In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Samantha Montano was a high school junior in Maine. She signed up for a spring break service trip to help out in the aftermath in New Orleans.

She had no idea what a disaster really looked like.

She soon found out. In New Orleans, she was surrounded by miles of rotting debris stacked high, mold-covered homes, streets dark from lack of electricity or streetlights. There was no recycling, mail, trash service, or transportation, and hardly anything that resembled a school system.

“It was not until I was standing in the aftermath of one that I fully grasped the scope and scale, the complexity, and really, the devastation,” she told Grist.

The trip changed her life. She applied to college in New Orleans so she could return to help. She ended up getting a doctorate in emergency management and, along with teaching at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, she is now a sought-out expert on emergency management, or what she calls “disasterology.”

And, as she tells you in her new book, Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis, most people don’t really know what emergency management is — or, for that matter, what a disaster is.

Here’s what Montano wants you to know: Most so-called disasters are, in fact, entirely predictable. Instead of focusing on prevention, lawmakers and the U.S. emergency response system focuses on reaction, and even then, our emergency management system is flawed because it doesn’t respond equally to all communities — especially lower-income neighborhoods of color.

“Disasters, and catastrophes, are a choice,” she writes. “They are a political decision.”

Read the full article about the political nature of natural disasters by Jena Brooker at Grist.