PAUL:
Welcome to Brainwaves, a podcast about big ideas produced at the university of Colorado Boulder.
Today: natural disasters like tornadoes, floods and fires.
It seems like they’re happening more often. Are they?
And what are we doing about it?
Every year, more than 90,000 people die in natural disasters; 160 million people are affected.
That’s according to the World Health Organization.
And experts think those numbers are probably going to rise.
Brainwaves’ Andrew Sorensen talked to Lori Peek, the director of the Natural Hazards Center, to find out why, and what we can do about it.
ANDREW:
We’ve seen a lot of floods going on in the Midwest this year. There were the wildfires in California last year. A few years ago, massive strings of tornadoes across the Midwest. It seems like we're seeing more natural disasters affecting more people. What's going on there?”
LORI:
You are absolutely correct that by almost any measure we are seeing an increasing frequency and intensity of these natural hazards events and they are affecting larger numbers of the population and climate change is one of the major drivers of these events that were seeing but it's more than that it's also rising social and economic inequality. It’s where people are situated on the landscape that more people are living in more hazardous regions. It's unwise land use planning practices. It’s degradation of the built environment. It's all of those things working together that are ultimately generating these larger scale disaster events that we are witnessing across the nation and around the world.
ANDREW:
And you touched on it a little bit, but certain people in society are more vulnerable to these. Your research has focused on kids, the elderly, people living in high-poverty situations. Can you tell us a little bit about why those people are kind of in the line of fire, so to speak?
LORI:
Social scientists who study hazards and disasters for a very long time, they are focused on vulnerable populations or at-risk populations. And these are groups of people in our society who, during nondisaster times, tend to be the most marginalized. It's the poor. It's children, the elderly, racial and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities. So, people who oftentimes have fewer resources, who have less power, less voice in society, we know that they oftentimes have the hardest time preparing for disasters. And then when disasters do happen, they oftentimes are disproportionately affected, and then they have the hardest time recovering and their recovery processes oftentimes are really protracted.
ANDREW:
On the point of it, it takes a long time for these people to recover. You wrote in your book, Children of Katrina, you followed these kids for seven years afterwards. What kind of effects were you seeing in kids who were around Hurricane Katrina seven years after the fact?
LORI:
Yes, and thank you for asking that because following the children for such a long period of time taught us a lot of lessons about recovery. And I think one of the main lessons is that recovery is not a linear process. I think we think of disasters as these sort of shock events that hit and then we have this postdisaster decline and then the assumption is sort of that we’re going to be on this upward trajectory. But the simple fact of the matter is that that's not the case. That we found it that children after Katrina were, in many ways, their recovery looked a lot more like a roller coaster for some of the kids. Where they were up and down and up and down.
ANDREW:
What do those downs look like? What’s going on there?”
LORI:
Yeah, yeah, so in the post-Katrina recovery process with the children some of the things that we observed were related to their schooling and how hard it was to get children back into a steady school state. And that had to do with the displacements that they and their families experience. One of the boys in our study was displaced 12 times in the seven years that we were following him after the storm. We also saw how the severing of children's pier and family and social support networks, how'd that affected them after the storm. We also saw differences between girls and boys in terms of their recovery patterns—African-American and white children. And so, I think would you ask really good question like this—like, what was children's recovery like—one of the things that we were trying to unpack is, is how does recovery experiences very and why?
ANDREW:
What can we do to try to shorten that period of time that people are suffering from those impacts?
LORI:
Yes, that is a great question and I think—I'm really proud as the director of the Natural Hazard Center here at the university that that's something we've really been trying to focus our attention on is not just characterizing the problem but also to think about the solution. What can we do that actually might reduce the harm and suffering caused by disasters and speed the recovery time? And so some of the things that we saw after Hurricane Katrina was even among the most vulnerable children—children who were deeply marginalized before the storm were living in low-income families and communities and neighborhoods in New Orleans and elsewhere—that if they were able to have an advocate, someone in their sphere of influence who was able to get resources to that child and that family, to help the child and family to get back into routine and stability more quickly, that then we started to see that recovery cascade start to take place. But one of the issues was that it's sort of those advocates in children's lives. It was almost luck if they came into contact with someone who had access to resources who could help prompt that recovery process. And so one of the things that we’ve been thinking a lot more about is how can we make that more systematic? How can we embed that in our policies where equality becomes a part of postdisaster recovery? Where we start trying to think about not just putting communities back together again, not just putting families back together again, but how might we work deeply within communities to build a better and a brighter future?
ANDREW:
What can we do? What can families do to make sure that we are either ready to handle a natural disaster or maybe a little bit safer when one does come along?
