Reality Check: We're On Our Own

Thoughts on preparing our communities to lose federal funding for disaster preparedness, response and recovery.

My hometown in Northern Michigan experienced a catastrophic ice storm a few weeks ago.

When I first heard about this incoming storm I didn’t think much of it—that area has had many ice storms before, where we’d lose power for a few hours and within a day everything was back to normal. But as that weekend in late March bore on, I noticed that the dispatches from my friends and family back home, via infrequent texts or social media posts, were becoming increasingly dire.

By Saturday night, people were posting about being stranded between or behind trees or downed powerlines, about running out of medication, or not having enough gas to power their generators (if they had them) through the next few nights of well-below-freezing temperatures. Friends and family sent me photos of the ice and downed trees and powerlines that had quite literally crumpled under the weight of 1.5 inches of ice. 300,000 people were without power, and it took up to 20 days (even more in some cases) to get power back online for remote areas. The power grid had to be effectively rebuilt.

If you live outside of Michigan, it’s very likely you didn’t hear about this, though it was no less one the worst disasters in over a century for this area, which spans almost the entirety of the tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. For what it’s worth, my grandma—who’s been around for the better part of that century—has never seen anything like it. No one had, and this area has long been relatively unscathed by the usual suite of climate/natural disasters, meaning folks were nowhere near adequately prepared for the reality of being without power for 20-some days.

Governor Whitmer declared a State of Emergency a few days after the storm, while the National Guard arrived around the same time to provide critical surge capacity for everything from door-to-door wellness checks to clearing debris from roadways. Governor Whitmer also sought federal assistance by requesting a disaster declaration—a necessary step to open up FEMA funding and assistance—which was subsequently denied by President Trump.

This wasn’t the only disaster declaration that’s been denied by Trump recently. Deep-red Arkansas was denied the declaration after a spate of destructive tornadoes in March, while Washington was denied a declaration for the destruction resulting from the November 2024 “Bomb Cyclone”. Trump has threatened to completely shutter FEMA, which (I shouldn’t have to say) would be a catastrophic loss and would cause untold suffering in communities at risk of disaster (spoiler: that’s literally everywhere). The few folks I know at FEMA say the agency is getting the chaos treatment that has become the standard operating procedure for the Trump administration—sow chaos and uncertainty and provide basically no answers while confused employees try to keep doing their jobs with less resources and direction. Unfortunately for FEMA, disaster planning and recovery are things that feels superfluous when you/your community haven’t experienced a disaster, but proves to be indispensable when that day inevitably comes for you.

A public information officer views the destroyed homes near Echo Summit, CA after the 2021 Caldor Fire burned through the area.

I spend a lot of time talking to people who plan for and respond to disasters, from fire chiefs and wildland firefighters to emergency managers and city and county employees, and the common denominator in a lot of those conversations right now is 1.) lamenting a lack of funding and capacity to adequately prepare their communities for the suite of disasters they are vulnerable to and 2.) just how unprepared residents in these communities are for the realities of disaster (whether that’s a windstorm, wildfire or earthquake). We aren’t prepared, and we’re actively losing the resources and money that were once ear-marked for not only disaster recovery, but disaster preparedness—money that in many cases was appropriated for hazard reduction in rural, vulnerable, low-income or otherwise underserved¹ communities that are most at risk of disaster.

Trump has stated that he wants disaster preparedness, response and recovery to become more of a state-level function. As is often the case, it requires a bonkers amount of naivete to not understand that states (and counties etc) already do most of the actual work in this space, but they rely on funding and surge capacity from the feds, particularly during actual disasters that push the limits of state-level response and recovery agencies. The truth is: gutting these programs will result in significantly more suffering, and it’s well documented that disaster amplifies social inequities—meaning that this suffering will inordinately impact vulnerable communities (rural, low-income, elderly, disabled and others) that didn’t have the money to adequately prepare, let alone to recover.

The loss of federal funding for FEMA and other disaster preparedness/response/recovery functions is being felt across every single sector of the disaster world. Preparedness funding like the FEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant program has been halted, which had—since 1998—supplied some $18 billion to states to improve resilience in their most at-risk communities. In my county and others around Western Washington, these grants have been utilized to purchase land in at-risk floodplains, in order to prevent development in places where extreme flooding is likely. These types of programs hinge on an understanding that an ounce of prevention (mitigation costs) is worth a pound of cure (recovery costs), which is apparently something that rich politicians who’ve only ever lived in an urban environment have a hard time wrapping their heads around.

