Disasterology (DISASTERS) with Samantha Montano

Get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Have the perfect night in with their finest frozen pizza meal deal. Get the finest frozen pizza, chips and ice cream all for six euro like a delicious spicy salami, hot honey and do ya or Margarito wood fired pizzas, served up with their crispy chunkie chips and ice cream like sea salted caramel or pistachio for dessert. Can't argue with that shop in store or online Tesco.

Okay, it's room temperature cheese, which you always forget is better than called cheese. Ali ward back with another episode of Ologies. You know every week I worry will I make a good enough episode for you? Am I gonna bungle it? This one is a disaster, and I'm happy to report it's a disaster in the best way. I'm gonna get a few formalities out of the way up top. I want to thank the patrons at Paton dot com for making the show possible. For as little as a

Yeah.

When I found out you were in North Dakota, I was like, oh, I'm coming for you. And now, how long have you been a disasterrologist.

Well, it depends on how you define disasterrologists. I've had my doctoral degree in emergency management for two years now, and then before that, I was in grad school for five years and I did four years of disaster related work before that what.

Is disaster related work entails.

So I got my start in disasters right after Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure in New Orleans. I was in high school at the time, so.

Side note, this was in August of two thousand and five, and Hurricane Katrina was a Category five storm that hit Florida and Louisiana. So New Orleans, which sits below sea level, was protected by miles of levees and floodwalls in which over fifty breaches and major leaks occurred, leaving eighty percent of the city flooded after the hurricane, so over eighteen hundred lives were lost. Sam who's originally from Portland, Maine, went to New Orleans in the.

Aftermath, and there was like a group from my high school going down to New Orleans to help gut homes and rebuild, and so I went on that trip to volunteer for a week, and I kind of just got what we call the disaster bug, And so I ended up moving to New Orleans when I graduated, and I lived there for four years doing all different kinds of recovery work with different nonprofits in the city. And then

Then I took a group of volunteers to.

Drop in Missouri after their tornado, and I just kind of kept going until I went to grad school.

And when you say that you got the disaster bug, as they say, you're not the only person who calls it the disaster bug.

No, I don't know who started that, but it's definitely a saying, particularly among like practitioners and people who do a lot of volunteering during and after disasters.

What is the disaster bug?

It's just kind of this.

I don't know, it's like this like draw You're like being drawn towards disasters when they happen. I think you just notice them more frequently you especially when you are going to a disaster during the actual response and into like the very early days of recovery.

It's like this very.

Kind of unique feeling within a community that's going through that. And so getting the disaster bug is kind of like like it, not liking that feeling, but kind of being drawn towards that.

Okay, side, don't I couldn't find the exact origin or first usage of this phrase, but it's definitely in parlance in the disaster community. So in one twenty seventeen disastrology workshop titled Preparing for the Future of Disaster Health Volunteerism, Sean Casey, who's an acting director of an emergency response unit, said that many volunteers quote get the bug to complete

Yeah, So Rebecca Solnet has written an entire book about this. Actually, it's called a Paradise Built in Hell, And that's Basically the title of that book is what is kind of

Were you ever druk by that mister Rogers.

Quote, Yeah, the one about the helpers.

Yeah, always look for the helpers were there will always be helpers, you know, even just on the sidelines. That's why I think that if news programs could make a conscious effort of showing rescue teams, of showing who medical people, anybody who is coming into a place where there's a tragedy, to be to be sure that they include that, because if you look for the helpers, you'll know that there's hope.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

I think about that quote a lot whenever a disaster happens and it's shared around. I mean, that's where that quote comes from, is that no matter how bad a situation is, there's always people there that are helping in various ways.

And so that's kind of what your work entails, is helping and figuring out how to mobilize people to help more.

Yeah, exactly.

So within the world of disasters, the part that I study is emergency management, So it's how we actually manage the disasters, Like how do we make sure that the right people are in the right places at the right time. How do we do things to prevent disasters from happening in the first place.

What do we need to do ahead.

Of time to make sure response and recovery to disasters goes well. How do we get communities recovered as quickly as possible?

How do you define disaster and how do you define your role as a disasterrologist. I know you weren't the first person to necessarily utter the phrase, but maybe the first to take ownership of it since like the eighteen fifties or something.

So there is is shocking, but there technically is not a consensus on a definition of disaster.

But why not?

There's like some different ones out there that people are kind of drawn to when I explain it, I think the easiest way to think about it is that it is when a hazard, meaning something that poses a threat to us, interacts with us, our communities, the things we care about to the point that we are overwhelmed, and so at that point that hazard has become a hazard event, and then hazard events kind of follow along. This spectrum,

So it kind of fades up like an ombre of horrors.

And so in emergency management we study all three.

But yeah, they kind of follow along this spectrum.

So a catastrophe is worse than a disaster. Yes, So it's funny because we think of those words only in hyperbole of like I got a lot, it was a catastrophe. How do you feel about the show Catastrophe? Are you like, calm down quick aside? I love the show Catastrophe. It is wonderful.

No, it's fine.

Words have different meanings in different contexts, so okay, it's fine.

