When your phone starts blaring and a disaster alert goes off, do you know what to do? Do you have an emergency kit? Do you have a place to stay for a few days? Do you have a way to get there? What about your children and pets? And do you have the cash to fix your roof if it comes off while you’re out? Have you considered moving?
For millions of Americans, this is not a domestic concern. In what has already been a dangerous and deadly year with tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods across the country, a disaster of this magnitude is hardly surprising.
Extreme weather events are becoming more common, dangerous, and destructive. As average temperatures rise, sea levels rise, rainfall increases, and heat waves become more common. At the same time, more people are living in places where they are vulnerable to hazards such as coastal flooding and wildfires.
The good news is that natural disasters are generally killing fewer people. Humans are adapting with better infrastructure, better forecasting, better warnings, and better responses to the aftermath. These advances have required people to take these risks seriously. They have invested in upgrading structures, conducted years of research, and sought shelter when sirens sounded or alarms sounded.
But even in areas at risk of disaster, complacency can set in.
Memories of past disasters can fade quickly, but financial and policy incentives can push people to rebuild in vulnerable areas or weaken natural protections against threats. Some people always decide to stay put, even when a major storm is approaching. Hurricane Ian in 2022 was one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history, and most casualties were those who chose not to evacuate. Residents gave a variety of reasons: leaving was too expensive, too logistically complicated, or past warnings failed to materialize.
In Germany, the term “flood dementia” describes a phenomenon in which even people directly affected by a flood quickly begin to act as if the flood had never happened.
Most people are the exact opposite of doomsday preppers who build bunkers and underground food storage facilities. Most of us have never considered the reality that climate disaster will affect us.
And too often, despite all evidence to the contrary, people adopt the mindset that nothing bad can happen to them. Some of the most dangerous areas in America are experiencing the greatest population growth and construction booms.
Unfortunately, as climate change expands the areas where floods and fires can occur, bad things can happen to you and to all of us.
This means that more and more people are facing risks they have never experienced before, and that they need to develop the insight to prepare for them. The goal is not to invite disaster and live in fear, but to take meaningful action to reduce the damage before, during, and after the threat. Otherwise, the fragile progress we have made in saving lives from disasters will collapse, and many of us will be put at risk.
Why It’s Hard to Remember Lessons from Past Disasters
A look at the history of natural disasters shows that people have been able to anticipate future events and take steps to reduce the damage, at least temporarily.
Hurricane Andrew was the largest storm to ever hit the United States, and it prompted a new generation of building codes and regulations to make Florida homes more wind and flood-resistant. Now the largest storm since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it has caused insurance companies to raise rates, but there has been a significant increase in the number of people buying flood insurance for homes in the area and further afield.
People can recognize that risk is changing. After the massive tornado outbreak in December 2021, people in the affected areas began to report that tornado patterns had changed over time and that their areas were more vulnerable than before. “It was amazing what they put together,” said Kim Cloco-McLain, a social scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which supports the National Weather Service. “They took this event that happened to them or was happening near them and their communities and connected it to this broader environmental change.”
But the salience of disasters can fade quickly. After a surge in flood insurance purchases following a hurricane, many people have found a pattern of gradually phasing out their policies as costs and concerns decrease in the years between major storms. One analysis suggests that the shock can fade in as little as three years.
In addition to disaster dementia, there is also the issue of our own luck. One of the strangest phenomena is what happens to people who struggle to keep their homes from collapsing, flooding, or burning. Some people who escape disasters take similar precautions as those who were directly in the path of destruction, but numerous studies have found that even narrow escapes can make someone feel less vulnerable or less at risk from extreme events.
There are several variables that influence these beliefs. One study found that people with greater financial flexibility were more likely to worry about future disasters after a near-miss. Also, if disaster predictions or warnings do not come true, people may be less likely to act on future warnings.
This perception affects how much people are willing to pay to protect themselves and how much they are willing to invest in protecting their communities from future destruction. Also, the lower the perception of risk, the less likely someone is to seek shelter or evacuate when water, wind, or fire (or all three, as in the case of Hurricane Beryl recently) comes.
People struggle to respond to disasters even when they recognize that the threat is increasing.
Insurance payments often only cover restoring a property to its original condition, not upgrading it to withstand more destructive events in the future. Changes in flood and fire risk maps can make it much harder to sell a home or buy an insurance policy, leaving people with limited resources trapped in unsafe homes even if they want to better protect themselves or leave permanently.
When you add all of this up, the number of people who don’t know how to act, don’t think, or don’t realize that they could be affected by a major disaster is astounding.
So how do you “scare” people without freaking them out?
While many natural disasters occur quickly, it takes years for people to take them more seriously.
Disaster responders and public officials must be proactive in educating the public about the evolving and growing threat. In places like Florida, where many new immigrants are unsure of what to do during a tropical storm, such education efforts must be ongoing, explained Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a public policy professor at the University of Central Florida who studies disaster response.
The goal, Sadiq says, is to create a “culture of preparedness,” where everyone from individual residents to community groups, emergency responders, city officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) practice a consistent plan for dealing with an impending disaster. Children learn to head to the basement when a tornado siren sounds at school, families plan evacuation routes, and utilities put extra line workers on standby to address power outages.
Creating this culture is not about how people perceive their own risk, but about how much they trust those in charge. “I think trust in the government or the agency that issues the evacuation plan is very important,” Sadiq said. “If I didn’t trust FEMA and they said, ‘You have to evacuate your community,’ I probably wouldn’t follow that advice.”
The way authorities communicate risks and warnings is also important. Too many false alarms can make people accustomed to warnings and make warnings less effective when a disaster actually occurs. Risk assessments that use jargon or provide data to the reader can make it difficult for the general public to analyze the risks they are exposed to.
One way to improve disaster response is to work with local officials and agencies who already have open lines of trust and communication in the community. Messaging about imminent or ongoing threats must also take into account the fact that some of the most vulnerable people have the hardest time getting information and preparing accordingly.
For example, there may be language barriers for those living in hazardous areas. Some people have nowhere to go during an evacuation, and others are physically unable to leave without assistance. Detailed, customized disaster response plans are needed to ensure all of these people are safe when the next major hurricane or wildfire hits. “If you leave people behind, you’re failing,” Sadiq said.
With rising sea levels and more frequent and intense weather extremes, all of these plans will need to be redesigned regularly to account for the increasing risks. Introducing people to threats they have never personally experienced before requires some creativity. One idea is to develop visual and real-world interactive elements, such as markers on buildings that show how high a storm surge is likely to be, or monuments that show the boundaries of potential future wildfire zones.
At this point, the extreme weather events associated with warming have increased somewhat, but their destructive potential and human toll have not. That makes it even more urgent to take action now: improving forecasts, expanding early warning systems, and adapting infrastructure to reduce the damage from disasters and save lives.
But doing all this requires believing that the worst-case scenario is a real possibility and that it can be prevented.
