Lessons from Helene: ASU professors explain the complexities behind emergency management

Hurricane Helene is already one of the deadliest hurricanes on record, resulting in a costly and complicated relief effort.

The death toll as of Thursday has surpassed 200 people and will continue to rise as hundreds are missing and unaccounted for. Damages will most likely be in the hundreds of billions of dollars when recovery and rebuilding efforts run its course.

The hurricane’s breadth and intensity has hurled through six states and wended its way to far reaches of the mainland, making emergency response difficult.

If there is a silver lining to the wreckage, it’s the lessons that can be learned in climate change and emergency preparedness during the weeks, months and years to come. Undoubtedly, Arizona State University professors Brian Gerber and Melanie Gall will be monitoring Helene’s aftermath and how the government and municipalities are responding to the disaster.

As co-directors of the Center for Emergency Management and Homeland Security in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, their work addresses ongoing risk reduction challenges characterized by complex social, economic, environmental, cultural and technological interdependencies and conflicting objectives.

The center also works closely with government on all levels as well as with the private sector and the disaster services nonprofit community on a comprehensive range of issues.  

The two spoke to ASU News in a Q&A about Helene, why hurricanes are becoming deadlier and what citizens can do to prepare in the case of an extreme emergency.

Editor's note: Answers have been edited for length and/or clarity.

Question: Can we safely assume that Hurricane Helene’s extreme damage means that we’ve entered a new era of climate change and that it’s no longer the coastal states that will be hit with natural weather disasters?

Gall: I would not go that far. What we certainly can say is that the warmer sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are allowing tropical storms to intensify more rapidly. Storms have the potential for faster and greater intensification than previously. Helene was a Cat 4 storm with a fast forward movement and making a beeline north, which allowed it to go far inland and impact areas unaccustomed to tropical rainfall and hurricane-force winds.

Climatologists are investigating if the storm was able to stay for as long as it did as a result of the “brown-ocean effect.” This refers to the availability of warm water to continue fueling the storm, not from the ocean, but from water-logged soils. This was the case in the Georgia and the Blue Ridge Mountains, which experienced days of heavy rainfall immediately prior to Hurricane Helene making landfall.

Gerber: First, this is an historic disaster, and we often think of change, including policy change around disasters, as following such landmark incidents. But this has been a long process. The results of putting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the mid-18th century or so (start of industrialization) leading to about a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global mean temperature compared to pre-industrialization — plus increased global population, plus increasingly urbanized populations in relatively high risk areas — all combine to lead us to where we are today. And that is a planet at a very risky point in terms of vulnerability to disaster disruption. So maybe not a new era per se — but it does help underscore how important it is to understand disaster risk and that an era of increasingly extreme weather disruption will continue to be a feature of our daily lives.

Second, I want to add there is at least some cause for optimism. Governments across the globe have made significant strides in the past quarter century in taking disaster risk reduction more seriously and in understanding and attempting to improve community resilience capacity. Government policy, and the transition from a fossil fuel energy system to renewables that is underway at present, is a series of incremental improvements (often steady, though not always) that occurs out of the headlines. So there is at least a decent chance we’ll be able to adjust to the more dangerous world of a warmer climate. Will there be massive disruptions? Yes. Is humanity doomed on this planet? Not if we continue to work to get things right.  

Q: Even though we knew Hurricane Helene was coming, why is it so hard for the government to evacuate people and get resources to the ones who stay behind in a timely manner?

Gall: Residents along the Florida coast largely evacuated in a timely manner. To my earlier point about rapid intensification, keep in mind that this storm was moving really fast and intensified fast as well. By the time people went to bed on Wednesday evening, the storm was barely a Category 1 storm, and by Thursday night when the storm hit, it had exploded to a large Category 4 storm.

When the storm started impacting the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was late at night with many people likely unaware of the catastrophe that was unfolding around them. People act based on experience. You hear it over and over again that people could have never imagined the extent of the damage. This largely explains the lack of preparation. If you can’t imagine it and most in your community stay put as well, you are unlikely to leave.

Gerber: There are three core challenges here. One is being able to forecast where a storm is going to hit and to communicate to the public what they should do. This is not an easy task when you have rapid intensification. In general, a characteristic of extreme weather is that you don’t always have enough information early enough to make sure you can evacuate large numbers of people. 

Second, even when you do have a good idea on what an evacuation should look like, to a significant degree, we rely on people to move themselves away from a hazardous area. But of course, there are lots of members of a community that can’t do that for a variety of understandable reasons that can be anticipated. So a community, ideally, would invest significant resources in building evacuation assistance capacity. However, many communities in the U.S. quite literally don’t have the resources to make such investments. 

