Disaster after disaster

Shana tovah. This is going to primarily be a post about the responses to two hurricanes: Helene, which wiped out a significant portion of the Gulf Coast and western North Carolina, and Milton, which is on track to be yet another catastrophe in Florida later this week. But there is an anniversary to mark first.

Today is of course October 7. Since this is a leap year, it marks 366 days since Hamas broke through the prison walls in which Israel encases Gaza and lit the slow-burning fire which — thanks to the genocidal Israeli response — is on the verge of setting the entire Middle East ablaze. There is no shortage of good things to read about the anniversary: I recommend Spencer Ackerman’s latest, as well as this short post by Elad Nehorai.

For me, the most sickening thing about the last year has been how predictable and unchanging it has all been. Even as each new day has brought new horrors and an expanding field of battle, the throughlines have remained maddeningly constant. So I’ll just re-up two of the first things I wrote about the new phase of horror in October of last year. I’m sad to say that both have held up well.

Scientists came into this hurricane season predicting the worst. Record high ocean temperatures, boosted by man-made climate change, appeared to be setting the stage for historic destruction.

At first, it seemed that reality would fall short of the worst — possibly because of other knock-on effects of climate change. But the good luck didn’t last. Hurricane Helene did significant damage in Central America and the Caribbean before restrengthening and becoming the strongest hurricane to hit Florida’s Big Bend region since 1851. It then killed hundreds of people across six states — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia — and doing more than $38 billion worth of damage. The worst effects were felt hundreds of miles inland in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, an area long thought to be a climate-change haven, where entire neighborhoods and towns were wiped out by flooding rivers and creeks, and landslides.

Now, less than two weeks later, Category 5 Hurricane Milton is again crossing the Yucatan Peninsula and bearing down on Florida’s Gulf Coast, with measurements so terrifying they brought a seasoned meteorologist to tears:

(Note to all readers in Florida, and especially the Tampa Bay area: Get out. Now.)

As dangerous as these storms have been, the lies being spread outside the disaster zones have been perhaps even more destructive. If you’ve spent any time on social media or talking to Trump-supporting relatives in the last weeks, you’ve no doubt heard these lies: that there is no federal emergency response (because all the money went to illegal immigrants and/or Ukraine/Israel), that would-be rescuers are being arrested or turned away, that the Biden administration is limiting support to just a couple hundred dollars per family, or that the government somehow created or steered the hurricanes to punish or suppress the vote in rural areas. (That last one gained national prominence thanks to Madam Space Lasers herself, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene.)

The short answer is that these claims are transparent bullshit. Federal support for victims of Hurricane Helene has now topped $210 million, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, better known as FEMA. In North Carolina alone it is more than $26 million, with more than 700 FEMA staff, over 1,200 urban search and rescue personnel, and over 1,000 National Guard troops on the ground. The $750 available to affected persons is just an initial, emergency payment rushed to the most affected people. It’s a relatively new program called Serious Needs Assistance, the amount of which is set by a federal rule. (In January, FEMA estimated the total outlay for SNA will be over $308 million a year.) It is in addition to, not instead, of other forms of disaster assistance. Also contrary to the rumors: the $750 is not taxable and does not need to be repaid.

Insofar as local and federal officials are turning people away, it’s trying to keep untrained amateurs and the junk they may be carrying out of dangerous and overtaxed disaster zones, where they might have to end up being rescued themselves. On Sept. 28 alone, there were some thirty near-mid-air collisions over North Carolina thanks to people trying to race into the zone without bothering to coordinate with anyone else.

And if you need someone to explain to you (or MTG) that human governments in the year 2024 can neither create nor control hurricanes, you are probably reading the wrong newsletter.

But you don’t come here for short answers. One of the longer answers is that disaster relief is a famously messy process, in which prior inequalities are reinforced, money gets misspent, and many survivors find themselves shut out from the aid that is supposedly flooding the zone. (See for instance: Katz, J. M. (2013). The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. New York, Palgrave Macmillan.)

Over the years, in that book and elsewhere, I have been a big proponent of recognizing that disaster survivors are their own first responders. And indeed, the storm survivors have been each other’s first line of defense using community organizations and mutual aid: conducting rescues in canoes, delivering meals via ATVs, and just, in the words of Blue Ridge Public Radio reporter Laura Hackett: “Overall, they're really just willing to do whatever to help each other survive right now.” Those are words that anyone who has survived a major disaster can relate to. I know I can.

