The disaster effect – Grist

Hello, and welcome back to state of emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. There is considerable research on the politics of disaster and how extreme weather shapes voter behavior. We have quoted some of them in this newsletter. Today, you’ll hear about that research through a different lens: from a researcher whose career, and life, was upended by one of the deadliest disasters in American history.

In the spring of 2005, Daniel Aldrich was completing his doctorate in Japanese energy politics at Harvard University. That summer, he moved to Louisiana with his wife and two young children and rented a house in New Orleans to start his first ever job in academia at Tulane University. The campus was bustling in late August as students moved into their dorms and teachers prepared for the first day of classes. The last Monday of that month was supposed to be Aldrich’s first day of teaching. He never reached the campus. Hurricane Katrina struck southeastern Louisiana as a Category 4 storm on the morning of August 29, 2005, resulting in more than 1,500 deaths in three southern states and causing $300 billion in damage.

Twelve feet of water turned Aldrich’s home, eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, into a swamp and destroyed everything he owned, including his car. The Aldriches first evacuated to Texas and then moved back to Boston. They didn’t go back to New Orleans for months, until that January. “That’s when we saw the horrors on the ground,” Aldrich said. On the walk from his home in the city to Tulane, little fountains of water shot out of the ground every few steps. The weight of the floodwaters crushed the city’s underground infrastructure. Finding a doctor was almost impossible. Grocery stores were out of stock. Abandoned boats blocked the streets. They didn’t last more than half a year. Aldrich got a job in Massachusetts, and the family went north again. In Boston, Aldrich’s children were tested for lead, a city requirement. Levels of the toxic metal in their blood tripled while they were in New Orleans, where floodwaters and post-hurricane demolition had swirled the lead in the paint coating many of the city’s nearby homes.

Katrina marked a turning point in Aldrich’s life and in his professional trajectory. He would spend the next two and a half decades researching the politics of disaster and disaster resilience, writing three books on the subject and become one of America’s leading disaster resilience experts. And he would soon find that epochal disasters like Katrina—which often represent an individual’s first interactions with the federal government—radicalize. That experience, his research found, can ultimately dictate political preferences and voter behavior.

Most importantly, Aldrich learned that survivors tend to become more civically involved after a disaster: They run for office, start community groups and show up at town meetings. Accustomed to sitting outside the research he was doing, Aldrich realized he had become a data point himself. “Hurricane Katrina destroyed my house, my car and everything I owned,” he said. “For me, it definitely changed my perspective.”

Read my full conversation with Aldrich here.

Follow the money

Researchers in Japan analyzed the effects of disaster relief on the electoral outcomes of the established parties. Decades of data have revealed that electoral goods distributed in response to extreme weather events before elections can lead to statistically significant electoral gains for the party in power. We’re talking about a bump of a few percentage points — 2.8 and 5.4 points for Japan’s lower and upper legislative houses, respectively — but in my conversation with Aldrich, he pointed out that because only a third of eligible voters usually voice, a change of 2 to 5 percent is “a pretty big deal.”

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