In the hours leading up to a significant storm, a town experiences an odd silence. It’s evident in the little things. Tape is being applied to windows. Cars are being relocated to a higher area. Watching the river from a porch in southern Vermont, a woman considers whether or not to leave. The majority of what will decide her fate has already been decided by the time the rain actually begins to fall. These decisions were made years ago in zoning offices, county budgets, and community meetings that no one attended.
Above all, the research consistently indicates that. Decision support systems for disasters tend to focus primarily on preparedness and response, while recovery and mitigation receive less attention than they likely deserve, according to a 2024 review published in Heliyon. This imbalance is telling. Resilience is actually created during the dull, unglamorous stages that precede a disaster. The cameras are drawn to the dramatic moments.
This pattern is evident throughout the Northeastern United States, where heatwaves, wildfires, and flooding have begun to occur with an almost annoying frequency. A 2021 review of community resilience interventions in that area that was published in Sustainability revealed what researchers had been hinting at for years: only a small number of the more than 200 studies met the fundamental requirements of being evidence-based, locally applicable, and reasonably priced for towns with modest resources. Five. Out of 205. It’s difficult to avoid reading that number twice.
The emphasis on the unattractive foundation was what those few successful programs had in common. readiness for mental health. social capital. emergency preparation abilities. things that, because they are committee work, sound like committee work. The Ready CDC intervention, the COAST project, and the COPEWELL Rubric are not technological wonders. They are primarily organized methods of introducing neighbors to one another before they are in need of one another.
From the opposite perspective, the post-disaster studies present a similar narrative. Researchers examined two nearby towns—one flooded and the other spared—after the 2014 floods in South East Europe and discovered that social capital and interpersonal resources were crucial to the affected community’s ability to recover. In the event of a power outage, trust cannot be created. Individuals who were already connected to one another performed better. Those who didn’t didn’t. When you consider how little our disaster spending actually reflects that, it becomes clear.
Public officials don’t discuss this tension in public. It is costly, time-consuming, and politically unappreciated to build resilience before a storm. For a culvert, no one is re-elected. In contrast, helicopters, press conferences, and subsequent federal funding are all part of disaster response. The neighborhoods that are already designated as dark blue on the CDC’s social vulnerability index—that is, those with the least capacity to withstand another shock—are consistently hit by the consequences of the incentives being reversed.
This may eventually need to be addressed due to climate change. Between the two decades prior to and following 2000, the economic cost of disasters increased by 82%, and the first half of 2023 alone resulted in $110 billion in losses worldwide. The arithmetic eventually breaks down. It’s genuinely unclear if towns will react by making investments sooner rather than simply responding more forcefully after the fact.
It appears that the storm itself is rarely the decisive element. Most of the answers are written by the time the wind picks up. Whether we want to continue acting differently is the question.
