We’re Living One Disaster to the Next

Just for a minute, try to tick off all of the disasters you’ve read about over the past few weeks. There were the fires in Maui. The earthquake in Morocco. And now? Libya is trying to recover from stunning floods. There are these eerily silent drone shots showing mud-soaked rivers overrunning their banks. And here in the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report this week saying that 2023 set a record for the number of “billion-dollar” weather events. And the year isn’t even over.

It left me feeling like it was the summer of disasters. Tara Powell, who studies disaster, agreed. Her expertise is actually “collective trauma,” and she says this summer’s disasters are a kind of collective trauma.

“The things that have really stood out to me,” Powell said, “are the size and the scope of the disaster. So, for example, what happened in Maui—how much devastation with the wildfires—also with Morocco—how difficult it is right now for them to do recovery efforts—and then the numbers that are coming in with Libya: 10,000 people missing as of right now. And they have accounted for 2,000 that have died so far. And that’s just the beginning numbers. We know it’s going to get much, much larger.”

Powell’s a social worker. She was actually living in New Orleans getting her master’s degree when Hurricane Katrina struck. She tried to help the city recover. In some ways, she looks back on that devastating flood, nearly two decades ago, as a completely different time. Back then, everyone wanted to respond. There was righteous outrage that lasted years. “But now that we have so many happening and so much devastation, people are definitely tired,” Powell said. “With that fatigue, you can become detached a little bit from the impact of the disaster on those communities.”

On Wednesday’s episode of What Next, we spoke about fighting disaster fatigue—and cultivating disaster resilience. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: Tara Powell teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign now, but she has worked in all kinds of disasters. She’s provided emergency response after a tornado in central Florida, wildfires in California, floods in Iowa. And disaster fatigue is something that’s worrying her more and more these days, with the sheer number of disasters ramping up.  

Tara Powell: I look at disaster fatigue in two different ways. So, there are the people who are viewing it from the outside, seeing what’s on the media, having empathy and wanting to support, but not directly having experienced it. And then there’s the disaster fatigue from survivors.

Start by telling me about the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Because, of course, you’ve been a survivor yourself. Back in 2005 when Katrina struck New Orleans, you initially evacuated to Texas.

With Katrina, I lost my house and was displaced for a number of months. And then when I moved back, I didn’t have housing that I could live in, and I lived in my friend’s sunroom for a number of months. One thing that I saw with that was how much a community can come together. The people that I went through Katrina with are lifelong friends, because we went through such a significant, stressful event together, but we were able to support each other. Disasters are not fun, they’re not easy, but they can really, really help you recognize and build your community and recognize your own individual strength.

When Katrina hit, were you studying disasters at all?

I was. I was getting my master’s in public health and social work at Tulane University, and I was studying complex emergencies. I had just come back from the Peace Corps in West Africa, and I had originally planned on going back internationally, but I was like, “OK, wait, a complex emergency just hit here, and I’m living in it.” It gave me a very different perspective than I had originally thought. It helped me understand what it was really like to live through a disaster. When we’re going through a disaster ourselves, our brains are not fully clear. We’re on autopilot.

It’s funny because my understanding is that while Katrina was this profound experience for you, it was also one of the experiences that got you really thinking about disaster fatigue. Is that right?

Yeah, definitely. With Katrina, it was amazing. People came down for years. But I do remember getting questioned often, in around 2007, when I was still doing that work and the funding was starting to dry up for supports for people—people from outside who weren’t living in New Orleans, who hadn’t really seen it, they said, “Well, when does the hurricane end? When is this over? Everybody should be recovered right now.” But still, most of the children I was working with, a lot of the families were displaced. There were a lot of child-headed households there. They were living multiple families in one house because the housing just wasn’t restored. And so, the hurricane definitely wasn’t over. With so many disasters happening right now, we see as people go from disaster to disaster, but they don’t recognize that two, three years later, those communities are still recovering and are still really struggling trying to get their basic needs, trying to rebuild their homes and lives. That’s really where a lot of the fatigue sets in for survivors.

“Fatigue” may not be the first thing you think of with disaster survivors. But Powell says it’s all too real, and pretty different from the initial trauma people may have lived through. It doesn’t necessarily take years to set in, either. When she worked in disaster zones, Powell would often notice that the basics of getting their lives back on track was grinding for the people she met.

It’s very stressful. Maybe you can’t move into your house for a while. Maybe you’re having to deal with FEMA. Those are the longer-term, compound secondary stressors.

It sounds like being consistently annoyed.

Exactly. Yeah. One of the big annoyances is just driving. When a hurricane or an earthquake hits, roads are shut down and just getting from point A to point B. If you’re washing machine doesn’t work, you’re not able to wash clothes. Being on the phone with the insurance agency. Trying to get your children back to school, trying to support your children when they’re stressed as well. It’s all of these things that can lead to longer-term burnout and long-term exhaustion. That’s really where that disaster fatigue comes in versus those more significant post-trauma reactions.

I know that you responded to disasters in places like the Philippines where something like a typhoon happens regularly. I wonder a bit about how people there cope with the relentlessness and whether there’s lessons for everyone else.

