News Update: The Questions After Harvey

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.

RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.

So if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.

They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.

See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RV Insurance at progressive.com today.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet injuries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of the Atlantic.

Sitting across from me is Atlantic staff writer David Graham, who has been covering Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath.

Hi, David.

Hi, Matt.

I'm happy that you happened to be in DC so that we could have this conversation in in studio together.

There might not have been a disaster on the scale of Harvey in America in our living memory.

Major parts of Houston are still underwater.

Rescue efforts are still ongoing.

And

in the aftermath of the torrential rain, people are still discovering new terrors.

So in many ways, it is way too soon to be talking about the aftermath of Harvey.

But

if this disaster is like any other, then the nation's attention will already have moved on, while the actual victims of the storm are only beginning to reckon with what it's left them.

Right now, we have way more questions than answers about what Harvey's done to us, but I wanted to use those questions, David.

While Houston is still leading the headlines,

What should we not lose sight of?

So I think a few things.

One is how fast fast can we get people back home?

And who are the people who return and who are the people who are unable to return?

How fast can we get money to those people?

How much money will they get?

Where is that money coming from?

Whether it's the federal government, state government, insurance, private aid, charity.

Who are the victims?

I mean, I think that's an important question too.

We have been shorthanding this as Houston.

I have done this a bunch.

But there are a lot of people outside of Houston who are very much suffering from this as well, who are liable to be lost simply because they're not in a big city.

Who's in charge of the recovery?

Again, whether that's the state government or local government or the federal government or outside organizations.

What are going to be the long-term health effects of this storm?

And also, what will it really cost?

We've got a lot of speculation about whether this could be the most expensive storm in U.S.

history, but there's so much we still don't know about what it will cost and where it will come in on those charts.

So let's start with the victims.

When you say, who are the victims, what do you mean by that?

My friend Jacob Remus, who's a disaster historian, likes to say that disasters are social.

So who gets hurt worst by storms is really defined by a lot about society and the way that we structure things.

And also who ends up getting the attention.

So part of that is, again, if you're in a major city, you get a lot of attention.

When we think about Katrina now, we think about New Orleans.

We We don't necessarily think about the rest of the Gulf Coast, which also was brutally hit by the storm.

Then the question is, when we take care of people after the storm, who gets taken care of?

People who have private insurance and are able to get money from corporations that are paid to insure them tend to be helped a lot faster than people who are depending on the government.

In past hurricanes, for example, public housing has not been rebuilt quickly at all.

It has taken years to get these things, get public housing rebuilt.

Where are all those people living in the meantime?

They've got to be living somewhere.

So those are the sort of things.

When I say who are the victims, it's about who we decide to prioritize in the recovery efforts.

You also talked about the speed at which we can get those victims made whole, or even partial, I guess.

What can we learn from past disasters on that front?

What is this likely to look like for the victims a year from now?

Aaron Powell,

I think a lot about Katrina and the housing situation.

The FEMA trailers became sort of a shorthand for how bad the government response was to Katrina.

But that's a good question.

When can people get back in their homes?

Can they get back in the same homes?

Do they have to be moved elsewhere?

How fast are insurance claims being handled?

Then there's some questions about the quality of insurance claims.

After Hurricane Sandy, for example, there are a lot of errors in the claims that were put in.

The federal government had to reopen thousands thousands of them to readjust them.

That takes time.

And it also, the decisions decide who gets made more whole and who gets made less whole.

Aaron Powell, tell me a little bit about how

we think about estimating costs in a situation like this.

Well, we have to deal with both the questions of how we are feeding and clothing and sheltering these people so there are these direct costs.

We have the question of getting them back in homes homes or building new homes for them.

We have lost economic productivity, especially in a major city like Houston that's an economic engine.

We have people who have lost their jobs from this, so they are, you know, people are going to need government assistance in the form of unemployment for reasons they would not have had to get it without this storm.

