you and so that is

the hell that this paradise is happening within. Were you ever struck by that Mr. Rogers quote? Yeah the one about the helpers. Yeah always look for the helpers. There will always be helpers you know even just on the sidelines that's why I think that if news programs could make a conscious effort of showing rescue teams of showing medical people anybody who is coming into a place where there's a tragedy to be to be sure that they include that

because if you look for the helpers you'll know that there's hope. Yeah it's really interesting I think about that quote a lot whenever a disaster happens and it's shared around I mean that's where that like quote comes from is that no matter how bad a situation is there's always people there that are helping in various ways. And so that's kind of what your work entails is is helping and figuring out how to mobilize people to help more? Yeah exactly so within the world of disasters the part that I study

is emergency management so it's how we actually manage the disasters like how do we make sure that the right people are in the right places at the right time how do we do things to prevent disasters from happening in the first place what do we need to do ahead of time to make sure response and recovery to disasters goes well how do we get communities recovered as quickly as possible How do you define disaster and how do you define your role as a Disasterologist? I know you weren't the first person

to necessarily utter the phrase but maybe the first to take ownership of it since like the 1850s or something. So there is this is shocking but there technically is not a consensus on a definition of disaster but why not? There's like some different ones out there that people are kind of drawn to when I explain it I think the easiest way to think about it is that it is when a hazard meaning something that poses a threat to us interacts with us our communities the things we care about to the point that we are overwhelmed and so at that point that hazard has become

a hazard event and then hazard events kind of fall along this spectrum is one way to think about it so you have emergencies on the low end disasters in the middle and catastrophes on the high end so it kind of fades up like an ombre of horrors and so in emergency management we study all three but yeah they kind of fall along this spectrum so a catastrophe is worse than a disaster yes so it's funny because we think of

those words only in hyperbole of like I got a lot to say that was a catastrophe yeah how do you feel about the show catastrophe are you like calm down quick aside I love the show catastrophe it is wonderful no it's fine words have different meanings in different contexts so okay next slide as long as you know they're hyperbolic right I have called my hair a disaster so many times in my apartment a disaster so many times and it's a little different and so when it comes to your role from a

professional sense how do you get a degree in it how is that even structured how are you teaching it what's the what's the academic aspect of it like sure so I did not know anything about emergency management I did not know it was something you could get a degree in at all Samantha did her undergrad at Loyola University in New Orleans and one of her professors had gone to the University of Delaware which is home to the disaster research center this is a real place

the disaster research center and so when I demonstrated this interest in disasters she recommended that I look into grad school as an option and so I started looking into emergency management programs for my master's degree and there are at that time there was you know a bunch around the country of kind of varying quality and so I kind of just picked what I thought were the top three and applied to them and then I went with the one that gave me the most money which was

NDSU and that is how I ended up in Fargo, North Dakota a lot of disasters come through here tornadoes yeah we do have a tornado risk but mostly it's the flooding from the Red River oh my gosh so when it comes to disasters what are some of the most common ones that start as hazards and end up disasters so flooding is the most common one really around the world yeah really I didn't realize that so quick aside how many floods happen a year what are we talking

so I live in a place where you have to remember to water a cactus so I looked it up and a weather.com article from 2018 was titled not at all rosalie a concerning trend flooding deaths have increased in the US the last few years and it said the average number of flood deaths used to be 86 this is for the last several decades and then it jumped to 95 flooding deaths a year in the last 10 years and then over 100 deaths a year

in the past few years so like floodwaters it's on the rise now in India right now just this very monsoon season 1.2 million people have been displaced and evacuated with over 200 casualties so anyway floods not a good scene and what can be done about that so there are a lot of things so this is one of the key things we do in emergency management is look at what is what are the factors that are actually leading to this disaster happening because once you identify those factors

then you can start to try to do something about those factors so in terms of flooding there is a ton that we can do some of those things are related to kind of addressing the hazard itself so mitigating climate change itself is going to pull back on some of that hazard risk in terms of flooding in various ways so that is like one way you can drive at the cause of disaster so just like fix climate change easy peasy but on an individual level if you live somewhere that's say

prone to flooding you can raise your house Samantha says you can put up a flood wall or otherwise modify your own property you can also go to Craigslist buy a helicopter and park it on your roof PS I just looked up how much does the helicopter cost and it's about half a million dollars but if you don't mind a single cedar without doors that looks like it's made out of plastic you can find them on arrow trader for less than a used Audi would cost you probably

need to take a how to fly a chopper class first so it's probably like harder than a stick shift but I'm not a doctor and then also we can do things at a community level so obviously communities build levees build other kind of like bigger infrastructure projects there's kind of a push now back more towards more natural types of mitigation like you know revitalizing wetlands and whatnot you can do home buyout so that's something we've done in Fargo along the river where you

buy out people's homes and then turn that back into green space or a park or something so that when it does flood it's not too big of a deal it doesn't cause too much damage so yeah lots of different things you can do and what was your experience like uh in the aftermath of Katrina I know that is a huge question sure how would you quantify that because if it was a hurricane caused a flood yeah how do you yeah so uh when you go to New Orleans and you mentioned Katrina you'll hear New Orleans say something along the lines of Hurricane Katrina and the levee

failure and what they are getting at there is that yes there was a hurricane that was the like initial trigger of everything that happened but it was that hurricane interacting with a levee system that hadn't been maintained that and not maintained and not built correctly that led to the actual flood of the city so this also gets at this other kind of common myth in the disaster world we have this term natural disaster that we use all the time

but really disasters aren't natural they're caused by decisions that we make in how we build and where we live the policies that we have that are driving these things and so we can have natural hazards right the hurricane itself may be natural the tornado itself is natural but that that point where it interacts with us then it becomes you know we're involved in that now and so it's kind of if you look back at the way we've thought about disasters in the past

