Disaster science
The response to these persistent, repetitive events wears communities down and, in many ways, is more challenging.
On a December morning in 1917 a man named Samuel Prince, curate at St. Paul’s Church, was at breakfast when an explosion rocked Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Prince had helped search for and bury victims from the Titanic just a few years earlier, and once again he took action to help the victims of disaster. A ship carrying explosives had caught fire and blew up in the harbor, sending a shockwave of destruction through the seaside city. The impact killed 2,000, injured another 9,000.
Prince left Halifax to study sociology at Columbia University. There, he wrote his dissertation on the response and recovery after the explosion. Prior to the publication of his work, writings on disasters had simply given an accounting of what had occurred.
Prince’s dissertation outlined a series of observations about human and organizational behavior and has come to be regarded as the first systematic social analysis of a disaster.
When I tell people that I study “emergency management,” their eyes glaze over, so I started saying I was a disasterologist.
In fact, the way the people of
Houston respond to disasters was the subject of my doctoral dissertation and my new book, “Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis.”
A century after the Halifax explosion initiated the field of disaster research that we have today, the world needs to learn from how Houstonians respond to repetitive flooding. How do we better harness ordinary acts of heroism and heed the signals of fatigue?
Mass assault of help
In the decades after Prince’s work, there were a handful of social science studies done on disasters, but it wasn’t until the late 1940s, in the shadow of World War II and the outset of the Cold War, that the field exploded. Among the main findings is that in times of crisis communities come together. Contrary to popular belief, most people do not panic, loot or descend into chaos when disaster strikes. Rather than widespread antisocial behavior, we see again and again that people respond pro-socially.
The amount of assistance that arrives can be staggering, with researchers going so far as to call it a “mass assault” of help. It is impossible to get an accurate count, but some estimates are shocking. At least 40,000 volunteers spontaneously descended on Ground Zero in New York.
Although Prince and the other founding disaster researchers established that help flows into disasteraffected communities, in the decades since, surprisingly little research had been done on who those people are, what they do and why. Figuring this
out was the purpose of my research in Houston during the Tax Day Flood in April 2016.
Big disasters, such as Katrina and Harvey, capture our attention, because their death tolls are high and their economic impacts vast. But I think it is the comparatively smaller, often overlooked disasters such as the Tax Day Flood, that are most instructive about our future. The response to these persistent, repetitive disasters wears communities down and, in many ways, is more challenging. The events come with relatively few deaths and little national media attention. They do not get special bills in Congress to help survivors rebuild. The donations dry up quickly and volunteers don’t come to help a decade later. They are the disasters that largely leave local communities on their own to survive.
In mid-April 2016, I took one look at the expected rainfall totals for Houston and texted my dissertation adviser that I would be on the next flight from North Dakota to Texas. I raced home, packed my bag, booked a flight and left for the airport.
I had not been the only one watching the weather report for Houston. When I landed in Dallas on a layover, I found teams of volunteers in matching T-shirts representing the major national disaster nonprofits waiting at the gate. Like I had, they understood the serious flooding that was coming and were trying to get on the ground as soon as possible to help with the response. I was happy to see them because volunteers were exactly who I was going to Texas to study.
While waiting for the delayed flight, I scanned social media. There was one picture I saw circulating online that showed a group of people floating on an air mattress through the floodwaters. Sitting on the mattress was a woman holding on to two small children. The image felt so familiar to me. It could have been taken during any number of floods in the past 50 years, but this time I couldn’t look away.
Finally the flight took off and as we came through the clouds over Houston, passengers leaned over one another to see out the windows. Beneath us, muddy water escaped the bounds of rivers and bayous. Houston is so big that even in the worst floods, you can stand in one part of the city and not know a disaster is unfolding just a few streets away. From above though, I could see the water weave itself from one town to the next, revealing the extent of damage. I looked around the plane and wondered which passengers on our flight would be returning to flooded homes.
Affiliated volunteers
There is some variation from place to place, but generally the Red Cross is responsible for opening shelters and providing food and water to survivors during response, which is why I made the Red Cross my first stop in Houston.
I arrived at their headquarters downtown, and a volunteer working the front desk led me upstairs to their emergency operation center. There was an eerie stillness as we walked through the building. We wound our way through the halls past empty, dimly lit rooms that stood in contrast to the crisis outside. We walked upstairs and a door opened to bright lights and the organized chaos of the command center.
