This was a painful decade.

Every December I write a list of the places I have visited throughout the year. As a disasterologist, my work often brings me to the site of disasters. Even when I travel for vacation I have a knack for spotting the locale’s disaster history. In 2019 I visited the site of twelve disasters. They included both new disasters and old and ranged eight states and three continents.

In Niagara Falls, New York I visited the site of the mostly abandoned neighborhood of Love Canal, the site that led to the creation of the EPA’s superfund program. Later in the summer, I stood atop a quickly melting glacier in Iceland. A few months later the Prime Minister and others held a funeral for Iceland’s first glacier lost to climate change. I stood at the foot of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that had halted international air travel for months in 2010. In June, I stood along the beach in Grand Isle, Louisiana where a decade ago I watched oil and dead animals wash ashore after BP’s reckless decisions left 11 men dead and over 200 million gallons of oil bursting into fragile ecosystems. Across the world, in Kerala, India, I met with students, policymakers, volunteers, and business owners who have faced down record-breaking flooding and mudslides for the first time in a century.

As I made my list, I realized that I had also happened to visit all five of the places that I have lived — the small town of Taylorville, Illinois, the coast of Maine, and the cities of New Orleans, Fargo, and Omaha. Each of the places that, in my life, I have called home are in crisis, on the brink of crisis, or recovering from crisis.

I spent last New Year’s Eve on the beach in Maine next to a raging bonfire. Just a few miles south, the same beach is eroding into the Gulf of Maine, which happens to be the fastest warming body of water its size anywhere in the world. A combination of infrastructure decisions, development, rising seas, and intense storms traveling further north have eroded the shore, sending waves into people’s homes and burying streets beneath the sand. It’s a continual, slow-moving crisis.

After the holiday, I flew back to Fargo where I was teaching emergency management courses at North Dakota State University. Within a few weeks, the Red River, just a few blocks from my apartment, threatened to flood the city. The mayor opened Sandbag Central with the goal of filling one million sandbags were they to be needed. Fargo stayed above water, a combination of the river not rising as high as expected and the success of mitigation measures implemented following previous floods. It was close enough, though. Water reached the bottom of the bridges that connect Fargo to Moorhead, Minnesota and the floodgates across the bridges were closed. From the fourth story of the Moorhead Mall parking garage, I surveyed the flooded roads and trails. Outside the city some, particularly farmers, did not escape damage. Fields were underwater and houses were surrounded by sandbags and other DIY barriers.

Only a few weeks later on a drive back to the east coast, I stopped in Taylorville, Illinois, a small town surrounded by farms in the middle of the state. I was born in Taylorville and lived there for the first few years of my life. In the final days of 2018, an EF3 tornado came through the town and damaged over 500 homes. By the time I visited, six months later, they were in various states of recovery. Blue tarps hung off roofs and construction equipment lay scattered across front yards next to piles of debris. I found our old house, unscathed, just a few streets from the ones that had been destroyed. In this case, nothing but luck had left it standing.

Later in the summer I was in New Orleans to teach a group of emergency management students from Missouri about the history of disasters in Southeast Louisiana. I lived in New Orleans in the midst of the recovery from Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure. We spent our weekends gutting flooded homes and building new ones. Fourteen years later, I stood in the Lower Ninth Ward watching a group of students, who had been only a few years old when Katrina came, put up a roofing frame. In the Lower Nine, many New Orleanians have not been able to return home. In a city like New Orleans, recovery is continuous and the next disaster around the corner. We drove past the Bonnet Carre Spillway, full of water from the North. It was opened an unprecedented two times this year. The Corps of Engineers closed the spillway in July, but the Mississippi River remained unusually high as hurricane season began. Two weeks after I left New Orleans, tropical storm Barry headed for the city. The Mississippi River was so high that for the first time in 90 years there was substantiated fear that the river levees in the city could overtop, or worse, fail if Barry’s storm surge made its way up the river. It was a near disaster that reminded us all of the city’s fragility.

At the end of August, I began a new job in Omaha. I looked down at the Missouri River escaping its banks as I flew into Nebraska. Omaha-Cedar Rapids were my new Fargo-Moorhead. In the fall, I drove around Nebraska and Iowa assessing the damage. Like North Dakota, farms and homes are underwater. Nebraska and other states in the Midwest had been through the worst flooding in decades. At least 14 million people were affected as levees failed, homes were flooded, and fields sat under stagnant water. 400 counties across 11 states requested federal assistance as the slowly unfolding disaster broke records throughout the region.

All my homes were hurt this year. Each of their futures, for different reasons, remain uncertain as the climate changes around them. I realized that I am not surrounded by disaster because it is my job, I am surrounded by disaster because in this era disaster is everywhere. The pain that I feel for those places, for the people who live in those places and helplessness is too much. I don’t know that I have the language to describe what it feels like to see all the places you’ve lived hurting. I don’t know how to tell you what it feels like to look on helplessly as buildings fall and people drown. There is pain and sadness. There is anger and frustration. And a feeling of panic that I keep pushing away so I can keep moving forward. I try to use each of these places as fuel for the courage it takes to be able to see what our future is without impossibly big changes. Disaster researchers know how to stop these disasters but we’re no match, yet, for the forces that are bigger than us.

