It is, as always, important to point out that according to this the president made response decisions based on his belief a disaster myth — that the public panics in times of disaster — which disaster scholars have studied for over 50 years.
Whether it’s officials delaying calls for wildfire evacuations or not being truthful w/the public about the scope & severity of an emerging pandemic lives are put at risk — and lost — when public officials make decisions based on a false belief about human behaviors in disasters.
It is horrifying and, frankly, lazy.
We know how to respond to these events. We have a century of damn research on this. We have practitioners with decades of experience. Yet, none of that matters when the person in charge won’t listen.
Here's a tweet from March 3rd where I defined what the word 'panic' actually means.
Read Rebecca Solnit's book. Look Quarantelli up on google scholar. This information is accessible.
To be clear -- I do not at all think that is why the President delayed sharing information with the public or failed to take decisive action but...
Okay also just seeing that the timeline is mad at Bob Woodward for not sharing these interviews earlier and like... okay, sure but also this surely is not revelatory or going to change anyone's mind?
I guess I'm just not sure how many more examples you need that the president has lied about something before you understand that he is a habitual liar.
He lies about disasters, among other things, constantly. Like... truly... constantly.
Like... I've written entire articles about it. 🤷♀️
Idk man, I just don't know where we go from literally changing a hurricane map with a sharpie...
This is all to say that if I were the president of a country staring down a pandemic I would simply not make response decisions based on The Disaster Myths.
Whatever. I've been tweeting about this for four years so I'm pretty done with it.
With the flooding in NYC, many people are rightly concerned about how FEMA will be involved in the response given the (seemingly) impending shutdown.
I'm going to try and explain this as simply as possible based on my current understanding. #EMGTwitter
The Disaster Relief Fund is the pot of $ used to pay for response & recovery when a community receives a Presidential Declaration.
For months, FEMA & White House have been asking Congress to refill the Disaster Relief Fund because it was very low.
At the end of August FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell made the correct decision to implement “Immediate Needs Funding”. This meant FEMA stopped recovery payments across the country in an effort to conserve remaining funds for life-saving response efforts
People keep sending me this article so it's time for an uncomfortable thread about emergency managers. There is some really important context needed here. #EMGTwitter
I have found that in the midst of a response most people reveal they have a misperception about what and who emergency managers are...
The majority of emergency managers in the United States are only part-time. They usually double as the fire chief or are a retired firefighter
In the minority are our larger cities where you have emergency management agencies with dozens, and in a few cases, hundreds, of professional emergency managers/ related positions. Then there's everything in between.
I'd like to share the final list of movies for the Disaster Film class I'll be teaching in the fall! #EMGTwitter
Before I do... some of you are going to be in a huff about certain movies not being included but I need y'all to be chill. (Some of you were not chill last time.)
I assure you have given this a lot of thought and this is what's best for this particular course and my particular students. This is set in stone so there's no negotiation that needs to happen.
Okay, here we go.
Disaster Film as Popular Culture: 100 Years of The Titanic
The Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) is a ~$355 million annual grant program that gives a few million dollars to each state for preparedness-related needs.
This is not a perfect program but for now, it's what we have.
EMPG funding is used for a range of things including upgrading equipment, funding education programs, plan development, and most importantly paying emergency managers salaries.
Practitioners and academics have been very clear that this grant must be protected.
A fire in New England (or the northeast, generally) is one of the future disasters that keep me up at night. It's not just the conditions changing but that we don't have the capacity to respond.
We've done very little to prepare. The population has no clue how to respond, we don't have the people, or equipment to fight effectively. We don't have people with a depth of knowledge. We're not mitigating.
One of Mainer's favorite phrases - "you can't get there from here" would single-handedly leave us dead in the water in large swaths of Maine.