#Disasters

[tilbageidanmark]

Dystopian Spectrum Venn Diagram.

(Not exact but it's the thought that counts.)

[willigula]

A satellite image taken by Maxar Technologies shows the Eaton fire in Altadena, California, on January 8, 2025

[thatdisasterauthor]

Just saw that FEMAs Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program has been canceled. As the disaster knowledge person, I come to you seeking hope- do you know of any other programs still doing this important community disaster preparedness work?

Unfortunately FEMA is under heavy assault, and that doesn't look like it's going to end any time soon. The BRIC program is just one portion of it so far. We're also seeing Trump be slow to sign disaster declarations, and even not signing them at all or denying them, and tons of grants have been frozen or revoked outside of the BRIC program as well. He also just announced the people he's putting on his FEMA review committee today and...ah...it's a terrible bunch.

This administration's goal with FEMA is to put disaster response back into the hands of the states. But that is just impossible. According to one higher up Emergency Management guy I spoke with recently, in Alabama, only four counties could afford to run their own Emergency Management departments without FEMA grants. Four. Alabama has 67 total counties. (He also stated that, to recover from Helene without FEMA help, counties in Alabama would have to raise property taxes 55-70%.) I would guess the numbers would be similar across most states.

Point is, yeah, it's a bad damn time right now. And it is probably not going to get better at any useful speed.

BUT.

But there are a ton of great people focused on this problem, and we're all working hard to plan for these changes as much as possible. What that looks like is changing all the time, due to the goalposts constantly getting yanked around, but it is being worked on. No matter what, some form of help is ALWAYS going to be there. It may not look the way you expect, or the way you want, but there will be something, even if it's just your neighbors.

Some things you can do to help:

Look up "Your State + VOAD." VOAD stands for "Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster." This will get you a list of local, vetted volunteer organizations that specifically offer their services during disasters. See if there's one you want to/can help out with, even during non disaster times! You can also look up "National VOAD" to find national groups.

If you have ever made use of ANY of FEMA's services, or you know someone who has, and you have a positive story to share about it, do so. Do it loudly and repeatedly wherever and whenever you can.

Go to your local city/state political meetings and talk about the value you see in FEMA and that you want to see it protected.

Call your representatives and tell them the value you see in FEMA and that you want to see it protected.

Make sure you are personally prepared as much as possible without it turning into an anxiety spiral. The more you can help yourself, the more weight you can take off a stressed system. A go bag and an evacuation plan are great places to start, and will already put you ahead of the game.

[reasonsforhope]

Since the 1960s, the world has seen a spike in the number of natural disasters, largely due to rising sea levels and an ever gradually increasing global surface temperature.

The good news? We’re getting better at helping each other when disasters strike.

According to a recent study from Our World In Data, the global toll from natural disasters has dramatically dropped in the last century.

“Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are,” wrote lead authors Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado.

To conduct their research, Ritchie and Rosado gathered data from all geophysical, meteorological, and climate-related disasters since 1900. That includes earthquakes, volcanic activity, landslides, drought, wildfires, severe storms, and mass floods. 

In the early-to-mid 20th century, the average annual death toll from disasters was very high, often climbing to over a million. 

For example, the study cites that in 1931, 2.7 million people died from the Yangtze–Huai River floods. In 1943, 1.9 million died from the Bangladeshi famine of 1943. Even low-frequency events had extreme death tolls. 

“In recent decades we have seen a substantial decline in deaths,” Ritchie and Rosado observed. “Even in peak years with high-impact events, the death toll has not exceeded 500,000 since the mid-1960s.”

Why has the global death toll from disasters dropped? 

There are a number of factors at play in the improvement of disaster aid, but the leading component is that human beings are getting better at predicting and preparing for natural disasters. 

“We know from historical data that the world has seen a significant reduction in disaster deaths through earlier prediction, more resilient infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response systems,” Ritchie and Rosado explained in their study. 

On April 6, [2024],a 7.2 magnitude earthquake rocked the city of Hualien in Taiwan. Days later, as search and rescue continues, the death toll currently rests at 16. 

Experts have praised Taiwan for their speedy response and recovery, and attributed the low death toll to the measures that Taiwan implemented after an earthquake of similar strength hit the city 25 years earlier. Sadly, on that day in 1999, 2,400 people died and 11,000 were injured. 

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Wang Yu — assistant professor at National Taiwan University — said that event, known as the Chi-Chi earthquake, revolutionized the way Taiwan approached natural disasters. 

“There were lots of lessons we learned, including the improvement of building codes, understanding earthquake warning signs, the development and implementation of earthquake early warning (EEW) systems and earthquake education,” said Wang. 

Those same sensors and monitoring systems allowed authorities to create “shakemaps” during Hualien’s latest earthquake, which helped them direct rescue teams to the regions that were hit the hardest. 

This, in conjunction with stronger building codes, regular earthquake drills, and public education campaigns, played a huge role in reducing the number of deaths from the event. 

And Taiwan’s safeguards on April 6 are just one example of recent measures against disasters. Similar models in strengthening prediction, preparedness, and recovery time have been employed around the world when it comes to rescuing victims of floods, wildfires, tornados, and so on. 

What else can we learn from this study?

When concluding the findings from their study, Ritchie and Rosado emphasized the importance of increasing safety measures for everyone.

Currently, there is still a divide between populations with high gross national income and populations living in extreme poverty.

Even low-income countries that infrequently have natural disasters have a much higher death rate  because they are vulnerable to collapse, displacement, and disrepair. 

“Those at low incomes are often the most vulnerable to disaster events; improving living standards, infrastructure, and response systems in these regions will be key to preventing deaths from natural disasters in the coming decades,” surmised Ritchie and Rosado.