LORI:
Yes, there are so many actionable steps that individuals, as well as families and communities, can take to get ready for disaster, and there's ample information available on the web. But I think one of the pieces of advice that I most like to give—I know there are lists out there of all the emergency supplies that you need to get, and I hope all of the listeners will go and look up what it is that they need—but that No. 1 piece of advice that I like to give is know your neighbor. Know your neighbor, because you might become the person who is helping to save your neighbor, or it may be your neighbor who comes and saves you in the event of a disaster. Despite long-standing myths about disaster, about looting and panic and so forth, actually one of the things that seven decades of disaster research has taught us is that your fellow survivors are the ones who are most likely to save you in an event of a disaster. So I think knowing your neighbor, knowing what their needs are and knowing how you might be able to help and how letting them know how they might be able to help you after a disaster, I think it's the No. 1 thing I'd love to share with your listeners today.
ANDREW:
And then one kind of final throw away question, perhaps sort of a fun one: What's in your Doomsday Kit?
LORI:
Ooh! So, I live in Boulder, Colorado. My husband and I live up Lefthand Canyon in the wildland-urban interface. And so one of the things is that we try not to think about a doomsday. We try to think about what could we do every day to reduce that very real wildfire risk that we do face here in the Mountain West. And so I guess if I had to say what was in the Doomsday Kit, I would say my husband's chainsaw, because he has cleared a lot of debris and down branches and dead trees from around our house. So in the event of a wildfire, not only will we hopefully be able to be safe but also we do that for our neighbors because we feel like we have a collective responsibility to clear that underbrush and to clear the things away from our house because that just might help our neighborhood to survive in the event of a disaster and also might reduce the risk they any good firefighters might face if they were coming in trying to save us and save our property.
ANDREW:
OK, Lori Peek with the Natural Hazard’s Center. Thank you so much.
LORI:
Thank you so much.
PAUL:
One type of disaster we’re seeing more of: tornadoes.
The National Weather Service says tornadoes have killed nearly 40 people so far this year in the United States.
And the insurance information institute says tornadoes caused more than $81 billion in property damage in 2018, a number that has been rising on average at least since the 1980s.
So how do we cut down on the destruction?
One idea is to warn people earlier.
Brainwaves’ Cole Hemstreet has more.
NATURAL SOUND:
“3, 2, 1.” (drone launching)
COLE:
That sound, the buzz of an unmanned aerial system, or drone, popped up across tornado alley this spring and summer.
One of the people at the controls, Bryan Argrow.
ARGROW:
There’s the longstanding question of what are the conditions that come together that end up producing a tornado.
COLE:
Agrow is an aerospace engineering sciences professor at CU Boulder.
He and another CU professor, Eric Frew, are part of the “TORUS project.” That stands for “targeted observation by radars and u-a-s of supercells.”
It’s a collaboration of engineers and weather scientists from Colorado, Nebraska, and Texas, (also Oklahoma) all trying to get never-before-seen data about the birth of tornadoes.
ARGROW:
The ultimate goal, the societal benefit from what we’re doing is to increase tornado warning time.
COLE
Right now, eric Frew says people don’t get much time at all.
Frew:
So currently, tornado warnings are issued when specific things are seen in the radar. When the storm is actually about to produce a tornado. The general public gets about 15 minutes of lead time.
COLE:
The TORUS team wants to give people *way more* time.
ARGROW:
…To on the order of an hour.
COLE:
Remember that movie “Twister,” where they sent the robots into a tornado?
This is kind of like that, but they’re more on the leading edge of the storm, away from the actual twister, and the drone they’re using looks like a small airplane -- the kind you might see the military use.
FREW:
Without getting into a lot of the meteorology, supercell thunderstorms, which are the storms that produce more tornadoes, have some structure. And the meteorologists talk about things like the left flank and the right flank of the storms. In the past, we’ve flown in the right flank. It’s the relatively calmer part of the storm, if there is such a thing. Whereas this time, we’re flying in the left flank, which is more into the heart of the storms. And so that’s a much more challenging environment than what we’ve done in the past.
COLE:
Back in the ‘90s, scientists tried flying manned planes into those areas. It didn’t go well.
FREW:
They hit some very turbulent air and it was very dangerous. And the community said, ‘that is not something that’s safe. We don’t want to do that in the future.’
COLE:
They tried computer simulations.
ARGROW:
Now the question then becomes: how do you verify or validate that that’s actually what happens?
FREW:
There are certain variables that you cannot measure without touching the storm. You know, radar and remote sensing gives a lot of information, but you don’t know the temperature, the humidity in the air unless you’re there.
COLE:
So out to the great plains they went, this time launching drones, “on call” every day from May to June.
FREW:
Typical day will begin around 10 a.m. We’ll have a weather briefing with the entire TORUS team.
COLE:
They’ll talk about where the storms might be, for that day and the next.
FREW:
Once the briefing is over, we typically have anywhere from two to six hours of driving to get in position.
COLE:
And it’s potentially dangerous work.
FREW:
The thing we worry about the most are other drivers. So, in these storms, you get a lot of tornado chasers, and so they call them chaser convergence. And that’s the number one we look out for.
COLE:
They’re also keeping an eye out for lightning, hail, and of course, tornadoes.
Though they’re also looking for supercells that don’t end in a tornadoes to compare to the ones that do.
