That storm was one of a record 1,263 tornadoes in the U.S. tracked by the National Weather Service in the first half of 2019. Many of those storms have been concentrated in the Southeastern part of the country, in a region dubbed “Dixie Alley.”

Tornadoes in the South can be particularly deadly because there’s a relatively high percentage of the population there living in mobile homes — and most of those homes are spread out in rural areas, meaning lots of people with few options to escape the path of powerful tornadoes.

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Alabama and the Carolinas are consistently among the top five states with the most residents living in mobile homes — as well as in modular or manufactured housing, which is intended to be in a fixed location, but is similarly dangerous in severe storms. According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, residents of manufactured housing have a median household income of just under $30,000 per year.

Protecting these low-income, far-flung populations with limited resources from major storms isn’t easy. That made them a subject of particular interest to researchers involved in a recent University of Maryland study examining mobile homes.

The first challenge people face is receiving critical information in time to allow them to take action. The researchers found standard tornado warnings are falling short in protecting residents. In particular, mobile home residents were less accessible on social media and more dependent on their local TV meteorologist.

Researchers also found the majority of mobile home residents had incorrect assumptions about what they should do during a storm, with many believing myths and misconceptions that could be dangerous like “if you’re driving, you should take shelter under a bridge during a tornado.”

The researchers recommended that National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices should work more closely with local newscasters to address this information gap. Similarly, forecasters could prioritize actions that mobile home residents can take to deal with limited physical supplies and inadequate shelter.

But educational campaigns can’t solve the problem completely, because residents (and the communities where they live) face significant planning challenges due to lack of resources and available services.

“Mobile home residents in our study reported statistically significantly lower perceived access to shelter and self-efficacy to take shelter compared to fixed home residents,” the researchers noted. Developing emergency evacuation plans is challenging in areas where many residents may lack reliable vehicles or other resources, or may be reluctant to leave their homes and belongings unattended for what may turn out to be a false alarm. It’s also hard to assemble an emergency kit when you can’t afford things like weather radios, hand tools, back-up batteries and chargers, or extra quantities of medications — let alone bigger items like generators.

Kelley said that in rural areas like his, residents often lack the time — and sometimes the transportation or ability — to get to a community shelter, even if they know where one is. “I wish every rural home had to have a storm shelter of some sort. We had four and a half minutes warning with this storm,” he said.

“It’s great to have community shelters available, but if people don’t have transportation to get there, or wait till they have confirmation of an approaching tornado before they move, the shelters are not effective,” said David Roueche, an assistant professor of structural engineering at Auburn University — located in Lee County. He specializes in researching wind damage and ways to make structures better protected from high winds.

He led a team that analyzed the impact of the March 3 storm, and specifically looked at the 19 out of 23 victims who lived in manufactured homes. Their investigation revealed that all of the manufactured homes involved either had degraded anchors, had anchorage systems that apparently didn’t meet state code, or lacked ground anchors entirely. Anchors are devices – generally made of metal, sometimes coupled with concrete – that are used in conjunction with straps or tie-downs to secure the structure to the ground.

“We know it’s a problem. What can these people do? We can enforce stricter building standards to give people a much better chance of survival in their home. We can install micro-community storm shelters — as in, smaller shelters that serve a street, or a cluster of relatives — but this all takes money that the residents don’t have. So how do we prioritize the limited pre-event mitigation funding from FEMA or other groups? What other funding mechanisms can we use? These are the questions we’re asking right now,” he said.

While progress has admittedly been slow, Roueche said he is encouraged by results seen in communities such as Moore, Oklahoma, which adopted enhanced building codes to strengthen their homes, with minimal impact on home prices. He is also a proponent of storm-vulnerable inland areas adopting the same Department of Housing and Urban Development building standards recommended in Florida and coastal regions, since climate change and unusual weather patterns have increased the incidence of extreme storms in a wider range of locations.

With nowhere else to go, Kelley said his family has no choice but to stay in their home while it is being repaired. “It is coming along slow but steady,” he said. He created a memorial area on a section of his property, where he will plant 23 fruit trees — one for each of the lives lost in the storm. The memorial also has a pond and chairs where people can come and remember the victims or just enjoy some peaceful solitude.

Kelley said he hopes it will provide some comfort to local residents.

Recovery from wildfires can take years, and for affected communities, one aspect is especially pressing: Housing. California’s housing prices are infamously high, and in Butte County, this problem is particularly bad. With 19.5 percent of the county living below the poverty line, explains Ed Mayer, Executive Director of the Housing Authority of the County of Butte, many households are heavily rent-burdened.

Five of his 36 staffers from around Butte County lost their homes in the blaze and many others are housing friends and family left houseless by the fire. The Camp Fire was most devastating in Paradise, where 95 percent of the city’s residential and commercial buildings are gone, says Mayer. The county as a whole lost a staggering 10 percent of its housing stock in the Camp Fire.

