The Landslide Will Bring It Down
Lessons from a Disaster in Switzerland
Early on May 29, I woke up to a message from a dear friend who was worried about me because she had seen breaking news that a landslide had buried a Swiss village. The previous day, a melting glacier that had been holding up nine million tonnes of rock suddenly detatched from Nesthorn, and within minutes, the village of Blatten was obliterated.
We live about a ninety-minute drive away from the disaster. But I have gone on many stunning hikes in the area, and my heart aches for the people who have lost their beautiful Heimat.
I’m from the Government, and I’m Here to Help
Ronald Reagan was wrong. When we or someone we love has a rare disease, when we need crucial infrastructure built or repaired, when we want reassurance that our food isn’t contaminated and our medications aren’t poisonous, and especially when we are threatened with or have survived a natural disaster, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” is not terrifying. It’s a relief. Charities lack the money and corporations lack the profit motive to solve our most costly and challenging problems. We need the government.
Switzerland knows this. The landslide destroyed Blatten in mere minutes, and yet with the exception of one older man who is missing, everyone in the village was saved. How? Government geologists in Switzerland constantly monitor seismic activity and snow conditions throughout the country. They predicted the landslide several days before it occurred, which gave the town ample time to evacuate. And this wasn’t an everyone-for-themselves evacuation plagued by chaos and traffic, as is typical after hurricane warnings in the US. The Swiss authorities sent helicopters and called in the military to help evacuate the entire town. And I do mean the entire town. The villagers’ animals were saved too.
Monitoring environmental threats and, if necessary, evacuating affected towns is just business as usual for the Swiss government. Two years ago, the village of Brienz in Canton Graubünden was evacuated because of the threat of a rockslide, for example. (That rockslide narrowly missed the town, but the threat remains, so the village was evacuated again a few months ago, and the government has helped to resettle the villagers throughout the surrounding area.) I have personally benefited from the vigilance of Swiss government scientists; their natural hazards portal warns us of areas at risk of avalanches or rockslides so we can avoid hiking or skiing there. In many places the government has also installed avalanche fencing on steep slopes to protect the towns below.
This public investment not only saves lives but also boosts the economy. It is in the interest of everyone living in Switzerland that the Blatten farmers are not left destitute. With the help of Swiss taxpayers, these rural mountain villagers will be able to start over and continue contributing to the economy. The data support the Swiss approach. Our Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may believe that it is a waste of money to assist victims of disasters, but they are mistaken. Switzerland shows that spending tax money on disaster preparedness, rescue operations, and help for affected people leads to more, not less, prosperity for everyone. Switzerland is richer than the US (Switzerland’s per capita GDP is $99,565, as compared with our per capita GDP of $82,769), and the prosperity is more evenly shared too (the Gini index in Switzerland is 33.8, as compared with 41.8 in the US).
We the People
Let’s compare the attitude of the current administration and DOGE to protecting Americans from natural disasters. It is not very Swiss, to say the least. As this sobering article notes,
FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff, including one-fifth of the coordinating officers who manage responses to large-scale disasters, according to a former senior official. . . . NOAA has lost about one-fifth of its staff, including hundreds of people from the National Weather Service.
This is exactly the wrong time to cut these crucial government services. To paraphrase Trotsky’s line about war, we may not be interested in climate change, but climate change is interested in us. As climate change worsens, we will suffer an increasing number of natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, and droughts. Adequately-funded government services benefit far more of us than tax cuts do. All of us are vulnerable to natural disasters and may need evacuation warnings or FEMA assistance one day, whereas the vast majority of Americans will get bupkis from the tax cuts, the bulk of which go to those who are already rich.
Worse, the funds that Congress has allocated for disaster relief are being withheld for political reasons. As David Graham reports in “FEMA Is Not Prepared,”
In April, Trump declined to declare a major disaster in Washington State, which would free up funding for recovery from a bomb cyclone in November 2024. . . . DHS also denied North Carolina more funding for cleanup after Helene. . . . The president also refused individual federal assistance to nine Arkansas counties struck by tornadoes in March, only reversing the decision after Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders . . . called the president directly.
. . .
[I]n his first term, Trump himself reportedly withheld or delayed disaster funds in multiple cases based on partisanship. His reversal on assistance for Arkansas residents raises the specter of a future in which only states whose governors are close to Trump can hope to obtain relief.