like way back we think about them as acts of god then we switch more to this idea of natural disasters still removing human responsibility from those disasters that have happened and so now there's this push among disaster researchers and others to kind of like pull back on that and acknowledge our our role in causing those disasters in that it wasn't planned for properly which then I guess would switch the hand to having more control in the future of how bad they are

yeah exactly how bad the impact is right did you ever did were you ever raised with Sunday school like Noah's arc in the notion of floods like was that something that stuck with you no I wasn't we weren't religious growing up but people often joke that Noah was the first emergency manager so a huge vessel on the high seas wherein you are expected to bone a lot so Noah he was also the world's first cruise ship captain when it comes to your work how much

of it is distributing water and getting places for people to stay and how much of it is on the front end where you're trying to enact policy change and make sure that people are better prepared uh so in the u.s the way that like generally we deal with disasters is that we're really reactive so we wait until a disaster happens and then we're reacting to it that's not good we need to be proactive we need to be doing things ahead of time okay get ready for a list of four things this is the base of disasterology the order

through the chaos so this might help we split disasters up into four phases so you have mitigation where you're doing things to prevent disasters from happening you have preparedness where you're doing things to get ready to deal with the response and recovery then you have response which is that like 72 hours where you're doing lifesaving tasks that's probably like what you think of when you hear about disasters and then there's the recovery process which depending on the situation can go on for months years decades

so mitigation preparedness response and recovery so in emergency management we deal in all four phases and obviously that is a lot so it kind of depends on what community you're working in and like what the situation is but emergency managers are doing a lot of their work in preparedness their writing plans they are doing initiatives to help individuals in the community prepare for disaster right they're doing all of those like getting themselves ready for response and recovery

the actual like distribution of water and getting people into shelters all of that happens in this very small window of time again like 72 hours sometimes a week sometimes a little bit longer and then you move on into recovery were you always very helpful as a kid were you always how many siblings do you have i have i'm the oldest of four okay all right and i'm much older than them so yes were you always putting out figurative fires and yeah you could say that yeah um so is it has it always kind of been in your

nature to to help out when you can yeah yeah okay side note is this an isolated incident or do firstborns get more shit done and just like helping people i read up on one study done of men in the swedish military and researcher dr sandra e black was looking into if birth order had an impact on non-cognitive abilities like leadership skills and she writes in one article about it higher scores were assigned to those subjects considered emotionally stable persistent socially outgoing

willing to assume responsibility and able to take initiative she crunched the numbers later born children had systematically lower scores onto all of those attributes now firstborn children tend to have jobs that require more sociability leadership ability conscientiousness agreeableness emotional stability extraversion and openness so firstborn kids tend to have important jobs like CEOs and lawmakers and politicians what's dr sandra e blacks steak in the game

you wonder oh she's a firstborn huh so i will now be pursuing my phd on the thesis so what if i'm the last born maybe i was too busy getting dunked on and being tricked into giving my toys away when my sisters lied to me so i became the family buffoon to escape persecution and that is why i work from pajama's writing content about lizard dicks okay girls like swarms of lizards right what is it like when you i think when people think about disaster recovery they do think of that that small window of time

when you're on the ground and you're you're seeing things and you're you're helping out um do you find that some people think that they're cut out maybe for this work and it's just too difficult or too emotional for them um maybe um i think going back to that disaster bug thing i think the people who like say they've cut the disaster bug are the people who are cut out for it so i guess there is something about it that some people seem to be more capable of handling for extended periods of time going back to recovery

smantha remember spent undergrad in louisiana after katrina and the floods and this was a massive catastrophe again 80 percent of the city flooded human bodies floated in the flood waters for days at a time infrastructure was out all over people left and never came back so for this episode i went back and looked up some ap photos of the direct aftermath and i literally cried over my laptop and then had nightmares the scale of this tragedy was unthinkable so what was her experience like there

so when i lived in new orleans i lived there for four years i was going to college so in some ways i was mostly living on campus in uptown new orleans um you know you could walk around outside and not really know that katrina had happened in the past few years um there were like some signs here and there but for the most part things looked quote unquote normal but because of the organizations i worked with worked with and the other things that i did i was regularly spending time in

all different neighborhoods throughout the entire city and you know when you live in a place that is going through a recovery especially of the size of katrina's recovery it affects kind of every aspect of your day from you know certain roads being closed down because they're still doing construction on those roads or fixing the sewer lines for the first time since the storm like years later or you know trash and recycling not being back or it being two to three years before the

streetcar starts running again right every different aspect of the city had to be rebuilt and so you're operating within this space that is not operating at its full capacity and so that kind of like that eats at you that affects your daily life and even i who was very much still removed from that like i myself was not going through recovery i myself was like living in like a place that was recovered and even then when i left new orleans i like felt the difference of

moving to fargo and being in a community that was all put together and operating the way you expect a community to operate and so yeah it definitely eats at you we also see that in the research in terms of you know people's mental health and the way that stress manifests during recovery we see an increase in domestic violence an increase in suicides during recovery among people who are going through that process and yeah it's extremely extremely difficult to go through particularly as a survivor of that disaster

does it ever affect you to see how people respond to certain disasters as opposed to others or how policymakers or political officials will respond to certain communities affected or certain disasters is that ever something that might get your goat yeah i'm mad like all the time okay that's what i think just constantly mad yeah just a side note so we recorded this in late april the world had just watched france's structural jewel

Notre Dame cathedral burn in part to cinders and collapse over one billion dollars in donations poured out of pockets and the church reported that most of it was from small personal donations so okay they raised a billion dollars very quickly fine it's europe there are so many countries that would chip in but it just read a recent travel and leisure article that noted an estimated 90 percent of the donations didn't come from europe they came from the u.s so what about