As long as you know they're hyperbolic. Right, I have called my hair a disaster. So many times in my apartment, a disaster so many times, and it's a little different. And so when it comes to your role from a professional sense, how do you get a degree in it? How is that even structured? How are you teaching? It's the what's the academic aspect of it?

Like?

Sure, So I did not know anything about emergency management. I did not know it was something you could get a degree in at all.

Samantha did her undergrad at Loyola University in New Orleans, and one of her professors had gone to the University of Delaware, which is home to the Disaster Research Center. This is a real place, the Disaster Research Center.

And so when I demonstrated this interest in disasters, she recommended that I look into grad school as an option, and so I started looking into emergency management programs for my master's degree, and there are at.

That time, there was, you know, a.

Bunch around the country of kind of varying quality, and so I kind of just picked what I thought were the top three and applied to them, and then I went with the one that gave me the most money, which was NBSU, And that is how I ended up in Fargo, North Dakota, a.

Lot of disasters come through here.

Tornadoes, yeah, we do have a tornado risk, but mostly it's the flooding from the Red River.

Oh my gosh. So when it comes to disasters, what are some of the most common ones that start as hazards and end up disasters?

So flooding is the most common one really around the world.

Yep, really, I didn't realize that so quick. Aside, how many floods happen a year? What are we talking? So I live in a place where you have to remember

So there are a lot of things.

So this is one of the key things we do in emergency management is look at what is what are the factors that are actually leading to this disaster happening, Because once you identify those factors, then you can start to try to do something about those factors. So in terms of flooding, there is a ton that we can do. Some of those things are related to kind of addressing the hazard itself. So mitigating climate change itself is going to pull back on some of that hazard risk in

It's like fix climate change, easy peasy. But on an individual level, if you live somewhere that's say prone to flooding, you can raise your house, Samantha says, you can put up a floodwall or otherwise modify your own property. You can also go to Craigslist buy a helicopter and park it on your roof. Ps I just looked up how much does the helicopter cost and it's about half a

And then also, we can do things at a community level.

So obviously communities build levies, build other kind of like bigger infrastructure projects. There's kind of a push now back more towards more natural types of mitigate, like you know, revitalizing wetlands and whatnot. You can do home buyouts. That's something we've done in Fargo along the river where you buy out people's homes and then turn that back into green space or a park or something so that when it does flood, it's not too big of a deal, it doesn't cause too much damage.

So, yeah, lots of different things you can do.

And what was your experience like in the aftermath of Katrina. I know that is a huge question. How would you quantify that? Because if it was a hurricane caused a flood, Yeah, how do.

You Yeah, So when you go to New Orleans and you mentioned Katrina, you'll hear New Orleanians say something along the lines of Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure. And what they are getting at there is that, yes, there was a hurricane that was the initial trigger of everything that happened, but it was that hurricane interacting with a levee system that hadn't been maintained that and not maintained and not built correctly that led to the actual flood

And so we can.

Have natural hazards, right, the hurricane itself maybe natural. The tornado itself is natural, but that point where it interacts with us, then it becomes you know, we're involved in that now. And so it's kind of if you look back at the way we've thought about disasters in the past, like way back we think about them as acts of God. Then we switch more to this idea of natural disaster, still removing human responsibility from those disasters that have happened.

In that it wasn't planned for properly, which then I guess would switch the hand to having more control in the future.

Of how bad they are, Yeah, exactly.

How bad the impact is? Right? Did you ever were you ever raised with Sunday school like Noah's ark in the notion of floods? Like, was that something that stuck with you?

No?

I wasn't. We weren't religious growing up.

But people often joke that Noah was the first emergency manager.

So a huge vessel on the high seas wherein you are expected to bone a lot. So Noah, he was also the world's first cruise ship captain. When it comes to your work, how much of it is distribute water and getting places for people to stay, and how much of it is on the front end where you're trying to enact policy change and make sure that people are better prepared.

So in the US, the way that generally we deal with disasters is that we're really reactive, So we wait until a disaster happens and then we're reacting to it. That's not good. We need to be proactive. We need to be doing things ahead of time.

Okay, get ready for a list of four things. This is the base of disasterrology, the order through the chaos.

So this might help we split disasters up into four phases. So you have mitigation, where you're doing things to prevent disasters from happening. You have preparedness where you're doing things to get ready to deal with the response and recovery. Then you have a response, which is that like seventy two hours where you're doing life saving tasks. That's probably like what you think of when you hear about disasters.

So mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

So in emergency management we deal in all four phases. And obviously that is a lot, so it kind of depends on what community you're working in and like what the situation is. But emergency managers are doing a lot of their work in preparedness, They're writing plans, they are doing initiatives to help individuals in the community prepare for disaster. Right, they're doing all of those, like getting themselves ready for response and recovery, the actual distribution of water and getting

Were you always very helpful as a kid? Were you always how many siblings do you have?

I'm the oldest of for okay, all right, and I'm much older than them, So yeah, were.

You always putting out figurative fires?

And yeah, you could say that.

Yeah. So Has it always kind of been your nature to help out when you can?

Yeah?

