Today, Explained - Disaster unpreparedness

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

Vermont just got slammed with flash floods, road closures, and evacuations. Harvard’s Juliette Kayyem says the storm reveals how unprepared the US is for the present moment, when natural disasters are more frequent and more intense than ever before. This episode was produced by Jon Ehrens and Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vermont's Governor Phil Scott addressed reporters and Vermonters earlier today and told them that after days of flooding, it's not over yet. Unfortunately, parts of the state are now expecting severe thunderstorms, which could bring more flash flooding, hail, and even the threat of a tornado. As many as nine inches of rain fell in parts of Vermont this week. To the question of whether it's possible to be prepared for something like this, consider Christiana Athena Blackwell. She moved to a new house in Plainfield, Vermont with her husband and baby five days ago and left her unpacked boxes in the basement, as you do, which then flooded. We have to face that reality and get prepared for the future. But I have my family. I have what matters and a really nice community. I'm worried about Vermont and sad.

Coming up on Today Explained, preparing for disasters in an age when they just keep coming. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs?

And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Nina Keck is a senior reporter with Vermont Public, and she has had an unusually busy week. Normally, I cover older Vermonters and issues around aging, but with the flooding that's gone on, it's all hands on deck and we are all focused on the damage and the recovery right now. What is the mood like in Vermont today? How are people feeling?

I spent most of yesterday afternoon in Ludlow, which was one of the hardest hit towns in the state. And, you know, on the one hand, it was truly devastated by the flooding. Businesses were grappling with the after effects, the cleanup. There's furniture all over the streets and people's lawns, broken glass. It's chaos just to look around and try to figure out where all these things came from. There was a palpable feeling of frustration and sadness. But I have to say there was this mixture of energy, too, and community spirit that really was kind of awe-inspiring to see because there was this muck everywhere people were in filthy mud boots and shorts they were tired some were wearing masks because now the the mud is kind of dried and it's created this

brownish dust that's everywhere but they were all cleaning together and they were sharing stories and talking about well how did you do and they were sharing stories and talking about, well, how did you do and how did you do and what can I do to help? And that was kind of heartening to see. So I think I've seen a lot of destruction. I've seen a lot of blown out roads and crumbling pavement and houses that are going to need a lot of work and buildings and businesses that are closed. But I think there were no fatalities so far that have been reported, which is really kind of a miracle. I read that in the hardest hit parts, up to nine inches of rain fell,

and it was very fast. In the areas that were hardest hit, what kind of destruction are we talking about here? What should we envision? So my colleague up in Montpelier said, you cannot understate the devastation that occurred in our state capitol. Everything was underwater. We are looking down Main Street towards State Street, and you can see what a lake it is. He said he saw people being rescued.

They had swift boat rescue teams that were operating all over the state, but he said he also saw just random citizens in kayaks and canoes and on paddle boards. In Ludlow, where I was yesterday, when the waters were raging, cars and trucks were floating down the street and being submerged under bridges. The damage has been catastrophic. We're all still sort of wrapping our heads around the damage that occurred. Thousands of homes and businesses have been really damaged, and it's going to take months, years to clean up and do the repair work necessary. I spoke to a woman earlier this week who had just moved to Plainfield, Vermont, three days in Plainfield and her house flooded.

I can see the river from our house, but it was looking okay until about three, between three and five, it was rapidly raising. And we were getting, you know, okay, nervous. Let's make a plan. Should we have a place to go just in case? When was the last time Vermont experienced something like this? The last thing that comes to mind is Tropical Storm Irene, which was 2011. That was a hurricane when it hit the east coast of the United States. But by the time it got to Vermont, it had dropped down to a tropical storm. Nonetheless, it dropped, I want to say, 11 inches at least in some parts of the state. Not at least, but about 11 inches over a very short amount of time. And it just hammered the state.

