Inside Grist’s new toolkit for navigating disasters

Extreme weather is at once unfathomably large and intensely personal. From afar, the shape of a disaster is relatively clear, even if the details aren’t: Flash floods, like the ones that hit Texas, North Carolina, and New Mexico over the July 4 weekend, or the hurricanes that are bound to hit later this summer, or heat waves baking large swaths of the country, or wildfires and tornadoes that seem to spring up like weeds.

On the ground, the details sharpen: your home is destroyed; people you may know lose their lives (as of July 15 there were at least 132 deaths from the floods in Texas alone, and about 170 more people are missing). The shape of the disaster is the shape of a house, or a neighborhood, or a community.

Navigating a disaster — before, during, and after it hits — can be overwhelming, and often involves a maze of agencies and regulations at local, state, and federal levels that you have never even heard of previously. And between the one-two punch of deteriorating local news and increasing misinformation on social media, even finding accurate information about the disaster can be hard.

So Grist, the nonprofit climate publication, put together a toolkit to help. It’s called Disaster 101, and it walks readers through every stage of a disaster, from making preparations ahead of a disaster to riding it out and navigating the maze of resources that are available in the aftermath. It’s made for sharing and adapting — by community organizers, local governments, and news outlets alike — and designed so that people with limited internet access can still access the most salient resources.

After the plaintext guides, there are six articles that are mostly about the connection between extreme weather and climate change. “I didn’t want it to be the first thing people see. When you’re experiencing a disaster, you’re not thinking, ‘How’s climate change affecting this?’” Gilpin told me. “That’s something you think about after the fact, down the road. But I also don’t want to turn people off from Grist, the toolkit, or any of the information that might be shared, because their immediate reaction is ‘Oh, I heard on the podcast I listen to that [climate change] isn’t real,’ because that’s a lot of people in our country. And so I think meeting people where they’re at, even if that means swallowing our pride and not saying the term ‘climate crisis,’ is really important.”

Disaster 101 is designed for sharing, republication, and — perhaps most crucially — adaptation, so that people who might not usually come across Grist’s work can still benefit from its resources. The guide explicitly encourages people to adapt the guides with local context, and even includes a template for journalists at local newsrooms with suggestions for how to localize stories, like paragraphs to tweak or cut and places to add contact information for state and local agencies. It will be a living document, to be updated as circumstances change at the national level. If, for example, the Trump administration carries through on its plans to dismantle FEMA, or ICE begins carrying out immigration raids in disaster areas, the guide’s resources about federal aid will have to change.

“I want it to be that we create this thing and then everyone copies it and improves on it,” Gilpin said. The hope, she said, is that everyone who is interested in getting out more disaster information — whether local governments, mutual aid and climate justice groups, or news outlets — takes what Grist made and runs with it, making the guides as locally relevant as possible. “We’re just laying the groundwork. I think, as a national newsroom, that’s a huge service we can offer.”

Gilpin also hopes that the guides will help create stronger connections between environmental justice and mutual aid organizations across states, many of whom Gilpin talked to while making Disaster 101. Those organizations tend to circulate massive Google Docs of resources in the aftermath of disasters. Disaster 101 is designed to make that work easier — it can be hard for a local journalist whose newsroom might quite literally be underwater to figure out where to begin with putting together guides — and maybe also increase trust between journalists and community organizers.

“I hope this helps build out a stronger network around disasters in general, not just after disasters but outside of disaster season as well, and really strengthening the information ecosystem around disasters,” Gilpin said. “Right now it’s sort of ad hoc, because there’s not a lot of direction from the federal government. The more we as journalists can partner with and collaborate with those people already doing the on-the-ground work, the stronger that information ecosystem can be.”