Thread by @m_older

There is no such thing as a natural disaster. Natural hazards like hurricanes, earthquakes, extreme temperatures become human disasters when they interact with unsafe housing, poor drainage, lack of savings, misinformation, inadequate health care, an absence of solidarity.

https://twitter.com/DanRather/status/1362418043813580801

Of course we have also learned how to produce unnatural hazards, causing earthquakes with fracking and worsening extreme weather by burning down the forests, polluting the atmosphere and the ocean. But even before we get into that, society determines who is hurt in disasters.

And it gets so much worse when we factor in the human-made hazards. Communities of color face disproportionate pollution and dangerous contaminants ALL THE TIME: in a disaster these may overflow, explode, leach into groundwater. theguardian.com/environment/20…

Poor and marginalized communities are often excluded into living in floodplains. They're cheated into using unsafe building materials. Their neighborhoods lack public transportation, making it difficult to evacuate without a car.

Nothing about disasters is natural, except sometimes and partially the hazard that triggers them. The disaster itself comes from the way we've structured our lives, prioritizing wealth for the few over safety for many, punishing people for the needs we've forced on them.

When I read stuff like the hateful statement by the Texas mayor (now, sic semper comemierdas, resigned) I really wonder what he thinks his (ex-)job is FOR, if not helping people who need it in his community. What else is government- organization -for?

https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1362140780140314624?s=20

But if anything the govt has an extra responsibility in this disaster, since it spent decades making it. It made it by removing robustness and redundancy from utilities, by allowing the wealthy to siphon money from what should be a public good, by not preparing, by strangling

people's ability to prepare themselves as they are paid less & less (in relative terms) for jobs that take more and more effort, with less help for children, elderly, and others that need care, and all the extra stress of an unmanaged pandemic. What is YOUR govt for, comemierdas?

Almost all disasters are predicted. We know they're coming, we just don't know when. Your govts are deciding now how they will be managed. Tell them you care.
& governments, industries? Don't think you can hide behind claiming disasters are unprecedented or unimaginable. We know.

And when I say there is no such thing as a natural disaster, this is a long-accepted consensus both in academia and in international disaster risk reduction practitioner circles. see, for example, @NoNatDisasters

When these comemierdas suggest that there's no point in preparing because it's rare, this is an attempt to obscure that most disaster prep is better for those systems in non-disaster times too. Texas could have a better, more resilient grid ALWAYS, which

https://twitter.com/shoobe01/status/1362437800830898177?s=20

would be better for the environment! Safer! Long-term, probably cheaper! But these comemierdas don't want to invest in infrastructure, because a) they're making bank with status quo b) if they're running govt like a business, it's a short-term, break it up & sell it off business

They only need stuff to keep working during their short term in office, so they don't want to spend budget to make anything good for the long-term. THEY THINK WE WON'T SEE THIS FOR WHAT IT IS. Tell them. Tell them we're smarter than that, we think long-term, we want good things.

If this piqued your interest, I recently did a thread about Lee Clarke's Mission Improbable: Fantasy Documents about how industries and governments use crisis "plans" to make us think that the danger they put us in so they can profit is reasonable

https://twitter.com/m_older/status/1349695991851708416?s=20