The people behind America’s disaster recovery

When a disaster strikes, be it a hurricane, flood, wildfire, or other type of extreme weather, an army of workers assemble. They arrive in waves to ravaged areas ready to respond. 

First in are the personnel trained to navigate the immediate crisis. Emergency managers run local shelters and coordinate on-the-ground response efforts, medics provide urgent medical care for those in need, and police, firefighters, and other public safety workers conduct search and rescue. Next, the skilled tradespeople show up, ready to restore and repair. Crews of utility linemen reconnect downed power lines, wastewater technicians fix damaged sewage infrastructure, and debris removal workers clear blocked roads and waterways. 

Relief workers representing federal agencies, nonprofits, and humanitarian groups set up services to provide things like shelter, food, and water. And then there are crisis counselors, animal rescue units, hazmat crews, contractors, environmental scientists, and many others. 

A legion of essential jobs contribute to America’s disaster workforce. As the world burns, floods, and melts around us, those jobs — and the people who do them — have never been more important.

Grist talked with more than a dozen people spread out across the United States who have worked on the ground following catastrophic disasters. We asked them to tell us about their jobs, why they do what they do, and what they’ve learned responding to extreme weather events.

These workers are just a small sample of those who make up the backbone of America’s disaster workforce. Their stories spotlight the many different roles and needs within the labor economy built on extreme weather.

Immediate Relief

Emergency manager

Name: Corey Amundsen

Title: Emergency manager

Location: Highlands County, Florida

What do they do? Lead a community’s preparedness and immediate response to natural disasters and other emergencies.

Last October, hours before Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida, the Highlands County Emergency Management operations center was abuzz with tension. Staffers, first responders, and volunteers huddled around a large television broadcasting the weather radar. Their eyes were glued to the screen when tornado warnings blared on roughly 60 phones all at once.

The tornadoes were developing on the outer bands of the Category 4 storm, sending county emergency manager Corey Amundsen and his team into a mad dash. They raced to open last-minute shelters, conduct search and rescue operations, and warn community members to stay off roads. A total of 14 warnings were issued for the county; seven tornadoes touched down. 

“We could actually see the debris balls from the tornadoes. I’ve got goose bumps now thinking about it,” said Amundsen. “We always hear tornadoes are possible in a hurricane,” but, he continued, “we weren’t expecting the amount of tornadoes. We actually had never seen that before.” 

This hurricane season, Amundsen has implemented some new rules: His team is now mandated to begin ramping up operations at least 96 hours before a hurricane is expected to make landfall — up from 72 hours — to take into account the risk of pre-storm tornadoes. Amundsen has also since created step-by-step instructions on how to identify the safest locations for shelters amid tornado warnings and inform county residents where to go that’s out of the path of the storm.

“I’m one person,” he said. “When we go under a local state of emergency, I’m the guy who is supposed to have a plan for everything. I’m supposed to know everything, and I’m supposed to know what to do, how to do it, where to get it. It’s a lot of stress.” Amundsen has worked as an emergency manager for three years now, after seven years spent as a paramedic. “You have to be able to handle the worst possible stress you can without showing it to everyone else. If I look scared and I’m freaking out, then everyone is just going to follow suit, and then you’re going to have pure chaos.”

First responder and firefighter

Name: Chris Westveer

Title: Volunteer firefighter

Location: Spruce Pine, North Carolina

What do they do? Everything from conducting search and rescue to providing first aid to mitigating hazards and clearing blocked roads of debris.

In the nearly 40 years he’s been a volunteer firefighter in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, Chris Westveer has responded to every type of call imaginable. Fires, medical cases, hazmat incidents, car wrecks, floods. Westveer says the town’s volunteer-run fire station is “basically an all-hazards department.” 

In all that time, though, nothing has ever come close to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene in 2024, which maintained remarkable force by the time it reached North Carolina. “We weren’t caught off guard by its arrival,” he said. “We were caught off guard by how bad it was.” 

It was 1:30 a.m. when Westveer was first called in to respond. The historic storm was in the process of dumping more than 2 feet of rain on Spruce Pine, washing out roads, toppling trees, destroying homes and businesses, and cutting power and water service. For the next few days, the tiny mountain community was isolated from the outside world, and Westveer worked nonstop. 

