It Keeps Happening: The Impact of Repeated Climate Disasters

It’s becoming hard to keep track. Was it Hurricane Helene that destroyed a neighbor’s house in Florida, or was it Hurricane Milton? Did a community deal with a mass exodus of residents after the Park Fire or the Eaton and Palisades Fires? An urgent issue emerging from our late stage of the climate crisis: The world is not simply dealing with one disaster but multiple ones, often at the same time and in the same areas, again and again.

“It felt just like, ‘Here we go again, this is unbelievable’,” Mimi Pickering of Whitesburg, KY, told The New York Times. “It’s been traumatic for people when it rains so heavily—it just adds to that PTSD.” Pickering spoke after days of damaging heavy rain hit her town in late February 2025, two years after eastern Kentucky was devastated by floods.

This time, the floods weren’t as severe as experts feared. But even the forecast caused alarm and trauma, reigniting barely buried anxiety in the 2022 flood survivors—feelings of fear and dread shared by Californians after a series of wildfires spanning years and only growing in intensity.

Repeated climate disasters in the same place can destroy a community.

Climate events such as wildfires and floods are no longer contained to a single season, thanks to accelerating climate change. And certain areas are hit more than others. That has a ripple effect on communities, impacting everything from mental health to resilience, and draining the resources of nonprofits and others trying to help.

Vulnerable Areas, Exhausted Communities

Some areas are more vulnerable to climate change: Homes built on floodplains face increased risk, as do communities with thick trees or overgrown vegetation in a wildfire area, which means more fuel for fires to consume. This risk doesn’t always correspond to home or land value. Some—though certainly not all—of the homes destroyed in the LA wildfires were mansions worth millions, which was also true of the 2024 landslides in Southern California.

Repeated climate disasters in the same place can destroy a community. It may be impossible for people to rebuild their homes, especially if homeowner’s insurance is inadequate or unavailable. And, exhausted by the emotional and economic stress, people leave. NPQ wrote about one California wildfire survivor who did just that, fleeing her Santa Barbara, CA, home in 2020—only to live through Hurricane Helene flooding in her new home, Asheville, NC. Globally, climate disasters account for about 60,000 displacements per day, according to the nonprofit USA for UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency).

“The trauma of living through a climate disaster can influence survivors’ decisions on where to go next,” NPQ wrote. It can also influence their feelings about a place, replacing a feeling of belonging and rootedness with feelings of anxiety, dread, and fear.

Living through one disaster can clearly impact both physical and mental wellness. But living through several?

“Now the question has become bigger and more demanding. Is it time to go…forever?”

The Los Angeles Times described survivor’s guilt as “the new normal” for Californians in 2025. One California resident wrote on her Substack about the “heaviness” of living through multiple once-in-a-lifetime events. After surviving the first wildfire near her neighborhood in 2020, she wrote “while I am so grateful to not be in the direct line this time around” she was “overridden” with survivor’s guilt.

Survivors also report feelings of anger. They view their homes, formerly a place of security, with suspicion. Once disaster strikes, it may feel inevitable that it will happen again.

Mary McNamara, a cultural critic at The Los Angeles Times, described how she and her husband asked themselves if it was time to leave LA with “traumatic regularity.” She wrote of the lucky feeling that they had survived the latest fires, “But we’re also exhausted and, with the winds blowing hard even as I write, on edge. Now the question has become bigger and more demanding. Is it time to go…forever? To leave, if not California then the foothills, which we have called home for 21 years?” 

Drained Resources and Burned-Out Workers

The impact of abandonment can be felt for generations in the communities left behind. In 2023, CNN reported on five places across the globe that were turned into “ghost towns” as their populations fled in the wake of climate disasters, from a small seaside village in climate-vulnerable Fiji to a coastal community in Louisiana. Losing families means not only losing valuable community members but also workers, students in schools, and help on the ground.

In the case of Cotul Morii, Moldova, which was overwhelmed by flooding in 2010, the town was completely abandoned. “Rather than rebuild, the government mandated that a new Cotul Morii village be reconstructed about nine miles away,” according to CNN.

Repeated climate disasters can decimate a population and drain resources meant to help. Trevor Riggen, president of humanitarian services at the American Red Cross, told Forbes that volunteers at the Red Cross, which launched twice as many major disaster relief efforts last year than a decade ago, are providing support “on a constant basis.”

Continuous disasters mean continuing to grow, to figure out how to help more effectively.

Riggen said, “What was once a service we provided for acute and episodic emergencies has now become a necessary standing program to combat chronic suffering.”

Nonprofit leaders and workers are already experiencing burnout in record numbers. Combined with the stress and scrutiny from a new Trump administration, many groups are stretched too thin to rise and face another disaster, nor do they have the funds to combat it.

Aid groups and environmental organizations are also dealing with another kind of fallout from repeated climate disasters: a public tired of hearing about them. In 2024, NPQ reported about climate fatigue, the emotional exhaustion and overwhelm that comes from being exposed—whether directly or indirectly—again and again to climate calamities.

Climate fatigue can lead to helplessness and inaction. It causes people to question why they should bother to help if severe storms will only keep happening. Such fatigue can mean a drop-off in donations, volunteering, and workers and activists in the climate justice space.

What can be done about climate fatigue and the overwhelm of continuous disasters? At least according to Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky: we can gain education and experience, try to be ready, to know more about what we’re facing.

Continuous disasters mean continuing to grow, to figure out how to help more effectively. As Beshear told The New York Times of the repeated disasters in his state, “We learn from every one, and we try to rebuild so that the next one and the next one we lose fewer people.”

For more on this topic:

One Year after Devastating Floods Hit Eastern Kentucky, Appalshop Continues to Rise

How to Navigate a Crisis Like a Pro

How Can Nonprofits Help When They’re Burning?