Puerto Rico hobbled by hurricane maria they got less help from the u.s federal government than texas and florida did for hurricanes harvey and ermah and as for personal donations folks gave about 32 million to Puerto Rico as compared to that one billion for a paris church hurricane maria's death toll in Puerto Rico which is a u.s territory is estimated at 3057 people so the death toll for the Notre Dame fire zero huge financial discrepancies there

certainly everything about disasters is injustice manifesting like who is affected most directly by disasters which communities are affected in what ways they're affected their ability to prepare for disasters their ability to mitigate disasters their ability to recover their ability to literally survive disasters all of this is tied to policies that are shaped by race class gender and all of those inequalities come out in the middle of a disaster

and you know it's those inequalities exist in all four phases but of course it's during the response that they are kind of most visible and in everyone's face. Kanye West sometimes just calling him out on a telephone. George Bush doesn't care about black people. Back vintage Kanye West that is. The golden days of Yeezy before red hats and proclamations that slavery is a choice so next time someone gets unhinged on twitter and pisses off huge swaths of the nation you can ponder

academically is this a pr emergency pr disaster or pr catastrophe and so when it comes to disasters say coming up versus how they were 10 12 20 years ago I mean not to use the forecast with the word forecast to on the nose but are we looking at more disasters and less preparedness so we're we're definitely looking at more disasters if we are continue on the trajectory that we're headed based on a couple of factors so one climate change to

the number of people in where they are living and three the way we're building those are the three kind of big factors that are going to be driving that increase in disasters so it's a little bit difficult to tell but generally that's the trajectory that we're on for sure let's touch on a few historical disasters shall we so I started my understanding of disasters probably back like mid 1800s like great Chicago fire then going to like the gullson hurricane of 1900 the san francisco earthquake and fire in 1906

mississippi river flood of 1927 the dust bowl and then kind of back up into more modern disasters how is how have disasters changed since ye old disasters as we might call them well a lot of things have changed the first thing that's changed is the actual hazards that we have to deal with so now we have more technological disasters more like human made oil spills chemical spills type of disasters what we've also changed the way that we build like the

things that we have in our community are just worth more now and they're more complicated to put back together after a disaster happens like putting the electric grid back together in Puerto Rico right like those types of things are more complicated and it takes longer so what's changed in the last 150 years isn't just better architecture technology communication transportation like soap but also an increase in government involvement Samantha says but we have FEMA now FEMA wasn't created until the 1970s

there were some offices that were a precursor to FEMA and what happens when say FEMA gets on the ground of a disaster what type of organization is most effective in getting people help what's the triage method and where do they start to assess and act on things the response begins before FEMA gets there so the first responders to any disaster or the people who are in that community so the survivors themselves um the like traditional first responders police fire etc they're first they're the local

emergency managers uh state level agencies and offices are all there and then the federal government comes in so you might recall photos of the Katrina response there were houses drifted from their foundations apartments still standing and really lovely historical downtown architecture bore not only stains from floodwater but also spray-painted exes surrounded by numbers and codes and these exes were kind of crudely slashed on thousands and thousands of

house exteriors and they looked ominous almost biblical but you know instead of lamb's blood it's just orange spray paint and these exes served as warnings and a heads up to other disaster relief workers so upon entering to check out the building one slash was made and then after searching the property for survivors the other slash was done completing the x so in the top quadrant was the date the structure was searched and the western quarter notes who searched the property and the right

or the eastern quadrant noted what hazards like rats or structural instability was happening and then the bottom section noted the number of living or dead found inside zero l zero db means the place was empty zero living zero dead bodies that number wasn't always zero though so many survivors of Katrina kept the x markings that were on their homes even after they repaired all around it and others had iron sculpture replicas made

to endure and memorialize the event after the pain faded others kept that memory alive in the form of tattoos like that hurried spray painted x was transferred from their houses onto their skin via needle to take to the grave i just you look at that and it is incomprehensible sometimes to think of how much chaos how much heartache how much loss how much just um disbelief and denial people must be in from a grief standpoint and then to try to figure out

where do we put people what's safest how many people are in this house i mean how do you even begin to tackle that so first of all communities have plans in place ahead of time they're not always great plans but they have them and anybody who's been involved in creating those plans theoretically knows what those plans are there is a system that we use nationally to help try to organize and coordinate and there is like a national framework for who is like which

major agencies are in charge of different areas like sheltering versus search and rescue so there is some breakdown in that sense and also once we're talking about the big disasters here and you have that national involvement you also have agencies and people that have worked together before on disasters and so they have more familiarity with each other and they're bringing all their experience of past disasters into their response so there's FEMA but also more grass roots efforts Samantha explains so what happens during disasters is that

people look around and they see that help is needed and they work together to address those needs and so sometimes these emerging groups are like little search and rescue groups in a neighborhood that start going around knocking on doors to check on people sometimes it is a group of people getting together to open a shelter in a church that they weren't expecting to have to do but there's a need for it so they do it we also have this convergence of people from outside of the impacted area coming in

like within that convergence you have volunteers coming from the outside area to kind of back up the survivors and help them address the needs and so when a disaster happens you have this formal system that's operating under this like plan and like procedures that they've thought through and then you have this informal system doing whatever they think needs to happen in the moment and that can be very frustrating as you can imagine for those in the formal

system I am more sympathetic to the informal system I think they're great they are really flexible because they don't have any rules or procedures that they're really following right they're really flexible and can meet whatever the needs are in that moment and so when you look at a disaster that's happening and if you're having a sense from the media that a response isn't going well sometimes what's happening is that there's been some kind of breakdown in that formal system and where people's needs are