The bulk of that period was spent in rescue mode: He pulled people out of homes damaged by mudslides or trees, and helped paramedics save someone having a seizure during the storm. He then focused on trying to clear blocked roadways and beginning to assess the unbelievable damage. “There are literally hundreds of moments that will be, unfortunately, forever etched in my mind,” said Westveer. “Dealing with people that have either lost loved ones or lost their entire belongings, or houses gone — it was a complete gamut of emotions every day.” 

The experience prompted Westveer’s department to make significant changes to how seriously it takes hurricane forecasts and how it responds in the storms’ aftermath. Before Helene, not even Westveer had an at-home hurricane preparedness plan. Now, everyone does, and his department has spent the last year investing in updated equipment and resources, including generators for the stations, as well as new brush trucks and four-wheel drive engines to expand their ability to respond.  They’ve also supported other public safety departments in the Spruce Pine community that have hosted trainings on how to develop emergency evacuation plans, how to fortify homes and businesses, and what should go into disaster kits, among other things. Those plans are now ready to be put to the test this storm season. 

“This year, we’re very vigilant,” he said. “I mean, every time I hear of a storm approaching, I’m watching the news.”

Emergency food worker

Name: Samantha Elfmont

Title: Global response director at World Central Kitchen

Location: Guatemala City, Guatemala

What do they do? Distribute food and water resources to communities reeling from a disaster.  

In the wake of the July 4 floods in Texas, no two days were the same for Samantha Elfmont. She works as the global response director for the nonprofit World Central Kitchen and arrived in Hunt, Texas, the day after the disaster struck. She immediately jumped into project management mode. She directed mobile units on what to do and where to go; connected with local food banks, chefs, and restaurants for supplies; and communicated with her teams around the world. She spent almost three weeks feeding communities in Hill Country after the floods.

Every morning, she rolled out of bed around 5 a.m. and immediately checked her phone to catch up on any messages she missed from colleagues based around the world during the few hours she was able to sleep.

When Elmont is deployed somewhere, her job is to coordinate whatever resources are needed to make sure people are fed. In Texas, that meant much of her time was spent communicating with vendors and local chefs and ordering thousands of meals that she and her team handed out everyday, all while traveling around the hardest-hit areas to hand out lunches and talk with survivors and first responders. “For me, it’s always that bigger picture: What is our transition plan? Have we worked with the community to see what else they need?” said Elfmont. They also distributed grocery store gift cards for survivors who lost their homes, community members who had lost jobs because their workplaces were destroyed, and volunteer first responders who hadn’t been paid. 

As someone who has worked in the humanitarian aid sector for over a decade, Elfmont says her biggest takeaway is that “you just cannot predict anything.” And as the frequency of disasters escalates because of climate change, so does the need for food in moments of emergency. But in those moments, Elfmont said, “It doesn’t matter where it is in the world. What matters is when people need food, and they don’t have access to food.”

Wastewater systems mechanic

Name: Cricket Logan

Title: Wastewater management mechanic

Location: St. Petersburg, Florida

What do they do? Keep sewage systems running before, during, and after a disaster, containing spills, and repair a community’s damaged wastewater infrastructure. 

Cricket Logan has worked for the city of St. Petersburg, Florida, for 21 years as a wastewater management mechanic. Logan is almost always in motion — identifying where the problems are in his assigned section of the plant that cleans St. Pete’s water, removing debris from pipes using high-pressure fluids, and racing to weld makeshift replacements while figuring out the best possible plans for repairs. “Most of it is straightforward mechanical work,” he said. 

Logan’s facility is the only wastewater treatment plant in the city that handles solids. If it goes down, the city’s sewage pipes back up. Logan said it “really doesn’t take near as long as you think” before that sewage begins spilling out into homes and streets. 

That’s why, every storm season, Logan and his colleagues are on call before, during, and after hurricanes, while most other residents are hunkered down. Come June, Logan knows he needs to stash about a week’s worth of food and clothes in his locker in preparation. “It’s part of my job,” said Logan, “we’re considered ‘emergency essential.’”