So it affects people both on the sort of basic pocketbook level and also at the governmental level.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, one of the things that you mentioned was coordination, was officials working together rather than at cross-purposes.

When has that been an issue?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So disasters like this are always just much larger than any single government entity can take care of.

They're bigger than the federal government.

They're just much too wide for that.

And so

the extent to which officials at every level are working together really makes a lot of difference.

I would say the initial signs on Harvey were a little bit

a little bit rattling.

We saw before the storm-made landfall a disagreement between Houston officials who were telling people that they should stay in their homes and the governor of Texas who was encouraging people to evacuate.

And when you have that kind of lack of coordination, people don't know what to do.

So some people try to leave, others don't.

That's a problem.

The question is whether or not they can work together well on the back end now to make sure that aid is moving efficiently and that everybody is getting the aid they need and you don't have disagreements.

You don't have sort of political fiefdoms fighting over who gets to disperse aid or hold on to the money that comes through.

Aaron Powell

Sometimes when we talk about disaster recovery, it can sound as though there is a plan that everyone agrees on and that officials just need to execute that plan at the fastest speed possible.

But I get the sense that that's not actually the way it works, that officials actually have a lot of different decisions to make and they're choosing among a number of options.

Which of those options or which of those decisions are you watching?

Aaron Powell, yeah, every storm is so different, so there's no obvious checklist you can follow.

And we learn new things from these storms.

You know, the data set of superstorms is relatively small, and so there's a sort of new set of lessons we get every time.

For example, when we're talking about people whose homes were destroyed or badly damaged by this, there are a couple options.

One is the government can come in, give them money to rebuild things as they were, and return to some sort of normal.

And I think that's a temptation that's very strong.

We want to get people back in their homes.

We imagine what we would want, and I think that often is we want to return things to the way they were.

But one question is: does it make sense to send people back to these homes?

What we see is, you know, Houston has flooded repeatedly over the recent years.

This is obviously much worse.

But maybe we should be thinking about whether we want to send people back to the same places or if we want to help them to move somewhere else that's going to be less flood-prone.

So you've got decisions like that to make.

This is a really interesting case of a major disaster hitting one of the biggest cities in the country.

And we don't have a whole ton of experience with that, but there there are cities that are vulnerable.

I'm interested to see what lessons we can take away from this storm, both from the storm itself and then from the recovery, about what happens if and when a major disaster strikes another major city.

Disaster planners are particularly concerned about Miami as being a place that's very vulnerable to a hurricane.

They're concerned about New York,

which as badly as it was hit by Sandy.

Sandy wasn't even a hurricane when it made landfall in New York City.

It could easily be hit by something else.

Houston could be hit again.

So, what we need to figure out is what it's like for a major city to go through this and how we can make major cities more resilient and more prepared.

Aaron Powell, if you could sit down with someone from the future who knew how this all played out, what would you most want to know from them?

Aaron Powell, in one year, I want to know how many people have returned to their homes or to new homes.

Basically, has Houston changed in size?

You know, we know that New Orleans shrank a bunch after Katrina.

What will happen to the city of Houston?

Is it the same?

Will Houston change the way it develops?

We've heard repeatedly in the days since the storm about how Houston has no zoning.

Is that something that will change?

Where will the money come from and how much will we end up actually spending?

And particularly, the national flood insurance program.

How much money will it spend?

Will Congress reauthorize it?

And under what conditions?

It's due to expire very soon.

Private insurers won't insure in a lot of these cases because they think the risk is too high.

And then I'm really curious about some cultural questions that I think are a little bit vaguer, but a city's character can really change after a storm like this or another natural disaster.

I think about how San Francisco changed after the earthquake.

I think about how New Orleans has changed since Katrina.

And I'm curious to see whether Houston is a different city in terms of demographics, you know, how the school system changes.

There are any number of these cultural questions that I think I want to know what the city looks like

in its character.

David, these are valuable questions, and I hope that we can keep them in view after the cameras leave Houston.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

Right now, we're in the studio in Washington, D.C., but I wanted to get a hold of someone who is actually in the Houston area.

