Residents assess a fallen tree in their Houston neighborhood after Hurricane Beryl swept through the area on July 8. As climate change has fueled more intense and frequent natural disasters, emergency responders face challenges from burnout to budgets (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

AUSTIN, Texas — Four days after residents of coastal Houston celebrated the Fourth of July with the traditional parades, backyard barbecues and fireworks, Beryl came calling.

The Category 1 hurricane, weakened from an earlier Category 5, slammed into Texas’ largest city on July 8 — an unusual midsummer arrival. Delivering one of the worst direct hits on Houston in decades, Beryl flooded streets, ripped down trees and left thousands without power, causing multiple heat-related deaths during a period of triple-digit temperatures.

Superlatives like “worst,” “biggest” and “most” increasingly sprinkle news accounts in disaster coverage. Even as residents of Houston deal with Beryl’s lingering impact, farmers and ranchers in the Texas Panhandle are still trying to recover from the largest recorded wildfire in the state’s history, a February inferno that consumed more than a million acres of land, an estimated 138 homes and businesses, and more than 15,000 head of cattle. Three area residents were killed.

Climate change has rewritten the script for disasters, leaving communities vulnerable to weather patterns that don’t abide by schedules or the rules of past behavior. As a result, hundreds of thousands of emergency responders are facing unprecedented challenges —from burnout to post-traumatic stress disorder to tighter budgets — as they battle hurricanes, windstorms, wildfires, floods and other natural disasters that are more frequent and intense than those in the past.

“Everybody’s strapped,” said Russell Strickland, Maryland’s secretary of emergency management, who also serves as president of the National Emergency Management Association, or NEMA, the professional group for state emergency management directors.

Agencies are grappling with “stagnant budgets and staff shortages” at a time when they need more money and people to deal with disasters and confront other demands, Strickland said. In the 1980s, states averaged just over three $1 billion weather disasters a year in cost-adjusted dollars, according to the association. In each of the past three years, the average has been 20. Last year, the nation was hammered by a record 28 of those billion-dollar catastrophes.

In a 2023 white paper, NEMA reported that “the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing number of back-to-back disasters have resulted in disaster fatigue and burnout.” It also reported that current funding levels for most emergency management agencies are “wholly inadequate to address the types of events that states are experiencing along with expanding mission areas.”

The nation’s disaster response system is a massive multilevel network that includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is charged with dispatching hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to battered states and communities, and counterpart state disaster agencies that advise or report to the governor. County and city governments also operate disaster and homeland security units.

Disaster officials throughout the country acknowledged that natural disasters such as wildfires, tornadoes and floods have increased and intensified as a result of climate change. Moreover, disaster agencies are being tasked with nontraditional assignments such as cybersecurity, opioid addiction, homelessness and school safety.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report published in May of last year said that state demands for FEMA assistance have “increased with more frequent and complex disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic” but that “FEMA has had trouble building a workforce to meet these needs.”

Budgets for state emergency management are funded by state legislatures and vary widely. The biggest states allocate a half-billion dollars while the smallest set aside closer to a half-million, according to a NEMA examination of state emergency management budgets.

California’s emergency management unit, attached to the governor’s office with nearly 2,000 employees, had the largest budget as of the 2022 fiscal year, with more than $530 million, according to the NEMA report. California is the nation’s largest state with 39 million people. By contrast, Vermont, which has less than a million people, had a fiscal year 2022 budget of $650,000 to fund 34 emergency management personnel, according to NEMA.

Texas, whose emergency management division teams works with the governor’s office and is based in the Texas A&M University System, had one of the largest budgets, $33.5 million to fund close to 500 employees, as of the 2022 fiscal year.

State emergency management agencies, which also receive money from the federal government, including FEMA, constitute the central nerve center during major disasters, typically working from a strategically located emergency operations center that includes representatives from various other agencies. Real-time information begins pouring in hours before the crisis, resulting in an all-points response that ultimately encompasses legions of state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, EMS, firefighters, relief agencies and a long list of other responders.

Heavier strain on emergency workers

As he took a late-morning break from battling a recent 11-acre brush and grass fire near Smithville, a small town about 50 miles southeast of Austin, 36-year-old state firefighter Billy Leathers reflected on his 18-year career with the Texas A&M Forest Service, which helps local fire departments fight outdoor blazes. A charred grassy hillside stretched behind him.

Leathers is a third-generation firefighter who followed his parents and grandfather into the job.

“That’s the only one that I found that I liked,” he said of being a firefighter, adding that he and his co-workers “wouldn’t do it if we didn’t like helping people.” But he acknowledges that the increasing pace “does kind of start to run you a little bit ragged towards the middle of the season.”

The job increasingly involves more than fighting fires.

In 2020, Tennessee responders confronted a bombing on Christmas Day in downtown Nashville, when a 63-year-old conspiracy theorist apparently intent on suicide parked his recreational vehicle near an AT&T facility and ignited an explosion that took his own life, injured eight others and triggered dayslong communication outages.

Tennessee also has faced a relentless surge of more traditional disasters, said Patrick C. Sheehan, who has directed the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency since 2016. In the 1980s, Tennessee had only three major natural disasters caused by severe storms and flooding. Since January 2014, the state has had 24 major disaster declarations.

“We’re having incredible, record-breaking rainfall,” Sheehan said. “We’re having record-breaking cold. We’re having record-breaking heat. We’re having tornadoes earlier and later.”

