Less than two weeks ago, Hurricane Florence battered the coasts of North and South Carolina. Prior to making landfall, those who were able to evacuate did so while others (mainly those who were too poor to go) stayed behind. As residents in those states begin the long road to recovery, we have evidence that the hardest hit are those people living in low-income and rural communities.
This should not come as a surprise. Researchers at non-profit organizations and humanitarian agencies have documented that it is the poor, the elderly and people in rural communities who are made most vulnerable in natural disasters. This was the case during Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina, and Florence is shaping up to be no exception. And it’s not just about the inability to leave one’s home during a disaster. It’s also about the ways in which the poor often have chronic health needs, food and income insecurity that make it more difficult to recover from catastrophic storms.
Fast Company profiled the ways in which a community in the city of Lumberton, North Carolina, is at risk and vulnerable in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence due to both geography and poverty. The geography puts residents at risk for severe flooding. But the poverty means they will require more social service support in the future.
“If you’re poor, you’re much more likely to see significant adverse effects that require support from outside agencies for a response to a disaster,” says Andrew Schroeder, director of research and analysis [for Direct Relief, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian medical aid].
Shroeder’s organization mapped out risk by health, disability and age and notes that while deaths can occur from the immediate disaster, there is also a likelihood that more people could die from subsequent emergencies during the recovery process. This is also what happened in Puerto Rico—where the majority of the deaths occurred after the initial impact of Hurricane Maria.
Though Republicans want us to believe that climate change isn’t really a believable phenomenon, there is also a clear link between the severity of Hurricane Florence’s flooding and destruction to the environment. According to Scientific American, North and South Carolina had already been experiencing a wetter than normal summer with unusual amounts of flooding. And it will only get worse as temperatures get warmer and extreme weather becomes an increasingly routine phenomenon.
“Our challenge is trying to manage the everyday [weather] that suddenly seems completely out of character,” [Sarah Watson of the Carolinas Integrated Science & Assessments and the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium] said. “The afternoon thunderstorm that sits over a localized area and drops 6 inches of rain in two hours—you can’t adapt to that. You can’t build infrastructure to manage that. Even if you could, you couldn’t afford it.”
All of this leaves the poorest people without the resources they need to prepare for storms—not just for their own homes but for the communities-at-large. Rural communities are cash-strapped more often than not, leaving people without hurricane and flood insurance and local governments simply don’t have the money to prepare for flooding and to secure public spaces. Thus, it is people in the wealthier areas that make out better in storms while those who are poor experience the greatest economic shock and may require years or decades to fully recover.
Because humans have degraded the environment so badly, we can only anticipate that dangerous and extreme weather events will increase in the near future. And since we have no regard for the well-being of the people in this country who are poor, living in rural communities, and the elderly, it’s a likely conclusion that they will continue to be the most impacted. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can actually spend resources to make sure sure poor communities have resources and are properly prepared for disasters.
State governments give a disproportionate amount of disaster preparedness funds to the wealthiest cities, which often have residents that can afford to rebuild. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that instead they could direct those resources to the people who need it most. That’s not communism or socialism or whatever else incendiary labels the Republicans want to call it. It’s actually just basic human decency.