This recent rain that we got was similar because there was a lot of it, but it was over several days after we'd already had saturated ground. So people are drawing a lot of similarities, but also differences. Some areas of the state were much harder hit recently, where wider swathes of the state were hurt in Irene. This supposed 100-year scenario has now happened twice in a span of 11, 12 years. And so there's definitely some bewilderment. People are still trying to wrap their heads around it. The woman in Plainfield we spoke to, Christiana, she told me that an emergency worker showed up at her home before the worst of the flooding started

and told her to get out. We got a knock on the door from an emergency team just saying, we're evacuating this street. Waste no time. Don't go left. Take a right. Go to the opera house. That seems like good disaster preparedness. After Hurricane Irene, was there a sense that this could happen again? Absolutely. Vermont Governor Phil Scott declared a state of emergency ahead of this storm on Sunday. And I think had a lot of emergency preparations in the works. I believe there were swift boat rescue teams that had been requested. Several came from North Carolina. He had reached out to other states. Massachusetts sent up crews, and they were available to provide aid. And I think just communities, Vermont, I think you have to realize is for people that don't live here, it's a very rural state. It's a lot of small towns and villages and communities. It's hyperlocal.

And after going through Irene, a lot of towns developed much better emergency plans. My own town has an emergency plan director and really mobilized ways to reach out to neighbors on a hyper local level. And I think, you know, you saw that in communities this time around, they kind of knew the drill that, you know, this can happen and this is who we should talk to in our town. This is maybe where the best place is to have emergency meetings or provide shelter later. So I definitely think the state was better prepared. But, you know, you really never can fully prepare for something like this because you don't know how bad it's going to be and where it's going to happen. Are people in Vermont talking about climate change,

or is this viewed as, you know, just an isolated natural disaster? No, I think people are talking about climate change. My colleagues at Vermont Public have been reporting on that a lot, talking to climatologists that have been looking at, well, what's the pattern with these storms? And, you know, when we get heavy rains, why do they linger? And is that going to be the new pattern? I think people are very concerned about it. And like everybody probably in the country and in the world, just sort of trying to wrap their heads around, well, what can we do as individuals or as towns to make a difference? But I think people are looking at it because here in Vermont, we've got four seasons that are all being impacted. You know, we're seeing winters for the ski season, which is so important here. You know, snowmaking operations have had to

shift to different warmer temperatures. We're seeing the maple sugar industry kind of worry about, well, if it warms up earlier than we're used to, you know, that starts the sap running. And then you've got farmers dealing with warmer temperatures, maybe drier conditions sometimes or wetter conditions in the summer. So, yeah, it's something that I think we're dealing with a lot here in Vermont. Nina Keck, she's a senior reporter with Vermont Public. You should know Today Explained airs on Vermont Public Monday through Thursday at 2.30 p.m. Great local news stations. Coming up, Vermont did have some disaster plans in place, as we just heard.

But those plans were of this day and age. Why we might need to plan as if the future is now. Thank you. number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together

and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Disaster maven Juliette Kayyem needs no introduction, but I will let her introduce herself anyway. I'm the faculty chair of the Homeland Security Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government,

where I'm a professor and teach in crisis and disaster management. 20 years in the field, serving both in state government as a state Homeland Security advisor, and then my most recent federal job was as assistant secretary at DHS during the Obama administration. And I think and write and worry about disasters. She also wrote the book The Devil Never Sleeps, Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters, and she says we are in fact in one. This is where we should stop acting surprised, right? I mean, just extreme climate events are happening in frequency and magnitude that we've never seen before. In 2023 already, we have 12 confirmed weather climate disaster events with losses exceeding 1 billion in the United States.

The scene across Northern California, trees down, damaging homes, businesses, and cars. This is actually just outside of Abilene. It's near Sweetwater, Texas. There's a storm chaser out there that did manage to get video of a baseball to golf ball-sized hail. You can see it there. It's bouncing. Wow. The brutal cold came in with a fury. At a city park, hats and gloves were left for anyone who needed them. Since 1980 to last year, we have about 8.1 events a year.

