Water Talk
Water Talk is a national podcast about all things Water hosted by Drs. Mallika Nocco (University of Wisconsin–Madison Extension), Faith Kearns (Arizona State University), and Sam Sandoval (University of California, Davis; University of California Agriculture & Natural Resources)
Water Talk
Ep 79: Disasters and Emergency Management
A conversation with Professor Samantha Montano (Massachusetts Maritime Academy, author of Disasterology) about the stages of emergency management, needs following different types of disasters, and the changing emergency management landscape across the United States. Released November 21, 2025.
So today on Water Talk, we're talking about emergency management and disasters with Dr. Samantha Montano, who is a professor of emergency management and a disasterologist, and in fact has a book called Disasterology that I do highly recommend. It really is a good book that talks a lot about disasters and climate change together in a way that I think is super helpful. And I think one of the things that is important for people to understand is this concept of emergency management. So I am somebody who has been working on disaster issues for a very long time, two decades at least at this point, and would say that I came in as somebody who is not at all trained in the sort of disaster landscape, the emergency management landscape. I really, the entree was working on wildfire in California at a time when it really was, at least from where I was sitting, much more of a sort of scientific, forestry, you know, just ecology kind of issue. And it's only been in the intervening sort of decade, probably the last decade really, when I've met Samantha, that I've kind of come to understand this larger landscape of emergency management, which Sam will go into in the podcast quite a bit. The way I understand it is that emergency management is this larger landscape of all of the processes that go into dealing with disasters. So it can be, you know, a lot of times when people talk about disasters, they'll talk about pre, during, and post phases of a disaster. But I think what Sam brings into the conversation is that there's an even broader scope than that in terms of thinking about, for example, planning, which I think, you know, had I known about emergency management 20 years ago, my life would have been a little bit easier because I think we were actually starting to talk about wildfire in a way that probably should have and actually did involve thinking about planning and the way even communities are laid out and you know, trying to connect with landscape planners and things like that. But I just didn't have the awareness of emergency management. So I think it's been a super, super helpful concept. And that's probably one of the main things that people need to look out for in this episode. Any thoughts, Sam?
Samuel Sandoval:Faith, one thing is that uh the audience should look for the different four stages that she's gonna mention about emergency management. And also I think early in this season we talked about with Kathy Schaefer about the national flood insurance program. And that was, I think, at some point very specific here. We're uh looking at the broader management. We should let our audience know the perspective that this will be broader, and also that we are going to be talking with some of her ideas on how to reform it.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, for sure. One of the things I really enjoy hearing from Sam about is just, you know, she has a very, very comprehensive view of the field and what's going on at any moment in time. And even though, as she notes, this is a very particularly confusing time, there are still issues that carry forward. And I think Sam is as well equipped as anybody to think about the things that we could be doing better. So without further ado, let's talk with Samantha Montano. Welcome to Water Talk. In today's episode, we're talking with disasterologist Samantha Montano about all things water-related disasters, which is to say most or at least many disasters. Samantha Montano is an associate professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and author of the truly fantastic book, Disasterology, Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis. She taught courses on a range of disaster subjects, including disaster preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation, vulnerable populations, and disaster communications. Dr. Montano's research interests include basic emergency management theory and the perceptions of emergency management. In addition to research, she is passionate about public engagement and in her quote-unquote spare time has written for or been interviewed by many national publications, ranging from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to Teen Vogue. Samantha, welcome. We are so thrilled to have you on Water Talk. And we often have a lot of early career folks listening to our podcast and have been asking people just to tell us about sort of a pivotal moment in your career that led you on the professional path that you're on now.
