…life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter’d with the shocks of doom – Tennyson (from In Memoriam, 118)
Flash flooding of the Guadalupe River during the pre-dawn hours of Independence Day produced tragedy along its length, most notably in Kerrville, Texas. More than 100 people have died, including vacationers and far too many young children at summer camps. More remain missing; the death toll continues to mount.
The grief is beyond any expressing.
We live on a planet that does its business through such extreme events. Floods can and do raise creek levels twenty feet in a few minutes. Events hit hardest at the local scale and are no respecters of location or time of day, or the lives and fortunes of those young or old who happen to be in the path of destruction. This heartbreak will not be the last.
Americans remain challenged and vulnerable, especially when warning lead times are short, when the threats develop at night, when the danger develops in underserved rural areas, and when those in harm’s way are not at home, but on travel or vacation (where risks and the appropriate actions needed are unfamiliar).
That is why we have an emergency management community, a closely-knit, coordinated network of federal-, state-, and local agencies, corporations and small businesses, NGOs, and others – to provide 340 million Americans a measure of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (those July 4th values) in the face of Earth’s real and present dangers. It is the motivation and vision for federal programs and resources at the national level that designed to be vigilant everywhere, 24/7 (even and especially during evenings and holidays), and to push out weather warnings and communicate risk (along with options for action) to that last mile, to those who are in harm’s way, to those who must act.
For all our efforts in emergency response to date, there is still work to do. There is still room for improvement. There always will be.
The early stages of the Guadalupe aftermath have seen a bit of finger-pointing. In retrospect, all involved can see how they might have done a bit more. One point of agreement, whether admitted or not; hazard risks do not lessen if we summarily do away with or diminish the operational capacity of the federal agencies – or when we do away with the supporting research and development that are the means to “doing better the next time.”
Nevertheless, that is the path that for the moment we have chosen.
So, in the face of the recent federal withdrawal (see also here), while waiting for the rebuilding of that infrastructure (which must eventually come), what are the opportunities for initiative, for agency? Clearly the federal operations and related R&D have to be rebuilt (even if along different lines). That will fully occupy a good part of today’s emergency management community – especially those who will remain in DHS, who will be charged with continuing maintenance and delivery of residual FEMA functions. But what else can be done in the meantime? What might the remainder do?
Here are three (of many) emerging narratives, that illustrate, but by no means exhaust the possibilities. They are offered here to stimulate ideas, to inspire imitation, experiment, action.
As FEMA shrinks, a grassroots disaster response is taking shape. This New York Times article starts out:
They were just drills, but each felt urgent and real. A group of volunteers searched a wooded area for someone who had been injured and stranded, ready to provide aid. Then they practiced a river rescue, attaching a rope near the bank to help pull the victim to shore.
This was Rescue HQ, a gathering in rural Tennessee last month where the founding members of several newly formed disaster response groups ran through emergency scenarios and discussed how to better coordinate in the chaotic aftermath of a storm or a flood.
Groups like this are growing in number — a new model of disaster response taking shape outside of government channels. Many volunteers are deeply religious and have military backgrounds.
They’re an unequal match for what the government can do, especially when it comes to long-term rebuilding efforts after natural disasters. But with the Trump administration pulling back staffing and funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency — and even pledging to eliminate it — communities may soon rely far more on volunteer help.
The article looked at two or three such efforts, surfacing reasons for hope as well as grounds for caution (all while driving-home the need for federal leadership).
After Lahaina burned, an experiment in housing the most vulnerable. Following the Paradise California wildfire of 2018, which destroyed 10,000 homes, rebuilding has been slow. Only 2500 structures had been rebuilt as of November of 2024. It’s possible to do better, as the Washington Post reported from Lahaina:
Almost two years after wildfires ripped through Lahaina, this is where global supply chains, disaster relief and a novel solution to America’s housing crisis come together. On track for full occupancy this summer, the 57-acre development is part of Hawaii’s attempt to house some of its most vulnerable residents, using hundreds of prefab homes in a way that has never been tried elsewhere. It’s also a test of how quickly the government and private companies can work together to prop up housing when there are few options — and whether other places will do the same.
At the Ka Laʻi Ola development, 450 structures will house roughly 1,500 people. The earliest waves of residents moved into their new homes one year after the fires — much faster than they likely could have in the rest of town as the recovery grinds on. More traditional construction is often hard to ramp up in remote or devastated areas. But here, the faster pace is possible because the development revolves around factory-built housing and a full-steam-ahead approach by local and state officials…
(A similar public-private collaboration is underway in rebuilding Altadena.)
Financing local emergency management. All this raises the question, given the FEMA cuts, where can the money for rebuilding infrastructure be found? Susan Crawford (not the newly-elected judge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but Susan Crawford the Harvard law professor emeritus), writing on Substack, suggests looking to individual states. She offers this (the post is worth a careful read in its entirety):
What’s a local government looking for abundant, inexpensive capital supposed to do? Well, federal government assistance aimed at climate adaptation may be a thing of the past, but the municipal bond market (which includes state bonds, despite the name) remains highly attractive to investors—thanks to an apparent Congressional inclination to keep the exemption of bond interest from federal taxation in place. Record-breaking numbers of muni bonds are being issued these days. And Gaughan wants everyone to consider what state-level public finance agencies can do for local governments when it comes to adapting to the ferocious physical effects of climate change.
“Bond banks have the back of local governments as they face ongoing climate challenges,” Gaughan says. “At the end of the day, we want our cities, towns, and villages to be successful,” he adds. “So that’s why we’re so vested in trying to figure this thing out.” He’s implying that relying on individual towns to figure out adaptation, each on their own, won’t work.
How could state bond banks—there are only about 14 of them—step in to assist municipalities? To start, they can act like a powerful financial uncle, by pooling borrowing needs, taking advantage of the state’s stronger credit guarantee, and attracting a diverse portfolio of projects, then passing along to municipalities the money they’re able to borrow at lower interest rates than many cities, particularly smaller ones, could access on their own.
Three ideas. Addressing only small, diverse slivers of emergency response and recovery. But accomplished by small numbers of people, leaving many others free to copy these approaches or to formulate and try out other ideas. Much of the opportunity is likely to be local. Though resource-constrained, local governments see hazards risks as existential. America comprises over 3000 counties. The Guadalupe-Kent County experience is (or should be) causing thousands of county officials to lose sleep at night. Absent FEMA, they need help revisiting their emergency management plans, starting with traditional what-to-do-with-warnings strategies, but extending further, into minimizing the numbers of their populations living, working, and sleeping in floodplains, on earthquake fault zones, etc., in unsafe construction. They need help instilling hazard-awareness in their populations, beginning with K-12 public education on hazards. They’ll want to hire professional expertise, but they will also be interested in new tools that might make their task less expensive and more robust. In particular they’ll be on the lookout for ideas on how to harness artificial intelligence to augment and backstop every phase of the emergency management task.
The bad news is that none of the options will be easy, and success is by no means guaranteed.
Tennyson offers a valuable perspective. The poet reminds us that a meaningful life is not a matter of effortlessly scooping gold nuggets or rough diamonds from some creek. Life, especially a life worth living, demands sweaty, sustained effort, too often accomplished amid anxiety and sadness, and – punctuated by the very disasters that in this instance we’re trying to prevent.
The good news is that the possibilities are unlimited.