My homes were all hurt, but other people’s homes were hurt much worse.

A Decade of Destruction

There is no easy way to write these types of lists. Someone is always left out. These are the disasters that have stayed with me.

Less than two weeks into this decade, the Haiti Earthquake claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives. There was a heat wave in Russia and flood in Pakistan. By April there was oil flooding out of the earth, poisoning the Gulf of Mexico. International air travel was disrupted for days as Eyjafjallajökull erupted and Iceland battled flooding. In 2011 an 8.9 magnitude earthquake led to a nearly 30ft tsunami, which led to the problems at the Fukushima nuclear power plants. 15,000 people were killed. In the final days of April, a tornado outbreak across the United States left 321 people dead. Less than a month later Joplin, Missouri was hit with an EF5 tornado that killed over 150 people and became the costliest tornado on record. A drought in East Africa led to a famine so severe that 30,000 children died. 2012 brought Superstorm Sandy and a $62 billion in damages. There was a drought in the Midwest, fires out west, and another heat wave. Louisiana took the brunt of Hurricane Isaac. Iran and Afghanistan experienced horrific earthquakes. Typhoon Haiyan ripped apart the Philippines killing thousands and leaving millions displaced in 2013. In Moore, Oklahoma a tornado caused devastation, particularly to two elementary schools. The United States began 2014 with the “Polar Vortex” that brought life to a standstill and cost $3 billion. The Philippines were hit again in 2014 by Typhoon Hagupit. Floods and landslides in India and Pakistan. The drought in California continued. In April of 2015 Nepal was struck by an earthquake killing more than 2000 people. The Memorial Day flood began a rapid cycle of flooding in Texas. Across the country, South Carolina faced their own significant flooding. 2016 brought Hurricane Matthew which killed over 1000 people in Haiti before flooding the eastern coast of the United States. An unnamed rainstorm flooded Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Houston was hit again with the Tax Day Flood and then another flood in June. 2017 was the costliest year of disasters in US history totaling over $300 billion. California was ravaged by more wildfires including the particularly destructive Tubbs fire. In the south Harvey, Irma, and Maria came one after another breaking the limits of the US emergency management system. With drought, other severe weather, and spring flooding across multiple states there were a shocking 16 disasters that broke the billion-dollar threshold. The hurricanes continued in 2017 with Michael devastating the Florida panhandle and into Georgia. Hurricane Florence crawled slowly towards South and North Carolina, re-flooding many of the places still recovering from Hurricane Matthew. Records set by the Tubbs fire were broken by the Camp and Carr fires. This year, Hurricane Dorian caused catastrophic damage in the Bahamas before coming up the east coast and California fought through the third year of destructive wildfires and power outages.

All of these places are someone’s home.

2019 ends more than a decade, it ends anyy delusions that have allowed some to deny the consequences of the climate crisis have arrived. We’re told to spend our time worrying about the world we’ll leave for our grandkids, but we also need to worry about the world we live in now.

Disasters are never caused by a single factor, but no longer can anyone deny climate change is among them. Scientists and journalists spent the entire decade explaining that climate change is contributing to many of these disasters. Connections that have been made more explicit as science advanced throughout the decade. Many years ago I stopped arguing with people if climate change is real. Eventually I stopped arguing with people about whether or not climate change is human caused. In this next decade, I plan to stop arguing about the relationship between climate change and disasters. We do not have time.

As an emergency management researcher, I am infuriated by this list of disasters. Every single one could have either been prevented or the damage significantly minimized, had research been brought into practice and policy. We have not even yet had a substantive national discussion about the changes needed to how we manage disasters. The first decade of the 2000’s brought the most significant changes to emergency management policy in the nation’s history but this decade was wasted. Emergency management policy has been an afterthought, at most. We are not going into the next decade, one that guarantees even more billion-dollar disaster prepared. We’re not even ready for the disasters we already have.

We have to mitigate our growing risk and make decisions that will ensure the safety of our homes. In many ways, it is less an issue of science and much more about the political will to act.

Disasters are political and so are the solutions.

I refuse to sit back and watch this become our future. These disasters could unite us. We are not all affected proportionately by disaster, but there is no part of the country that has escaped the effects. Disasters are not once in a lifetime events, they are continuous. Each disaster is an extension of one another weaving history to our future. There is no home untouched by disaster past, present, or future. Together do these disasters not constitute a national crisis that demands action?

This year I saw the state of our homes.

In Love Canal, the homes were gone.

In Isle de Jean Charles, the homes were in their final days.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, the homes were in the 14th year of being rebuilt.

In the midwest, many homes survived another year only by the skin of their sandbags.

This next decade won’t just bring more disasters. It’ll be the decade when it will be decided whose homes are saved — and a lot of us are going to have to fight for the places we love.

The Year All My Homes Were Hurt: Ending a Decade of Disasters and Starting Another

A Decade of Destruction

Powered by Squarespace