Yeah, okay. Side note, is this an isolated incident or do firstborns get more shit done? And just like helping people? I read up on one study done of men in the Swedish military and researcher doctor Sandra E. Black was looking into if birth order had an impact on non cognitive abilities like leadership skills, and she writes in one article about it, higher scores were assigned to those subjects considered emotionally stable, persistent, socially outgoing, willing to assume responsibility,

Okay, girls like swarms of lizards.

Right, What is it like when you I think when people think about disaster recovery, they do think of that small window of time when you're on the ground and you're seeing things and you're helping out. Do you find that some people think that they're cut out maybe for this work, and it's just too difficult or too emotional for them.

Maybe.

I think, going back to that disaster bug thing, I think that people who like say they've caught the disaster bug are the people who are cut out for it. So I guess there is something about it that some people seem to be more capable of handling for extended periods of time.

Going back to recovery, Samantha remember spent undergrad in Louisiana after Katrina and the floods, and this was a massive catastrophe. Again, eighty percent of the city flooded. Human bodies floated in the floodwaters for days at a time, infrastructure was out all over. People left and never came back. So for this episode, I went back and looked up some ap photos of the direct aftermath, and I literally cried over my laptop and then had nightmares. The scale of this

So when I lived in New Orleans, I lived there for four years. I was going to college, so in some ways I was mostly living on campus in Uptown New Orleans. You know, you could walk around outside and not really know that Katrina had happened.

In the past few years.

There were like some signs here and there, but for the most part, things looked quote unquote normal. But because of the organizations I wor worked with and the other things that I did, I was regularly spending time in

And so, yeah, it definitely eats at you.

We also see that in the research in terms of, you know, people's mental health and the way that stress manifests during recovery. We see an increase in domestic violence, an increase in suicides during recovery among people who are going through that process. And yeah, it's extremely, extremely difficult to go through, particularly as a survivor of that disaster.

Does it ever affect you to see how people respond to certain disasters as opposed to others, or how policymakers or political officials will respond to certain communities affected or certain disasters. Is that ever something that might get your goat?

Yeah? I'm mad, like all the time. I'm okay, but I think you just constantly mad.

Yeah, yeah, Just a side note, So we recorded this in late April. The world had just watched France's Structural Jewel Notre Dame Cathedral burn in part to cinders and collapse. Over one billion dollars poured out of pockets, and the church reported that most of it was from small personal donations. So, okay, they raised a billion dollars very quickly. Fine, it's Europe.

Certainly, everything about disasters is is injustice manifesting, like who is affected most directly by disasters, which communities are affected in what ways they are affected, their ability to prepare for disasters, their ability to mitigate disasters, their ability to recover, their ability to literally survive disasters. All of this is tied to policies that are shaped by race, class, gender, and all of those inequalities come out in the middle

Kanye West sometimes just calling them out on a telethon George Bush doesn't care about black people back vintage Kanye West. That is, yeah, the golden days of yeasy, before red hats and proclamations that slavery is a choice. So next time someone gets unhinged on Twitter and pisses off huge swaths of the nation, you can ponder academically, is this a PR emergency, PR disaster or a PR catastrophe. And so when it comes to disasters, say coming up versus

We're definitely looking at more disasters if we are continue on the trajectory that we're headed.

Based on a couple of factors.

So one climate change to the number of people and where they are living, and three the way we're building. Those are the three kind of big factors that are going to be driving that increase in disasters. So it's a little bit difficult to tell, but generally that's the trajectory that we're on for sure.

Let's touch on a few historical disasters, shall we.

So I've started my understanding of disasters probably back like mid eighteen hundreds, like Great Chicago Fire, then going to like the Galveston hurricane of nineteen hundred, the San Francisco earthquake and fire in nineteen oh six, Mississippi River flood of nineteen twenty seven, the dust Bowl, and then kind of back up into more modern disasters.

How is, how have disasters changed since ye old disasters as we might call them.

Well, a lot of things have changed.

The first thing that's changed is the actual hazards that we have to deal with. So now we have more technological disasters, more like human made oil spills, chemical spills type of disasters.

What we've also changed the way that we build.

Like the things that we have in our community are just worth more now, and they're more complicated to put back together after a disaster happens, like putting the electric grid back together in Puerto Rico, right, Like, those types of things are more complicated and it takes longer.

So what's changed in the last one hundred and fifty years isn't just better architecture, technology, communication, transportation and like soap, but also an increase in government involvement, Samantha says.

But we have FEMA now.

FEMA wasn't created until the nineteen seventies. There were some offices that were a precursor to FEMA.

And what happens when say, FEMA gets on the ground of a disaster, what type of organization is most effective in getting people help, what's the triage method and where do they start to assess and act on things.

The response begins before FEMA gets So the first responders to any disaster the people who are in that community. So the survivors themselves, the traditional first responders, police, fire, et cetera.

They're first there.

The local emergency managers, state level agencies and offices are all there, and then the federal government comes in.

So you might recall photos of the Katrina response. There were houses drifted from their foundations, apartments still standing in really lovely historical downtown architecture bore not only stains from floodwater, but also spray painted xes surrounded by numbers and codes. And these exes were kind of crudely slashed on thousands and thousands of house exteriors and they looked ominous, almost biblical, but you know, instead of Lamb's blood, it's just orange

So, first of all, communities have plans in place ahead of time.