I have also been skeptical of overly centralized, militarized, command-and-control-style responses. My particular ire is reserved for responders who treat survivors as criminals — prioritizing protecting store inventories and capital over people’s lives. There has been a little of that in Helene, but not much — which may be a product of the racial demographics of the most affected areas (i.e., they’re mostly white). But I’m also a proponent of local disaster management and coordination between responders. So while I get the instinct of ordinary citizens to rush into a disaster zone and help in any way they can, I’m also on the side of officials who want to make sure that the outsiders coming in are accounted for and know what they’re doing. I’m also a fan of putting money directly in survivors’ hands (see: the $750, and additional home-repair aid).

The biggest thing I’ve been harping on for well over a decade and a half now is the need to prepare for, and wherever possible prevent, disasters from happening before they occur. In this case that would have been (and could still be) doing everything possible to mitigate climate change, as well as ensuring that strong zoning and building regulations are in place. It’s no coincidence that the same political faction spreading lies about the response is the same faction that has done everything possible to block both over the years. As the New York Times reports on the North Carolina state legislature, which has been dominated by a wildly gerrymandered GOP supermajority for years:

In covering up their incompetence, GOP and the Trump campaign are weaponizing one of the oldest and most common instincts in disasters — one I have seen over and over again around the world: People refuse to act on warnings of an impending disaster, because of distrust of authority, myopia, interia, or all of the above. Then once the disaster arrives — and is worse than expected, perhaps in part because of the lack of preparation — they become susceptible to wild claims that powerful people made the disaster happen for their own benefit. For years, these took the form of conspiracy theories about a formerly U.S. government-funded Alaska-based ionosphere research station called HAARP, which people imagined did everything from causing earthquakes to controlling the Earth’s weather. (It doesn’t, and hasn’t even been run by the U.S. government since 2015, though its founder did plead guilty to fraud.) In Haiti, those instincts took the form of rumors that the earthquake was caused by an underground U.S. nuclear test, or by undersea bulldozers engaged in a supposed effort to build an undersea tunnel from Miami to Venezuela.¹

These were all classic conspiracy theories serving a classic conspiracy theory purpose: they give a semblance of order to a terrifying chaotic universe, and, as importantly, someone else to blame for one’s own misfortune, lack of preparation, or both.

And because these tendencies are so predictable and universal, they are ripe to be taken advantage of. As the disaster scholar Chad M. Briggs noted in a paper from 2020, climate change and climate change-related disasters are fertile ground for hybrid warfare tactics of disinformation.² Just as aggressors target systems needed to recover following a conflict, Briggs wrote, malicious actors have actively undercut critical systems needed to “maintain social, political, and economic stability, or to recover following a disaster … increas[ing] that society’s vulnerability to emerging hazards linked to climate change.” He offered several examples: Russian social media and disinformation campaigns meant to polarize society in Ukraine (before the full invasion, which had not happened as of the paper), Boko Haram taking advantage of the stresses of drought in central Africa for recruitment and human trafficking, and criminal networks destabilizing climate-stressed areas of Central America.

And when climate-related disasters drive people from their homes or into human-trafficking networks, they are used to further polarize and divide destination countries. Briggs writes, in a sentence that encapsulates the GOP platform in the 2024 election perfectly: “This division works best when tied with a coordinated disinformation campaign that frames the existence of refugees as a national, cultural, or existential threat, rather than a humanitarian crisis.”

I’m not saying, barring evidence to the contrary, that all of the political lies circulating about the hurricanes — lies that could serve to make the impending Hurricane Milton even deadlier than it has to be — are an elaborate plot being directed out of a foreign capital. Or even that it has been masterminded from the start by Trump’s team. But just as disaster-response systems are most effective when they coordinate and combine local and organic efforts, it’s impossible to miss the ways that the messaging is being weaponized and amplified from the top of the ticket.

Trump and his allies clearly want to use these hurricanes to create confusion and distrust, which they hope to exploit to win votes. If they are successful, then the one thing we can be sure of is that the disasters of the future will continue to worsen: not just because climate change will get worse, but because — as laid out in Project 2025 — the very agencies that prevent, mitigate, and respond to disasters, including the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, and FEMA, will be gutted, defunded, and stripped for parts. Because while governments can’t direct the weather, they can leave us more vulnerable to it — especially by turning us against one another. That’s why it’s so important to fight the lies, and to remind ourselves and each other of the biggest fact of all about disasters and crises of all kinds: we get through them better, together.

Cover image: Workers, community members, and business owners clean up debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, North Carolina on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

1  Putting aside the fact that this tunnel would be both useless and impossible to build and maintain, it never made sense to me why it would have to be built under Haiti’s capital. According to a WIRED article by journalist (and Racket subscriber!) Arikia Millikan, the rumor had its roots in a fake wiki-style article from 2010 set in a fictitious parallel universe, which somehow got picked up and shared out of context by conspiracy blogs and Haitian email dads.

2  HT Brooke Binkowski