Samantha Montano:Yeah, thank you for having me. Happy to be here with you guys. So I got started doing disaster work in New Orleans after Katrina. I lived in the city working with a bunch of different nonprofits, doing recovery work. And the first kind of like pivotal career path moment was in my, you know, second half of junior year of undergrad in New Orleans. One of my professors sat me down and was like, hey, you've been writing these papers in class about the Katrina recovery and you have some good insights here. I think you should go to graduate school and get a degree in emergency management. I was a psychology major, so like related but different. And that was the first time that it even occurred to me that you really could get a degree in emergency management, let alone a PhD. And so that was a first big career path there. And then the second big one was following the 2016 Louisiana flood. I had been writing about the flooding in Baton Rouge and like throughout kind of middle Louisiana, and it wasn't getting a lot of national media attention at the time. And so kind of through a roundabout way on Twitter, ended up connecting with the environmental editor or science editor, I guess, for Vox at the time. And they took my blog post and published it into my first piece for a national outlet, which again was not something that I had even really considered doing, but opened the door to all of the public engagement work that I'm now able to do.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, that's so cool. I relate to almost every aspect of that journey. It's so funny how a well-timed intervention from somebody can open up possibilities that you just didn't even know were there, you know, like graduate school or degrees or any of that kind of stuff. And so I really am excited to talk with you about disasters and emergency management. It's sort of important because I feel like I might be one of the people that you yell at on the internet sometimes about being a disaster or climate person who doesn't totally understand emergency management and how it all fits together. So I feel like to really understand kind of the work you do and the perspective that you're coming from, it's kind of important for people to think about emergency management as a context. And so, can you just talk about what emergency management is and how it relates to the disaster concept? And then we're always, of course, looking for a water thread. So maybe what that means when it comes to water.
Samantha Montano:Sure. I would never yell at you, Faith. You're never who I'm talking about. Um so yeah, so emergency management includes all of the people who are doing work related to disaster response, recovery, mitigation, and preparedness. So response is probably what you think of most when you think of emergency management. This is like first responders, it's saving lives, it's what they make all the disaster movies about. It's when you get 24-7 news coverage, uh, you know, when you're saving lives is the primary thing that's happening. This is like as the hurricane is making landfall. Then you have recovery, which is putting everything back together again afterwards, including everything from housing recovery to economic recovery to social cultural recovery to mental health recovery. Really complicated and often extremely long process. Emergency management is also responsible for the things ahead of a disaster. So that includes preparedness, so the things we're doing to better enable us to get through that response with kind of as uh little pain as possible, but then also the things we're doing to prepare for the recovery. So, how can we set ourselves up ahead of time to try and make that recovery process go more smoothly? And then the fourth phase that we work in is mitigation. So this is anything that you're doing to minimize your risk. So trying to prevent a disaster from happening at all, or at least minimize significantly what those impacts are going to be. So this could be things like building a flood wall. It would also include building codes, land use development, zoning laws, all of those kinds of things go into mitigation as well. So that is a very like broad range of responsibility. We have, you know, people who are emergency managers and work in emergency management agencies. Of course, FEMA is most well known, but every state has an emergency management agency. Most counties have an emergency management agency, and then obviously big cities, big towns do as well. But a lot of variation across the country in terms of what they're actually doing day to day, like what kind of resources they have, what the concerns are for their communities. Also important and related to water here to keep in mind is that emergency management in the US takes what we call an all-hazards approach. This means a couple different things, but one of the things it means is that emergency management can be responsible for like any kind of hazard that happens. So, you know, most people are gonna think of like hurricanes and earthquakes and tornadoes first, but emergency managers are also involved when our drinking pipes are contaminated, like in Flint, Michigan. Emergency management is also involved when there's an incident at a nuclear power plant, or when there's some kind of chemical explosion or release, like the Norfolk Southern Train Derailment in Ohio a few years ago. They're involved with cybersecurity incidents all of the time, all across the country. They are in charge of creating like nuclear response plans. If there were a nuclear attack on U.S. soil, just a really uh terrorism-related incidents, mass shooting events, right? So this massive, massive, massive range of possible hazards all need to kind of be within this wheelhouse of emergency management. So, as you noted, a lot of the events that we deal with in emergency management are water-related. Flooding, obviously, most common there, but also things like Flint or when, you know, I'm thinking of New Orleans when they had the salt water intrusion up the Mississippi River, um, all kinds of ways, droughts, of course. Any way that water, you know, we have too much water, not enough water, not the right kind of water, then you may see emergency management involved in some capacity.
Samuel Sandoval:Sam, Samantha, bienvenida once again, and uh we're really happy to have you here. I know that you've been talking about disasters and emergency management. And uh so what are the challenges that the emergency management is facing? And what do you see some ways forward for these challenges?
