When Disasters Are No Longer Isolated Events
September 12, 2025
You wouldn’t know it from the forecast, but the East Coast is currently in the middle of hurricane season. September also marks the end of what has been a relatively tame fire season on the West Coast. Last year, however, was a different story: Hurricane Helene inundated Appalachian communities such as Asheville, North Carolina. Just a few months later, the Palisades and Eaton fires devastated greater Los Angeles.
Although these disasters occurred on opposite coasts, Rod Schoonover, Daniel P. Aldrich, and Daniel Hoyer argue in Issues that they represent a new risk dynamic. “The impacts of these events have grown while the time between shocks has shortened, leading to cascading risk: A pandemic weakens a community’s capacity to handle a flood, a flood weakens the government’s capacity to respond to a wildfire.”
As federal agencies relinquish their ability to predict and address complex risks, effective response now falls to local governments. Although states, cities, tribal governments, and counties cannot match the resources of the federal government, Schoonover, Aldrich, and Hoyer find strategies for the future: “In these jurisdictions, trust in public institutions may still be largely intact, and decisive adaptive leadership is still possible.”