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Last month, at the start of hurricane season, I hosted some close friends for a hurricane preparation dinner. Over the best pizza and wine, my girlfriend, roommate, best friend, and I discussed how we would evacuate New Orleans together, with our three dogs and three chickens. We also discussed when we would leave (as soon as the storm reached Category 2) and where we would go (depending on the direction of the storm, we have friends in Texas and Georgia who could stay with us).
For decades, communities have relied on emergency management agencies to tell them what to do when disasters occur. But as the world warms, storms are intensifying more quickly and making it much harder for cities to plan their response. In an ideal world, Emergency managers are required to order mandatory evacuations within 72 hours, but the storm is moving so quickly that give City There is little time to tell people to evacuate, and in the coming months and years many more people will have to decide whether to evacuate (a confusing process at best and dangerous for vulnerable people at worst) or prepare to stay in their homes (possibly without power and no help from city authorities for a week or more).
Fast-moving storms present emergency managers with a double dilemma: if residents have too little time to escape, they risk becoming trapped in their cars as the storm closes in. But calling for unnecessary evacuations when the storm is weaker than initially feared is a danger in itself. During Hurricane Rita in 2005, for example, evacuees in Houston found themselves short of fuel, water, and food, and stuck in hot traffic jams. finished More people are dying than the storm itself. With less time to prepare for the storm’s arrival, coastal managers could switch to more targeted evacuations, focusing on people directly in the path of the storm surge.
For those who choose to stay, help from the city is not a given. Days after Hurricane Ida, New Orleans officials announced eight Emergency Resource Center A place where people in need can charge their devices, buy food, cool down, etc. The city then proposed a list of 15 potential emergency resource centers, but there is no guarantee that these centers will be operational in an emergency. Buildings could be damaged in a storm, and sites could become unusable. Must decide Accordingly, in the end, Messaging The city’s announcement is that people who remain there must survive on their own for the first 72 hours after the storm hits.
When I mentioned the hurricane-preparedness dinners to Kim Johnston, a professor at Queensland University of Technology who has pondered how communities work together during natural disasters in Australia, she was quick to offer some useful advice. Johnston’s research shows that community-led disaster preparedness saves lives and speeds recovery. Because cell service can be limited during a disaster, she suggested moving group chats to WhatsApp. It’s also important to think about how to evacuate pets, she noted. In our case, that meant putting our dogs in a separate car from our chickens. I was grateful for Johnston’s guidance, but I also worried: How would those with fewer resources or no support system cope?
The problem goes far beyond New Orleans. Record ocean temperatures This year there have been more major hurricanes than usual,the study Published in May The study found that between 1979 and 2020, the global average rate of tropical cyclone intensification increased near coastal regions. One of the forces that weakens hurricanes is “vertical wind shear,” the change in wind speed and direction with height. Climate change is reducing vertical wind shear in coastal areas, Kartik Balagul, a climate and data scientist and one of the study’s authors, told me. And that reduction means storms are more likely to intensify quickly just before landfall. That’s what happened with Hurricane Beryl earlier this month. Forecasters said the storm was unlike anything they’d ever seen before, forming early in the season and experiencing two rounds of rapid intensification before making landfall.
New Orleans is, in some ways, better prepared for the challenge than other cities. Richard Chatman, deputy director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, first visited the city in 2005 to help with emergency response after Hurricane Katrina. “This is a special place,” he said of New Orleans. “People know each other, right down to the porch-side neighbor mentality.” Community groups have stepped up to fill gaps in disaster preparedness, hosting supply distributions and installing commercial-scale solar panels and batteries at local churches. Mary Delahocey, who works at the Split Second Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the health of people with disabilities, told me she’s been warning clients not to treat city-sponsored evacuations as Plan A and advising them on other options for preparing for the next storm.
Planning your personal disaster response wisely isn’t a strategy that can be replicated across cities or countries. But the lessons of New Orleans apply to others who must prepare themselves. Neighbors should talk openly and often about their contingency plans. People with disabilities should notify state services. Smart 911 Prepare an evacuation plan and a stay-at-home plan for each of your needs. Of course, this list is not comprehensive. It is best to follow specific instructions from your local authorities.
A week after the hurricane dinner, my roommate and I ordered plywood to protect the windows of our home in Gentilly from high winds. I was home alone when the wood arrived and started carrying the plywood, sheet by sheet, out to the backyard. My neighbor across the street came to help. “You don’t have to do it alone,” he said.
No one has to do this aloneOr so I thought.