And third, even if the first two challenges were resolved, there is an individual-level behavior challenge: Nontrivial numbers of the public will not heed evacuation guidance for various reasons, and that then puts pressure on emergency responders to try to rescue such persons. None of those three challenges are easy to overcome — and we need to understand the most effective possible ways to mitigate the most troubling features of these types of challenges when trying to improve and enhance the safety of the public in disaster situations.

Q: Now that more states and cities are getting hit inland with hurricanes and other naturals with more frequency, is FEMA going to have to revamp how it operates? And if yes, what would that look like?

Gall: All disasters start as local incidents. Revamping most likely will start at the state level. The president had approved a pre-landfall emergency declaration for Florida, which primes FEMA to provide federal assistance and resources faster. None of the other impacted states requested a pre-landfall emergency declaration, which is an indication that they did not anticipate the impacts well — despite the local weather service offices such as the one in Greenville/Spartanburg issued dire warnings and warned of catastrophic flooding and that people should seek higher ground. The National Weather Service Office issued flash flood warnings and emergencies all night long.
It appears that many state agencies were not ready and did not anticipate the level of devastation that occurred particularly in the Blue Ridge Mountain communities. The northerly hurricane track was unusual for the Southeast and really impacted communities less aware, less prepared and less resourced for what we saw with Helene.

Gerber: I do not think “revamp” is the right way to think about lessons from this particular disaster. I would say a couple things here. In the past two decades or so since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the federal government, with state and local government partners — and tribal and territorial partners as well — have made legitimate efforts to improve our capabilities in responding to emergencies and disasters. Real progress has been made. Instead, I would say FEMA — and state, local, tribal and territorial governments — can continue to build on improvements made over the past 20-plus years.

I think the particular features of this storm — the amount of water dropped combined with the topography of places like Asheville, North Carolina, means that even if every government action was perfect, there’s no way to stop a flood from causing major infrastructure damage. You can find ways to limit damage, but there are no magical solutions for that.

But where we need to make more significant gains is less in the incident response and more in the area of integrating emergency and disaster preparedness across a comprehensive set of government systems. Not just first response and emergency management systems and efforts at protecting built infrastructure, but thinking about how to have preparedness integration with everything from mental health systems, medical systems, insurance systems, etc.

Q: How will this impact insurance companies going forward regarding flood policies?

Gall: For one, flood insurance is generally a federal insurance policy. Most homeowners have federal flood insurance. Your local insurance agent only serves as facilitator. The National Flood Insurance Program has been in deficit for years — ever since Katrina. However, the flood insurance program has been revamped in recent years with the goal of charging actuarially, meaning risk-reflecting premiums.

Insurance policies related to natural hazards only have one trend, and that is up — independent of the program being federal or from the private sector. Risk is increasing and therefore your insurance premiums are increasing as well.

What I’m more concerned about is the fact that the areas that have been impacted have notoriously low participation rates in the flood insurance program to start with. There will be many, many homeowners and renters who have lost everything because they have never purchased flood insurance.

Gerber: Homeowner insurance in parts of California and Florida, and elsewhere, is already in crisis. We are about at the point where a number of areas are effectively uninsurable areas for homeowners — or are about to be. What federal and state policy actions are going to be taken to address the crisis? That’s a key question to watch — and with the upcoming election, the next presidential administration is going to have to make it a central part of their disaster management agenda.

Q: From a management perspective, what lessons can be learned going forward from this disaster?

Gall: Everybody should have flood insurance — no matter if your mortgage company or landlord requires it. If it rains, it floods. Here in Arizona, we are notoriously at risk from flash flooding, and everyone should have flood insurance. The good news is that if you are outside the 100-year floodplain, flood insurance premiums will be low.

The other piece of advice is to always stay alert and informed. Don’t assume it won’t affect you. Listen to your local emergency managers and National Weather Service Office. And don’t assume that it can’t get worse than the last disaster your community experienced or remembers. It can and it will.

Gerber: Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that we, as a country, are going to have to take even more aggressive steps in improving infrastructure resilience. ... We are going to have to shift to even more pre-disaster funding efforts aimed at mitigating hazard risk. Historically, we tend to fund repair/recovery after disaster, and have funded less pre-disaster protective or mitigation efforts. That has changed a bit, but we are going to have to take a much stronger step in that direction as we see continued challenges associated with more extreme weather incidents.