still being met it's happening through the informal system so sometimes these big systems get the attention while the more grassroots efforts pick up the slack one of the key things about Puerto Rico is that because Puerto Rico is in fact an island the convergence from outside wasn't able to happen as quickly as it was able to in Texas during Harvey or in Florida during Irma or North and South Carolina during Florence it just took longer for people from the outside to be able to get in

and so in Puerto Rico you saw this kind of breakdown in the formal system but you also saw a breakdown in the informal system which is less usual and that helped contribute to kind of what people were seeing as they watched Puerto Rico unfold and one of the reasons why it was so bad in terms of the response I mean if only they had more paper towels they had these beautiful soft towels very good towels Puerto Rico had like almost everything working against them once Maria formed they already were

vulnerable in terms of the infrastructure on the island and the fact that they are more isolated than someplace like Houston then you had the added issue of the emergency management system already having been strained at that point Harvey and Irma had both just happened and I mean those were major disasters that took you know attention from everybody and so by the time we got to Maria everybody was tired people were already deployed resources were already used up and then you add another layer of government

dysfunction at multiple levels and like out of out of hurricane and you have what happened in Puerto Rico what happens when the president gets in his helicopter whatever survey something scratches his chin declares it an emergency like there's always that moment where they've just they've declared not an emergency and you're like okay that must mean some paperwork gets shuffled differently that's actually a really important thing to have happen so the way that you kind of get FEMA involved and the get the federal

government involved more broadly in a disaster is that it has to be a presidentially declared disaster so the governor of the state has to declare an emergency and then they go through a process with FEMA of asking the White House to declare it a presidential disaster so once the president signs that FEMA and the rest of the federal government can become involved and start supporting that specific disaster it has really really important implications

for recovery specifically in order to get individual assistance like a homeowner get individual assistance from FEMA post disaster you have to be in a county that received a presidential disaster declaration and has had individually met the like threshold for all of those programs being opened through FEMA and I noticed you use the word survivors I haven't heard you use the word victim which seems deliberate and I imagine there's a reason sure so oftentimes we hear survivors described as victims

I tend to use the word victims to describe the people who have died in the disaster and use survivors for those who have survived it varies if I'm like talking to somebody who has been through a disaster I use the word that they use so if they're calling themselves the victim then I go with that but generally I prefer survivors one so that you can have that distinction between victim and survivor but also in the way that it is empowering I suppose it seems to also pay some respect to the people who lost their lives as well

yeah I think a lot of people hear about disasters more in terms of the millions of dollars of property damage or how much it will cost to rebuild but maybe don't always remember the number of lives lost is that in part of your work something that you try to shine a light on at all or is that something that you feel should be considered yeah certainly it's something to know and to be considered I think talking about disaster deaths can be

really complicated this is another thing that kind of came to light for the public during Maria is who counts as having their death attributed to a disaster and who doesn't there's some like legal and financial implications that are tied to that but then there's also like who gets to decide if a death is attributed to that disaster or not because we know disasters are so complicated right and disasters to me aren't just that moment of impact the disaster is the whole thing all

like through recovery like that's all still the disaster is still happening it's just manifesting in a different way and so to say that somebody who has died from literally drowning in flood waters their death is obviously attributable to that disaster but then to me somebody who has died of a heart attack from being so stressed out about the recovery process a week later I I mean that death is just as attributable to that disaster in my opinion but again there's this like complicated legal

situation that is going on but yeah we're not good at counting disaster deaths it's really complicated some of it is like a logistics issue of this is like more of it but like going to find bodies and like being able to actually like figure out who is missing of course when you look back at certain disasters you can see who in a community isn't counted among disaster deaths and who is and so it's all just really complicated and I understand that statistics for heart attacks after an earthquake say spike a few days later

is that something that disasterologists look at or in health statistics like that yeah certainly there are some researchers who look at that those would be under the heading of like indirect disaster deaths if they're counted at all okay so quick aside I remember years ago seeing an article about heart attack deaths after LA's 1994 Northridge earthquake and I went and found it so the county coroner found a five-fold increase in heart attack deaths the day of the earthquake

and a week later the heart attack levels sunk back down to normal and in an area like New Orleans with this catastrophe like Katrina and the floods the recovery process itself can be so stressful that Tulane researchers found an uptick of heart attacks a full decade after the event and in Japan after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami there was an increase in heart attack and stroke deaths for a solid month and for two weeks after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 the areas of New Jersey that were most impacted

saw a 22 increase in cardiac related deaths so given that these casualties aren't always attributed to the disaster itself counts are likely under reported and just reading about this is wrenching and what do you think people can do when we're watching the news and we're seeing long lines of people waiting to get clean water and people who have been displaced and families that are sleeping in gyms and what can a person do I know you mentioned a lot of people kind of descend on the area but you know through your work I've

I've read also that that can displace people who need a place to sleep because there's all these kind of volunteers that now need a place to sleep so what can we do when we're seeing this to to help so there are a lot of things that you can do to help it kind of depends on when it is in relation to the disaster and kind of where you are in relation to the disaster so if the disaster has happened in your community and you see an opportunity to go volunteer

and you can get there safely and you're not in anybody's way and you're helping then that is something that you can do if you are away from the disaster when it happens I usually recommend not going there right away I recommend usually waiting more for the recovery and kind of let that immediate crisis subside before adding yourself to that situation but you can donate money if you're able to there are a lot of great national disaster

organizations but then there are also a lot of local nonprofits from that community that are going to be involved in the response and recovery for probably a longer period of time than those bigger national organizations and so it does take some effort and some googling but usually you can find some of those local nonprofits and usually any that are working in the community are going to be involved in some way if it's a major disaster and then if you do really want to go volunteer and you're from further away

then there are usually opportunities to go volunteer during the recovery again mostly through those national disaster organizations and how do you feel about the way some disasters get covered on the news do you feel like it's good to expose them or are you like oh you're showing the absolute worst part on a loop to get ratings so it's complicated it is certainly frustrating at times to see you know the classic weatherman like standing in the ocean as a hurricane

