One of my earliest disaster-related memories is a tornado in 1990 that destroyed Petersburg, Indiana. Petersburg is a small place, just a couple thousand people, in a region made up entirely of small places. The EF-4 tornado ripped through the town in just a few minutes, destroying a nursing home, apartment complex, elementary school, two dozen businesses and nearly 200 homes. Four people lost their lives.
I doubt that anyone reading this remembers the disaster (except for my Jasper readers, big shoutout to the Hoosier state), but it permanently changed the town. It is one of countless forgotten disasters that have shaped rural lives and rural communities.
The United States is a big country. The headline disaster events are often centered in large cities (think the Los Angeles wildfires or Hurricane Katrina) where the concentration of people and economic activity means eye-popping costs and impacts. The density of universities, non-profit organizations and media in those places also means they receive ongoing attention and coverage. But policymakers and disaster professionals also need to be thinking about rural places like Petersburg, and not simply as smaller versions of cities. Small towns and rural communities have their own unique hazard exposures, vulnerabilities, needs and capabilities, i.e. their own risk dynamics. Understanding them is an essential step towards building national and rural resilience.
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