AUSTIN, Texas – Four days after coastal Houstonians celebrated the Fourth of July with classic parades, backyard barbecues and fireworks, Beryl came to visit.
The Category 1 hurricane, weakened from an earlier Category 5, struck Texas’ largest city on July 8 – an unusual mid-summer hurricane. Beryl was one of the worst direct hits to hit Houston in decades, flooding streets, downing trees and leaving thousands without power. During a period of triple-digit temperatures, several people died from the heat.
Superlatives like “worst,” “biggest,” and “most” are becoming more common in disaster reporting. While Houstonians are dealing with the lingering effects of Beryl, farmers and ranchers in the Texas Panhandle are still trying to recover from the largest wildfire in the state’s history. A February inferno destroyed more than 1,000 acres of land, an estimated 138 homes and businesses, and more than 15,000 head of livestock. Three residents lost their lives.
Climate change has rewritten the script for disasters, making communities more vulnerable to weather patterns that don’t follow schedules or codes of conduct from the past. As a result, hundreds of thousands of emergency responders are facing unprecedented challenges — from burnout to post-traumatic stress disorder to tighter budgets — as they battle hurricanes, storms, wildfires, floods and other natural disasters that are more constant and intense than in the past.
“Everyone is on edge,” says Russell Strickland, Maryland’s emergency management secretary and chairman of the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA), the professional association of state emergency management directors.
Agencies are struggling with “stagnant budgets and staff shortages” at a time when they need more money and staff to handle disasters and meet other demands, Strickland said. In the 1980s, states averaged just over three billion-dollar weather disasters per year, according to the association. Over the past three years, the average has been 20. Last year, the country was hit by a record number of 28 of these billion-dollar disasters.
In a 2023 white paper, NEMA reported that “the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing number of consecutive disasters have led to disaster fatigue and burnout.” It also reported that current funding levels of most disaster management agencies are “woefully inadequate to handle the types of events facing states while expanding their areas of operation.”
The nation’s disaster management system is a immense, multi-tiered network that includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is tasked with distributing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to affected states and municipalities, and corresponding state disaster management agencies that advise or report to the governor. County and city governments also operate disaster management and homeland security units.
Emergency management officials across the country acknowledged that natural disasters such as wildfires, tornadoes and floods have increased and intensified as a result of climate change. In addition, emergency management agencies are being tasked with non-traditional tasks such as cybersecurity, opioid addiction, homelessness and school safety.
A U.S. Government Accountability Office Report A report released in May last year said that states’ demand for FEMA assistance had “increased due to more frequent and complex disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic,” but that “FEMA has struggled to build a workforce to meet these needs.”
State disaster management budgets are funded by state legislatures and vary widely. According to a study of state disaster management budgets by NEMA, the largest states allocate half a billion dollars, while the smallest allocate just under half a million dollars.
California’s emergency management unit, which is attached to the governor’s office and employs nearly 2,000 people, had the largest budget in fiscal year 2022 at more than $530 million, according to the NEMA report. California is the largest state in the U.S., with 39 million residents. In contrast, Vermont, which has a population of less than one million, had a budget of $650,000 to fund 34 emergency management workers in fiscal year 2022, according to NEMA.
Texas, whose Department of Emergency Management teams work with the governor’s office and are housed in the Texas A&M University System, had one of the largest budgets starting in fiscal year 2022: $33.5 million to fund nearly 500 employees.
State emergency management agencies, which also receive funding from the federal government, including FEMA, are the central nerve center during major disasters. They typically operate from a strategically located emergency operations center that also includes representatives from several other agencies. Real-time information arrives hours before the crisis, allowing a comprehensive response that ultimately involves armies of state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, EMS, firefighters, relief agencies, and a long list of other emergency responders.
Increased burden on emergency services
Taking a break from battling a 11-acre brush and grass fire behind schedule in the morning near Smithville, a compact town about 50 miles southeast of Austin, firefighter Billy Leathers, 36, reflected on his 18-year career with the Texas A&M Forest Service, which assists local fire departments in fighting outdoor fires. A charred, grassy hill stretched out behind him.
Leathers is a third-generation firefighter who followed his parents and grandfather into the profession.
“It’s the only job I enjoy,” he says of being a firefighter, adding that he and his colleagues “wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t enjoy helping people.” However, he admits that the increasing pace “starts to wear you out a little bit towards the middle of the season.”
Increasingly, the work involves more than just firefighting.
We’re experiencing incredible, record-breaking rainfall. We’re experiencing record-breaking cool. We’re experiencing record-breaking heat. Tornadoes are occurring earlier and later.
– Patrick C. Sheehan, Director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency
In 2020, emergency responders in Tennessee were confronted with a bombing in downtown Nashville on Christmas Day, when a 63-year-old conspiracy theorist, apparently intent on committing suicide, parked his RV near an AT&T facility and set off an explosion that killed him, injured eight others and caused communications outages that lasted for days.
Tennessee also faces an unstoppable tide of classic disasters, says Patrick C. Sheehan, who has headed the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency since 2016. In the 1980s, Tennessee experienced only three major natural disasters caused by severe storms and flooding. Since January 2014, 24 major disasters have been declared in the state.
“We have incredible, record-breaking rainfall,” Sheehan said. “We have record-breaking cold. We have record-breaking heat. We have tornadoes earlier and later.”
Sheehan and other disaster managers point out that because of constantly changing weather patterns caused by climate change, it is now almost impossible to accurately predict a so-called season for storms such as hurricanes and tornadoes. As Hurricane Beryl shows, coastal storms are hitting earlier and with greater force.
“We expect the frequency of weaker hurricanes to decrease and stronger hurricanes to become more frequent,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas State climatologist.
More residents, more danger
Texas’ top disaster responder is Nim Kidd, a former San Antonio firefighter who heads the Texas Division of Emergency Management and typically stands alongside Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott during meetings about tornadoes, fires, floods or other weather events.
Formerly part of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state police, the department was transferred to the Texas A&M System in 2019, putting it under the same umbrella as Texas A&M Forest Service firefighters. Kidd also serves as A&M’s vice chancellor for disaster and emergency services.
Al Davis, director of the Forest Service, and Wes Moorehead, his deputy, said the danger of wildfires in Texas has steadily increased as the state has grown rapidly. More people have moved to the state, often settling in attractive areas near trees and shrubs that are vulnerable to fires during drought and triple-digit heat.
“They like a little bit of nature around them,” Moorehead said. “They want some trees, grasses and vegetation. And in Texas, that grass, that vegetation, those trees – that’s fuel for a wildfire.”
The state’s emergency preparedness and firefighting efforts came under scrutiny during a House hearing on the devastating fires in the Panhandle, which began on Feb. 26 when a downed power line sparked the blaze that eventually spread 95 miles and reached Oklahoma.
Local concerns focused primarily on delays in providing aircraft to fight the fire, as the state does not have its own firefighting fleet and relies on private contractors. The state’s first order for aerial firefighting equipment from the federal government did not come until 24 hours after the so-called Smokehouse Creek fire broke out, the investigative committee found.
In his testimony at the hearing, Kidd advocated the creation of a state fire department fleet, which was also recommended by the five-member panel.
The Panhandle investigation also highlighted the importance of volunteer fire departments as a reinforcement of the state’s emergency services. Committee members noted that volunteer fire departments are “severely underfunded,” further undermining emergency preparedness.
Many first responders said they accepted the danger, stress and low pay because they wanted to do their job, said Moorehead of the Texas Forest Service.
“When you have people who have the drive, the willingness and the willingness to go out and do what is right and good for the citizens of the state,” he said, “you can overcome bottlenecks that you never imagined.”