They're not always great.

Plans, but they have them, and anybody who's been involved in creating those plans theoretically knows what those plans are. There is a system that we use nationally to help try to organize and coordinate, and there is like a national framework for who is like which major agencies are in charge of different areas like sheltering versus search and rescue.

Agencies and people that have worked together.

Before on disasters, and so they have more familiarity with each other and they're bringing all their experience at past disasters into their response.

So there's FEMA but also more grassroots efforts, Samantha explains.

So what happens during disasters is that people look around and they see that help is needed, and they work together to address those needs. And so sometimes these emergent groups are like little search and rescue groups in a neighborhood that start going around knocking on doors to check on people. Sometimes it is a group of people getting together to open a shelter in a church that they weren't expecting to have to do, but there's a need

And so when you.

Look at a disaster that's happening and if you're having a sense from the media a response isn't going well, sometimes what's happening is that there's been some kind of breakdown in that formal system, and where people's needs are still being met, it's happening through the informal system.

So sometimes these big systems get the attention while the more grassroots efforts pick up the slack.

One of the key things about Puerto Rico is that because Puerto Rico is in fact, an island, the convergence from outside wasn't able to happen as quickly as it was able to in Texas during Harvey, or in Florida during Irma, or North and South Carolina during Florence. It just took longer for people from the outside to be

I mean, if only they had more paper towels.

They had these beautiful soft towels, very good towels. Puerto Rico had like almost everything working against them. Once Maria formed, they already were vulnerable in terms of the infrastructure on the island and the fact that they are more isolated than someplace like Houston. Then you had the added issue of the emergency management system already having been strained at that point.

Harvey and Arma.

Had both just happened, and I mean those were major disasters that took attention from everybody, and so by the time we got to Maria, everybody was tired. People were already deployed, resources were already used up. And then you add another layer of government dysfunction at multiple levels, and like at a hurricane, and you have what happened in Puerto Rico.

What happens when the president gets in his helicopter, whatever, surveys something, scratches his chin, declares it an emergency. Like there's always that moment where they they have declared not an emergency, and you're like, okay, that must mean some paperwork gets shuffled.

Differently, that's actually a really important thing to have happened. So the way that you kind of get FEMA involved and get the federal government involved more broadly in a disaster is that it has to be a presidentially declared disaster.

So the governor of.

The state has to declared an emergency and then they go through a process with FEMA of asking the White House to declare it a presidential disaster. So once the President signs that, FEMA and the rest of the federal government can become involved and start supporting that specific disaster.

Those programs being opened through FEMA.

And I noticed you use the word survivors. I haven't heard you use the word victim, which seems deliberate, and I imagine is there's a reason.

Sure, So, oftentimes we hear survivors described as victims. I tend to use the word victims to describe the people who have died in the disaster, and use survivors for those who have survived.

It varies. If I'm talking to somebody who has been through a disaster.

I use the word that they use, So if they're calling themselves the victim, then I go with that. But generally I prefer survivors one, so that you can have that distinction between victim and survivor, but also in the way that it is empowering, I suppose.

It seems to also pay some respect to the people who lost their lives as well. I think a lot of people hear about disasters more in terms of the millions of dollars of property damage or how much it will cost to rebuild, but maybe don't always remember the number of lives lost. Is that in part of your work something that you try to shine a light on at all, or is that something that you feel should be considered.

Yeah, certainly it's something to know and to be considered. I think talking about disaster deaths can be really complicated. This is another thing that kind of came to light for the public during Maria is who counts as having their death attributed to a disaster and who doesn't.

There's some like.

Legal and financial implications that are tied to that, but then there's also like who gets to decide if a death is attributed to that disaster or not? Because we know disasters are so complicated, right, and disasters to me, aren't just that moment of impact. The disaster is the whole thing all like through recovery, like that's all still the disaster is still happening, it's just manifesting in a

And I understand that statistics for heart attacks after an earthquake, say spike a few days later, is that something that disastrologists look at or in hell, statistics like that.

Yeah, certainly there are some researchers who look at that. Those would be under the heading of like indirect disaster deaths if they're counted at all.

Okay, so quick aside, I remember years ago seeing an article about heart attack deaths after LA's nineteen ninety four north Ridge earthquake, and I went and have found it. So the County corner found a five fold increase in heart attack deaths the day of the earthquake, and a week later the heart attack levels sunk back down to normal.

So there are a lot of things that you can do to help. It kind of depends on when it is in relation to the disaster.

And kind of where you are in relation to the disasters.

So if the disaster has happened in your community and you see an opportunity to go volunteer and you can get there safely and you're not.

In anybody's way and you're helping, then that is something that you can do.

If you are away from the disaster when it happens, I usually recommend not going there right away. I recommend usually waiting more for the recovery and kind of let that immediate crisis subside before adding yourself to that situation.

And how do you feel about the way some disasters get covered on the news? Do you feel like it's good to expose them or are you like, oh, you're showing the absolute worst part on a loop to get ratings.

So it's complicated.

It is certainly frustrating at times to see you know, the classic weatherman like standing in the ocean as a hurricane is coming, right, that's frustrating.

This na, this is as bad as it will be able.