is coming right that's frustrating this thing is like pounding us from behind but at the same time the media is a vital component of our like overall emergency management system they're providing lifesaving information to the people who need it they're sending out warnings they're disseminating information about evacuations they're telling people where they can go to get help Samantha says that the news media is also amplifying organizations collecting donations and they're shining a light on how their

response is going and if governmental organizations are doing with the can however so the media loves to cover a disaster during the response and then they go away and so local news outlets will obviously keep covering the recovery but our local news media has taken a hit and so we really need those national news outlets to be covering those recoveries into the long term and it's difficult for them to do and it's difficult to capture people's interests and attention but it is so

important because as a recovery goes on for years and years and years that community needs money they need that political pressure to again hold government accountable for you know giving the money that they've said that they're going to give and to do the projects that they've said they're going to do and when you're teaching what are your courses focused on how where do you even begin to look at this and so for our undergrads they start out with like an intro to disaster class

where we just kind of give an overview of everything and then they take one class for each of the four phases recovery response preparedness and mitigation and they take like a social vulnerability class they take a planning class they take international emergency management so all different classes how do you yourself kind of keep mentally healthy despite maybe seeing some stuff that is difficult well i compartmentalize okay they don't necessarily know that that's a healthy approach but that's what we've been doing

um yeah yep yeah you just shut that off put a little box yep we'll have to deal with that later the fire festival talk did you see it i did about to go to fire festival could be amazing could be a disaster island getaway turned disaster nightmare in paradise there was no music they were put into disaster relief tent how'd you feel about the fema tents and what a nightmare so yeah i uh i saw a picture of the tents i maybe it was even before the documentaries came out i don't know

but i saw them and i was like gosh this looks so familiar to me where have i seen those before and i all of a sudden i realized and i was like oh no when i watched that documentary i was like there must be people in emergency management just losing their shit right now i mean huh wild i know why what what a vacay what a what a beach safari i know seriously um disaster movies yes talk about them you got a favorite let me start by saying this i hate all hollywood disaster movies

the one disaster movie that i like is beast of the southern wild it's not perfect there are some issues but i think that's the best one you think it's the most well done yes side note i have not yet seen beast of the southern wild but according to the youtube link for the trailer it's set in a forgotten but defiant bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levy a six-year-old girl named hush puppy's life is changed by a fierce storm and this tiny hero must learn to survive

unstoppable catastrophes of epic proportions so now i very much want to watch it but there's one disaster movie i watched in the theater with two of my girlfriends while drinking concession stand white wine and i don't need to see that one again so you haven't seen like san andrea's with the wrong oh i mean i've seen them i hate watch them yeah did you see san andrea's with the rock yes i did we're gonna make it we're gonna make it i was just like is he surfing on a tidal wave like why is there an american flag at the end

it was yeah it's pretty bad wild um what do you hollywood disaster movies get wrong other than everything so uh probably the biggest issue is that they perpetuate what we call the disaster myths so there are a series of myths about human behavior that will not go away boy howdy buckle up for flimflam and hollywood movies perpetuate them so um there is this myth that people panic during disaster that it's like mass chaos and everybody's running around not knowing what to do when in fact people actually

are quite calm they make rational decisions based on the information that they have gathered around them they help one another they're pro-social going back to that paradise built in hell idea and that they all work together related to this is like this myth that there's rampant looting during disasters stores looted people stand peated not does not happen research is like very clear on this and so all of those hollywood disaster movies everybody's looting

everybody's running around panicked freaking out and so yeah that's the that there's usually um a white heterosexual male that fixes things so yes of course and then he always gets laid at the end it's amazing now what do you do or how do you approach people who won't leave their houses and i'm talking about my parents specifically Nancy Larry my parents are very smart but also stubborn and historically it had been hard to get them to leave

when a storm was headed their way how do you how do you approach those how do you get people to leave for their own safety sure um so a couple different issues here depending on the situation the first is if they are like physically financial etc able to actually leave um once you've addressed like all of those issues and it's just somebody being stubborn um i my go-to is to tell them to write their social security number on their arm in permanent marker so their body can be identified

oh yeah it's tough but hey that's a good one yeah what happens when you tell people that are they like okay i'm coming yeah they're you you get a reaction um yeah is that smart to do in any emergency just in case to write your number yeah um i mean you could you could can't hurt sure and let's talk about what's in your trunk does your car have an emergency get in it are you the most prepared person ever or are you like when it comes it comes

i am embarrassingly unprepared most of the time really yeah you don't have like a month's supply of water in your trunk in a flare no certainly not well it depends on where i am at any given moment like technically you're supposed to have like a preparedness kit in your office i do not have that at all um i mean i have like a preparedness kit at home but i don't pay a ton of attention to it which is a problem that's bad you should do that i am like setting a very bad example

i learned it by watching you the thing is it really depends on your situation so um i so just the fact of like having a preparedness kit does not necessarily mean that you are prepared for a disaster like there are some things in there that could be useful to you when a disaster happens but preparedness is much much more than that it's also your social network and your like knowledge of disasters and hazards and that your local knowledge of your community all of those things are

kind of just as important in different ways for actually having like the physical items stockpiled in your house so again you should like absolutely have a three-day supply of water in your house which i do but um you know preparedness is more than just that do you ever watch doomsday preppers yes i have all right do you watch it like you guys know what's up or do you watch it you say you've wasted so much dehydrated corn yeah look my biggest issue with that show is that they

pick one hazard to obsess over and prepare for which like is fine but it's usually not the hazard that they're most at risk for there was one episode many years ago where they were preparing for like an economic collapse or something i think and so they had all of this stuff stockpiled they had like a million guns in their house and i think they're like bars of gold or something and then a wildfire happened and they had to evacuate their house on the show in the middle of the episode

