FIRST RESPONDERSEmergency Responders Struggle with Burnout, Budgets as Disasters Mount
Climate change has rewritten the script for disasters, leaving communities vulnerable to weather patterns that don’t abide by schedules or the rules of past behavior. 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, windstorms, wildfires, floods and other natural disasters that are more frequent and intense than those in the past.
Four days after residents of coastal Houston celebrated the Fourth of July with the traditional parades, backyard barbecues and fireworks, Beryl came calling.
The Category 1 hurricane, weakened from an earlier Category 5, slammed into Texas’ largest city on July 8 — an unusual midsummer arrival. Delivering one of the worst direct hits on Houston in decades, Beryl flooded streets, ripped down trees and left thousands without power, causing multiple heat-related deaths during a period of triple-digit temperatures.
Superlatives like “worst,” “biggest” and “most” increasingly sprinkle news accounts in disaster coverage. Even as residents of Houston deal with Beryl’s lingering impact, farmers and ranchers in the Texas Panhandle are still trying to recover from the largest recorded wildfire in the state’s history, a February inferno that consumed more than a million acres of land, an estimated 138 homes and businesses, and more than 15,000 head of cattle. Three area residents were killed.
Climate change has rewritten the script for disasters, leaving communities vulnerable to weather patterns that don’t abide by schedules or the rules of past behavior. 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, windstorms, wildfires, floods and other natural disasters that are more frequent and intense than those in the past.
“Everybody’s strapped,” said Russell Strickland, Maryland’s secretary of emergency management, who also serves as president of the National Emergency Management Association, or NEMA, the professional group for state emergency management directors.
Agencies are grappling with “stagnant budgets and staff shortages” at a time when they need more money and people to deal with disasters and confront other demands, Strickland said. In the 1980s, states averaged just over three $1 billion weather disasters a year in cost-adjusted dollars, according to the association. In each of the past three years, the average has been 20. Last year, the nation was hammered by a record 28 of those billion-dollar catastrophes.
In a 2023 white paper, NEMA reported that “the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing number of back-to-back disasters have resulted in disaster fatigue and burnout.” It also reported that current funding levels for most emergency management agencies are “wholly inadequate to address the types of events that states are experiencing along with expanding mission areas.”
