Hurricane misinformation festers, revealing a new side to the climate fight » Yale Climate Connections

After Hurricane Helene dumped over 20 inches of rain on towns in western North Carolina, emergency response kicked into gear. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, requested a major disaster declaration, which was quickly approved by President Joe Biden, speeding federal funding and help. Search and rescue teams took to the air and water. Linemen rushed in to get the power back up and running. Community aid organizations began collecting and distributing supplies. 

And online, false rumors about the response began to spread. 

The rumors ranged from terrifying conspiracy theories to more banal, but still dangerous, false information about FEMA aid availability. (Editor’s note: We will avoid spreading the conspiracy theories here and encourage you to do the same.) 

Misinformation is not uncommon after a disaster. But as climate change brings more weather disasters to communities across the U.S., could the rampant spread of misinformation harm disaster response and prevent survivors from getting the support they need?

To answer this question and more, we sat down with Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Montano has been pushing back on this misinformation on X in the wake of Helene and is an advocate for emergency management reform. She is also the author of the book “Disasterology: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Change.” 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Yale Climate Connections: Have you noticed a change in misinformation around disaster response and recovery after Hurricane Helene?

Montano: I would say the change is really related to the volume of misinformation. Usually, we see confusion about how to access FEMA aid, what eligibility looks like, what you’re agreeing to when you accept FEMA assistance. So that kind of confusion is normal, but the volume of it is different, and I think also maybe the intention behind some of the spread of misinformation feels much more political than it has in previous disasters.

Yale Climate Connections: What are some of the most common false rumors that you’re reading, and why are they harmful to survivors?

Montano: One that’s really common is that if you agree to accept the $750 from FEMA (that’s just a first wave of funding for your immediate needs), that FEMA can take your house. That is not true, but that potentially has some really significant consequences. If you are seeing that everywhere, and you’re somebody who does need that $750 you might hesitate and say, “Well, I’m gonna go without that. I don’t want to give my house away.” Or even if you hear FEMA is coming and taking people’s houses, that may mean that you stay at your house, even though it’s not habitable, right? And it’s full of mold. That can be really dangerous. 

There’s also been a lot of misinformation about FEMA’s budget and what they spend money on.

There is also another strain that FEMA is stopping supplies from coming in, which is not the case. When a disaster happens, there’s what we call a convergence of help on impacted communities, and a lot of that convergence is in the form of donations of various supplies. And sometimes those supplies are really helpful and useful, and other times they don’t actually meet the needs of the community, or they overwhelm the community. It’s hard to trace the origins of this, but I think one of the things happening there is maybe people are showing up with a car full of in-kind donations and being told by someone, whether they work at FEMA or not, “We don’t need more donations right now, but thank you.” And that’s being kind of twisted into, “FEMA is blocking the roads”

Yale Climate Connections: What does it mean for the recovery effort that so much of this misinformation is spreading?

Montano: Once information gets out there, it’s very hard to correct it. And that is what has happened with Helene. I’m really worried about how that misinformation is going to now spread to the Milton response. 

The piece of this that I’m concerned about is the damage to the relationship between FEMA and survivors. That $750 is just a first wave of funding. There’s still more money that people may be eligible for, up to $42,500, to help repair their houses. I’m worried that if they thought, you know, we shouldn’t take this $750 then now they’re gonna say, we shouldn’t take this $40,000. That piece of it is something that FEMA is going to have to continually address throughout the recovery. Hopefully, local news will continue to help sort fact from fiction for folks.

Yale Climate Connections: What reforms could be done that would help the response effort, and that also might help instill some trust between disaster survivors and emergency management?

Montano: I talk a lot about the need for comprehensive emergency management reform. And what I mean when I say that is that we need to change our whole system at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level, and across all phases of emergency management, from mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. 

There is truly an endless list of things that we could do to make emergency management more effective, efficient, and equitable. Some big changes would be removing FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and making them an independent cabinet-level agency, as they were pre-9/11. This would just make it easier for FEMA to communicate. It would divorce FEMA from this immigration fight that is happening, that they’ve kind of been dragged into, partly because they are within DHS. So it helps protect FEMA in a number of ways and makes them more flexible, brings them more authority and power to navigate the complexities of the federal response. 

