Natural disasters can create poverty on a large scale. The World Bank says that disasters put 26 Million people across the globe into poverty each year. Nationally, When we look at the results of hurricane Katrina we saw thousands of people with damaged homes, cities and infrastructure. Some of them are still in the process rebuilding. We think that the government or volunteers will help us. That is far from the truth. FEMA gives about $8000 cash to rebuild and the rest of the money to rebuild is comes from loans. If insurance won’t cover the disaster, then you likely will owe a significant amount of money to rebuild. Plus FEMA’s response time can be weeks instead of days. .

You may think, those are all big things, but what out our area. Locally, we’ve been blessed living in an area with limited huge disasters. At a local level, we had the snowpawcolypse of 2017. And some of us are still recovering from that. But, we’ve had numerous drought declarations and wildfires around our community.

The majority of these disaster have negative effects on our farms and ranchers, but not on the direct cities. This does bring down our community financially, as those are job creators and exports from our community.

At the smallest level the house fire is the one that is the biggest problem that Love INC sees. It seems that those with the worst consequences are rentals that have poor upkeep. These places seem to have tenants without renters insurance. The tenants do not have financial cushions to help with the rebuild. They can quickly become homeless and jobless.

What can you do? Be prepared. Encourage others to prepare financially for emergencies. Have a 72 hour kit ready. When, we had building collapse, I encouraged many of our clients to have a bag with a change of clothes, some snacks and food, a water bottle and other necessities by their front door in case you need to leave quickly. Also have a small stockpile of food can help for emergencies where going out is not possible or even job lay offs.