Meanwhile, our land management agencies are being gutted, thereby reducing their efficacy, thereby making it a whole lot easier to have conversations about federal public lands being better off in the hands of the states (WHICH IS A HORRIBLE IDEA for reasons too innumerable to list here). The chaos, ongoing brain drain—I know many feds who have either retired or quit in the last three months—and reductions in force in these agencies will make them basically useless, which of course is by design². Furthering this goal of making federal land agencies largely obsolete (and easier to cull), they’re also planning to restructure the entire wildland firefighting workforce by consolidating all of the disparate federal fire agencies (USFS, BLM, USFWS, BIA etc) under one command agency (a “National Wildfire Service”) outside of the Forest Service, which has long been tasked with fire preparedness, prevention, suppression AND recovery on a majority of forested federal lands. And listen, I know the Forest Service needs a lot of work, but this ain’t it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—divorcing the wildland fire functions of land agencies from the science, research, monitoring and restoration work at land agencies will be a huge step backwards, if not a categorical disaster. Losing sight of the ecosystem function of fire in these landscapes by viewing it only through a suppression lens will set us up for disaster. In fact, many countries that *do* have a National Wildfire Service of sorts have actually looked to the US for leadership and intel in moving towards a more holistic approach to fire management that is informed by ecosystem health and needs, rather than having fire agencies that fail time and time again because they are strictly suppression-focused. It’s safe to say that focusing all of our attention on fire suppression at all costs over ecosystem health as a whole will set us up not only for more catastrophic wildfires, but for more loss of firefighter lives, and for ongoing losses of critical habitat, old-growth and riparian areas to high-severity fire.

It’s clear that very little thought has been given to the actual execution of such a massive restructuring. For one, these agencies are already strapped for resources, particularly as we prepare for what could be a rough fire season across the country, so I can’t imagine they’re prepared for a wholesale restructuring of the wildland fire program by effing September 30th. There’s only so much that a significantly reduced workforce, a good chunk of which spends April-October fighting fires or supporting fire efforts, can handle. I won’t go into this too deeply except to say that thinking you can just restructure an entire program—complete with tens of thousands of employees and a century of operating procedures to deconstruct—with the stroke of a pen is naive at best and purposefully ambiguous at worst. None of this considers the fact that these agencies are hemorrhaging people and experience by the day, and that their stated goals for this new agency sure feel a whole lot like the failed 10 am policy that got us into this mess in the first place. It’s particularly interesting that there’s a desire to increase aircraft dependance in fighting fires, all while Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT)—who owns an aerial firefighting company that regularly secures Forest Service contracts—wants to end Forest Service aircraft inspections. Slimy work there, Sheehy. Also, as a reminder, we will quite literally never be able to air-tanker our way out of our wildfire problem, perhaps a manifesto for another time.

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I point this all out to say that the typical structures that have long helped us prepare for and respond to disasters are disintegrating by the day, which will radically increase how impactful these inevitable events are. Sure, there will likely be people around to respond to disaster when it comes (unless it’s a really big one, like the catastrophic earthquake that has a roughly 40% chance of impacting the entire Pacific Northwest sometime in the next 50 years). But the pre-disaster coordination, training, planning and mitigative action—the stuff that quantifiably reduces the impacts of these disasters—isn’t going to happen to the extent that it needs to. And after a disaster happens, when your county is looking for federal grants to clean up debris or replace water infrastructure to protect your drinking water or begin reforestation in burnt over stands or any number of other things, it won’t be available, or the process will be even more hindered by a lack of funding and resources (because we all know that these processes aren’t perfect as is). States, counties and cities simply do not have the cashflow or capacity to support the immense need following urban wildfire conflagrations like those in LA in January, let alone catastrophic ice storms, earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes.

We’ve seen a lot of catastrophic events in just the last five months (Hurricane Helene and the LA Fires come to mind first), which have both pointed to an increasingly undeniable fact: modern disasters are maxing out the capacity of local first response agencies in startlingly quick fashion. Our long-held expectations for how local, state and even federal government resources are supposed to respond to disasters do not align with the actual scale of the disasters we’re experiencing, nor with the real-life capabilities of these agencies to respond effectively—which, to be very clear, are being compromised every single day that the DOGE dorks are at the reigns. It might be helpful to think of this as a “bubble,” which refers to a good or fortunate situation that is isolated from reality or unlikely to last. We are watching a disaster bubble pop in real time right now, and if trends hold, the fortuitous climate conditions we’ve experienced over the last 80-100 years are not going to look anything like the next 100 years. I say this particularly from a wildfire standpoint—as fuel loading, fire suppression, climate change and other factors combine to create increasingly catastrophic wildfires and urban conflagrations—but it applies equally to other disasters that will become more extreme with climate change (ice and wind storms, snow squalls, hurricanes, tornadoes etc).