This thing is like founding us from behind.

But at the same time, the media is a vital component of our overall emergency management system. They're providing life saving information to the people who need it. They're sending out warnings, they're disseminating information about evacuations, they're telling people where they.

Can go to get help.

Samantha says that the news media is also amplifying organizations collecting donations and they're shining a light on how their response is going and if governmental organizations are doing with they can.

However, so the media loves to cover a disaster during the response and then they go away, and so local news outlets will obviously keep covering the recovery, but our local news media has taken a hit, and so we really need those national news outlets to be covering those

And when you're teaching, what are your courses focused on how where do you even begin to look at this?

So for our undergrads, they start out with like an intro to disaster class where we just kind of give an overview of everything, and then they take one class for each of the four phases Recovery, response, preparedness, and mitigation.

They take like a social vulnerability class.

They take a planning class, they take international emergency management, so all different classes.

How do you yourself kind of keep mentally healthy despite maybe seeing some stuff that is difficult.

Well, I compartmentalize.

Okay, they don't necessarily know that that's a healthy approach, but that's what we've been doing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you just shut that off. Put a little box.

Yep.

The fire Festival doc. Did you see it?

I did well to go to the fire festival.

Could be amazing, could be a disaster island get away, turned disaster.

Nightmare and paradise. There was no music.

They were put into.

Disaster relief tents.

How'd you feel about the FEMA tents?

And one a nightmare?

So yeah, I saw a picture of the tents. I maybe it was even before the documentaries came out, I don't know, but I saw them and I.

Was like gosh, this looks so familiar to me. Where have I seen those before?

And I all of a sudden I realized and I was like, oh, no, no, no.

When I watched that documentary, I was like, there must be people in emergency management just losing their.

Shit right now, I mean wild.

I know what a vaca, a beach safari, I know seriously, disaster movies, yes, talk about them. You got a favorite.

Let me start by saying this, I hate all Hollywood disaster movies. The one disaster movie that I like is Beast of the Southern Wild. It's not perfect, there are some issues, but I think that's the best one.

You think it's the most well done?

Yes.

Side note, I have not yet seen Bisa of the Southern Wild, but according to the YouTube link for the trailer, it's set in a forgotten but defiant bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee. A six year old girl named Hushpuppy's life is changed by a fierce storm, and this tiny must learn to

Oh, I mean I've seen them. My hate watch them.

Yeah, did you see sant Andreas with the Rock?

Yes? I did. We're gonna make it, We're gonna make it.

And I was just like, is he surfing on a tidal wave?

Like?

Why is there an American flag at the end, it was Yeah, it's pretty bad. What do Hollywood disaster movies get wrong? Other than everything?

So, uh, probably the biggest issue is that they perpetuate what we call the disaster myths m hm.

So there are a series of myths about human behavior that will not go away.

Boy howdy buckle up for flimflam.

And Hollywood movie perpetuate them.

So there is this myth that people panic during disaster, that it's like mass chaos and everybody's running around not knowing what to.

Do, when in fact, people actually are quite calm.

They make rational decisions based on the information that they have gathered around them, They help one another, they're pro social. Going back to that paradise built in hell idea and that they all work together. Related to this is like this myth that there's rampant looting during disasters.

Stores looted, people stampeded, not does not happen. Research is like very clear on this.

And so all of those Hollywood disaster movies, everybody's looting, everybody's running around panicked, freaking out, and.

So yeah, that's the but there's usually a white heterosexual male that fixes things. So yes, of course, and then he always gets right at the end.

It's amazing.

Now, what do you do or how do you approach people who won't leave their houses? And I'm talking about my parents specifically, Nancy Larry. My parents are very smart but also stubborn, and historically it had been hard to get them to leave when a storm was headed their way. How do you how do you approach those How do you get people to leave for their own safety?

Sure, so a couple different issues here depending on this situation. The first is if they are like physically, financial, et cetera, able to actually leave once you've addressed like all of those issues, and it's just somebody being stubborn, My go to is to tell them to write their social Security number on their arm in permanent markers so their body can be identified.

Oh yeah, it's tough, but hey that's.

A good one.

Yeah.

What happens when you tell people that? Are they like, okay, I'm coming.

Yeah there you you get a reaction? Yeah?

Is that smart to do in any emergency just in case to write your number? Yeah?

I mean you could.

You couldn't hurt.

Sure.

And let's talk about what's in your trunk? Does your car have an emergency kit in it? Are you the most prepared person ever? Or you like when it comes it comes?

I am embarrassingly unprepared most of the time.

Really, you don't have like a month of live water in your trunk and a flair No, certainly not.

Well, it depends on where I am at any given moment. Like, technically, you're supposed to have like a preparedness kit in your office. I do not have that at all. I mean I have like a preparedness kit at home, but I don't pay a ton of attention to it, which is a problem. That's bad. I should do that. I am like setting a very bad example. I learned it by watching you. The thing is, it really depends on your situation. So I.

So just the fact of like having a preparedness kit does not necessarily mean that you are prepared for a disaster, Like, there are some things in there that could be useful to you when a disaster happens.

But preparedness is much much more than that.

