When Storm Prep Is Left Up to Citizens

Last month, at the start of hurricane season, I invited my inner circle to a hurricane-preparation dinner. Over a supreme pizza and a bottle of wine, my girlfriend, our roommate, my best friend, and I discussed how we would evacuate together from New Orleans with our three dogs and three chickens. We talked about when we’d decide to leave (as soon as the storm hit Category 2) and where we’d go (it would depend on the direction of the storm, but we have friends in Texas and Georgia with whom we could stay).

For decades, communities have relied on emergency-management agencies to tell them what to do during a disaster. But as our world warms, storms are intensifying more rapidly, making it much harder for cities to plan their responses. In an ideal world,emergency managers would have 72 hours to orchestrate a mandatory evacuation, but fast-moving storms give cities much less time to order people away. In the coming months and years, more people will need to decide either to evacuate—a process that is disruptive at best, and dangerous for vulnerable people at worst—or be prepared to stay home, in some cases without power for more than a week, and possibly without assistance from city officials.

Fast-moving storms put emergency managers in a double bind: If they leave residents with too short a window to flee, they raise the risk of them getting trapped in their cars as the storm bears down. But calling for an unnecessary evacuation, where a storm ends up less intense than first feared, has its own dangers. During Hurricane Rita in 2005, for example, evacuees in Houston were short on fuel, water, and food, stuck in a traffic gridlock in high heat; the evacuation wound up killing more people than the storm itself. With less time to prepare for a storm’s arrival, coastal managers could turn to more targeted evacuations, focusing on the people directly in the path of storm surge.

For residents who choose to stay, assistance from their city is not a given. In the days following Hurricane Ida, New Orleans city officials set up eight emergency resource centers where those in need could charge their devices, pick up food, and cool down. The city has since proposed a list of 15 potential Emergency Resource Centers, but the activation of these centers in an emergency isn’t guaranteed. Buildings could be damaged in the storm, and site availability would have to be determined accordingly. Ultimately, the messaging from the city has been that for the first 72 hours after a storm hits, those who stay are on their own.

When I told Kim Johnston, a Queensland University of Technology professor, who has thought a lot about how communities collaborate during natural disasters in Australia, about my hurricane-preparation dinner, she quickly replied with useful advice. Johnston’s research has shown that community-led disaster preparation saves lives and speeds up recovery. She suggested moving the group chat to WhatsApp, as cell service could be limited during a disaster. Figuring out how to evacuate pets is also important, she noted. For us, that meant the dogs would need to be in a different car than the chickens.I was grateful for Johnston’s guidance, but also worried: How will those who have fewer resources or no support system manage?

The problem extends far beyond New Orleans. Record-breaking ocean temperatures are expected to fuel more major hurricanes than usual this year, and research published in May found that the global mean rate of tropical-cyclone intensification has increased near coastal regions during the period from 1979 to 2020. One force that weakens hurricanes is vertical wind shear, how wind changes speed and direction with altitude. Climate change is reducing vertical wind shear in coastal areas, the climate and data scientist Karthik Balaguru, one of the authors of the study, told me. And that decrease means storms are more likely to intensify quickly just before they make landfall. We saw it happen earlier this month with Hurricane Beryl—a storm that forecasters said was unlike any they’d seen before, developing early in the season and undergoing two rapid intensifications before making landfall.

New Orleans is, in some ways, better equipped for this challenge than other cities. Richard Chatman, the deputy director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, first came to New Orleans in 2005 to help with emergency response after Hurricane Katrina. “This is a special place,” he said of New Orleans. “All the way down to the porch-neighbor mentality. People know each other.” Community groups are stepping up to fill disaster-preparedness gaps, hosting supply distributions and adding commercial-scale solar panels and batteries to local churches. Mary Delahoussaye, who works at the Split Second Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the wellness of people with disabilities, told me she’s reminding her clients not to treat city-assisted evacuation as their plan A and advising them on other options to get ready for the next storm.

Planning smartly for one’s individual disaster response isn’t exactly a replicable strategy across cities and countries. But New Orleans’s lessons can apply to others who must rely on themselves to prepare: Neighbors should talk with one another openly and often about their just-in-case plans. People with disabilities should alert the national service Smart 911 about their particular needs. Have a plan for evacuating and a plan for staying. This list is not comprehensive, of course; it’s best to look out for specific guidance from local officials.

A week after our hurricane dinner, my roommate and I ordered plywood sheets to protect the windows in our house in Gentilly from high-speed winds. I was home by myself when the wood was delivered and started pulling the sheets into my backyard one by one. My neighbor from across the street came over to help. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone,” he said.

No one should have to do this alone, I thought.