As I went from meeting to meeting within the Red Cross operation center, I found the assessments of what was happening outside varied. This kind of conflicting information made the work I was trying to do more complicated, but it wasn’t unusual.
During a response there is a lot of information flying around very fast. It comes in from different sources and changes quickly, not to mention the game of telephone that’s played as it goes from one person to the next, all while communication networks may not be fully operational.
This means getting a grasp of even basic numbers — such as how many people are at shelters — can be difficult, if not impossible.
Despite the conflicting information, from Red Cross headquarters, it resembled the quintessential disaster response. Various agencies and organizations appeared to be coordinating. Everything that should have been happening seemed to be happening.
As I sat in the Red Cross headquarters hearing about how everything was going well, I couldn’t get the image of the
kids on the mattress out of my head. I noticed a list of shelters written on the wall and wrote down the addresses. The kinds of volunteers I needed to find weren’t hanging out in emergency operations centers — they would be out working among the survivors.
Unplanned response
At one of the shelters I visited, I interviewed a volunteer who was running the kitchen. On paper, the shelter was run by the Red Cross, but he wasn’t a Red Cross volunteer. He told me word had gotten out around town that this particular building would be a shelter. People began showing up from the nearby flooded neighborhoods looking for help before any officials or volunteers had arrived. Unsure of what to do, a building manager had unlocked the doors and invited everyone inside. Then he started calling around asking people he knew to come help. The guy who was now running the kitchen had been one of those phone calls.
When he arrived, he found the kitchen empty. He had never run a kitchen before, nor had he ever worked in a shelter, but he saw hundreds of hungry people so he figured it out. For the next five days, he kept hundreds of evacuees and volunteers fed. Impressed, I asked him how he pulled off such a feat. He laughed and said he was just treating it as though it was a wedding. He had some experience working for an event planner and had figured out he could apply those skills to running the shelter. There were some bumps in the road, like a visit from the health department with a list of health code violations. He took it all in stride though, improvising as he went.
I heard similar stories from volunteers across the city. Most had heard about the severity of the flooding from their friends and family, on social media, or from news reports. They arrived en masse at the shelters and other hubs of relief activity, like donation distribution sites. They would spend some time wandering around to see how things worked and then they jumped in to help. They found something that needed to be done and they figured out how to do it. Some had volunteered during previous floods or had been through flooding themselves. Most volunteers had no formal disaster training, but it didn’t seem to matter much. Anyone can make a sandwich.
I heard similar stories and saw similar issues everywhere I went, from the middle of Houston, to the suburbs, to the rural counties. In each of these places I found local spontaneous volunteers coordinating their own response.
Disaster fatigue
What was remarkable to me about the Tax Day Flood was that the response was so unremarkable. There was no controversy, no colossal screw-up that left hundreds dead. There were no scandals, or paper towels thrown. The response mechanisms that emergency management had planned for seemed, for the most part, to be functioning.
Bigger than an emergency but smaller than a catastrophe, it was large enough to require a federal response, but not so large that a slow federal response would have been felt on the ground. While it does not feel right to call the response a failure, there are some in Houston — like the family on the mattress — who probably would not call it a success either.
There can be tension between these volunteer efforts and the government’s response as they are unaware of what the other is doing. This tension was certainly there in Houston. Over and over again I heard from volunteers that there had been no plans for opening shelters, yet extensive sheltering plans had been developed by the Red Cross and local emergency management officials. Some of the plans were even available publicly online.
Four months later, in August 2016, I returned to Houston to interview volunteers still working on the recovery from the Tax Day Flood, and I found the fatigue was dire. I was walking into a region that, though well practiced in responding to floods, was tired and low on resources. We cannot respond to one disaster after another as we have. Emergency management resources must be shored up and overhauled while investing in minimizing Houston’s future risk.
I left Houston worried. The Tax Day Flood is not the kind of disaster Hollywood makes movies about. There will always be large-scale disasters like Harvey and Sandy, but it is the repetitive, smaller floods that communities are being forced to navigate more frequently that seem to be wearing us down. The Houston region had been through three floods in the span of just 13 months. Less than two months after I left, Houston would flood again. Some people re-flooded while some escaped the next round. Still others who had not previously flooded did so for the first time. It was a kick while they were down. Yet everyone was doing what they could to keep moving forward. There wasn’t any other option.