Emergency responders struggle with burnout, budgets as disasters mount – The Mercury News

David Montgomery | Stateline.org (TNS)

AUSTIN, Texas — Four days after residents of coastal Houston celebrated the Fourth of July with the traditional parades, backyard barbecues and fireworks, Beryl came calling.

The Category 1 hurricane, weakened from an earlier Category 5, slammed into Texas’ largest city on July 8 — an unusual midsummer arrival. Delivering one of the worst direct hits on Houston in decades, Beryl flooded streets, ripped down trees and left thousands without power, causing multiple heat-related deaths during a period of triple-digit temperatures.

Superlatives like “worst,” “biggest” and “most” increasingly sprinkle news accounts in disaster coverage. Even as residents of Houston deal with Beryl’s lingering impact, farmers and ranchers in the Texas Panhandle are still trying to recover from the largest recorded wildfire in the state’s history, a February inferno that consumed more than a million acres of land, an estimated 138 homes and businesses, and more than 15,000 head of cattle. Three area residents were killed.

Climate change has rewritten the script for disasters, leaving communities vulnerable to weather patterns that don’t abide by schedules or the rules of past behavior. As a result, hundreds of thousands of emergency responders are facing unprecedented challenges —from burnout to post-traumatic stress disorder to tighter budgets — as they battle hurricanes, windstorms, wildfires, floods and other natural disasters that are more frequent and intense than those in the past.

“Everybody’s strapped,” said Russell Strickland, Maryland’s secretary of emergency management, who also serves as president of the National Emergency Management Association, or NEMA, the professional group for state emergency management directors.

Agencies are grappling with “stagnant budgets and staff shortages” at a time when they need more money and people to deal with disasters and confront other demands, Strickland said. In the 1980s, states averaged just over three $1 billion weather disasters a year in cost-adjusted dollars, according to the association. In each of the past three years, the average has been 20. Last year, the nation was hammered by a record 28 of those billion-dollar catastrophes.

In a 2023 white paper, NEMA reported that “the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing number of back-to-back disasters have resulted in disaster fatigue and burnout.” It also reported that current funding levels for most emergency management agencies are “wholly inadequate to address the types of events that states are experiencing along with expanding mission areas.”

The nation’s disaster response system is a massive multilevel network that includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is charged with dispatching hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to battered states and communities, and counterpart state disaster agencies that advise or report to the governor. County and city governments also operate disaster and homeland security units.

Disaster officials throughout the country acknowledged that natural disasters such as wildfires, tornadoes and floods have increased and intensified as a result of climate change. Moreover, disaster agencies are being tasked with nontraditional assignments such as cybersecurity, opioid addiction, homelessness and school safety.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report published in May of last year said that state demands for FEMA assistance have “increased with more frequent and complex disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic” but that “FEMA has had trouble building a workforce to meet these needs.”

Budgets for state emergency management are funded by state legislatures and vary widely. The biggest states allocate a half-billion dollars while the smallest set aside closer to a half-million, according to a NEMA examination of state emergency management budgets.

California’s emergency management unit, attached to the governor’s office with nearly 2,000 employees, had the largest budget as of the 2022 fiscal year, with more than $530 million, according to the NEMA report. California is the nation’s largest state with 39 million people. By contrast, Vermont, which has less than a million people, had a fiscal year 2022 budget of $650,000 to fund 34 emergency management personnel, according to NEMA.

Texas, whose emergency management division teams works with the governor’s office and is based in the Texas A&M University System, had one of the largest budgets, $33.5 million to fund close to 500 employees, as of the 2022 fiscal year.

State emergency management agencies, which also receive money from the federal government, including FEMA, constitute the central nerve center during major disasters, typically working from a strategically located emergency operations center that includes representatives from various other agencies. Real-time information begins pouring in hours before the crisis, resulting in an all-points response that ultimately encompasses legions of state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, EMS, firefighters, relief agencies and a long list of other responders.

Heavier strain on emergency workers

As he took a late-morning break from battling a recent 11-acre brush and grass fire near Smithville, a small town about 50 miles southeast of Austin, 36-year-old state firefighter Billy Leathers reflected on his 18-year career with the Texas A&M Forest Service, which helps local fire departments fight outdoor blazes. A charred grassy hillside stretched behind him.

Leathers is a third-generation firefighter who followed his parents and grandfather into the job.

“That’s the only one that I found that I liked,” he said of being a firefighter, adding that he and his co-workers “wouldn’t do it if we didn’t like helping people.” But he acknowledges that the increasing pace “does kind of start to run you a little bit ragged towards the middle of the season.”