ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President Trump landed in Texas today to visit areas ravaged by last week's flash floods. Here he is speaking with first responders and local officials.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We mourn for every single life that was swept away in the flood, and we pray for the families that are left behind. It's amazing, the incredible spirit from those families.
SHAPIRO: Trump also approved the state's request for more federal disaster assistance. The Texas floods highlight the special challenges rural communities face preparing for and responding to natural disasters. Dianna Bryant is former director of the Institute for Rural Emergency Management at the University of Central Missouri. Welcome.
DIANNA BRYANT: Thank you for having me.
SHAPIRO: What makes emergency management in rural areas different from cities and towns?
BRYANT: Well, there are a couple of features. One is organizationally. Emergency service agencies in rural communities are often independent agencies. Most rural areas are protected by volunteer fire departments, so they are independent with their own boards, their own funding streams and often no funding. Law enforcement is often then more of a county-provided service, where it's a county sheriff rather than local police departments, and then emergency medical services like paramedics and ambulance services are spotty.
SHAPIRO: So it sounds like a lot of different challenges, many of which can be boiled down to a lack of resources relative to more densely populated areas. And so when you look at places that are doing this well in rural America, what do they have in common? Like, what are the solutions to these problems that places have found?
BRYANT: Well, those are very unique, and a lot of it is about relationship building. You often have fire chiefs or police chiefs that have been in those positions for long periods of time, have established relationships with people and are trusted to both give timely information and the right information.
SHAPIRO: Can you tell us a story that serves as an example of how this works when it goes well?
BRYANT: Well, Clinton, Missouri, about 20 years ago, had a building collapse, and they certainly didn't have rescue capability. They didn't have heavy equipment to be able to pull the building apart, search for people. And they relied upon all of the communities that surround them and urban search and rescue to come into their community. So their sheriff then coordinated all of this. He credited some recent training that he had been to where he had met many of these people and knew them by name. So when they came to his community, he felt comfortable in assigning them tasks to do and knew what their capabilities were.
SHAPIRO: I remember back in 2008, when Hurricane Ike hit Houston, people in the big city were cleaning up shattered glass and damaged buildings. And then when I drove east to more rural areas, the scene was very different. There were a lot of dead livestock. And I met this man named Robbie Smith, who was the local game warden, who, in that moment, was also handing out emergency supplies like water, ice, and food. And here's what he told me.
ROBBIE SMITH: A lot of what you see are these cows, and it's these people like you see walking around here. That's some of their livelihood. So it's no different from a business owner in town who had his building blown away.
SHAPIRO: To me, that underscores the difference in challenges, not just in resources to respond to those challenges, when you're talking about rural areas.
BRYANT: Well, yes. People have a different investment in the community. And particularly because a lot of these responders are volunteers - they are the ranchers and the farmers and the other people in the community, so they are also - then have an investment, their own livelihood at risk. And what we find in rural areas is there's a lot of overlap between membership and organization. So someone might be a paid sheriff's deputy, but they are a volunteer firefighter, and they may also work on dispatch or as an EMT in the ambulance on the weekend. So they have different roles to serve, but when we have a disaster, they have to choose which one of those is primary.
SHAPIRO: As climate change increases the likelihood of extreme weather events, do you see the conversation among rural emergency managers changing?
BRYANT: I do think that there is concern about what types of preparation and mitigation need to be adopted for events that occur more frequently and are more severe. And I do think the emergency management community talks a lot about those adaptations and what that looks like. But fundamentally, it comes down to preparing the public for these things that are going to be not like it was in the past.
SHAPIRO: Dianna Bryant is former director of the Institute for Rural Emergency Management at the University of Central Missouri. Thank you so much.
BRYANT: Thank you very much.
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