Whether we live in a red, purple, or blue state, we are all Americans. It is unpatriotic to deny people the relief they have paid for with their tax dollars simply because of their political party.
We used to agree that it was important to fund the National Weather Service, NOAA, and other early-warning systems that enable us to escape natural disasters like the landslide that destroyed Blatten. And we used to agree that when catastrophes hit, FEMA should have sufficient staff and resources to help our neighbors recover and begin again. I cannot believe that we have changed so much as a country that we would prefer to give the rich a bigger tax cut, at the cost of abandoning the rest of us to our fates. We can’t stop disasters. The landslide will bring it down. But great nations warn their citizens of impending danger, and when disasters befall their people, they choose generosity.
How about you, readers? Do you support fully funding NOAA and FEMA, or would you prefer a tax cut? Why? Have you ever experienced a natural disaster? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Right now, I’m in the US because our youngest is graduating from college. This is a momentous transition, especially for a stay-at-home mom like me! (I even had to update my Substack profile from “mom of college-age kids” to “mom of young adults.”)
But June is a time of transition for everyone. It’s the month of graduations and weddings. It’s the end of the school year and the start of summer vacation. It’s when leases are up and houses are sold, and so families move away, to new homes and new opportunities. This time of year always makes me think of “Landslide,” a song about the inevitability of change in our lives: “Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides? / Can I handle the seasons of my life? . . . Time makes you bolder / Even children get older / And I’m gettin’ older, too.”
In honor of this poignant season, when our kids are becoming independent and growing into themselves, I offer this live recording, sung by a very young Stevie Nicks. In contrast to the deep, husky resonance of Nicks’s mature voice, her voice here is light, high, and clear. Listening to her feels like traveling back in time.
I volunteered after a hurricane-prompted evacuation once, and only once.
I was fascinated by the people who came to shelter in a high school that was closed to students in order to house them.
They soon got to quarreling. Many complained about the public school food, which they had had to endure so far once, even though nearly all of them would’ve been through public school themselves and presumably had some familiarity with what is possible there.
They had strange requests like can you get some antibiotic for my pet bird?
A lot of of them expected that various medicines would be provided for them, rather than having brought them.
These were not people who had lost their homes. They were kind of reacting or overreacting to a previous natural disaster and running away from the coast. They were doing as they were told or encouraged to do. They had no desire not to herd together, or seek out relatives or other arrangements.
They had spent a lot of time in their cars, probably on the way as everyone made their exit from a large area.
I remember thinking, I would have stopped the car anywhere and slept there. Brought a tent. Whatever.
They seemed simultaneously comfortable with this kind of ward of the state situation, and also very vituperative about it.
Some clearly regarded it as a sort of party.
They all seemed pretty helpless.
They had not brought bedding for the most part. They complained about their cots. They got into tussles over the space in the areas like the gym that were given over to them.
In any case a food inspector showed up and decided that a lot of the food had reached the wrong temperature so it had to be thrown away, so those who hadn’t like it then complained about the loss of it until more could be prepared.
You can be full of compassion for people you don’t know, and I understand that that is a normal reaction for some people to feel. I was horrified to discover that the people were so different from myself, having been told so often that people are all the same.
It was a moment of utter alienation. I did not betray this, but I understood that people volunteering wasn’t for me. Live and learn.
It would be interesting to know if the people in the Swiss village are much like these people I’ve described, who are numerous in America, and the majority in many places.
(USA) I've been a lifelong sci fi fan, and have been disappointed at the devolution of the entire genre into dystopian nightmares. Turns out, we're in one. Day after day is a constant drip drip of the latest loonacy from a parade of ass clowns... the latest; a WWE style take down of a California Senator at a press conference in LA. Saddest of all? I fear we let our secondary educational outcomes slip away unnoticed over several decades, to where we are way down the list in terms of STEM outcomes in the world among advanced economies. I am not sure we can ever get it back. Are we going to enter an insular dark ages in the USA because of it? I mean, you have to have a whole lot of sub par graduates to elect something like the current clown show. Now that morons outnumber the rest of us, who's going to vote for rigorous outcomes that may, in time, lead to the critical mass of critical thinking necessary to maintain a bulwark against another lowest common denominator reality show takeover of the country? Keep fighting the good fight, Mari.