With the frequency of natural disasters growing, the odds of them overlapping in ways which amplify their effects are also increasing, according to an article in The Grid. And with these amplifications, the risk of these disasters overwhelming the available resources for emergency response is also becoming more likely. Says Alessandra Jerolleman, associate professor of emergency management at Jacksonville State University, “When you have not only the compounding events, but you also have simultaneous events across the country, then you very quickly exceed the capacity of the emergency management system.”
The increasing frequency of these major disasters can be seen through their costs, where a recent analysis showed that disasters costing $1 billion or more in damage have gone from an average of once every 82 days in the 1980s, to once every 18 days for the period from 2017 to 2021. With the shortened times, it’s inevitable that multiple disasters will overlap. Says Susan Cutter, co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute, of these overlapping or cascading disasters, “Just as they are beginning to recover from event No. 1, event No. 2 happens. And so you are, in essence, reducing the capacity every time there’s a subsequent event to such a degree, that over time, there’s no capacity whatsoever in those communities to respond.”
Cutter points to Puerto Rico as an example of repeated disasters overwhelming a region’s ability to respond, noting “Even before Hurricane Maria, just the number of times that the island has been affected by hurricanes, by earthquakes, by heavy precipitation events, is over time affecting the entire capacity of the island.”
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