It's also your social network and your like knowledge of disasters and hazards, and that your local knowledge of your community. All of those things are kind of just as important in different ways for actually having like the physical items stockpiled in your house. So again, you should like absolutely have a three day supply of water in your house, which I do. But you know, preparedness is more than just that.

Do you ever watch Doomsday Preppers? Yes? I have are. Do you watch it like you guys know what's up? Or do you watch it and you say you've wasted so much dehydrated corn?

Yeah? Look, my biggest issue with that show is that they pick one hazard to obsess over and prepare for, which like is fine, but it's usually not the hazard that they're most at risk for. There was one episode many years ago where they were preparing for like an economic collapse or something I think, and so they had all of this stuff stockpile.

They had like a million.

Guns in their house and I think they're like bars of gold or something. And then a wildfire happened and they had to evacuate their house on the show in the middle of the episode, and not like the things they had done to prepare were not useful in this situation.

And that's why I'm a prepper, and that's why I'm a prepper. And that's why I am a prepper.

And so this is what I'm saying, like, we need to take this broader view of preparedness. Right, there are some things that will help you in multiple hazards, right, Like having extra food and water in your house is like generally a good thing to do that'll help you in any situation in which you have to shelter in place. But to also kind of be thinking about how different different things are useful depending on what the situation is.

A wheelbarrow full of gold ingots during a wildfire so helpful, just the worst. Can I ask you questions from listeners?

Sure?

Okay, okay, but before we get to patron questions, a few words about sponsors of the show. But before that, these sponsors make it possible to make a donation to a cause of the ologe's choosing. And this week doctor Samantha Montano shows the Bill Anderson Fund and Bill Anderson was a scholar and a disaster specialist, and the Bill Anderson's Fund's mission statement reads, African American and other minority

What is just bad?

So this ties back into the presidential disaster declarations. So in the US, if an event has that disaster declaration, then we consider it a disaster.

That's like problematic in a few ways that are pretty obvious.

What if someone's like, who is a real disaster and you're like, not yet, it's not official yet. You have to wait before you can call that.

Well, I mean I might tell and that on Twitter, but.

It's like announcing a bregancy, not until we get the flyover question. So, how does the president declare something a disaster? Okay, well, the government of the state or the Indian tribal government has to request that something be declared an emergency or disaster and that it's exceeded their resources. They're like, this

Yeah, So this is a huge, huge, huge problem, not only in the US, Canada is going through it to right now other countries as well. So the way I'm going to simplify this, but the way that we usually talk about like one hundred year of floodplains has been based.

On like historical records and based on whatever.

That community looked like at the time that they drew the flood maps for that community. Of course, communities are constantly changing. Anytime you go cut down a bunch of trees and put pavement down, you have changed the flood risk in that area, and in the past, our maps haven't accounted for those changes. This is all like very complicated, and this is a problem one because people may not know that they are in a flood or they may

It's kind of like an evolving policy nightmare all the time.

And now are they going to have to go up in category numbers for hurricanes at all?

You're gonna have to talk to the meteorologists about it.

Okay, I will I haven't done meteorology yet. Yeah, I don't mind if I do. Mary rose By first time question asker asked how has social media changed disasters? Okay, this social media question was also asked by Sydney Brown and Isabelle b Holper. You know she's thinking about things like the Facebook option to mark yourself safe when there's a flood, or how has increased communication helped or hindered it.

Yeah, so generally they are helpful.

They do a lot of things like help us send out warnings, help communicate and keep people more up to date in terms of like official responses.

But it's also useful to be able to have all of your.

Neighbors on Facebook, and to have a Facebook group about your neighborhood. If you're evacuated from your house, as people are, you know, finding out information here and there, you have a place to kind of share all of that information. So they're also useful in that way when you get into the recovery, every community that has a disaster at this point has some kind of like Facebook group where people are sharing resources and talking about the recovery.

It's useful for being able to gather donations.

It's helpful in terms of people being able to see the damage and like kind of wrap their heads around.

What has happened.

So it's useful in all these different ways. Search and rescue also really useful. There are a lot of documented cases of people posting online saying I need a rescue. My phone won't dial out, but I can post here. There are obviously issues in terms of barriers in terms of who has access to social media. Of course, your phone needs to be charged and like working in the midst of a disaster for it to be useful, But generally I would say they're a positive contribution.

Rachel wants to know how would we recover from nuclear fallout? So that's a pretty simple, easy question.

I would move to another country. I'm kidding.

Is there a real answer to this?

Well, first of all, I mean there's like the contamination zone, which then you just leave.

But past that, I mean you would have to basically.

You're dealing with like internally displaced people's situation then, so you're finding new places for people to live, and then past that, the recovery actually looks like pretty similar to as it would from any other disaster where you have to completely leave and start over.

Right, I mean, I think abandonment is pretty much they the name of the game, right, Yeah. Micah Eckert asks when disasters happened, what is the most helpful thing that people can do? In general?

Donate money to local organizations.

Sinney Brown wants to note what is the cost of disaster relief and how long does it actually take communities to rebound.

It is a lot of money and it takes a very long time. It depends on the disaster. But I think in the past couple years, the US has had thirteen billion dollar disasters a year.

You might need to fact check me on that number.