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“Prior to the crisis, we had a vacancy rate of maybe 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent,” he says, estimating that Butte had approximately 1,000 units available around the county before the fire. That’s far short of the 6,000 households, including some receiving housing assistance, that will be looking for new homes after theirs were destroyed. Evacuees from Paradise are predominantly low-income elders and disabled people who settled there for a unique combination of affordable housing (by California standards) and access to medical services, he explains, a situation they may struggle to find elsewhere in the state.

He fears low-income residents may leave the state altogether, while others may be left doubling up with friends and family or moving in and out of shelters and the street. Mayer even raised the prospect of “tent cities” akin to those seen during the Dust Bowl to accommodate desperate residents, some of whom are already camping due to the lack of sheltering options. The local alternatives, like neighboring Oroville, are unlikely to meet the needs of evacuees — 60 percent of Oroville renters are already paying more than 50 percent of their income in rent and utilities every month. Oroville was also in the headlines in 2017 for its crumbling dam, which itself may be threatened by the fire.

“This is not the first time this has happened,” Mayer says, noting that Butte County reached out to officials in Santa Rosa, where last year’s Tubbs Fire destroyed nearly 6,000 structures, including in low-income neighborhoods, to learn more about how they handled losing five percent of their housing stock to a fast-moving wildfire. The lessons from Santa Rosa and surrounding Sonoma County may prove to be instructive for other communities in the state facing similar catastrophes.

In the weeks and months after the Santa Rosa fires, rents began soaring, and so did property values, though Governor Jerry Brown instituted temporary price gouging protections that led to at least one successful prosecution. Construction costs also began to rise, further crunching homeowners attempting to rebuild and complicated by a proliferation of unlicensed and unqualified contractors flocking to the area to take advantage of property owners eager to start rebuilding.

In Santa Rosa, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat estimated the housing crunch caused by the Tubbs fire drove some 7,000 people to leave the city of 175,000, and over 1,000 fled the county altogether — some, tragically, for Butte County. Renters particularly struggled, with working-class people and undocumented immigrants heavily represented amongst those scrambling for housing.  According to the industry-supported Insurance Information Institute, only 37 percent of renters carried renters’ insurance for their homes, which left many renters with limited resources to replace belongings, let alone find new homes. Long, uncertain waits while property owners determined whether and how to rebuild were compounded by housing scarcity and rising prices, making it hard to stay in the area in the aftermath of the fire. Sonoma County was ultimately forced to declare a homelessness crisis to access funds for people experiencing homelessness, with rates climbing six percent in the aftermath of the fire.

Yet, even with an obvious crisis, Santa Rosa voters just rejected a $124 million bond measure designated for affordable housing.

According to CoreLogic, rents tend to spike after disasters, as illustrated in the aftermaths of Hurricanes Irma and Harvey as well as the Tubbs fire. Delinquencies also increase as impacted residents fall behind on their mortgage payments, and something else happens too: Property tax revenues drop, at the precise moment counties and municipalities need that money most. Another Santa Rosa ballot measure, which passed, approved a temporary sales tax increase to provide funding for emergency services, offsetting some of these tax losses. But sales taxes are regressive: they place the highest burden on the people who are most likely to need the support.

These trends are highly predictable, yet communities are still unprepared for them.

The Camp Fire is the deadliest in California history, but devastating wildfires are no longer shocking exceptions. They are the status quo for the Golden State, which has hit the frontlines of climate change just like hurricane-wracked communities across the country in the South. Another CoreLogic study estimates over 48,000 homes are at risk from wildfires in California, many in communities that have already burned before, sometimes multiple times. California’s own Climate Change Assessment, released in August of this year, found that the number of acres burned by fire throughout the state will increase by 77 percent by 2100 as a result of impacts from climate change.

Decreasing rainfall is desiccating already fire-prone environments right as the wind kicks up in the summer and fall, and all it takes is a spark from a flat tire, poorly maintained electrical line, or bad hot tub wiring to ignite a fire. Embattled utility company Pacific Gas and Electric has already taken the unprecedented step of temporary power cuts during periods of high fire risk in an attempt to avoid sparking another conflagration, and a group of Camp Fire survivors just filed suit against the utility, claiming it played a role in the fire that took their homes, though the cause remains under investigation.

“I don’t know,” says Mayer, pausing for a moment to gather his thoughts. “There’s major decisions facing the community.” It’s a sentiment echoed across fire-prone California, from Santa Rosa officials agonizing over whether and where to approve new developments to the fire evacuees roaming the aisles of drugstores far from home in search of replacement toothbrushes.

Although more than a decade has passed since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, there is a stark discrepancy between those who can access the resources they need to rebuild their communities—the relatively affluent—and those who cannot. This has been fueled in large part by a market-based approach to recovery, which considers economic recovery more important than restoring social services. And when privatization comes at the expense of public goods, it’s the poor who pay the price.

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For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rebuilding program paid homeowners based on the market value of their houses rather than on the cost of repair. This left many black working-class homeowners unable to rebuild their homes, because they lived in areas with lower market values—a result, in part, of discrimination past and present. The limited resources to rebuild, combined with the dramatic reduction in public housing—many large public housing developments were shuttered—have fueled the city’s affordable housing crisis.

