The disaster problem
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How is climate change affecting disaster preparedness?
When it comes to home improvement, even the most experienced DIYer has a limit.
I'm not going to come in here with the blowtorch and get it hot and solder and put the copper pipes. I'm not doing it.
I call it very nice man to handle it.
When to call the experts and when to do it yourself. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Eloise.
Hi.
Can you just introduce yourself, please?
Yes. So my name is Eloise Blondio. I am senior producer at On The Media, and I helped make American Emergency the movement to kill FEMA.
I'm a huge On The Media fan. Aw. I once ran into Brooke, the host of On The Media, at a wedding a couple years ago. And when she said who she was, I, like, spat out my drink.
That's such a fun surprise.
So tell me about this series you've been working on.
So I made this series with our host, Michael Loewinger, and we were really interested in how we got to this very interesting political moment where storms and floods and fires are getting more extreme, more intense, less predictable. And the agency that is supposed to help us help Americans during those kind of really scary events is
is fighting for its life politically. And we wanted to understand, how did we get here? How did this agency that's meant to save America become so distrusted?
There was even this talk when Trump took office of getting rid of the agency altogether, which when you look at the crises that are looming over us, is a very scary thought.
Yeah, we talk a lot on the show about... how climate change is making natural disasters more unpredictable. It does feel like exactly the time when you would want to have this agency around. And I was really interested to find out that a lot of the distrust around FEMA stems from conspiracy theories.
Yes.
The conspiracy theories that we see today around FEMA can actually be traced pretty much to the beginning of the agency.
And I guess the important thing that I've realized about FEMA is that it's always struggled to earn the trust of the public it's been hoping to serve.
Interesting.
That is not a contemporary challenge for the agency. It's really been there since its creation.
Hmm.
It feels like it parallels a lot of other stuff going on with federal agencies. You know, we did several episodes about the pullback of funding in federal science agencies like the NIH, the CDC, NSF. And it didn't occur to me really to connect that with FEMA, but it seems like a similar thing is happening with FEMA and it comes from this sort of fundamental lack of trust.
Yes, I think that we're in a political moment where any kind of existing fault lines or instabilities in how our systems were set up are being exposed. And I think that for a long time, FEMA was able to do great work while contending with these challenges of earning trust from the public. And I think that they have struggled to meet the current political moment.
I think that could be said for a lot of agencies. And the current political moment is very complicated for a lot of reasons.
It is so complicated. It is. And honestly, when I think about these conspiracy theories and how wild they are and how...
Many there are. It's hard to imagine really what a good response to them would be in this current era. We spoke to Willa Remus at the Washington Post, and he did a study of misinformation during Hurricane Helene. He said that FEMA's most popular tweets since Hurricane Helene reached 50 times fewer people than the false rumors.
Damn.
Okay.
It's really hard.
Yeah.
That is like the challenge that our government, you know, has to rise to. But yeah, it's hard to imagine it right now.
So this is a four-episode series you guys produced. Our listeners are going to hear the first one in just a second.
Why has FEMA become a target for conspiracy theories?
I wonder if you could just tee it up. What are they going to hear?
In this episode, we really go back to the very beginnings of FEMA, and we find out some really surprising things about the agency and about what it was doing behind closed doors.
And it also really sets up some of the problems that we see FEMA going through today.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How is climate change affecting disaster preparedness?
0:01–5:03
2
Why has FEMA become a target for conspiracy theories?
5:03–6:53
3
What historical events contributed to FEMA's distrust?
6:53–10:20
4
How did the agency evolve since its inception?
10:20–16:00
5
What role did misinformation play in FEMA's reputation?
16:00–21:52
6
How has political leadership impacted FEMA's effectiveness?
21:52–26:55
7
What are the consequences of FEMA's budget cuts?
26:55–32:42
8
Can FEMA regain public trust in its disaster response?
32:42–1:00:22