and not like the things they had done to prepare were not useful in this situation and that's why i'm a prepper that's why i'm a prepper and that's why i am a prepper and so this is what i'm saying like we need to take this broader view of preparedness right there are some things that will help you in multiple hazards right like having extra food and water in your house is like generally a good thing to do that'll help you in any like situation in which you have to shelter in place but to also kind of be thinking about how

different different things are useful depending on what the situation is a wheelbarrow full of gold ingots during a wildfire so helpful just the worst um can i ask you questions from listeners sure okay okay but before we get to patron questions a few words about sponsors of the show but before that these sponsors make it possible to make a donation to a cause of the oligarchs choosing and this week Dr. Samantha Montano shows the Bill Anderson fun and Bill Anderson was a scholar and a disaster

specialist and the bill anderson's funds mission statement reads african-american and other minority representation in hazard and disaster mitigation is very important research has shown that racial and ethnic minorities often have increased difficulty evacuating prior to a crisis and are more likely to experience disproportionate physical and financial loss during disasters our focus now is on students who are already enrolled in graduate school so a donation will go to the billandersonfund.org

and now some words about sponsors making that happen okay your disaster questions Anna Thompson wants to know who establishes what is a disaster what is just bad uh so this ties back into the presidential disaster declaration so um in the u.s if an event has that disaster declaration then we consider it a disaster that's like problematic in a few ways that are pretty obvious what if someone's like whoo this is a real disaster and you're like not

yet it's not official yet you have to wait before you can call that well i mean i might tell them that on twitter but it's like announcing a pregnancy you're like not until we get the flyover question so how does the president declare something a disaster okay well the government of the state or the indian tribal government has to request that something be declared an emergency or disaster and that it's exceeded their resources they're like this is above our pay grade dude and according to fema.gov the

president can declare a major disaster for any natural event including any hurricane tornado storm high water wind driven water tidal wave tsunami earthquake volcanic eruption landslide mudslide snowstorm or drought or regardless of cause fire flood or explosion that the president determines has caused damage of such severity that it is beyond the combined capabilities of state and local governments to respond so i guess this is where the presidential helicopter tour comes in

and he's like oh yeah whoo this sucks now the next question was also asked by lacy kilbert and steve koalzak anna thompson also asked who determines the levels for things like 100 year floods or 100 year storms how are people going about reclassifying them since they're happening more frequently yeah so this is a huge huge huge problem um not only in the u.s. canada is going through it too right now other countries as well um so the way i'm like going to simplify this but the way that we usually talk about like a hundred year flood

plains has been based on like historical records and based on whatever that community looked like at the time that they drew the flood maps for that community of course communities are constantly changing anytime you go cut down a bunch of trees and put pavement down you have changed the flood risk in that area and in the past our maps haven't accounted for those changes um this is all like very complicated and this is a problem one because people may not know that they are in a flood

or they may not know what their flood risk is um it has implications for flood insurance and who needs to be covered by flood insurance it influences all of the like flood infrastructure that we build in a community this is complicated to do across the entire country with everything changing all the time and then you add climate change to it which is changing the actual hazards um and you just like get this big mess and so currently fema has a flood mapping

program connected to the national flood insurance program they are constantly making changes but it's kind of like an evolving policy nightmare all the time yeah and now are they going to have to go up in category numbers for hurricanes at all you're going to have to talk to the meteorologists about that okay i will i haven't done meteorology yet yeah don't mind if i do um mary rose b first time question asked her asked how has social media changed disasters okay this social media question was also

asked by sydney brown and isabel b hopper you know she's thinking about things like the facebook option to mark yourself safe when there's a flood or how has increased communication helped or hindered it yeah so generally they are helpful um they do a lot of things like help us send out warnings help communicate and keep people more up to date in terms of like official responses but it's also useful to be able to have all of your neighbors on facebook and to have a facebook group about your

neighborhood if you're evacuated from your house as people are you know finding out information here and there you have a place to kind of share all of that information so they're also useful in that way when you get into the recovery every community that has a disaster at this point has some kind of like facebook group where people are sharing resources and talking about the recovery it's useful for being able to gather donations it's helpful in terms of people being able to see the damage and like kind of wrap their heads around what has happened

so it's useful in all these different ways search and rescue also really useful there are a lot of documented cases of people posting online saying i need a rescue my like phone won't dial out but i can post here there are obviously issues in terms of barriers in terms of who has access to social media of course your phone needs to be charged and like working in the midst of a disaster for it to be useful but generally i would say they're a positive contribution Rachel wants to know

how would we recover from nuclear fallout so that's a pretty simple easy question i would move to another country okay i'm kidding is there a real answer to this well first of all you i mean there's like the contamination zone which then you just leave um but past that i mean you would have to i basically you're dealing with like internally displaced people situation then so you're finding new places for people to live and then past that the recovery actually looks like pretty similar to as it would from

any other disaster where you have to completely leave and start over right i mean i think abandonment is pretty much the yeah the name of the game right yeah mica eckard asks when disasters happen what is the most helpful thing that people can do in general donate money to local organizations sanny brown wants to know what is the cost of disaster relief and how long does it actually take communities to rebound it is a lot of money and it takes a very long time uh it depends on the disaster um but

uh i think in the past couple years the us has had 13 billion dollar disasters a year you might need to fact check me on that number fact check this and it was 14 very close 14 different billion dollar plus disasters in 2018 killing at least 247 people and costing upwards of 90 billion dollars hurricane michael did about 25 billion in damages hurricane florence was just under that at 24 billion and the california wildfires were also over 20 billion

