Aside from the obvious moral failings this tweet betrays, it's also a teachable moment. He defines disaster as an event in a specific moment. If you died later due to the long term effects of the hurricane, then your death is not part of the hurricane, in this way of thinking.
2. I'm really glad he gave an honest account of his thinking here. It will launch a discussion on the ways we count disaster deaths and economic impacts.
3. Defining a disaster as an "event" has an old history in the United States--when the first federal funds were spent on disaster research in the 1950s it was done to model the social impacts of a nuclear attack.
4. Civil Defense officials had no nuclear attacks to work from (except of course for Hiroshima and Nagasaki) so they paid for studies of close proxies, like earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes--disasters that affected multiple systems with limited warning.
5. Social science disaster research was born from this funding, & it developed over the decades into a multi-disciplinary research endeavor that has told us a LOT about human behavior in disaster. (ps: it's not at all what the Civil Defense officials expected, people don't panic)
6. By the 1990s there was an emerging consensus that the historical preconditions and long term after-effects of disasters were just as (if not more) important than the "event" itself--it's an interconnected chain of events that stretch backwards and forwards in time.
7. For first responders and emergency managers--the people pulling you out of the tree & making sure the evacuation route is open--the event is the job, managing the distress of the moment/day/week. But these event managers know (better than most) that event thinking has limits.
8. You will never understand why some people are vulnerable and others are not if you focus only on the disaster as en event. You will never understand why some communities recover quickly while others languish. You will never understand PTSD. Event thinking is amnesiac, faulty.
9. But if your interest is downplaying the impact of disaster, well then you had better be totally committed to event thinking. Because then you can avoid learning anything substantial, & you can get back to business-building in dangerous places-avoiding environmental protection.
10. So when Trump says the death toll of Maria shouldn't include people who died "later," and when he says that counting them is political, he's right--but he should say that NOT counting them is also political--it's a choice that intentionally under-counts disaster impacts.
11.Trump disaster logic tells us that firefighters who are now sick from September 11 are not part of that story. Soldiers suffering PTSD are not to be counted among the casualties of war. Nothing matters unless it happened in the event-if you didn't die then, you don't count.
12. This isn't just Trump-his craven political framing is just an illustration-but it's a national conversation we must have. Is a disaster a process or is it an event? Does it have a clear beginning an end? Do we owe care to future generations, or to past victims? Trump says no.
13. His failure of imagination is ours if we continue to underfund FEMA, act like infrastructure degradation has nothing to do with disaster, act like everyone can cope with disaster the same regardless of age or income.
14. We can live with event thinking if we want-it's more profitable anyway and it relieves us of the moral burdens of care. It relieves us of the need to protect the commons. It relieves us of inter-generational burdens.
15.Or we can work together to build a culture of long term preparedness--based in scientific reality--we can define disaster as a social process that carries on for a long time both before & after the water slams the shoreline.We can embrace the reality that disaster is slow. END
