Twelve years ago this week, forecasters sounded an alarm about a storm of unprecedented scope and power. As experts predicted, early on the morning of October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy, having ravaged the Caribbean, made landfall just northeast of Atlantic City and began cutting a path of devastation to New York City. The so-called Frankenstorm brought 48 hours of wind, rain and storm surge, killing dozens and destroying hundreds of homes and crippling the city’s transit system and power grid.
Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, is an expert on the study of response to catastrophes like Sandy. In talking about recovery efforts after Sandy, he said there were three main challenges: “One is logistics, getting stuff to people. One is finding people who need help. And the third is getting people back in their homes,” said Schlegelmilch.
Schlegelmilch said some aspects of disaster preparedness and recovery have improved since Sandy, with better forecasts and an investment in teams that canvas neighborhoods, looking to help vulnerable people. After Sandy, “We had all these people stuck in high rises, socially isolated, in very horrible conditions,” he said. “Now we have a process [in place], so that would probably go a bit better, assuming we follow those processes.”
When Hurricane Milton approached landfall earlier this month, meteorologists once again sounded an alarm about an unusually powerful storm. The storm intensified so rapidly—strengthening from a Category 1 to a Category 5 within 10 hours—it shattered records.
Not two weeks earlier, Hurricane Helene had caused widespread destruction and deaths across the southeastern U.S. These hurricanes left catastrophic damage and pain in their wake, including dozens of fatalities, billions of dollars in damages, incalculable emotional trauma and several new questions about the escalating consequences of climate change and disaster recovery, especially around post-storm communications.
Making matters worse, in the days and weeks after Milton and Helene, there were reports of widespread misinformation. Among them was a claim that the government used weather technology to create these hurricanes, deliberately targeting certain sectors of voters; that federal officials did not respond to Helene and intentionally withheld aid to victims; and that the federal government had plans to seize hard-hit communities and prevent residents from rebuilding on their own property.
Below, Schlegelmilch discusses the disaster response following Milton and Helene; how misinformation can hamper rescue efforts; and why strong community ties are so important after large-scale disasters.
What are your thoughts on the consequences associated with such misinformation?
At the very least, it takes attention away from the core response by creating another operation to counter the misinformation. At worst, it harms people in terms of their ability to access resources by creating false perceptions that prevent them from getting help. This can have direct and indirect financial as well as health and mental health consequences as people are trying to rebuild their homes and their communities.
Was the amount of misinformation associated with this storm unique to this election cycle? Or do we often see this kind of problem following disasters?
We see this problem all the time at a smaller scale. But just speaking anecdotally, this feels bigger than in the past. We are seeing more direct efforts from groups like FEMA to rapidly refute misinformation. There is some reporting about misinformation coming from accounts associated with foreign governments. This is all within an information ecosystem that seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and otherwise not trusting official sources as in the past.
Considering the importance of social cohesion in disaster recovery and the campaign noise around Hurricane Milton, what’s your take on the recovery efforts in Florida so far?
It is hard to tell this early on, but we know that [communities] that have high levels of cohesion prior to the storms are more likely to have a stronger recovery. Neighbors helping neighbors is always one of the most important factors in response and recovery from disasters. Helping to sustain this will be important. Having places of congregation, socializing and support, keeping communities together, are also important components over recovery’s long haul.
What do these two hurricanes elucidate about the consequences of compound extreme events?
The impacts of extreme events are continuing to increase and overlap, threatening to break the very systems we use to manage disasters. Some of this can be attributed to climate change, but societal development is also a large factor in our vulnerability.
What can officials do to counter this growing risk?
The next several decades are going to be very expensive. We need to continue to fund the increasing costs of response and recovery, while also stepping up funding for climate adaptation, as well as pushing for climate mitigation. It will take decades for emissions reduction and climate adaptation efforts to impact hazard severity and vulnerability, but the longer we wait, the more expensive this period will get.
In the wake of Helene and Milton, given that disaster science is a young science, what would you most like to see happen in terms of research?
We need more details on what works and why. Broad statements like ‘preparedness is cheaper than response’ are agreed upon by virtually everyone. But we are asking people to invest a lot of money from a lot of different sectors in mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. They have specific questions about their money and why they should invest in disaster resilience versus something else. We need better and more specific answers for this value proposition to prompt action from a plurality of societal sectors.
Considering the pain associated with these most recent hurricanes, do you believe policy makers have the will and support to invest in preparedness planning and recovery?
The incentive structure for how policy is developed is not aligned at all with preparedness. There’s no electoral incentive for preparedness.
What do you mean by that?
Voters reward response spending by re-electing officials, and they vote them out if a response is perceived to be bad. Voters don’t respond to preparedness funding at the ballot box, even though it saves money, lives and livelihoods. Perhaps this will change as people get fed up with these impacts. But until voters demand it, we shouldn’t expect elected officials to behave differently.