Not much about working in hurricane response had ever rattled Logan — until Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the same stretch of St. Petersburg just weeks apart last fall. The night Helene touched down, Logan’s crew was instructed to leave. “For the first time I’m aware of, in probably 50, 60, 70 years, we shut down the entire plant completely and jumped in our work trucks and drove downtown [to shelter],” he said. “And then at three in the morning, they came in and said, ‘Get back out there.’” The hurricane was still raging on as he rushed back into work.

With the crew off duty, the wastewater systems had failed. Untreated sewage overflowed from dozens of manholes throughout the city and seeped into homes. Residents in some sections of the city were advised not to flush toilets or drain sinks for at least 48 hours after the storm to prevent more backups. “We’re really in a moment that nobody has seen,” he said.

Federal response worker

Name: Sue Anne Bell

Title: Emergency responder for the U.S. Disaster Medical Assistance Team

Location: Ann Harbor, Michigan

What do they do? Provide services such as medical care in areas affected by major disasters.

It was late September 2017, and Hurricane Maria had just lashed Puerto Rico, causing devastating damage to the archipelago, including its hospital infrastructure. As a member of the U.S. Disaster Medical Assistance Team, a subsidiary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Sue Anne Bell was deployed to San Juan, where she spent six weeks providing emergency medical care. Every night, she’d treat up to 80 patients in the tents of a field hospital. 

Many patients just needed medication refills. Others needed help with physical injuries caused during the storm or cleanup. Then there was the treatment for conditions likely triggered by the trauma of the hurricane and limited food resources available, such as high blood pressure and diabetes. 

Underlying it all was resource strain. Three weeks after Maria roared through Puerto Rico’s main island, a young child and their mom showed up to Bell’s emergency center tent. The child was experiencing a serious asthma attack. Bell and her team didn’t have the facilities to help them. The few hospitals that hadn’t been damaged by the storm denied their requests to transfer the patient because they were under-resourced and understaffed. “I just remember thinking, ‘What will we do if this child’s condition worsens?’” she said. 

Bell remembers spending 10 or so hours monitoring the child’s dangerously deteriorating condition in the tent, repeatedly calling hospital after hospital. Finally, they lucked out when one a few miles away agreed to take them. 

It’s a situation Bell finds over and over in the field. In the wake of disasters, local hospitals and clinics are quickly overwhelmed. Issues like a lack of power or water send droves of patients to field hospitals that may lack adequate tools or resources to help people. “These other hospitals were saying, ‘We can’t safely care for this patient.’ We’re saying, ‘We can’t safely care for this patient,’” she said. “And so we had to work out, ‘Where can they get the best care they can? And how do we make that decision?’”

Medical specialist

Name: Mary Mitchell

Title: Nurse and hospital clinical systems manager

Location: Sarasota, Florida

What do they do? Help to treat and intake injured people before, during, and after an extreme weather event.

After 35 years as a registered nurse and hospital manager in Sarasota, Florida, Mary Mitchell is no stranger to hurricane response and recovery. Mitchell has lived and worked through dozens of major storms, and in time, she developed a routine for when a hurricane approaches: Walk her team through the hospital’s disaster preparedness checklist, make sure everyone has a personal evacuation plan, prepare backup copies of patient medical records in case of power loss, and pack an overnight bag in case she needs to stay long-term at the hospital. 

But when Hurricane Ian barreled through southwestern Florida on September 28, 2022, her regular disaster playbook was thrown out.

The morning after the Category 4 storm hit, killing at least 148 people, Mitchell drove to a disaster response zone assembling outside of a local hospital to handle the large number of patients needing medical care after the storm. She spent four days supporting the work being done in the mobile medical tent, figuring out care logistics, technical and operational necessities, and helping medical staff. 

Mitchell vividly remembers seeing “dazed looks” on the faces of those who stopped by the tent for care. “They were pale, and you could tell they were exhausted,” she said. Many of them, mostly elderly, were covered in wounds inflicted by Ian. Others were visibly dehydrated. She couldn’t help but wonder if they had family there to help them, or if they had any neighbors or friends who were aware they had been hurt. “You’re hearing these stories. You’re seeing these patients,” said Mitchell. “Everybody was affected.”

