Two and a half years ago Hurricane Maria ripped open homes across the southern Puerto Rican city of Ponce, destroying the rickety electrical grid and sending thousands of people into shelters or onto the streets. People were still rebuilding when, in January, a devastating earthquake jolted the island’s southern coast. Afraid of collapsing walls and showering concrete, people moved back outdoors, where they still spend cool, wet nights under blue tarps strung to poles and tied to cars packed with coolers and lawn chairs.
Now thousands brace for a wave of illness as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads insidiously across the island, threatening people without homes, without water, some struggling even to maintain basic hygiene. It’s the latest blow in a diabolical cascade of crises, striking Puerto Ricans at their most vulnerable. When the sickness comes, doctors and nurses will be scarce; the hurricane forced almost half of them to leave the island in search of jobs.
Everyone is in hell, said Abel Vale, a retired environmental consultant who lives north of Ponce, or left forgotten.
This is how cascading catastrophes can compound in effect, kicked off or made worse by climate change, which promises to amplify the harm and make even unrelated crises more painful.
And it may well portend what comes next for the rest of the United States.
The flooding, hurricanes and wildfires that now regularly arrive in the U.S. each spring and summer, after all, are not on hold because we also face a health crisis. Changes in the climate have made the chance of a natural disaster striking during this pandemic significantly more likely, and its likely impact more severe. Today, hurricanes are larger, and more intense than ever. Fires are spreading faster and further amid drought, their total size having doubled in recent years. Meanwhile, precipitation across the Midwest which suffered devastating floods last spring has increased by more than 45% since the 1950s.
Climate change is loading the weather dice against us, said Katherine Hayhoe, a professor of public policy and law at Texas Tech University and one of the world’s foremost climate scientists. We always have the chance of rolling a double six.
When we do, disasters that might have otherwise proved manageable will compound and amplify COVID’s effects until the hurt measured in lives, livelihoods and property damage winds up worse than it might have been from any one disaster alone. Storms, floods and fires will greet a crippled nation, its people sequestered inside homes, its workforce locked down, unable to procure even basic emergency and building supplies. The authorities tasked with responding to it will already be consumed by other emergencies, their capacity to provide even the most fundamental aid limited, their budgets gutted.
Scientists as well as national security experts and U.S. defense officials have long warned that climate crisis would act as a threat amplifier, exacerbating everything from terrorist attacks to immigration. And yet there’s been little serious quantification or consideration of what these amplifications might look like. In 2017, the U.S. National Climate Assessment warned that scientists and officials often fail to capture what the report called compound extremes and anticipated that the impact of several disastrous events unfolding in rapid sequence would catch the nation by surprise.
Now, as a pandemic rifles through the lives of Americans, killing thousands each week, we’re looking down the barrel of hurricane season, which begins in less than two months. Gulf of Mexico waters are running unusually warm, setting up conditions for strong storms, and the researchers at Colorado State University predict there is a 69% chance that a major hurricane will make landfall in the U.S. this summer or fall.
The public health responses required to manage the pandemic run directly against what will need to be done to respond to such a hurricane. Large numbers of people may need to flee on short notice and be housed in shelters that are overcrowded, understaffed and undersupplied. In 2017 in Florida Hurricane Irma still forced some 191,000 people into crowded arenas and other shelters.
If that happens again, how will people maintain physical distancing? Will states still send evacuees into shelters? Will National Guard troops permit them to cross state boundaries? It’s easy to see how flight from the threat of nature could lead to a resurgence of contagion, starting a whole new wave of infections spreading across the country. To say that we are not prepared for these concurrent disasters is putting it mildly, said Irwin Redlener, a clinical professor of health policy at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a leading expert in public health ramifications of catastrophic events. I’m extremely worried.
2020 Pro Publica Inc.