They got a couple of shots at what they were looking for this summer, but they’ll have to go back next year, too.
FREW:
Good science requires good amounts of data. We scheduled two years, because that’s what we think it takes to have a really strong dataset.
COLE:
Ideally, the TORUS team says, that’ll give them what they need to give people a little more time.
ARGROW:
And be much more accurate in determining when to issue warnings and get people to safety when these issues start to form.
COLE:
For Brainwaves, I’m Cole Hemstreet.
PAUL:
What would you do during an emergency?
How would you react?
If you’re a man, odds are, not great, according to some new research.
Brainwaves’ Lisa Marshall has the story.
LISA:
Even today, the sound of a helicopter still makes my shoulders tighten. … It reminds me of the rainy September morning six years ago when I kissed my husband goodbye, gathered my two daughters and terrified black lab, and climbed aboard a Chinook helicopter.
We were evacuating our flood-ravaged neighborhood.
In the aftermath of a 1,000-year rain that devastated the state of Colorado, we’d gone four days without power, water, phones or internet. The highway connecting us to civilization had collapsed, rendering our mountain burg inaccessible.
The fire chief gathered the neighbors and told us: Winterize your houses. Double-bag your trash to keep the bears away. And get out.
I packed up and left. My husband, and several other mostly men, insisted on staying.
In the year to come, as we grappled with the postflood fallout, my experience and his would be very different.
According to new research from CU Boulder and Texas A&M, our story is not uncommon.
MICHELLE MEYER:
The studies began in the late ’90s to really look at how gender—how women and men respond differently to disasters. There were a few studies before that. But still even today we often think that men and women are going to respond exactly the same to these external stimuli, when that’s not really the case.
LISA:
That’s Michelle Meyer, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. Meyer recently teamed up with CU Boulder sociology student Melissa Villarreal to take a closer look at just how women and men respond differently to disasters. They interviewed 43 women in two Texas towns—one had been hit by a deadly tornado; another by an explosion that destroyed hundreds of homes. From this, and previous studies, they found some patterns.
MEYER:
A lot of studies, in terms of evacuation, say, for a flood or a hurricane, which have a longer time to prepare, do show that women are ready to evacuate first. Are ready to prepare the house first and get out. And in many cases now we know that during a hurricane evacuation, most families that have two vehicles will send two cars. Women and children early and men will either stay behind completely or evacuate the very last minute before the impact happens.
LISA:
Even in the case of a tornado, where there is far less time to prepare, disagreements between men and women are common.
MEYER:
Many of the women we interviewed talked about these dynamics between themselves and their partners, their husband or their boyfriends or other man. Or even a father or grandfather that was with them in their household. And the disagreements about when to take protective action. Where to go and how to do it. So some women often wanted to get into the closet for the tornado much earlier. While the men said that they didn’t need to. They were outside and the women would wait for the man to come in. (654)
LISA:
The gender differences didn’t end there. In the aftermath, this study and others have shown, emergency management agencies still often ask to communicate with the man of the house.
MEYER:
Yes, it was still even after Katrina where they we're dealing with aid issues in terms of thinking that the head of the household with a man. So this wasn't that long ago that we were still having aid processes, help processes, support processes that we're looking for a man to be the head of the household and to provide all the information to the rest of the household. Provide all the money that was received the rest of the household and make decisions. And saw this in our case, too. Some women having examples where they weren’t hearing from the recovery groups. Because the recovery groups kept calling the cell phones of the husband even though they both went and talked to the recovery group. (409)
LISA:
And when it came time to volunteer, some women reported feeling isolated or left out. As the men were out rebuilding, the women were at home taking care of children whose schools had been destroyed.
MEYER:
The women really talked about how the community came together and supported each other in both disasters, and they really enjoy that part of the community involvement—postdisaster. But yet at the same time, sometimes women’s leadership was a little bit stymied postdisaster. We had a few women that we interviewed that wanted to be involved in community recovery leadership but they were turned away or kind of moved along … and these women did feel that it had to do with either gender or race. That they weren’t allowed to be part of the leadership team for some of the recovery processes.
LISA:
How could this information be used to improve disaster response? The authors believe more attention should be paid to empowering women to be part of the recovery and to assuring they have the information they need in the middle of a disaster.
MEYER:
We haven't really thought about this in the U.S. about how to cater our warning communications based on gender, and what does it really mean to know that in many cases men are staying behind or wanting to stay out longer, and how gender roles play into that. I don't have an easy solution for that, but I think that it is something we need to consider that the gender gets in the way of how warning communications and protected action is going to happen.
PAUL:
If you haven’t already, please like and subscribe to Brainwaves wherever you get your podcasts, and share them with your friends.
This episode of Brainwaves was produced by Dirk Martin, Andrew Sorensen, Lisa Marshall, Cole Hemstreet and me.
I’m Paul Beique.
Andrew is our executive producer.
Sam Linnerooth is our digital producer.
Cole and Andres Belton created our introduction.
Thanks for listening, and see you next time on Brainwaves.