Yeah, the Philippines was really interesting for me because when I went there, around 2013 with Typhoon Yolanda, and I was working with the communities, I said, “OK, this must be extremely stressful.” And they said, “Yeah, well, we have these all the time.” So, I was like, “Wow, OK, this is a little bit different than what I what I expected.” But they’re like, “Well, what we do is we come together. We know they’re going to happen. We know how to support each other.”

So interesting, so different from the United States approach of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

Yeah, exactly. That is something that we can learn from the global population. Community is really important, especially with these kind of collective traumas. We can’t just pull ourselves up by the bootstraps when we’ve lost everything. And recovery takes a while, so how do we support each other?

Tara Powell doesn’t love going into disaster zones these days as a first responder. After doing it for years, she got frustrated by how limited her capabilities were in the wake of an emergency. She also started to wonder how she could prevent some of the trauma she’d spent so long treating. So now, she’s doing a different kind of emergency response. More like emergency preparedness.

I have a project that’s in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, and we’re in schools. We’re working with children who are at the highest risk for being exposed and disproportionately affected because they’re in low-income communities, which are usually the most impacted communities because low-lying levels, people can’t evacuate And, we’re not just specifically talking about, “OK, a disaster is going to strike. What do you do?” But it’s about helping children identify the peers, the parents, all of those people, places, and things that can keep them safe so that they could go to those in the event of significant stress, a disaster. Also, different ways that they can cope with hard feelings, anger, sadness, grief.

So that they know what to do. 

Exactly. And not just those basic needs that you have, but really, what are the resources that I have? Both individual coping resources, family supports, community supports. And what can I do if a disaster strikes to support my own emotional needs?

I wonder how you think people who are observing more disasters at a distance, like not necessarily experiencing them, can harness that same energy.

I think that energy can be harnessed as long as they’re provided some knowledge about how can we support people and how can we support each other in disasters rather than just hearing what we hear in the media. We hear, “OK, this disaster’s happened, all these people have died or we’re searching for all of these people.” And you hear the size and the scope. People, they want to give. People are inherently pretty caring, and they want to support others, but they don’t know how. But then you hear about the next disaster, and it’s very surface level. You hear about disaster to disaster to disaster. But what we’re not hearing about much is the good stories of recovery. How can we support people during that long-term recovery? Because there’s so many events.

Well, the images are so stunning at the beginning of a disaster, and you can kind of get flooded with them.

If people are watching the media over and over again, you can also experience secondary traumatic stress, which mirrors post-traumatic stress symptoms. So being constantly on edge, having dreams about disasters that you didn’t even necessarily experience directly. Being hyper aware, being hyper alert. And so, there’s all these secondary traumatic stress symptoms that we can also get, even if we’ve never even experienced this disaster firsthand.

How do you think about the media and its role in all of this here.

I limit my media. There is so much that is going on, and images or played over and over and over and over again. It’s important for us to know when when disaster strikes and to have some kind of understanding of how we might be able to help. But there’s also that limit of when do I turn it off? Do I need to know everything that’s happening minute by minute? Because that actually can cause significant stress on a person. And so, having that balance is important. Knowing when to say, “I need to turn this off and I need to do my own self-care so it doesn’t stress me out so much that I’m going to have nightmares about what happened.” Because seeing that kind of destruction is stressful in and of itself, even if you’re not directly there.

Self-care sounds so indulgent when you’re looking at these huge disasters. It’s really hard.

Yeah. It seems like it could be indulgent, but really, we have to do that to keep ourselves going, so that we don’t burnout ourselves. It’s beyond taking a bubble bath or getting a massage. It’s how we talk to ourselves. It’s how we interact with the world. It’s doing breathing exercises. All of these things just to make sure that our own mental health remains OK. Because with all of the information overload and inundation that we get, it’s natural for the world to feel pretty stressed out.

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Do you have rules around media in your household?

I do. Yeah. When a hurricane is coming, for example, I will see that it’s coming, and I will monitor it, and I’ll check, like, once or twice a day. I won’t listen to the news. Actually, I just read what’s going on. Because the news can be a little bit more stressful for me. When, for example, the earthquake in Morocco hit. I read about that, but I won’t read about it more than once or twice a day. And those are my limits, because we know things will be constantly changing. But the minute-to-minute reports cause so much stress. If I’m called to respond to a disaster, I want to make sure I’m not overloaded before I go. But I do want to have the information that I need. So, it’s that balance of information versus feeling like you need to know everything that’s happening right away.

I feel a little bit like we’re in a period of adjustment. There’s more disasters now, and we’ve built a whole system of response based on disasters not being maybe as regular as they are now. And that may be what we’re seeing here: this new normal.

It’s true. And one thing I always question when we think about the new normal. I always wonder, Well, what actually is normal? Will this be normal for a long time, or will we have another new normal? Will the disasters keep happening in this way, or will they even expand more? And how do we adapt, and how do we adjust? Because as humans, we really are resilient. We’ve been living in the world for a long time, and we are able to adapt and adjust. We’re just in a period of transition of adapting to a changing world.