Fact check this and it was fourteen very close fourteen different billion dollar plus disasters in twenty eighteen, killing at least two hundred and forty seven people and costing upwards of ninety billion dollars. Hurricane Michael did about twenty five billion in damages, Hurricane Florence was just under that a twenty four billion, and the California wildfires were also over twenty billion. So a chorus of experts and scientists have

And then that's just government. Businesses also donate money. There's nonprofits that are involved, Individuals are sending donations, foundations, et cetera. So there's a lot of money flying around, and we actually don't do a super great job of keeping track of all of that money. So yeah, it's difficult to keep track of all the different sources. And in terms of the length of recovery, it again depends on the resources you have access to and kind of how bad

A whole group of folks ask this next question, and they are Sydney Brown, Danny ce Ray, Kasha Deli Dames, Savannah Procop, Michelle Grondine, and Anna Elizabeth and a ton of people asked, what is the biggest disaster that scientists are anticipating? I mean, is it people running out of water? Is it super volcanoes, tectonic shifts, climate change, earthquakes, floods like all.

Of the above, all of the above.

Yeah, I mean we're seeing more fires, We're seeing more hurricanes, more flooding. So obviously a drier climate and a winter climate depending on where you're at. Yes, so all of it, Yes, got it, just a more headway to the apocalyms it's great.

Let's see.

JSB says, I have seen various articles listing the US states least likely statistically to suffer a natural disaster. Do you think these have any basis in actual fact? And should I move to Ohio?

Usually those types of maps are based off of which states have had presidential disaster declarations, so that's where they're getting those from. Usually, so yeah, sure, some states tend to have fewer disasters or less severe disasters than others, but again, changing climate, still some are safer than others.

And Elizabeth Gable said, essentially, are there more disasters now or does it just seem like they're more disasters because we hear about them more.

No, there are more disasters because there are more people to be in arms.

Way, Oh, that does make sense. Yeah. We got a bunch of prepper questions from Savannah Procop, Kitty Halberson, Sydney B. Brendan, Dean, Claire Meyer, Ashley Theodora Visian, Jay Sarah Loquist first time question asker as well as another firster, JSP wants to know what are the skills it would be most useful in the aftermath of a disaster and says I'm skeptical of preppers with collections of guns and gold. But it would wouldn't be useful to know how to can food or sow or something.

If it's like the apocalypse.

Yes, okay, no, I mean generally in the United States, the most useful thing is to have a savings account with a lot of money in it, or a really good insurance policy.

Has that like other skills to have.

I mean, if your house is destroyed, having some kind of construction experience is useful.

So maybe fewer guns, more hammers. Yeah, learn to cook a squirrel. Elizabeth Holper and a few other people, including Stephen Kerrison, asked is AM radio still a good source to get information during a disaster if a cell phone tower fails? And where's Ham radio?

During all this?

Is anyone using Ham radio?

Yes? Really?

Yes, Yes, those are good sources of information if you have access to those type of radios.

Okay. Side note, there's a rumor that Paris Hilton is really into Ham radio and as a whole room full of vintage equipment. And even if this rumor is fake news, I want you to know that I would read fan fiction about it.

That's hot.

Also, this next question is from someone you know, but also from Sarah Terry, Canon Party, Heather Shaver, May Merrill, Lily Hill, and first time question asker Liz Powell. Side note question for me, how screwed are we with a big in California? Or do you guys out here even like checking it, like when it happens, it happens, or are we like TikTok it's happening.

I mean, I can't predict earthquakes, but yes, it is something to be aware of and pay attention to.

Okay.

Also new Madrid though, what is that New Madrid? Oh?

No, what's that?

There's a fault line in the middle of the country. Where is it goes through Saint Louis?

Oh?

Keep joky?

So okay, yeah, google that if you need something else to worry about.

Oh I will, y'all, I check this out. And yes, in eighteen eleven and twelve there was a seven point nine earthquake followed by a seven point four aftershock. Those are huge Saint Louis floods and earthquakes and tornadoes. Man, it's a good thing. Y'all have toasted ravitiolis because that is some shit to deal with. Speaking of twisters, Leely Hill wants to know, is there something we can do

Yes, definitely, if you can have a tornado shelter put in, that would be the best thing to do.

Depending on where you live.

Sometimes there are like community shelters, like trailer parks will sometimes have like like a community tornado shelter, or you can have one in your house. Also making sure that you are tied into your community's warning systems so varies a little bit, but make sure you go onto like your city's website and usually there's some kind of like sign up for whatever their alert system is. And also just be aware if your town has tornado sirens like no to listen for those things.

Like we do a monthly drill in Fargo, so people are like familiar with what it sounds like.

Chrispher wants to know, not really question, but I would like it if she could speak about how severe PTSD can be in a survivor after experiencing a disaster. Do you see as part of people's recovery is dealing with the just the post traumatic stress of it.

Yeah, so when we talk about recovery, we're including everything from like physical recovery, economic recovery, to mental health recovery as well.

Again, it's going to vary.

This is like one thing that we're becoming more cognizant of in the recovery process is accounting for mental health care throughout the event.

This next question about asteroids was asked by Tyler Q and just Tyler Q. So I was mistaken. So Tyler Q, here you go, some people are asking about asteroids.

