Rethinking Disaster Preparedness Language

It’s time to start rethinking the language we use when preparing for disasters. So much of what we tell each other about disasters is built on the assumption that help will come. As I’ve written about often on my blog, we have developed and promoted an illusion about disasters, that officials will be able to swoop into a disaster and help will come to everyone at a household level. (at least in the US). We play out this visual in disaster preparedness education while acknowledging a possible lag: in 3 days, help will come. We tell ourselves and each other: you’re the help until help arrives. Keep 72 hours of supplies until help arrives. We tell CERTs to wait for activation and instructions.

But that’s not our lived experience. Help at that level may come if you are in dire need. You may be evacuated from a life-or-death situation. You may be asked to leave your home and offered a shelter if your neighborhood is deemed unsafe. But there’s a lot of in-between from unaffected to life-threatening in a disaster, and the vast majority of people involved will have a lot of responding work to do.

We must acknowledge and fully bake into our disaster language – People impacted by the event are the primary and majority responders in disasters. They have the most work to do. In emergency and disaster management conversations, we focus on the work that government or response organizations do: search and rescue, alerts and warnings, sheltering, feeding. But the vast majority of the work in a disaster is done by individuals – evacuating, finding somewhere to stay if home is destroyed, calling the insurance company, clearing out a damaged house, finding food to eat a few times a day, every day when the power’s out and the grocery store is closed. Even with shelters, PODs, and ERVs running, those are a small proportion of what people are already doing for themselves, through their communities or private options. There’s a lot of work for response systems to do. It’s nothing compared to the amount of work individuals do in a disaster.

Even beyond the individual work, communities must respond as well. (When I talk communities, I mean below local government jurisdiction – neighborhoods, associations, faith communities). Given the nature of my professional roles, the events I worked were more often large, widespread events where national level help was needed. In so many of these, I worked with communities that had to form their own response, often because they’d become isolated from the larger area. Roads or bridges were washed out, or other infrastructure was down. These were often not the hardest-hit communities. Some had significant damage to power, water, and buildings, but not the kind of widespread devastation that would have put them at the top of anyone’s list. I worked with many of these communities in trying to get high water vehicles or helicopters or other capabilities to get supplies or even volunteer staff into the area to help them with their response. (Often really annoying the people that I was requesting it from by being a….let’s just call it persistent). In a smaller event, what happened to them would have been the disaster itself. Next to something bigger, the formal response systems gave them life sustaining support like food and water, but they had to sit tight and navigate the stabilization phase with each other. (Similar to how we all lived in the Covid pandemic.)

As a wider system of government and aid organizations, we asked these neighborhoods to maintain their own response, with occasional resupply. From what I’ve seen, our community preparedness doesn’t really address this, even as it is becoming a more frequent reality. In the last ten years in the U.S., we’ve seen numerous concurrent events that have arguably exceeded our national capacity to respond, especially in 2017 and 2020. Hurricanes like Matthew (2016), Ida (2021), and Helene (2024) have had impacts spanning hundreds of jurisdictions and countless individual households and communities. Even before any talk of pushing responsibility and cost down to the states, possibly at a peak of government emergency management funding, neighborhood-level communities had to mount their own response. It would be shortsighted to believe we could ever fund a government or aid organizations to the point where it eliminates the work required at the individual and household level in a disaster. That’s just the reality of disasters.

Sometimes the hazard overwhelming our systems is even more immediate. In the Camp Fire (2018), firefighters had to stop fighting the fire altogether and focus solely on getting themselves and anyone nearby to safety. In Lahaina (2023), the speed of the fire and blocked evacuation routes overwhelmed the response before it could fully organize. Even when responders are on scene, doing their job, an event can outgrow the plan built around them. That doesn’t fit the traditional help-will-come model either.

Those events are not outliers. In the US, that’s nearly one every year, without even counting the floods and winter storms where this happens several times a year.

In order to be effective, preparedness language needs to be honest and forthcoming about the roles and work people will be required to do in a disaster. When an event shifts into a large disaster, people cannot afford to wait for help.

This is what led me to develop a course series called Everyone Responds in a Disaster, with the first pilot course now available. It focuses on building individual capability to make the most informed decisions throughout the disaster cycle, building the reference points, the brain’s muscle memory, for what to do. It starts with the personal: how our bodies and minds respond to stress and danger. Then it moves into how we react in groups, and how that plays out in decisions at each phase of the disaster cycle. It covers group dynamics in disasters and how to avoid panic behavior. I also go into the nuance of how people react when the response feels like it’s failing, when the government or the wider system seems to not be helping. I add the context to understand the limitations of preparedness and readiness, the costs and tradeoffs. I link it back to the research on how people panic when they feel that the people who are supposed to be helping them aren’t. These are topics that are a critical part of disaster research and sociology, but difficult for a government or response organization to say directly. As a third party, I’m hoping to spread the word without it being tied to any one agency’s efforts.

The current pilot is an introduction to these concepts, for the individual member of the general public. It’s oriented to the U.S., but draws examples from disasters around the world, the lessons are universal. It’s built on the Udemy marketplace platform, with AI disaster simulations and conversations to practice decision-making in a disaster. You can find the current discount code on the River Mac page.

Future posts on this blog will go further into the disasters-are-different theme — the realities of disaster, how our current frameworks and systems are ill-equipped and not designed to handle them, and what we can do to fix it.