The wave of disasters that have struck different parts of the United States of America over the recent past implores attention for two reasons. The first is that disasters contributs to a pattern imputable to climate change, where extreme weather events become more frequent and severe. The second reason is that retrospection reveals possible flaws in the country’s capacity to mitigate adverse effects of a disaster. Evidence from five articles shows that the country’s disaster recovery system is operating below its potential, hence the need to review performance in previous incidents.
The first article reviewing the country’s disaster response system is Steven Rodas’s “The Long Journey Home.” Here, Rodas shows how serious flaws in the nation’s disaster response system have prevented some Superstorm Sandy victims from fully recovering ten years since the disaster struck. A major setback in the recovery process has been inadequate knowledge among the populace about disaster preparedness and response. Remarks from survivors of Hurricane Sandy that ravaged New Jersey in 2012 revealed concerns about the lack of a playbook to help people know how to respond to a disaster (Rodas, 2022).
Moreover, Rodas’s (2022) harrowing recount of the sluggish recovery from Sandy shows that the response system ended up re-victimizing people instead of helping them. In retrospect, one can peer through emotions and discern incompetence on the government’s part when assessing damage and disbursing post disaster financial aid, hence the double and over issuance of financial assistance. The government has the resources and capacity to determine how much a victim needs to make considerable recovery from a disaster; penalizing survivors for ‘receiving too much help’ is not just humiliating but also underscores gross incompetence in the country’s disaster recovery system.
The second article this analysis focuses on is Mackenzie Adams’s “10 years after Superstorm Sandy: What’s Been Done and the Road Ahead.” Although both Sandy and Rodas present a decade-long hindsight after Sandy, the latter focuses more on the successes of recovery efforts. The remarkable recovery gains in New York, for instance, hinged on relevant federal representatives collaborating and meeting quarterly. In these meetings, they leveraged resources, minimized overlap and discussed disaster prevention and recovery efforts befitting the communities in question (Adams, 2022). Prompt response also had a major impact on recovery process.
It only took the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers days to initiate recovery efforts on the ground and achieve so much success in just 10 years (Adams, 2022). The analysis by Adams shows how political will and a leadership approach that integrates multi-stakeholder perspectives can be beneficial in a distracter response.
In the third source, “Sandy Recovery and Progress,” the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) zooms in further on the achievements on existing disaster response system. Some notable successes of these recovery efforts include resiliency funding for 35 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments the disaster damaged and over 200 buildings building equipped with powerful generators in case of outages (New York City Housing Authority, n.d.).
The record of accomplishments seemingly validates Adams’ (2020) analysis, which revealed that many recovery and resilience projects were completed in about five years since Sandy struck. Such success stories attest to how much the country can achieve if it commits to helping disaster victims rebuild; however, they also prompt the urge to question what could happen disaster recovery is not taken seriously.
The ugly underbelly of the nation’s disaster recovery system is revealed in Paul McLeod’s “Puerto Rico’s Recovery From Hurricane Maria Was Years Behind Schedule. Then Fiona Hit.” Although Paul does not make a direct comparison with response to Sandy in New York or New Jersey, he discerns a comparable laxity when Puerto Ricans faced Hurricanes Maria and Fiona. Despite the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) allocating about $28 billion in funding only $40.3 million had been used to upgrade Puerto Rico’s utilities (McLeod, 2022). This slow response has been largely attributed to governance failures, micromanagement of the Puerto Rican authority, and bureaucratic bottlenecks (Donevan et al., 2022; McLeod, 2022). The stark difference in disaster response enthusiasm in New York and Puerto Rico once again reveals one of the United States’ greatest flaw: the fixation with maintaining territorial power even at the expense of human lives.
More evidence of this profound insouciance and disparity when those considered expendable endure disasters is presented in NPR’s podcast titled “An Unfinished Recovery from Hurricane Maria Left Puerto Rico Vulnerable to Fiona”. In this presentation, Donevan et al., (2022) confirm that ridiculous bureaucratic bottlenecks and sheer lack of commitment have put Puerto Rico in a precarious cycle where every subsequent disaster negates ongoing recovery efforts from a previous calamity. Perhaps a more effective disaster response strategy would widen the list of stakeholder and work from the needs of the communities, rather than impose external solutions on them, which may only spur resistance or elicit unintended consequences like the re-victimization of victims witnessed in New Jersey.
In conclusion, there U.S. stands to draw many benefits by taking a retrospective look into its response to past catastrophic incidents. Reflection is a powerful way to identify key strengths and that can be utilized in overcoming whatever barriers have made it so difficult for victims to recover more effectively and faster from calamities. As the analysis has revealed, disaster recovery has been more effective in some parts of the country, but consistently poor in others. These mixed outcomes suggest that the nation needs a disaster response system that puts human value first and seeks to preserve it regardless of where the disaster occurs in the U.S.
References
Adams, M. (2022). 10 years after Superstorm sandy: What’s been done and the road ahead. New York District Website. Web.
Donevan, C., Zamora, K., Kelley, B., Lewis, R., Jarenwattananon, P., & Yenigun, S. (2022). An unfinished recovery from Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico vulnerable to Fiona : Consider this from NPR. NPR. Web.
McLeod, P. (2022). Puerto Rico’s recovery from hurricane Maria was years behind schedule. Then Fiona hit. Vanity Fair. Web.
New York City Housing Authority. (n.d.). NYCHA recovery & resilience. Web.
Rodas, S. (2022). A decade after Hurricane Sandy. The long journey home. NJ. Web.