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After the ice storm in Michigan, I saw people asking about getting their wages covered because they couldn’t get to work, or wondering how they could get hotels paid for because they didn’t have heat or power or water at home, or wondering where the hell FEMA was, or wondering why no one was coming to help. And I hate to be the one to say this, but the fact is that our current administration isn’t coming to help, and is making it more difficult for state and even county-level resources to respond, which have long been tasked with deploying federal funds. Sure, we’ve probably never had sufficient funding for disasters, but what we’re experiencing now is a wholesale war on disaster preparedness (and everything else we should value in society…sigh). Now, more than ever before, we need to be prepared to take care of ourselves when disaster comes for us.

This may be an empowering or even exciting thought for people who are really into things like bushcraft or prepping or those magazines with names like THE PREPPER BUSHMAN or whatever, or perhaps those who have worked in disaster response and know what to expect. I consider myself a pretty big nerd in this regard (but not on the prepper spectrum, I should say), so I personally find it interesting to think about a disaster scenario and visualize how I would react and contribute to the response and recovery phases. But the vast majority of our country isn’t prepared for the realities of a post-disaster situation, because they’ve either never needed to care or, more likely, they’re consumed with the 1000s of other things people have to think about every day. Realistically, how much of the general public has even bare bones first aid and CPR training? How many have 10-15 gallons of freshwater stored away for emergencies? How many have a generator AND a few gallons of gas on hand to actually power it? Do they have emergency kits ready to go? Do they have 3-5 days of food for their family? Do they have a means of heating their home and food if they don’t have propane or a wood stove? Have they considered their evacuation route from their home? Do they know how to reach their neighbors—particularly those who are elderly or disabled and will need assistance during disaster?

I’m guessing the answer to the above questions would be eye-opening to anyone with even a cursory understanding of disaster preparedness. This leaves us in a position where we desperately need to collectively reckon with the fact that we are about to experience an era of American history defined by disaster, despite not really having the funding or capacity to do what we actually need to do to prepare. And you only need to look to Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Helene, the Maui Fire, the Camp Fire, the LA Fires, the Labor Day Fires, and countless smaller-scale disasters (like the Northern Michigan ice storm, or the annual destruction wrought by tornadoes in the Midwest and South) to see that if we don’t more adequately prepare for these disasters, the next few decades of playing defense will cost us vastly more money than Trump’s cuts will ever be able to balance out. We are experiencing a change in the status quo, and the quicker we realize that the better.

I do believe one of the most important skills to have in disaster (and probably life in general) is to know when things have changed; to be able to recognize, in real time, that what’s happening is not ops-normal, and that your subsequent actions and decisions will need to reflect that. It applies to evacuating from wildfire as much as it applies to our current political moment. Our brain craves homeostasis, and in a moment of chaos it will desperately look to confirm that things are still the same—but we must be prepared to override this instinct.

At this moment, I have to wonder if we will recognize that things have changed in time to actually prepare for the new paradigm we’re rapidly entering into; I wonder if we’re prepared to accept that the structures and systems that buoy life as we know it are extremely vulnerable, and that the solutions and tools we seek in building resilient communities lie directly with us and our neighbors.

I don’t think we need to meet this moment with fear, but instead with a recognition of our own agency, our own power in being prepared for the very different life that may lie ahead for many of us in this era of climate change, megafires and our current administration’s ongoing actions that make us more susceptible to the increasingly extreme disasters we’re facing.

Many have written about the profound sense of community and shared humanity that arises after a disaster.³ My question is: can we summon this transformative, collective power before disaster? Can we rise to the challenge of preparing for our new reality, whether we like it or not? Can we let preparedness be a canvas for the resilient, vibrant, collaborative communities and lives we all desire?

1. Federal employees aren’t allowed to say this word anymore but that doesn’t mean I can’t!

2. However, a judge recently ruled that federal reductions in force must be put on pause for at least two weeks.

3. Most notably Rebecca Solnit with her book A Paradise Built In Hell.