so a chorus of experts and scientists have warned that these type of disasters are climate related so unless things change with regard to global warming the government will keep having to write these checks and then that's just government businesses also donate money there is nonprofits that are involved individuals are sending donations foundations etc so um there's a lot of money flying around and we actually don't do a super great job of keeping track of all of that money

so um yeah it's difficult to to keep track of all the different sources and in terms of the length of recovery it again depends on the resources you have access to and kind of how bad the damage that you've experienced is so somebody who has a lot of money and a lot of resources can probably get through recovery somewhat quickly whereas somebody who's you know living paycheck to paycheck kind of gets thrown into this recovery system to get a little bit of aid from government

to get some support from nonprofits that are reliant on their friends and families to help you get really sucked into this cycle that can take many years if you know you ever get through it there's no guarantee that you're going to recover from a disaster when it happens a whole group of folks ask this next question and they are Sydney Brown, Danny Q, Ray Kasha, Deli Dames, Savannah Prokop, Michelle Grondin and Anna Elizabeth and um a ton of people asked what is the biggest

disaster that scientists are anticipating I mean is it people running out of water is it super volcanoes tectonic shifts shifts climate change earthquakes floods like all of the above all the above yeah I mean we're seeing more fires we're seeing more hurricanes and we're flooding so obviously a drier climate and a wetter climate depending on where you're at yes so all of it yes just a marching headway to the apocalypse that's great

um let's see jsp says I have seen various articles listing the US states least likely statistically to suffer a natural disaster do you think these have any basis in actual fact and should I move to Ohio um usually those types of maps are based off of which states have had presidential disaster declarations um so that's where they're getting those from um usually uh so yeah sure some states states tend to have fewer disasters or less severe disasters than

others but again changing climate still summer some are safer than others and uh Elizabeth gable said essentially are there more disasters now or does it just seem like there are more disasters because we hear about them more no there are more disasters because there are more people to be in harm's way oh that does make sense yeah we got a bunch of prepper questions from Savannah Prokop, Kitty Halverson, Sydney B, Brendan Dean, Claire Meyer, Ashley, Theodore

Visian, Jay, Sarah Loquist, first time question asker as well as another firster jsp wants to know what are the skills that would be most useful in the aftermath of a disaster and that says I'm skeptical of preppers with collections of guns and gold but it would would it be useful to know how to can food or so or something if it's like the apocalypse yes okay um no I mean generally in the united states um the most useful thing is to have a savings account with a lot of money in it um or a really good insurance policy

pass that like other skills to have I mean if your house is destroyed having some kind of construction experience is useful so maybe fewer guns more hammers yeah learn to learn to cook a squirrel uh Elizabeth Holper and a few other people including Steven Garrison asked is am radio still a good source to get information during a disaster if a cell phone tower fails and where's ham radio during all this is anyone using ham radio yes really yes um yes those are good sources of information if you have access to those

type of radios okay side note there's a rumor that Paris Hilton is really into ham radio and has a whole room full of vintage equipment and even if this rumor is fake news I want you to know that I would read fanfiction about it that's hot also this next question is from someone you know but also from Sarah Terry Cannon Purdy Heather Shaver May Merrill Lily Hill and first-time question asker Liz Powell um side note question for me how

screwed are we with the big one in california or do you guys out here even like checking it like when it happens it happens or are we like tick-tock it's happening I mean I can't predict earthquakes but yes it is something to be aware of and pay attention to okay also new madrid though what is that new madrid oh no what's that there's a fault line in the middle of the country where is it goes through st. Louis oh kidoki so okay yeah google that if you need something else to worry about oh I will y'all I checked this out and yes

in 1811 and 12 there was a 7.9 earthquake followed by a 7.4 aftershock those are huge st. Louis floods and earthquakes and tornadoes man it's a good thing y'all have toasted raviolis because that is some shit to deal with speaking of twisters um lily hill wants to know is there something we can do to prepare for tornadoes I lived in an earthquake zone when I was little we stockpiled water food batteries in case there was an earthquake but now living in tornado alley as an adult we don't do that mostly just

because a tornado would likely just suck up anything we stockpile piled and redistribute it to another town so is there a way to prep yes definitely um if you can have a tornado shelter put in that would be the best thing to do depending on like where you live sometimes there are like community shelters like trailer parks will sometimes have like like a community tornado shelter or you can have one in your house also making sure that you are tied into your community's warning system so

varies a little bit but make sure you go on to like your city's website and usually there's some kind of like sign up for whatever their alert system is and also just be aware if your town has tornado sirens like know to listen for those things like we do a monthly drill in Fargo um so people are like familiar with what it sounds like CRISPR wants to know not really question but I would like it if she could speak about how severe PTSD can be in a survivor after experiencing a disaster do you see as part of people's recovery is dealing with the just the

post-traumatic stress of it yeah so when we talk about recovery we're including everything from like physical recovery economic recovery to mental health recovery as well again it's going to vary this is like one thing that we're becoming more cognizant of in the recovery process is accounting for mental health care throughout the event this next question about asteroids was asked by Tyler Q and just Tyler Q so I was mistaken so Tyler Q here you go

some people are asking about asteroids we're screwed man that's that we're dinosaurs man lacy gilbert wants to know how advanced are we in predicting natural disasters it depends on the hazard we're doing pretty well in terms of hurricanes for example if you compare now to the 1900s we have come a very very long way it's one of the reasons that we've seen a decline in hurricane-related deaths in the united states with a few exceptions but then other hazards are

more set a non-set and our harder obviously earthquake prediction is like a point of great focus and trying to figure that out seismologist dr lucy jones if you're out there please talk to me um john stroman asks how organize our response efforts in times of crises sometimes it seems like everything is a well-oiled machine with multiple organizations working in tandem to fix broken lives other times it seems like a fully autonomous disaster in itself so why is the management of a disaster also a