We're screwed, man.

That's that we're dinosaurs man. Lacy Gilbert wants to know how advanced are we in predicting natural disasters.

It depends on the hazard. Doing pretty well.

In terms of hurricanes, for example, if you compare now to the nineteen hundreds, we have come a very, very long way. It's one of the reasons that we've seen a decline in hurricane related deaths in the United States with a few exceptions, but then other hazards are more set and on set and are harder. Obviously, earthquake prediction is like a point of great focus and trying to figure that out.

Seismologist doctor Lucy Jones, if you're out there, please talk to me. John Strowman asks how organize our response efforts in times of crises? Sometimes it seems like everything is a well oiled machine with multiple organizations working in tandem to fix broken lives. Other times it seems like a fully autonomous disaster in itself. So why is the management of a disaster also a disaster?

That is a great assessment. Part of what people are kind of seeing when they.

See that discrepancy is the difference between an emergency disaster and catastrophe. And once we get large scale disasters into catastrophes, that's where everything is just it seems like a shit show, particularly from the outside, and that's like part of what is making it a large scale disaster or catastrophe.

It seems to me a lot of times when I see the aftermath of a disaster, it seems like water is one of the most critical things to be distributing. Is it difficult to truck in tons of palettes of bottles of water. Are there better ways to do that, like filling stations or I don't know, this is a super dumb question. I might totally cut it out, but it always just seems like how are they going to get all those bottles of water to people? And is there enough water?

Sure? Sure?

I hate to keep saying this, but it depends on the situation. So here's one way to think about this. So I talked before about convergence and how all these people come from the outside. In addition to people, there's also materials coming in from the outside, all different kinds of supplies. Some of those materials are like requested and planned for, right, So you'll have trucks coming in with.

Water that someone somewhere has requested, and.

They're coming in to some kind of distribution point that like generally is good and okay, fine, great.

The problem starts to become when you have.

Unrequested donations flooding into the community that's been through a disaster. So when people go to their closet and just like pull out any old clothes that they don't want, and they like, if you're in North Dakota and I go to the store and buy cases of water and put them on a truck to Texas.

Like, that is not effective, That is not helpful.

And so it's those unrequested donations that then like get to that community and then they sit in a warehouse and are never distributed or you know, it takes the community's recent sources to organize and donate or organize and distribute those donations. That's where things become much more complicated.

And ideally after a.

Disaster, you just like get the community's water system back up and running as quickly as possible.

Speaking, which is Flint considered a disaster at this point?

Or no, I would call it an environmental crisis. But that's like kind of a weird academic distinction that like maybe isn't that important for the actual situation. It's like definitely still within the realm of what I think about or would research.

Yeah, it's yeah.

And then watching just one hundred million dollars from like Chanelle go to the fix the church is like, oh my god, oh my god.

Wild.

Yeah, last questions I always ask. I mean, I feel like this is absolutely the stupidest question to ask, the smartest person given the topic. But what's the thing you like the least about disasters? Like everything?

I don't know, honestly, it's watching the same problems just happen again and again, like we know what the problems are, and like we know what's causing disasters, and we're just not we could we could like stop most disasters from happening, and we don't.

Yeah, what top problems would you identify that are contributing to Like if you could wave a magic wand and to fix those problems.

Okay, with a magic wand, I mostly I would change like where people are living, right, move them into less vulnerable areas to like wave a magic wand and just fund all of the mitigation projects that local communities want to do, right, Like people know their community's best, Like they're the ones who know what their communities need to

Just bring insert chimes here, magic wands. Your favorite thing about your work.

I think being able to.

Have a platform to amplify the voices of survivors and to amplify those communities that don't get that media attention, even just acknowledge.

I think sometimes that yes, I see what you're going through.

This is a disaster. You're absolutely right. More people should be paying attention.

Being able to understand what they're experiencing, I think is probably my favorite part.

Did you ever think that you would be the world's foremost disastrologist.

Well, I'm not the world's foremost disasterrologist probably, but.

I mean I don't know of a lot of other people. You got the domain name, so well, that's true, Pierce the Veil's got nothing on you. Yeah, but yeah, I mean in terms of disastrology as a discipline and a disastrologist, it's like call of doctor Sam.

Yeah, I'm just the loudest on Twitter.

Well that's good. More air horns and bullhorns. You're doing great work. Thank you so much for letting me peppery with stupid questions and thanks for coming all the way to Fargo. I get to check off North Dakota on my list. I'm glad there are no tornadoes while we were here, though, yikes. So travel far and wide if need be, and ask the foremost smartest people your deepest down stupid questions, because we're all gonna die one day now. To learn more about doctor Montano, head to her website

Lisa, are you getting used a camera that this cardader just came and erased the Hollywood side.

The Hollywood side is gone.

Get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Have the perfect night in with their finest frozen pizza meal deal. Get the finest frozen pizza, chips and ice cream all for six Euro like our delicious spicy Salami, hot honey and do youa or Margarito wood fired pizzas, served up with their crispy, chunky chips and ice cream like Sea Salt de Caramel or pistachio for dessert. Can't argue with that shop in store or online. Tesco.