Constant, Compounding Disasters Are Exhausting Emergency Response

Fires, droughts, floods, power outages. The interval between disasters is shortening, or in some cases, disappearing all together.

It’s not just one fire. It’s several — at the same time. Or, it’s a fire and power shutoffs happening during a drought in a region that still hasn’t recovered from the last dry cycle.

The acceleration of disaster is repeating worldwide, in part because vulnerable people and developments are encroaching on hazardous terrain. Landslides in the unstable Himalaya mountains in recent years have demolished newly built hydropower stations and killed hundreds, including more than 200 dead or missing in February from the Chamoli disaster. But the acceleration is also occurring because a supercharged climate is churning up more powerful hurricanes, more punishing droughts, more oppressive heat waves — altogether more environmental and water-related risk.

Dealing With The Soup of Chemicals That Can Get Into Your Drinking Water 
 
All the things that go down the drain and end up at the waste water treatment plant are not removed there. Some of the industrial byproducts that end up in sewers, the agricultural chemicals that runoff farmland, and pharmaceuticals that pass through our bodies all can end up in our streams and lakes. It’s a soup of chemicals. They’re difficult to keep out of drinking water.

Dealing with chemicals seems more complicated for regulators. Only recently PFAS was discovered in drinking water, but it had been there for decades. More than likely there are other chemicals not yet detected.

Chemicals in water can mix. That’s where dealing with pollutants really falls short.

In Pandemic, New Thinking on Responding to Weather Disasters

Weather-related disasters occur annually, displacing an average of 20 million people every year globally. The difference in 2020 was the new coronavirus. The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 — which paralyzed entire nations at the outset of cyclone and monsoon season in the Northern Hemisphere and along the equator — presented an unsettling and daunting obstacle to moving people to safety, ensuring their health, and helping them recover.

Even in calm times, securing a coastal city before a tropical storm or fleeing from a wildfire can be chaotic and stressful. In a pandemic, the familiar playbook for responding to these emergencies is being rewritten. The humanitarian community’s standard procedures for evacuation, sheltering, and tendering care are being swiftly recalibrated to a period of physical distancing and limited mobility.

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