Public schools met a similar fate. After the storm the city eliminated jobs for 7,000 teachers, who were dismissed without pay. The city also began moving towards a charter-based school system—a model based on market-driven ideas of choice, efficiency, lack of centralized oversight, and limited union control. This switch pushed many of the city’s most disadvantaged students out of high performing schools through a process known as “creaming” that is designed to inflate test scores.

The force of a global economy

Why has funding for disaster recovery shifted away from supporting citizens’ and communities’ needs, and towards models that favor privatization of public services? The answer lies in the shifting nature of the global economy.

Beginning in the 1970s, the deregulation of finance, transportation, and the environment—as well as the loosening of trade barriers—increased the flow of goods and jobs across national borders. This shifted manufacturing out of the U.S., and created pressure to compete globally for ports, shipping, finance centers, and tourism, as well as other high-end service industries such as the medical industry—areas in which New Orleans has historically played a significant role.

This shift happened on a city level too, and it fundamentally changed the relationship between local governments and their citizens. Governments have moved from public management to entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on increasing the economic standing of their city. Since the focus following a disaster is on restoring economic growth, the decision-making process for post-disaster cities—such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the greater New York region after Hurricane Sandy—often increases inequality of access and delivery to much needed public services, such as health care, affordable subsidized housing, and public schools.

A vulnerable health care system

In New Orleans, the health care system is perhaps one of the clearest examples of how this harms the city’s poorest residents. As the main trauma hospital, New Orleans Charity Hospital should have been a key component in recovery efforts. Though it was damaged during the storm, the National Guard had cleaned and restored the hospital so that it was able to receive patients within a few weeks. However, state and local officials chose to keep it shuttered. Instead, they opened an interim hospital and continued with plans to build a new hospital complex that would require razing nearly 70 acres of a national historic district.

For state officials, Hurricane Katrina presented an opportunity. As early as 1991, a strategic plan from the Louisiana Health Care Authority showed that officials who oversaw the state hospital system had been looking for ways to get out of the business of “charity,” and to move away from the two-tiered system that left the Charity hospitals serving most of the state’s uninsured. This was raised again in the early 2000s after Louisiana State University took over management of the hospital, when a report commissioned by LSU argued that the proportion of low income patients the hospital was serving was hampering its financial stability. But as long as Charity Hospital remained open and serving predominantly indigent patients, it would be hard to justify the expense of constructing a new building.

The damage sustained during Katrina provided the justification and funds for a new building with a new name. This was shown most pointedly in the fight over FEMA funds to repair the hospital—FEMA initially estimated repairs would cost $23 million, but the state and LSU fought for nearly $500 million to fund the hospital’s full replacement. When asked for comment, representatives from LSU said “planning for a replacement hospital was well underway with appropriated state funding from the Louisiana Legislature.” LSU had received $1.8 million for a master plan study in 2003 and was seeking funding for a move before Katrina. But even after Katrina, the state only offered $300 million towards construction of the 1.2 billion dollar hospital.

For ten years, Charity Hospital remained shuttered while the new building, now renamed University Medical Center, was constructed. Officials hoped to build a public-private partnered “destination” hospital that would be the lynchpin in the larger effort to transform the medical corridor into an economic engine for the city, though a leaked draft study challenged the hospital’s financial footing, particularly in light of the changing federal health care rules. This same report did note the successful effort to rebrand the hospital.

In the meantime, the city suffered the gutting of a trauma center and psychiatric care facility after one of the most traumatic social disasters. Psychiatric patients who had been served at Charity ended up in the local jail— notorious for human rights abuses—in higher rates. When community members questioned why Charity could not be reopened to serve the population as a hospital for the future (at meetings the author attended in Spring of 2011 on Charity’s reuse, as well as meetings on the process of expropriating houses in the new hospital’s footprint)—as a study suggested could be done for a much lower cost—board members replied that the Charity facility “does not meet the programmatic requirements for the LSU hospital moving forward.” LSU declined to comment on this conversation, but stated that “it was well documented that Charity Hospital was no longer an appropriate building for health care.”

Remaking our cities

It’s worth asking: In what image are cities remade after disasters? Public schools and the Charity system were in need of funds and a system-wide overhaul before the storm, but a narrow view of how to fix these pre-existing problems moved both towards privatization.

Much of the national conversation after Hurricane Katrina focused on the inequalities of class and race that made New Orleanians vulnerable before the storm. But throughout the recovery effort that vulnerability has not changed for many of the city’s poorest—a particularly dangerous risk as cities face more disasters, more often, as a result of climate change. Shifts in formerly public institutions often to private and non-profit oversight did not increase access as much as they removed decision-making from public oversight, and changed the nature of public participation in these key institutions.

If cities are going to be prepared for the future and foster sustainable communities, they should seriously question whether a healthy business environment is more important that the health of its citizens. Now, Louisiana is faced yet again with another long recovery from massive flooding. It also has new leadership, which has placed the health care of its citizens as a primary concern.  Hopefully, we will see something new emerge from the waters.