Utility lineman

Name: Zach Wood

Title: Journeyman lineman

Location: El Dorado, Arkansas

What do they do? Fix power lines, transformers, and other parts of the grid to restore electricity for a community.

Zach Wood has worked as a lineman for about a decade, installing and repairing power lines for a number of utility companies across the country. The danger and physical risk is a big downside of the job, he said, but the demand and pay has been growing rapidly in recent years as the planet warms and climate disasters get worse. “The more intense and more frequent storms definitely work out well for linemen. We’re making more money every year that the weather gets crazier,” said Wood.

Last year, Wood took a new approach: He did what he calls “storm chasing.” He moved from job to job on short contracts based on the weather, showing up after everything from hurricanes to winter storms in more than seven states. The days were long and brutal — Wood worked 16-hour shifts on average. He dug holes, reset downed power lines, shimmied up poles, and cleared debris that had fallen on wires. “In a storm, the goal is to get everybody’s lights back on … as fast as we can,” he said. “But I’ve seen many people get hurt and injured because they are moving too fast.”

For someone like Wood, who gets paid more when the damage is worse, it’s easy to feel somewhat conflicted about the progression of climate change. “We know that hurricanes damage people’s lives and stuff, but it’s our livelihood,” he said. “So we’re sitting here, like, rooting for it to turn into a Category 5 and really tear some stuff up, because we’ll get two months of storm pay out of it, which sounds heartless and mean, but … it’s our paycheck. It’s like the funeral business.”

Rebuilding and Recovery

Debris removal crew

Name: Jon Stamper

Title: River cleanup coordinator

Location: Asheville, North Carolina

What do they do? Remove debris like downed trees, trash, and build materials scattered across the landscape by the storm.

When Hurricane Helene tore through Asheville, North Carolina, last September, it dispersed millions of pounds of debris throughout one of the world’s oldest rivers. The French Broad River was “absolutely demolished,” said Jon Stamper — so much so that it prompted the local nonprofit MountainTrue to create his job as a post-Helene river cleanup coordinator. 

“It’s really hard for me to describe the scale of the devastation here,” he said. Everything from trees to whole houses was swallowed up by the storm’s high-velocity floods. “It’s photos, it’s trophies, it’s Grandma’s plate set, it’s stuffed animals, it’s toys and playground equipment. I mean, it’s just anything that you could ever think of that existed somewhere in a town, in a home, in a community, or in a factory.” 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and private contractors removed most of the large-scale debris, like houses and cars, from the waterways they littered. That left the rest to local crews like Stamper’s. 

On December 4, just a few days on the job, Stamper hosted his first organized cleanup of the watershed. With a donated SUV and a dump trailer, Stamper and 25 volunteers began the grueling work of clearing a sliver of French Broad River by hand. “There are islands on the river that have apartment-sized debris jams, logs, and intertwined PVC pipe that we’re actually out there cutting out,” said Stamper. 

Since that first cleanup, his team has removed what Stamper estimates to be 800,000 pounds of debris. The job is a new direction for him: Stamper is a combat veteran of the war in Afghanistan and served in the U.S. Marine Corps. He says he “found his home on the river” after struggling upon returning from military service. His goal is now to protect those places. “This is really hard, tedious work, picking up trash,” he said. “It’s also emotionally taxing. We’re talking about picking up people’s lives. There is no playbook for this.”

Disaster response expert

Name: Jorge Vera

Title: Former director of emergency services at the American Red Cross

Location: Gainesville, Florida

What do they do? Provide everything from short- and long-term housing to medical care and resources to help survivors access government aid. 

Jorge Vera was a 34-year-old disaster specialist for the American Red Cross when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida on August 24, 1992. Within 48 hours, he was boarding a military airplane to Miami. When he landed, the scene took his breath away. 

“It looked like a bomb had dropped,” he said. “Miami was literally devastated. All of the basic infrastructure in the community was gone. It was chaos.” 

For Vera, the next three weeks were a blur. People needed food, medical attention, and a secure place to sleep. Vera’s job was to set up Red Cross shelters equipped to provide all of that and more. 