Those are getting faster and more frequent. In 1980, I think we had $3 billion events. And these are all adjusted numbers. So if I just look at the economic impact of what's happening, forget the cause, and we're not even talking about human life. We are facing these in a frequency. And they are setting what I call the floor, right? In other words, because these communities, whether they get hit next year or the following or five years from now, they are weaker because of the devastation. So it's the cumulative aspects of these disasters

that is impacting the United States. And we've got to get out of this mindset that, OK, we're going to save lives, clean up after the disaster, and then cross our fingers. I have to imagine that our response to disasters has changed over time. But tell me first, how has it traditionally worked? The framework was essentially established, or it was professionalized in the 1970s under a framework called the Incident Command System. You'll hear people in my field talk about ICS. It's a very formalized system, and the benefit of it is it's hierarchical. You have an incident

commander who's just deploying resources and getting logistics moving and planning. And the benefit of it is it's plug and play. So you can expand it. So if I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I need more bodies, people from Boston can come over. So the general theory or the general plan for emergency management is we say that locals respond, states coordinate, and the feds support. So it basically means disaster management makes or breaks at the local level. That is still true, right? It is, what is your emergency management agency doing? What kind of plans do they have in place? And are they able to deploy resources that had worked relatively well. You could expand

things. But now we have no give. The reason why is because we don't have localized disasters like we used to. I mean, look at the fires in Canada. At some stage, the United States cannot send any more firefighters to help in Canada. So where are they deploying from? South Africa and Australia. The 57 specialists are from New South Wales. Most are from the Rural Fire Service. The state's Minister for Emergency Services, Jihad Dib, says tens of thousands of people have had to flee their homes in Canada,

a scenario residents in New South Wales are all too familiar with. And you're seeing it here just in the last week, right? States generally could call on another state and say, could you send over X, Y, or Z? Because we need support. We need more bodies. We need more lights. We need more generators, whatever it is.

Well, now you have two massive events in two states that generally would share resources under an emergency mutual aid compact. That's becoming harder as well as we're seeing these multi-state disasters. We've mutual aid requested from state to state, swift water rescue teams from North Carolina. We have two in that are engaged right now. And we have a swift water rescue team coming from Michigan and from Connecticut. These are the stresses that we're seeing operationally that now is leading in fits and starts to changes in disaster management, how we deploy, how we professionalize it, but also how we think about disasters for the United States. You gave me some specific examples there.

How would you broadly describe how disaster response is changing? In the past, we divided the world into left a boom and right a boom, and we're agnostic about the boom, right? So it could be the flood, the fire, the terrorist attack, the pandemic, but your boom is your disruption. Left a boom is prevention and preparation. We're getting ready. We know it's coming or it could come. And then right of boom is response, recovery, and resiliency. That's the stuff you see. Things are getting deployed. Communities are trying to rebound. That used to be viewed as linear, one and done, right? Random and rare. That's the way we thought about it. That's the way our entire structure was built. It's a circle. It's a circle now. And so you have to think about

the investments you're making in preparation as really being about, can this community recover fast enough? Because it's coming again. We may not know where or when, but that's the kind of stress that's facing the profession itself as it transforms from a profession that used to be, say, your average emergency management officer was a former cop or firefighter. And that's not the communication skills. That's not the outreach skills. That's not the equity skills that we really need for disaster management. But you're also starting to see it in the policies. Let's just be honest here. We've incentivized bad behavior through our disaster management framework, and that's what needs to change.

