Just How "Natural" Are These "Disasters"?

When people hear the word “disaster,” they often think of it as an acute event, a disruption, or something unpredictable. However, many weather events we may refer to as disasters are not matters of pure chance, but rather the result patterns and decisions over a longer timetable.

The circumstances and human decisions leading up to the event can often provide context which may call into question just how unexpected the event really was. For example, a lightning strike may be thought of as a one in a million disaster, but if you examine a larger timeframe and gain the context of knowing a person was out in a thunderstorm on an open dam carrying a large metal umbrella and camera equipment, the shock isn’t quite as great.

Similarly, when we use the word “natural,” which is usually taken to mean something existing in or caused by nature and not made or caused by humans, to describe some of these disasters that are being accelerated by climate change, should we consider that there is a point where these weather events no longer fit that description?

Human activity has actively accelerated climate change, altering global weather patterns and causing changes to the frequency of floods, droughts, and wildfires, often to increasingly deadly consequences.

When the two words are put together to create the term “natural disaster,” we may be normalizing these events and the suffering they cause by characterizing them as a one-off event, independent from a larger picture rather than a consequence of our own decisions and policies.

To use a more apt example for the Northeast, let’s think back to last month, when heavy rains turned deadly in Connecticut and floodwaters caused significant damage to roads, bridges, residences, and infrastructure across the southwestern part of the state.

One rain station in Oxford, for example, reported 14.83 inches of rain in 24 hours, about four times the town’s average for the month of August. This was a one in 1,000-year storm according to federal rainfall probability data, meaning it has a 0.1% chance of occurring annually. However, the frequency of 100-year and 1,000-year storms is increasing.

We may think of this as a natural disaster, but when examined with the context of climate change, we are experiencing severe precipitation events that are worse than forecasted much more frequently, and therefore cannot forget that we have played a role in these events. At what point do we begin to see these disasters as something with a manmade component, and begin to plan accordingly?

This first appeared in Sound Outlook, a newsletter of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection in November 2024.