“You have a plan A, plan B, plan C, and then try to sort out which is the better one at the time you respond,” he said. “There’s nothing romantic about it. There’s no room to kind of check yourself, or go, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ Or, ‘What am I doing?’ It’s just go, go, go, go. There’s no time, whatsoever.” 

While still working to respond to Andrew, Vera was hired to lead emergency services as a director for the Red Cross in Miami and the Florida Keys. Though he “fell” into the career, in part incentivized by the Red Cross’ tuition reimbursement program, which paid for him to go to college, he ended up working for the organization’s disaster response outfit for nearly a decade. 

“The rhythm of the work, and the mission of the work … it appealed to my sense of service,” said Vera. “You find things out about humanity. The best and the worst comes out at times of disasters.”

As the planet warms, and disasters grow in frequency and severity, Vera sees the demand for this type of position growing, too. Back in the ‘90s, when he was responding to Andrew, climate change wasn’t being discussed in the world of disaster relief, he says. That’s no longer the case. “Climate change is changing everything, everything — the world as we know it,” he said. “We already see it.”

Crisis counselor

Name: Priscilla Dass-Brailsford

Title: Trauma psychologist at Georgetown University’s department of psychiatry

Location: Washington, D.C.

What do they do? Provide emotional and psychological health assistance to disaster survivors.

Priscilla Dass-Brailsford was just four years into her career as a trauma psychologist when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. The floodwaters hadn’t yet begun to recede when she got a call from someone at the Medical Reserve Corps asking if she would travel to Lafayette, Louisiana, to serve as a disaster mental health responder. She boarded a plane from D.C. and landed in a city entirely torn apart by the cataclysmic storm. 

For two weeks, Dass-Brailsford helped run a triage mental health clinic in a football arena in Lafayette. She worked shifts at a folding table with a handwritten sign taped to it: “MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.” The line never seemed to end. Dass-Brailford consoled one person who heard from a neighbor that their missing father “had been seen on the dock with a tag on his toe.” She listened to children who just wanted to go home, but had nowhere to return to. 

At night, Dass-Brailsford slept in one of the arena’s stadium box rooms alongside dozens of other volunteers.

Crisis counseling looks different for everyone, she said. With one grief-stricken 8-year-old girl, for instance, Dass-Brailsford’s session didn’t require much talking at all. They simply sat, side-by-side, coloring with crayons — a bubble of peace in a space otherwise marked by mayhem. 

It wasn’t long before they attracted other kids, who asked if they could color, too. She told them to first ask the little girl if it was okay. “The child had lost all her sense of power. That’s what disasters do. They make you helpless,” said Dass-Brailsford. By the time they finished coloring, some 20 minutes or so later, the girl was beaming. 

“People go through traumas and they get resilient,” she said. “Watching them come through something horrific and get to the other side, it gives me tremendous purpose.” A year later, Dass-Brailsford would help launch a mental health walk-in clinic in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Katrina “had such an impact on me professionally and personally,” she said. She continues to work with disaster survivors in her private practice, and has since published journal articles and books about her experiences counseling in the aftermath of Katrina.

Hazmat manager

Name: Shannon Vanella

Title: Waste management and hazmat unit manager

Location: Siskiyou County, California

What do they do? Identify and secure contaminated areas, removing and disposing of the toxic waste, and overseeing environmental remediation of an affected site. 

In the summer of 2022, the McKinney and Mill fires burned more than 64,000 acres in northern California over nearly two months. When the blazes were snuffed out, six people had been killed and more than 400 structures damaged. 

In the months that followed, Shannon Vanella spent each work day outfitted in a hard hat, safety shoes, and other protective clothing, visiting every single parcel of burned land. When a property is incinerated, it leaves remnants of everything that once made that structure a home, from polyester furniture fabric to plastic tupperware to car batteries to solar panels. Vanella’s job with Siskiyou County’s waste management department is to make sure that she and her crew find all leftover hazardous debris and dispose of it correctly. They then test the soil for toxins. 

Throughout the process, she’s the person who talks with property owners, gets them to sign the paperwork needed for waste removal, answers questions, and keeps them posted on the crew’s progress. She also produces technical reports documenting each inspection. 

“We all have the right to live on clean ground and have clean water and air,” said Vanella. “I can at least make sure that there’s not any heavy metals in somebody’s soil and that the river they live beside isn’t getting runoff from all of the debris.”

