A wildfire on the Island of Maui. A tropical storm in North Carolina and a Category 1 hurricane in northern Georgia. Extreme heat in New England. Extreme cold, snow, and ice in the South.
Changing hazard risks are blindsiding many locations in the United States, as unfamiliar disasters expose previously unseen vulnerabilities in our infrastructure and preparedness. Many places in New England do not have air conditioning, and roads are designed to withstand cycles of cold rather than extreme heat. Officials in California had to learn how to provide public information and warnings to prepare residents for a rare summer rain event that surpassed annual rainfall totals. And residents of Ashville, North Carolina, learned a painful lesson that living on high ground doesn’t save you from post-storm isolation after extreme flooding in the valleys below.
In this increasingly unpredictable environment, we cannot expect local emergency managers with limited personnel and resources to prepare for each possible disaster scenario. A better alternative is for authorities to focus on planning for long-term disruptions of critical supply chains, services, and commodities, no matter the cause.
Helene’s death toll has now exceeded 230 people across seven states, making it the second most deadly hurricane on the US mainland in 50 years. Power and water outages have lasted for weeks in some locations, and fully repairing road, water, and electricity infrastructure losses will take years.
Categories of Plans for Unexpected Disasters
How can a community function without electricity, safe drinking water, or the transportation infrastructure needed for critical supply chains for weeks or even months? These are questions that those in earthquake prone areas—such as the New Madrid seismic zone in the central United States and the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest—have been asking for years. They are also questions that communities with decaying water infrastructure, such as Flint, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi, have had to answer to keep their residents supplied with clean drinking water for extended periods. It is time for many more areas in the country to ask these same questions and plan for extended outages of the services we rely on for everyday life.
For example, jurisdictions need a water plan that considers options for generating their own supplies if isolated from supply chains that would otherwise provide drinking water. These could include desalination, equipment for pumping and purifying water from natural sources, and collecting rainwater for non-drinking purposes such as firefighting. Since entire cities may have to rely on generators and the fuel to keep them running, they need an energy plan that might include temporarily closing non-essential facilities that consume large amount of electricity. And it is important to consider how the massive energy demands of data centers for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining, for example, can be sustained without crowding out supply for residents in times of crisis.
Emergency managers also need plans to help our just-in-time supply chains bring in food and medications when there are catastrophic impacts on our roads, bridges, and tunnels. This requires advance coordination between government and the private sector to plan how they will work together to restore the movement of life-sustaining commodities. Governments can plan for prioritized infrastructure repairs, transportation waivers, and security to ease the way for the private sector to deploy its massive capacity and expertise in satisfying the demand for commodities.
In places far from Hurricane Alley and the Pacific Ring of Fire, such preparations may feel like planning for Hollywood-style threats and hazards, like ice sheets descending from Canada in “The Day After Tomorrow” or meteorites pelting the earth in “Armageddon.” But planning in the 21st Century means acknowledging that an increasingly interconnected world with complex digital and physical dependencies is running up against increasingly disturbed natural systems that threaten to tear those connections apart. The residents of western North Carolina will attest that the impossible is becoming increasing probable.