Samantha Montano:Yeah, so I think like most fields right now, emergency management is in a state of chaos a bit. We have seen just an incredible number of changes to FEMA in particular, but changes that have kind of trickled down into state and local emergency management agencies since the Trump administration came back into office. We have seen a significant loss of staff within FEMA, either through like firings or people leaving. We've in particular seen a huge brain drain from FEMA. So the kind of top leaders of that agency who really hold the expertise for that agency have almost all left. You also are seeing a really chaotic series of changes to funding for emergency management across the country. It's a little hard to even describe because it changes day to day. There's a number of lawsuits that are still unfolding across the country, but effectively it comes down to the administration withholding emergency management funding from state and local governments across the country, or you know, putting up barriers to them being able to access it, slowing down the disbursement of that money and then kind of other barriers. And you are also seeing effectively like a takeover of FEMA by the Department of Homeland Security. And so, from an emergency management perspective, these are like all the things you don't want to do, right? You need to be really flexible and really clear uh about what the expectations are and to move quickly uh when something happens. And these barriers have been put in place to prevent that from happening. So, you know, that kind of just scratches the surface there. But, you know, really massive challenges. I mean, even on our best day, emergency management is incredibly challenging. I have been very vocal for over a decade now about the need to reform how we do emergency management to make it more effective, efficient, and just. And unfortunately, that like remains more true uh than ever before at this point. So those are the big challenges, I guess, in terms of you know what's gonna happen moving forward. It really anything could happen. There, I think are some like pessimistic outlooks here that are are pretty pretty bleak. There's also, I think, some more optimistic outlooks here. We have like some things going for us in emergency management, right? So in general, people really like it when FEMA shows up to their community to give them money after they've been through this horrible disaster, right? And so even though there is a lot of criticism of FEMA, the criticism is not let's get rid of FEMA. The criticism has always been how can we get more money from FEMA more quickly to more people? And so a lot of these, almost all of these things that the Trump administration has done to FEMA are in opposition to that, right? They're leaning more towards let's get rid of FEMA, let's slow it down, let's not spend as much money, right? The exact opposite of what the public wants and what members of Congress want. And so I think because of that, right now in Congress, there is a bipartisan bill, if you can believe it, to make some pretty big changes to FEMA. It's not in any way comprehensive reform or like, you know, it's not gonna fix all issues with FEMA, but it does some really critical things. One, it underscores that Congress, you know, bipartisan support in Congress for FEMA continuing to exist, which is important. And the second really big thing it does would uh remove FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security, return it to be an independent cabinet level agency as it was pre-9-11, which is something those of us in the field have been asking for since it was put under DHS in 2003. And so that would be a potentially tremendous change that we've wanted for a really, really long time. There's a bunch of other kind of changes to how we approach particularly recovery in there. Some I think are are maybe more useful than others, but that, you know, if that moves forward, that actually is a very positive thing for emergency management. At the same time, uh, there is something called the FEMA Review Council, which was created by President Trump when he came into office and is stacked with people who mostly do not have emergency management expertise. The people on there who do have emergency management expertise, we may have some moral and ethical issues going on with their understanding of emergency management, and they have been going through this process of kind of coming up with their own proposal for reform for FEMA. We don't have the results of that council yet. I'm not super hopeful about what those recommendations are going to look like. So then the question kind of becomes are we going down Congress's path? Are we going down the FEMA review council path? Are we going down the president's path where he has repeatedly said he wants to eliminate FEMA, or like something somewhere in between, right? It's it's not clear right now. So we're still in kind of a holding pattern of waiting to see what decisions are made and who wins out in the that decision-making process.
Faith Kearns:Can I ask about two super specific things that I feel like keep coming up, which is largely around payouts after sort of some of these bigger disasters like Helene is sort of still lingering there. My understanding around the Texas floods is still still, you know, just that kind of that issue of how funds get distributed after a disaster, which I think, as you're saying, has been a problem for a very long time. This isn't particularly new, but it it does seem to have some new dimensions. And then the other piece, I feel like I haven't heard as much, but heard especially from you early on was around privatization potential. Maybe where do things stand at this point on those two topics?