Right after the McKinney and Mill fires, there was a local meeting to help fire victims understand available relief and recovery services. While Vanella was there, she ended up in conversation with an older man, who had worked as a firefighter before he retired. “He said, ‘I realize that the place I grew up in will never look the same in my lifetime, and I don’t know if I can live here anymore,’” she recalled. “Then he put his head down in his arm, and he just started sobbing. It was just all I could do to hold it together.” The experience informed how she has since handled communicating with the people in her line of work. 

“Whenever you’re working with survivors like that … they don’t process information the same, and they don’t remember things that you’ve said to them,” she said. “You just have to be really patient and give them the time. It’s not the easiest thing to allow the government on your property to scrape up every belonging you ever had and throw it in a trash can.”

Animal rescue

Name: Christen Skaer

Title: Veterinarian and co-founder of the Sedgwick County Animal Response Team and Kansas Animal Response Team

Location: Wichita, Kansas

What do they do? Locate displaced and injured animals post-disaster, provide medical care and lodging for affected pets and livestock.

On a Friday night in May 2007, a tornado with wind speeds over 200 miles per hour tore through Greensburg, Kansas. It was one of 22 that developed in the area in the span of five hours. 

After seeing the devastation on the news the next morning, veterinarian Christen Skaer, who lived several hours away in Wichita, called the town’s animal control department and asked if it had a plan for affected animals. It didn’t, the person on the line told her, and the city could use all the help it could get, so Skaer sent out an unofficial SOS to her local network of vets and then hit the road. 

What she found was appalling. “There were horses with [pieces of] two-by-fours sticking out of their sides. Cats with eyeballs hanging out. There were lots and lots of wounds,” said Skaer. First responders had simply been scooping up wandering dogs and cats and moving them out of the disaster zone. Some animals were literally dropped onto the other side of a fence, just to be moved out of the way. 

So Skaer and her volunteer team improvised a response plan. Their top priority was to care for the animals in direst need and treat the ones they could. 

Later, they began the onerous process of trying to reunite farm animals and pets with their owners. They posted announcements on social media and in local vet networks. Some people attempted to falsely claim animals — Skaer says this brand of “pet theft” unfortunately tends to happen after disaster events — and in the frenzy, she noted, many animals “just disappeared.” So they began asking for vet records and photos of the animal, and they tested whether animals responded to owners with familiarity.

In the end, they rescued 350 animals displaced from the tornado. 

“It was a trial by fire,” said Skaer. But their experiences demonstrated the need for formalizing a disaster unit specifically for animals. Two such units were born after the 2007 tornadoes — the Sedgwick County Animal Response and the Kansas Animal Response Team. Skaer volunteers for both, and they still use much of the base response plan they cobbled together all those years ago.

Emergency Manager

Name: Josh Morton

Title: Director of emergency management

Location: Saluda County, South Carolina

What do they do? Lead a community’s preparedness and long-term response to natural disasters and other emergencies.

By 6 a.m., the morning after Hurricane Helene, the severity of the storm’s damage in the region around Saluda County, South Carolina, prompted Josh Morton, the county’s emergency director, to pull all his emergency crews off of the road, with the exception of life safety missions. Thirty minutes later, two firefighters en route to respond to a structural fire were killed after multiple trees fell onto their truck. By 7 a.m., there wasn’t a single passable road left in the county. 

He and his team knew it would be a long recovery process — clearing roads, opening additional shelters, distributing food, water, and fuel.

There was also the near-total loss of all communications technology. “The one thing we didn’t really have a good plan for was how to effectively go back 100 years and get information out without the use of the internet or cellphones,” Morton said. 

In the year since the storm, he and his team have been making plans to be better prepared for the next one. They’ve been printing off pamphlets with information about where to get help, food, or shelter and pasting them on public buildings. Earlier this fall, they also applied for a federal hazard mitigation grant to set up physical communications hubs throughout Saluda County, though they won’t know the outcome of that until next year.“The idea is to have these established sites so that people know, ‘Hey, if there’s a disaster and I can’t get information, here’s where I can go get it,’” said Morton. 

“We just want to make sure that never happens again.”