Everything else is just going to be Band-Aids. My mom, Juliette, lives in central New York in the Hudson Valley, and she lives in a house where the basement floods. And in fact, the basement did flood this time. She got about six inches of water, which is not terrible. We've seen worse. But once upon a time, I would have thought somebody will come and help my mom if she needs help. And nowadays, what's really interesting is in 2023, I think somebody might look at my mom and say, why are you in that house? Why are you still there if this has been going on for 30 years? Do you think we are looking at the role that the individual plays in the boom more and more? Much, much more. Does your mom have

flood insurance, by the way? She does. Yep. Oh, good. Okay. So that's just for making sure. This This idea of putting more pressure on communities to behave better is starting to take hold. And I don't mean that as a sort of hostile thing. I mean, it's both good and bad. So on the tactical level, let's say a boom happens. We're not going to leave your mom in her house. But if there's evacuation orders and those evacuation orders are not abided by, by some percentage of the community, sometimes it's just ideology, sometimes it's pets. In the last 10 years, we've seen some tough love from mayors and others simply saying to people. All the advice we can give is get out, get out now. You still have time to leave. Those that are going to stay,

it's unfortunate, but they should make some type of preparation to mark their arm with a Sharpie pin, put their social security number on it and their name. We've got first responders available, but once it gets bad, we're not going to put their lives in jeopardy and they will not get help. To the bigger issue about, you know, do people stay or go? We have set up a disaster management system that incentivizes bad behavior. It pays people to rebuild where they are. It gives them individual assistance as if they alone were impacted. We have major events and then, you know, powerful senators can just get lots of money and simply get people cash. Senator, you wrote a letter Friday to the Senate Appropriations Committee asking for disaster relief dollars for desperately needed resources to rebuild Florida communities.

After Hurricane Sandy hit northeastern states in 2012, you voted no. How is that strategic thinking? It's just not. But we've put in a system in which, you know, the boom happens, we respond, we save lives. That's a priority. You try to minimize property harms. And then everyone goes after disaster relief as if it's one and done. And the thinking now, and the insurance companies are forcing us to think about it,

is how do we use that money after a disaster to make this community better? I want to say there are some changes. They're really piecemeal, but they are good. There's been changes in everything from the Inflation Act that allows for more money to be spent to mitigation to even the Farm Bill has provisions because, you know, we don't need to call it climate change. Some communities and ideologies don't want it to be called climate change. Who cares? Get money out to farmers who are seeing flooding and help them mitigate their harms. There's been changes to disaster relief that if a community uses their money for mitigation, at the next disaster, the feds will actually give more rather than less. In other words, you're sort of

incentivizing mitigation. And the gamble is these communities will suffer less if they put more into resiliency and fortifying structures and getting people out of certain communities. But these are being done piecemeal or they're being driven by insurance or the market. That's no way to think about it, given the numbers and the magnitude of what our communities are facing. And so to that end, if you were put in charge, you could make whatever change you wanted, where do you think you'd begin? What would be your first move? You know, in my dreams, I would repeal a piece of legislation called the Stafford Act. Pursuant to the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, or the Stafford Act, FEMA provides

public assistance grants to state, tribal, and local governments to assist in their recovery efforts after a disaster strikes. Basically, its general theory is a disaster happens to a community, that poor community, we feel bad for them, could have been us, right? So let's just pay them money, distribute individual assistance, distribute public assistance, distribute money to the localities and states and write a check and let's get them back to normal.

Okay, so that worked. But now it doesn't work, right? And so what I would do is rethink how we're paying for the last disaster to prepare us for this disaster. Condition that money, right? Dear community, dear individual homeowner, we're not doing this anymore. We don't care your politics. We don't care anything. Basically, you can have a check if you do X, Y, and Z and whatever those conditions are.

And we know what they are. If you live in a fire area, we know what kind check if you do X, Y, and Z and whatever those conditions are. And we know what they are. If you live in a fire area, we know what kind of roof you have to build. If you live by the water, we know what kind of fortification you need. And these are the kinds of efforts at each home level, at each community level that will change the incentive structure. We have to incentivize, essentially, resiliency. We don't do that now because we still are in a mind frame of these disasters are random and flukish, and we're just going to brace ourselves until the next one.

Today's episode was produced by Vermont Bureau Chief John Ahrens and Miles Bryan. It was edited by Matthew Collette. Laura Bullard is our senior fact checker and Amanda Llewellyn was our junior fact checker today. Our engineer is Michael Rayfield. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.