Samantha Montano:Sure. So recovery, again, is super complex. You've got money coming into communities from multiple federal agencies. Most of it's coming from HUD and FEMA, but you also have DOT involved, USDA, you know, depending on the situation, potentially, you know, a dozen federal agencies that have some kind of recovery money going to state and locals. And that is very complicated to track. We do not have a way of really tracking that money well. It also means that state and local governments are having to put out a lot of money to pay for recovery and then get reimbursed, right? And so I think a lot of what's in the news right now is about the reimbursement process and how that has been slowed down. Now, to be clear, it's always been slow, but from what we're hearing from communities, as you said, especially North Carolina, they're kind of in the sweet spot timing-wise here for a lot of this reimbursement. The process of getting reimbursed is taking longer than normal. And there's more back and forth, and there's more confusion and there's more uncertainty about what funding they actually are or are not eligible for, like whether funding still exists or not. So that, you know, is I think something communities are going through now. Now, I'm gonna like knock on wood as I say this, but we have had not quite as many disasters as we normally would have uh or have in the past couple of years this year. You know, the big ones really have been continued recovery from Helene and the LA fires, of course, and then the Texas flood, and now the new flooding in uh on the coast of Alaska. So I'm very curious to see how the recovery process unfolds for Alaska. I think they are in a pretty unique situation in terms of so many be people now being displaced from their homes and their land uh throughout the winter. And so anytime we see that kind of extended evacuation recovery is more complicated. You also have a location there that has already been controversial among some in terms of, you know, whether people should be living there or not, right? You have some back and forth going on with mitigation funding for some of those communities with the EPA, where money was taken back from them to do mitigation. So there's kind of a coming together of issues in Alaska that I think look pretty different from Texas or North Carolina that I think could be pretty instructive to what recovery may look like kind of more broadly across the country. And then your second question, privatization. So, you know, there is the emergency management that I explained, right? Where you have this like tier of government agencies. Now, of course, more than just emergency management agencies are involved in emergency management. All these other government agencies are also involved, but then you also have the nonprofit sector, all kinds of disaster nonprofits and non-disaster nonprofits are involved in all of those phases of emergency management that I mentioned. And then you also have businesses involved. And some of those businesses are involved because they are like a hotel, and so when people evacuate, they need to stay open so people can stay there. Some of those businesses are involved because they themselves have been affected by a disaster, like your local bookstore is flooded, right? And so they need to recover now. And then you also have businesses that are involved because they are somehow like responsible for the disaster, like have a really key role in that disaster. So I'm thinking of like utility companies during wildfires, for example, and they're so involved that they often like have a seat in the emergency operations center, right? Because they serve such a critical role. But you also have this like huge swath of businesses that are involved because they are given contracts to help with disaster work, right? And so this could be anybody from like contracting with a company to provide food and water to a shelter during a hurricane to kind of infamously our debris management contracts where you're hiring companies to come in and clear debris. You also might have contracts to bring in extra people to help run your emergency operations center. You are hiring companies to consult on mitigation planning and coming up with preparedness advertising campaigns for your community. So across again, all four of those phases, there's all of these companies that are being hired by largely government, although businesses may also hire, like big businesses will hire them too, to come in and fulfill these various functions and tasks that fall within the responsibility of emergency management. And this has happened for many, many decades, but it has grown to the point now where I often call it kind of our shadow emergency management system. You know, you have a situation across the country where many emergency management agencies only have one person working in them, often even a part-time person working in them. It is not possible for them to do all of the things that need to happen across those four phases. They really don't have an option but to try and find the money to contract this workout. And there are a lot of drawbacks to doing that, just like contracting out plans, for an example. Well, we know from research that the most important part of a plan is the process that you go through to create that plan. So if you've just handed that off to a consulting company, your community is not going to be involved in making that plan. All of the stakeholders who are, you know, touch that plan are not going to have been involved. They're not going to know what's in that plan. So it undermine, it can undermine the very effectiveness of the work that they're trying to do. Then you have the like financial impacts of doing it, right? Billions of dollars are going into these disaster consulting, et cetera, uh companies every single year. And it is very rare to see reporting on this. There isn't really much empirical research on this either. The data is very hard to get. And so that has always been red flag. And now we're in a situation where, you know, as Naomi Klein explained, when there's a moment of crisis, you open up that window even further for disaster capitalists and and whatnot to come in and take advantage of that, right? And so I do think we are, as a field, quite vulnerable to the possibility of privatization. The one like kind of wrench in this plan is that the way the Trump administration is talking about disasters is that they want to stop putting money towards disasters, period, right? Some of them want to just hand that money off to the state from the federal government, but many of them, like if you look at Project 2025, they just want to stop spending money. And that gets us into a weird spot because all of those private companies, they are living and thriving and surviving off of federal dollars. If those federal dollars go away as it stands now, states do not have the money to make up for that. So there is a little bit of a stalemate going on on like what exactly that future looks like, but it's definitely something to have on the radar and be cautious of.
