We Have an Issue: What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Disaster
In this week’s cover story, Lina Fisher examines the looming threats of flood and wildfire
By Kimberley Jones, Fri., May 27, 2022
In this week's cover story, Lina Fisher tackles two very serious threats keeping local emergency planners up at night: wildfire and flood. I asked Lina, a native Austinite who writes frequently about environmental and development issues, about her experience reporting this story.
"I was struck by the omnipresence of the risk, due to climate change and the way the city has been built. It intersects so much with land development code." Lina pointed out that, though code has been written to steer future construction, "a lot of these problems were created in the Eighties," mentioning subdivisions built without evacuation routes in mind, or buildings constructed with flammable materials.
Lina told me the flood component of the story required less work to report – Austin has more experience with flooding, which also means "we have a more robust system in place for that" – but the fire reporting was more labor-intensive, and that her findings there were more dismaying.
Her biggest takeaway? "It's more about preparation than actual response." She encouraged readers to take a look at the city of Austin's "What's My Wildfire Risk?" map (find that interactive map with her story online at austinchronicle.com/news) and consider ways you can make your home and community safer, including becoming a Firewise neighborhood.
A different kind of disaster, an unnatural one, took place Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas, when 19 children lost their lives after a gunman opened fire in their elementary school. There is a poison here. How any sane person could look at this state and this country's epidemic of mass shootings and think the answer is to further loosen gun control laws is beyond me. My heart goes out to the community of Uvalde, and to every parent who knows not even a school or a place of worship can offer safe harbor for their child so long as the gun lobby is steering the moral compass of our elected leaders.
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