At the state and local level, this is true for FEMA too, but especially at the local level, we really need to see increased funding for local emergency management agencies. Many of our agencies across the country only have a part-time emergency manager, which, in the context of the climate crisis, is ludicrous. Every place needs at least one full-time emergency manager, but probably more than that, and we need to see a real investment from local governments into preparing their communities ahead of time. That involves funding emergency management agencies to do that preparedness work ahead of time. 

As for other reforms, I mentioned the complexity of the recovery system. FEMA has made some changes in the past year that hopefully will be helpful, but we’re still not making enough changes. Folks are going through this process of applying for aid, getting denied, having to appeal it, getting denied again, having to appeal again. Nobody has time for it, it’s a strain on FEMA resources, folks are trying to do this as they’re displaced. So there’s a lot of red tape that needs to be cut within FEMA. Some of that is within FEMA’s power to address themselves, but if you’re looking at some bigger changes, like increasing the total amount of money that somebody can receive from FEMA, that’s something that needs to come from Congress. 

When we’re talking about reform, it’s actually really complex, because we need that reform federally, some coming from Congress, some from within FEMA. You need state legislatures to make changes, and you need your local mayor and city council to make changes. All across the country. So this is a huge task that, frankly, we’re barely even talking about, let alone actually taking action on.

Read: Denied FEMA Assistance? You can appeal

Yale Climate Connections: As you look to a future where we’re experiencing more extreme weather disasters, why is it important that misinformation be tackled and why is it important to rebuild trust?

Montano: Trust is just one of the fundamental tools that emergency managers have to be able to do their jobs effectively. Everything about emergency management involves communication, coordination, and collaboration, and all of those things require trust. It’s hard to build trust. That takes work long ahead of the disaster happening. And those relationships can get torn down in a matter of minutes when you’re battling this kind of misinformation, these kinds of conspiracy theories. 

This is one of the biggest challenges for emergency management moving forward. When we do have these instances where trust is broken, what do we do to repair that? It’s a question that I don’t know that we really have an answer to in emergency management. Just to think of an example, the trust between FEMA and the public was absolutely shattered during Katrina in 2005, and in the 19 years since, FEMA has worked really hard to try and earn that trust back. And yet, as we saw in Helene, so many people were evoking Katrina as the example of, “See, they failed us during Katrina, and now they’re failing you.” And again, two very different situations, right? It’s been 19 years, and FEMA has, time and again, proven itself to be a different agency, again, not perfect, I don’t want anybody to think that, but they certainly have done a lot of work. So you can see the longevity of that impact when trust is lost. 

Yale Climate Connections: Is there anything else that you think people should know or should be thinking about right now?

Montano: Everybody always wants to help after a disaster, which is so great. One of the ways that you can really help here, and I think moving forward, is really being super extra careful about what information you are sharing. Know ahead of time: Who are your trusted go-to’s in disasters? What meteorologists do you really trust? What journalists do you really trust? What publications? Having that known ahead of time I think is something we all need to be more conscious of doing. 

I really do think that one way people can help is by calling out misinformation when you see it. Look, I don’t want anybody to get in Twitter fights or anything. But I do think it is important to be speaking up and calling out that misinformation because as many people who are spreading it intentionally or not in good faith, I think many people are sharing it just because they don’t realize it’s misinformation.

Yale Climate Connections: The proliferation of AI-generated images after Helene was wild.

Montano: It’s one of those things where, like, we always have false images that spread during disasters. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Hurricane Shark. I call her Clara Sharkton. That shark picture is everywhere. (Editor’s note: The shark is fake.) So there are always false images. But those were really wild, AI-generated images. That is the signal of where we’re headed. Some amount of time ago, there was an AI video that went around with the Capitol exploding or something. And they caught it quick online to dispel it. But if you were just passing a glance, I mean, it looked real enough. That kind of thing is so terrifying from an emergency management perspective. You’ve seen how difficult it is for us to be able to stomp out a myth about $750, let alone stamp out a myth about whether a disaster has even happened. I do think, as bad as the misinformation has been during Helene, and I’m sure will be during Milton, we’re at the beginning here. This could be much, much, much worse if we do not take immediate action to try and make some kind of structural changes to prevent it.