“Overall development, poverty alleviation, and knowledge-sharing of how to increase resilience to natural disasters will therefore be key to reducing the toll of disasters in the decades to come."

-via GoodGoodGood, April 11, 2024

[disasterarea-podcast]

I hate this headline. And people are just going to read this headline and not the article and get angry, and that makes me even more annoyed.

The sirens in question are tsunami sirens. They’re down by the coast (not near where the fire was) and unsurprisingly direct people to higher ground. If locals heard them, that’s where they would go. Imagine if you were in the Midwest, and a wildfire was approaching so they fired up the tornado sirens. You wouldn’t evacuate. You’d go in the basement or the bathroom, because that’s what those sirens mean. Turning them on would send people into a death trap.

It’s the same problem here. The thing with emergency management is that different emergencies require different solutions. You don’t pull a fire alarm for a tornado, you don’t fire up the tornado sirens for a tsunami, and you don’t set off the tsunami sirens for a goddamn wildfire.

[captain-price-unofficially]

Dashcam footage of the Jet Rescue Air Ambulance crash in Philadephia tonight. The Learjet appears to have impacted the ground at a nearly vertical angle. The last transponder signal, sent seconds before the crash, showed a descent rate of more than 11,000 feet per minute.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Hindenburg over Manhattan, minutes before it exploded, May 6, 1937.

Photo: Associated Press via N-TV

[swan2swan]

This is easily one of the best moments between Kenji and his father. Just...a perfect illustration of their relationship. Daniel's busy with work, and Kenji's trying to tell him about something that he wanted in life. His father's response isn't just distant and uninterested, but it's showing that he wasn't paying attention before.

[wachinyeya]

The first and most important thing I learned when taking a uni-course on "Natural Disasters" is that there is no such thing as a 'Natural' Disaster. Nature is doing what it will do and there is no REAL control we have over that.

But what we DO have control over is our society--how we build our infrastructure, how we monitor the world around us, how we prepare and warn people of intense natural phenomenon, who and where resources go to and many other aspects of disaster prevention, preparedness and recovery.

Because when the impact of the natural phenomenon is minimal then it is no longer a disaster for our society, it simply is.

[captawesomesauce]

Disaster Prep is a full time 24/7/365 day a year thing, because no one should just go out and buy everything all at once, and times and circumstances change!

More importantly, there is no one size fits all way of thinking about your family, your situation, and your needs.

Some people do well with checklists, buy this and they're done. And that's ok! Some people do better with being asked questions and thinking critically about what they have, what they need, and what they'll do if x happens, or y happens. And that's ok too!

So having said that, a bunch of people I know and love have been filling my message boxes with questions asking me to tell them what to do, and so I made this quick little pdf as a starting point, not an ending point. This is the rough draft that I sent out, I've not proof read it, and I've found that days later, I'm still adding some stuff to it, but it's "good enough" for now and so I'll share it with y'all too...

[thatdisasterauthor]

If you post conspiracy theories on my posts about disasters--any disasters--I will block you. Full stop. Come to me with honest, curious questions about your suspicions and we can talk about that all day long as long as you remain respectful. But do not just slap conspiracy theories onto my posts and walk away.

[animentality]

[liquidlightandrunningtrees]

I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[thedoomedhometown]

some disaster writing tips in between

that conversation I had in notes with @mettasing actually reminded me of something you'll probably be seeing a lot here, and that I want to include as its own standalone writing tip/writing advice for writing disasters. In real life, every disaster has central, root causes: for example, pilot error sends a plane into a mountainside or another plane. A tornado (or straightline winds, but let's be honest, non weather people probably don't know or care especially if they've just been hit, and at a certain point the difference is academic) turns a mobilehome park into shreds of what used to be people's lives and possessions. A war breaks out because, in the end, one person or group of people decided that for whatever reason, their neighboring people did not deserve to live in peace. Etcetera.

That said, there is often a lot of contributing causes: the pilot was tired or had bad information from their instruments or the airline was trying to squeeze as much profit as possible and let safety lapse for it. People are living in mobilehomes or other substandard housing in a tornado prone area because it's the only thing they can afford, or their society decided that building earthcovered domes was ugly or not workable or whatever. An extreme rightist regime has taken over the government of the aggressor, and know war is a fairly reliable way to unite their country and shut up dissidents. Then there's mitigating factors and exaggerating factors: the plane only has a near miss rather than a crash because TCAS works and tells the pilot to pull up, or conversely turns into a flaming fireball with no survivors when it crashes because it just fueled up leaving the airport. Instead of hitting a mobilehome park, the tornado hits an empty field and only destroys already-harvested crops, or conversely the tornado hits the mobilehome park at full strength with no warning. The regime's war plans get leaked to such intense public outrage that they find themselves removed in one way or another, or conversely, they win the war with a near-instant crushing defeat and start going on an entire campaign to subjugate every single neighbor into an empire. These are something you need to consider the most when writing a fictional disaster - very few disasters happen in a total vacuum with nothing building up, no evidence of any sort of problem, solely being due to the root cause, and/or having nothing that in any way mitigates or exaggerates their impact. (the only ones that fall under this are typically things that are so overwhelming nothing can change the outcome - e.g. a massive asteroid impact on a society with no space capabilities at all, a black hole forming in close proximity to an inhabited planet whether Earth or your fictional setting, something happening before or after the capacity to understand what causes it or to prepare or warn for it has been developed) Writing these and showing them to some degree (or even just implying them) but just being aware of the geography of your setting, its economies and rich/poor divide, its political status, its level of scientific knowledge, all sorts of small details like that will feed into making a disaster in your story have a degree of depth and meaning to it that goes beyond "oh no, my entire village vanished off the face of the map, who knows and who cares why, on to the next quest!"