While everyone would like to be prepared in advance for an emergency, for many low-income residents, that preparation is a luxury they often can’t afford. With the recent tornadoes across the South, many of the areas hit were subject to high levels of poverty, where residents often having limited or no savings on which to rely, and access to cellphones or other methods of receiving warnings may be limited due to costs, according to ABC News. For Mississippi, which was hit hard by the tornadoes, the State Treasury reports less than half of Mississippi residents have $1000 in savings, and more than a third have no savings at all.
FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell notes the importance of cell phones in particular during times of disaster. For those without cell phones, however, Criswall told ABC News, “We need to really talk to these families and find out how they would have better gotten this message because we have to always work on giving people early warnings.”
Tanya Gulliver-Garcia, the director of learning and partnerships at the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, said of the challenges many low-income individuals face in recovering after a disaster to ABC News, “Your home is destroyed and the place where you lived is no longer accessible to you … And then if you are working paycheck-to-paycheck or you’re working a job that was destroyed – If you’re not allowed back in the community right away, you’re not even getting that paycheck-to-paycheck anymore. That’s gone as well.”