Sheehan and other emergency managers point out that climate change’s continually shifting weather patterns now make it almost impossible to precisely predict a so-called season for storms such as hurricanes and tornadoes. As illustrated by Hurricane Beryl, coastal storms are increasingly arriving earlier and in greater strength.

“We expect weaker hurricanes to decrease in frequency and stronger ones to increase in frequency,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist.

More residents, more danger

Texas’ chief disaster responder is Nim Kidd, a former San Antonio firefighter who heads the Texas Division of Emergency Management and who is typically alongside Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott during briefings on tornadoes, fires, floods or other weather events.

The division was formerly attached to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state police force, and was transferred to the Texas A&M System in 2019, putting it under the same umbrella as firefighters in the Texas A&M Forest Service. Kidd is also A&M vice chancellor for disaster and emergency services.

Forest Service Director Al Davis and Deputy Director Wes Moorehead said the wildfire danger in Texas has steadily increased with the state’s surging growth as more and more people migrate to the state, often settling in attractive areas close to trees and brush that become vulnerable to ignition during drought and triple-digit heat.

“They like a little bit of nature around them,” said Moorehead. “They want some trees, some grasses and vegetation. And in Texas that grass, that vegetation, those trees — that is fuel for a wildfire.”

The state’s disaster and firefighting operations came under scrutiny during a state House of Representatives hearing on the catastrophic Panhandle fires, which started Feb. 26 after a downed power line set off the blaze that ultimately advanced 95 miles, reaching into Oklahoma.

Local concerns focused heavily on delays in engaging aircraft into the firefighting effort, since the state doesn’t have its own firefighting fleet and relies on private contractors. The state’s first order for aerial fire-suppression equipment from the federal government wasn’t made until 24 hours after the so-called Smokehouse Creek fire erupted, the investigative committee found.

Kidd, testifying at the hearing, endorsed the creation of a state-owned firefighting fleet, which also was recommended by the five-member panel.

The Panhandle investigation also underscored the importance of volunteer fire departments in augmenting government emergency response agencies. Committee members found that volunteer departments are “grossly underfunded,” further undercutting emergency preparedness.

Many first responders say they tolerate the danger, stress and low pay because they want to serve, said Moorehead, of the Texas forest service.

“When you’ve got people with the drive and the willingness and the service mindset to go out and do right and do good for the citizens of the state,” he said, “you can overcome shortages like you’d never imagine.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

A pro-Trump mob breaks into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee/Getty Images).

Ahead of the first hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, I had the opportunity, — due to my more than 40 years in law enforcement — to share my thoughts as part of a panel discussion about what had happened on that terrible day and what I expected to come from the hearings.

I shared that I felt bewildered that so many citizens who purport to support democracy would attempt to overturn an election. That so many elected officials — including some county sheriffs and others in positions of power — had urged their supporters to do so.

After watching the first eight hearings of the committee these last two months, I am no longer bewildered.

I am outraged. As every American should be.

The Jan. 6 committee has done a remarkable job sharing its findings about the attack on the Capitol itself, and the months-long criminal conspiracy that led up to it. They have exposed the truth for the world to see, former President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies attempted to overturn the results of a free, fair, safe and secure election they knew they had lost through a multi-pronged scheme that included lying to their own supporters while bilking them out of millions of dollars in the process.

Even if the conspiracy had ended there, in cheating hard working Americans out of their hard-earned wages through outright lies about election lawsuits and allegations of fraud, it would have represented an egregious violation of the public trust by all involved.

But it didn’t end there, of course. The plot culminated in a violent attack on the Capitol that left over 100 police officers injured, many beaten and bloodied with career ending injuries.

So far, Trump and his enablers, both in the White House and Congress, have escaped accountability under the law.

So far.

The news that the FBI seized documents from Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago this week shows that there is a serious case unfolding against the former president.

I served more than 40 years in law enforcement, including 15 as sheriff in Dane County, Wisconsin. I also served as president of the National Sheriffs Association, which represents more than 3,000 sheriffs nationwide. I know how investigations work. I’ve seen prosecutors build out cases.

And my advice to Trump and his co-conspirators after watching these hearings is straightforward: Lawyer up. Prepare to accept responsibility. Accountability is coming.

I swore an oath to uphold the United States Constitution, as all law enforcement members do. It’s sometimes hard to put into words what that means, how that sticks with you.

But here’s what I know: Former President Trump swore an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution, too. That oath makes the unprecedented, egregious and illegal actions he took that had the effect of undermining our democracy unforgivable. He used the office of the presidency to manipulate, pressure and browbeat his subordinates into breaking the law for his own personal gain. He had help from members of Congress and staff in his White House and, as committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney has shared with us, he’s still trying to cover up his actions through witness intimidation.

Ensuring accountability and that no president ever abuses the office in this manner again is essential. That requires letting the committee finish its work and allowing the Justice Department to complete their own investigation unimpeded.

That is the only way to stop the ongoing efforts by many Trump Republicans from sabotaging future elections by changing state laws, threatening state officials and packing election administration offices so that they can have the final say over election results – even when they lose.

Members of law enforcement held the line for all of us on Jan. 6, 2021. May we all honor them, including those we lost as a result, through our commitment to seeing that justice is done and this never happens again.

This commentary was originally published by the Wisconsin Examiner, a States Newsroom affiliate.