Dr. Samantha Montano

FEMA workers pulled from Chicago storm damage surveys because of ICE The decision to halt disaster assessment work came amid the immigration crackdown in Chicago. Officials worried FEMA’s efforts could put residents and surveyors at risk.

👀👀

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

The whole thing is ridiculous. There is no one on that council that I trust.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Is there any research on whether physical or social scientists tend to be more or less “hopeful” about climate action as compared to each other? I have a theory…

Ugh. I suspect I’ve made it just in time.

Smart!

Please send advice about sabbaticals (particularly if you were traveling during yours)! I’m making a list of rules for myself which so far is primarily “never open my inbox”.

Listen, academia is a nightmare in a thousand different ways but they really popped off with this sabbatical thing.

I’ll be traveling full time (while writing, obviously) from July 2026 through February 2027 and it is single handedly keeping me sane.

Good chat about emergency management in these strange times on the Water Talk podcast!

Incidentally, the first author for the book we are currently writing (it's a textbook, don't get excited) was decided by a coin flip.

Anyway... @amsavitt.bsky.social and I have a bet going about what happens with the plot on the TV show 911 and the winner gets to be first author on our future book.

Disasterology: September 2025 This newsletter is a compilation of recent disaster ~things~ that I think are cool, important, or otherwise of interest to people who are intrigued with disaster (broadly defined).

Kevin Guthrie is back in the news* so let me use it as an opportunity to remind everyone of the horror he's responsible for in Florida.

*A quote in like one article. I will use literally any opportunity to bring this up.

disasterology.substack.com/p/disasterol...

Good! My students won an award!

I would pay so much money for this.

😍😍

He already tried to murder all of them less than five years ago so this certainly checks out.

I’ve since sent them the clip of the titanic silverware scene and guess I’ll be adding Titanic to my disaster film class for the spring!

My students asked me what silverware to use at the Banquet last night.

Me: Outside in. Haven’t you seen Titanic?

Students: no

Me: ??????

Other student: weren’t you in Titanic?

Me: ??????

Guys. A Titanic documentary, I was very briefly in a Titanic documentary. 😂😂😂

This all raises significantly more questions then it answered. Anything could happen!

Noem at odds with Trump-appointed panel over future of FEMA Instead of further shrinking and dismantling FEMA, the FEMA Review Council wants to make it more independent.

welp.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

This is the first story I ever did that got more than a million views

Consider my nerves frayed.

"We have a 2000s housing bubble level of financial engineering on top of a 1920s level of private unregulated lending on top of something bigger than a 1990s internet (or 1870s railroad) level of technology and infrastructure build-out. It’s one bubble to rule them all."

The important thing to bear in mind as Trump's popularity begins to wobble is that the disastrous economic consequences of the things he's done in the first 10 months of this term have not even *begun* to hit. We've been coasting on the fumes of the economy he inherited and soon they'll be gone.

Man looking at servers as if he can fix them. That was the plan all along.

Me at Cloudflare making sure OpenAI stays down:

I am pleased to see that Richardson's legacy as he leaves FEMA has been largely framed by his failure to respond to the July 4th flood.

It took days for the national media to notice he wasn't there. @marisakabas.bsky.social was the first to report it.

Yeah, of course. This entire thing is very silly.

My generous read of this is that this is a weird miscommunication? My understanding is that Kidd wanted to stay in Texas to run TDEM (because for him this is as sweet a gig as you get in public sector EM), not that he did not physically want to move to DC???

🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Politico: Nim Kidd could lead FEMA after possible Texas move According to Politico, federal officials could relocate the agency here and tap Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd to lead it.

Emergency management is not having a normal one…

www.texastribune.org/2025/11/17/f...