So I set up a phone call with my cousin, Sadia Solomon Turney.

She lives in Parlin, Texas, about 10 miles south of the city.

We had a conversation about what she's seen these past few days.

Hello, Sadia.

Hello, Matt.

How are you?

I'm good.

How are you?

I'm good.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for calling.

No problem.

I wanted to talk because you live in the Houston area.

How long have you been there?

Since 2006.

So more than a decade.

How is your house, your neighborhood, what is its circumstance right now?

We are all clear.

So I live in Parland, which is about 10 miles south of Houston.

And the highway that connects where I live, my city, to Houston was completely underwater.

So we were really like as a city, an island.

We could not get into Houston.

But my subdivision, I don't know of anyone that had flooding in their homes.

But it's crazy because you could hear the rescue helicopters.

just around the corner, like the subdivision next to us rescuing people from their homes.

My neighbor across the street, he went out on his boat and he was saying that the neighborhood behind us had water up to their chest and he was pulling people out of their

out of their homes.

So

I mean, we were fine.

We're completely okay.

I mean, there was a little flooding, but nothing that we couldn't even drive our cars out in.

But you could be less than a mile down the road in a neighborhood where people were stuck and being evacuated.

And like I said, I think I relate to a lot of

the families that are struggling in terms of I'm in go mode.

Right.

You know, like I'm getting what needs to be done.

I'm helping people get feel as comfortable as possible.

But there are moments where if you stop moving long enough, you realize the gravity of everything that's going around and the emotions hit you.

You know, and there's I think I posted on Facebook,

I had a huge

thing, cart full of supplies yesterday.

Basically, the church had sent me all the money from the congregation that had donated so that I could go and buy supplies for one of the other local churches that turned into a distribution center because my church was underwater, which is another just craziness that our church is underwater, but people are still pouring out to this other church that's helping people.

So

I was in Sam's Club getting all of the supplies together, and I was about to check out, and this woman walked up to me, and she's like, these look like they're supplies for people.

Please take this and add it to it.

And she just handed me money.

So those are the moments where you know it hits you.

Yeah.

We're still just at the beginning stages of this, and the months, maybe even years ahead, are going to involve a lot of heartache and headache for a lot of people.

So, right now, as you think about the past few days, what from this past week do you not want to lose sight of?

I think we're all

in general,

I think we kind of

focus on what affects us only

as humans.

And so sometimes there's a lot of that feeling of we're separate.

You know, this is your issue.

This is your issue.

What I don't want to lose sight on right now is that across the board, this has affected everyone in some way, shape, or form.

So we are all kind of on a,

it feels like we're all on an even

playing field, that everybody is kind of in this collective group.

And there's so much

just kind of unity and love in the atmosphere that there's no time to notice what our differences are.

Like there's no political agenda.

There's no feel of like racial separation or even like socioeconomic separation.

You know, you could

live in the nicest neighborhoods in Houston or the poorest neighborhoods in Houston.

If your house is flooded, then you need help.

Yeah.

So

that I don't want to lose sight of, that, you know, just the humanity that we truly are, when you get rid of all of our stuff, we are really all

the same.

Yeah.

And you feel that.

You sense that.

Well, I'm so glad that you are safe and that your home is okay and that your family is okay.

And I hope that you take care of yourself and it is wonderful to talk to you.

Love you, Saad.

Love you too.

Take care.

You too.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

This special bonus episode of Radio Atlantic was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend.

In next week's episode, I'll be rejoined by my co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg, while Alex Wagner goes gallivanting.

Thank you to David Graham for joining me in the studio and to my cousin Sadia.

It's so good to hear she's doing okay.

My thoughts are with the folks who are still struggling through this disaster.

The theme music for our podcast is by the one and only John Batiste.

As always, look for us at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

And if you like what you're hearing, please don't forget to rate and review us in iTunes and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Thank you once again for listening.

See you next week.