disaster that is a great assessment part of what people are kind of seeing when they see that discrepancy is the difference between an emergency disaster and catastrophe and once we get large-scale disasters into catastrophes that's where everything is just it seems like a shit show particularly from the outside and that's like part of what is making it a large-scale disaster catastrophe does it it seems to me a lot of times when i see um the aftermath of a disaster it seems like

water is one of the most critical things to be distributing is it difficult to truck in tons of pallets of bottles of water are there better ways to do that like filling stations or i don't know this is a super dumb question i might totally cut it out but it always just seems like how are they going to get all those bottles of water to people and is there enough water sure sure i hate to keep saying this but it depends on the situation so um here's one way to think about this

so i talked before about convergence and how all these people come from the outside in addition to people there's also materials coming in from the outside all different kinds of supplies some of those materials are like requested and planned for right so you'll have trucks coming in with water that someone somewhere has requested and they're coming in to some kind of distribution point that like generally is good and okay fine great

the problem starts to become when you have unrequested donations flooding into the community that's been through a disaster so when people go to their closet and just like pull out any old clothes that they don't want and they like if you're in north dakota and i go to the store and buy cases of water and put them on a truck to texas like that is not effective that is not helpful um and so it's those unrequested donations that then like get to that community and then they sit in a

warehouse and are never distributed or you know it takes the community's resources to organize and donate or organize and distribute those donations that's where things become much more complicated and ideally after a disaster you just like get the community's water system back up and running as quickly as possible speaking of which is flint considered a disaster at this point or no uh i would call it an environmental crisis but that's like kind of a weird academic distinction that like maybe isn't

that important for the actual situation it's like definitely still within the realm of what i think about or whatever research yeah it's yeah and then watching just a hundred million dollars from like chanel go to the fix a church is like oh my god oh my god yeah um last questions i always ask i mean i feel like this is absolutely this stupidest question to ask the smartest person given the topic but what's the thing you like the least about disasters like everything i don't know

um honestly it's watching the same problems just happen again and again like we know what the problems are and like we know what's causing disasters and we're just not we could we could like stop most disasters from happening and we don't yeah what top problems would you identify that are contributing to like if you could wave a magic wand and fix those problems okay with a magic wand i mostly i would change like where people are living right move them into less vulnerable areas to like wave a magic wand and just

fund all of the mitigation projects that local communities want to do right like people know their communities best like they're the ones who know what their communities need to be safe and there are communities all across the country that have a plan written out like they've done the research of what project needs to happen in their community to make them more resilient or to make them more ready to handle a disaster prevent a disaster from happening and very often the barrier is that they

do not have the funding for it or there's not political support for it and so i think just like funding all of those projects would be great just bring bring insert chimes here magic wands um your favorite thing about your work i think being able to like have a platform to amplify the voices of survivors and to amplify those communities that don't get that media attention even just acknowledge i think sometimes that yes i see what you're going

through this is a disaster you're absolutely right more people should be paying attention being able to like understand what they're experiencing i think is is probably my favorite part did you ever think that you would be the world's foremost disasterologist well i'm not the world's most disasterologist probably but i mean i don't know of a lot of other people you got the domain name so well that's true pierce the veils got nothing on you yeah um but yeah i mean in terms of

disasterology as a discipline and a disasterologist it's like i love dr sam yeah the one i'm just the loudest on twitter well that's good more airhorns and bullhorns you're doing you're doing great work thank you so much for letting me pepper you was to be questions thanks for coming all the way to fargo i get to check off north dakota on my list i'm glad there are no tornadoes while we're here though yikes so travel far and wide if need be and ask the foremost smartest people your deepest down stupid questions because we're all gonna die

one day now to learn more about dr montano head to her website at disaster-ology.com on twitter she is sam l montano and her bio says i'm not a regular disasterologist i'm a cool disasterologist and that's very true and i love her for it okay so we are at oligies on twitter and instagram i'm at ali ward with one l on both more links and attributions are always up at ali ward.com slash oligies there's a link to the episode page and the social

media pages and the sponsor pages up in the show notes always thank you to erin talbert and hana lipo for adminning the facebook oligies podcast group full of very kind wonderfuls also hello to the reddit subreddit group i don't know how reddit works but i hear y'all are assembling there hi feel free to hit up oligiesmerch.com including brand new check your crevices shirts and mugs and some hey and purr-bye shirts that are just up at oligiesmerch.com thank you shannon feltsis and bonnie dutch of the comedy podcast you are that for all

the merch help you're both wonderful thank you to assistant editor jared sleeper of the podcast my good bad brain for assistant editing jared just put out an amazing episode with traumatologist dr nicholas bar examining mental illness and mass shootings in case you like the debunking of flimflam so go check that out and thank you to my own emergency manager editor steven ray morris who helps me cobble these together every week and get them up as on time as possible for a couple of people with 10 jobs

he also hosts the purr cast about kitties and see Jurassic rite which is about dinosaurs the theme song for oligies was written by nick Thorberg of the band islands they are so good also happy belated birthday to my wonderful sister sauce aka celeste and to bonnie dutch i am so happy you both are on planet earth and happy birthday to my wonderful pal azette who has been a friend since sixth grade and is the best um if you stick around until the end of the episode you know i tell you a secret and this week the secret is that i'm

in a hotel room in san josei i could not get the air conditioning to stop blastic on me maybe i'm tired maybe it's day two of a no sugar diet but i wanted to cry and then i unplugged the entire air conditioning and it stopped and i let out a howard dean noise like yeah and i'm just riding that high still even though it's been hours so if you've ever given up sugar or cut carbs because of reactive hypoglycemia please come at me because i think this sucks at first

but please tell me that it gets easier okay bye bye you are you getting this on camera that this tornado just came and erased the hollywood sign the hollywood sign is gone