Q: Why did you pick Snooze A.M. Eatery for breakfast?
A: I tell people I’m like a unicorn of an eater. I have gluten and dairy allergies, but I’m also a vegetarian. It becomes really complex to eat out. There are only a few restaurants I go to where I can reliably say, ‘Hey, I have this allergy,’ and trust the food that comes out. Snooze is one of those places. My husband and I are also big breakfast people, and we love to come here when we can.
Q: How did you get interested in your research area?
A: I came from a creative writing background before I went into the social sciences. I have an MFA (master of fine arts) focused on nonfiction writing. When I was living in Virginia, I was interested in a group of storm chasers there. A high school teacher was taking students out to the Great Plains to learn how to forecast and understand severe weather. I thought it would be a great article, writing about this culture of storm chasing, so I joined them for 16 days. Interestingly, we ended up in Saragosa, Texas, because the storms we were chasing had let up for several days.
In 1987, Saragosa was hit by an F4 tornado, and it killed 30 people. I spoke with one of the survivors — I think she was 17 at the time of the tornado. She told an incredible story about how she survived. This town was a small, Spanish-speaking rural community. They didn’t have an infrastructure to get warnings. There wasn’t a siren in town. I remember thinking, ‘How is this possible, that you have a community that didn’t have good access to warning information?’ That totally shifted my way of thinking. I wanted to study the warning infrastructure itself.
Q: Can you talk about your research on compounding and cascading weather?
A: The event that really got me interested in extreme weather was Hurricane Harvey in 2017. This was when it became apparent that compound hazards were a big problem, especially heavy rainfall and strong winds. People were sheltering on their roofs as the flood waters rose, but they were also getting tornado warnings. Flash flood warnings advise people to get to the highest ground, but tornado warnings say to get underground or into a low-lying shelter. It was a real problem.
With colleagues at Colorado State University, I wrote a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) grant to study the compound hazards that occurred during Hurricane Harvey, and it just opened a Pandora’s box of different compounding hazards that I had never considered before.
Q: How do you see compounding hazards impacting the Central Texas Fourth of July flooding?
A: Compounds are not just about the weather. I also think about the technological, communication and social infrastructure we have. All these things come together through our warning system to help shape compound disasters.
So there’s all these layers that come together and interact and magnify the effects of a hazard: if it hadn’t been the Fourth of July weekend, if it hadn’t been that historic of a flood, if there was better cell phone coverage, if sirens or other warning infrastructure were there, if there weren’t all these people from out of town who might not have been familiar with the river – all these things compounded to make the disaster even worse.
People want to know who’s responsible, right? How to solve the problem. But what disasters show us over and over again is that they are so much more complex than any one simple solution. It’s really difficult to identify enough pieces to say, ‘OK, we fixed it for the future,’ because the details and context of the next event might be different. It can be very frustrating for many people involved, especially the victims who are just heartbroken and wondering how this tragedy could have happened in the first place.
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)