After Laura hit, smoke billowed across the sky from a chemical fire from a plant a few miles away from Lake Charles, where the poverty rate is almost double the national average. Residents were told to stay indoors and close up their houses — as much as was possible given that the hurricane had peeled off roofs.

Why are local governments so unprepared for hurricanes? For starters, the threat is changing: The hotter climate is making storms wetter and more intense. Real-estate development has left many towns more prone to flooding, with rain pounding down on concrete instead of on marshes that absorb water.

It’s also hard to convince people living in vulnerable places to spend time and money preparing for a catastrophe that’ll strike who knows when. Maybe they’ve managed past hurricanes without many problems besides shattered windows. Some people make a habit of riding out storms with friends. Before Hurricane Sandy struck New York in 2012, for example, Dolin said that many residents interviewed said they weren’t as worried about the storm because Hurricane Irene, which hit the area a year earlier, wasn’t as bad as the forecasts. People paid for that mistake with their lives, Dolin said.

Another problem is that people get an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. Even for bad hurricanes, memories start to fade as other things in our lives become more pressing. “I think to some extent, people like to forget about painful episodes in their lives,” he said.

Hurricane Laura might go down in history as an Irene. The forecast was brutal, with the National Hurricane Center predicting an “unsurvivable” 20-foot storm surge. That dire scenario didn’t materialize — the storm surge was about 9 feet where the hurricane made landfall — which could leave people with the impression, perhaps subconsciously, that the next one won’t be so bad, either.

Read the full article about lessons from past hurricanes by Kate Yoder at Grist.