Samuel Sandoval:Samantha, thanks, thanks a lot for for that description. I always think that if we put it in perspective, we are very lucky in the United States to have this type of relief. Not in all parts of the world this happens, and we should be uh aware of that. And as you're mentioning, all these this all these uh responses. I mean, you have and you are keeping track of all of these disasters. So how do you stay with a good mental health? And how do you help your students to prepare for a career on emergency management? Can you share some of those tips with us?
Samantha Montano:Sure. You know, one thing, you know, I mentioned that my undergrad degree is in psychology, and I think I got a little bit lucky there because um I do have um kind of a hyper-awareness of the importance of mental health and prioritizing that. So I do the best that I can in terms of, you know, recognizing for myself like when I need to turn the computer off and go for a walk. You know, when you study something like disasters for a really long time, you need to be really cautious of like secondary trauma. So I do things to try and minimize that as much as possible. Like you will never see me sitting in front of like CNN just watching disaster footage for hours on end. I'm good. I know what hurricane damage looks like, right? So I do talk with my students about this a lot. So I teach in an undergrad emergency management program, like mostly 18-year-olds, first time away from home, coming to college, and they take intro to emergency management with me their first semester, and I'm like, here's all this terrible stuff happening in the world. And also, congratulations, you all are going to be responsible for dealing with this when you graduate. And a lot of them are like, I just wanted to fight fires, but okay. And so, again, from the very first day of class, I talk with them about like the importance of their mental health and you know, encouraging them to go talk to the counselor on campus and come up with a system that works for them. Talk a lot about, you know, what has happened in the issues surrounding mental health and emergency management, but like also first responder agencies and how many of us are trying to course correct and and try to be better about that than we have been in the past.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, thank you so much, Sam. I appreciate that right up front you just said it's it's more of a goal practice than than a state of mind, because I think that's definitely true. We got to try and stay on top of it, but it's also an unreasonable expectation to feel, you know, to not feel deeply about this stuff. I guess that's a good segue into the next question, which is, you know, you and I, and actually um Sam and Mallika as well, and really share this commitment to sort of public engagement, science communication, public scholarship, whatever we want to call that stuff. And I know that for myself, I've really noticed a change in how to do that best this year. And I'm just wondering, you know, if you have noticed a similar change, if you have any sort of Insights to share about being a scholar, communicating about these tough issues with, you know, I know you talk with journalists a lot, decision makers, communities. Yeah, just sort of your thoughts on the state of the field and any advice you have for folks who are trying to navigate these big changes.
Samantha Montano:Yeah, I have seen a lot of changes. I think the first big change that I've been trying to figure out kind of how to how to navigate around is how many other disaster researchers are not comfortable talking to journalists anymore. There used to be like a pretty good group of us. And you know, over the course of the past year, more and more people are kind of backing out of agreeing to do interviews for reasons I understand in terms of being worried about backlash and you know getting instructions from their universities or whatnot. So relatedly, journalists who I talk to and have been covering disasters for a long time, also losing a lot of their sources as people have left FEMA and whatnot. So there's like this one challenge that's going on in the field in terms of just a loss of expertise and like loss of experts willing and able to talk to journalists. And of course, it's happening at a time when it's more important than ever. So one of the things that I've been doing is really doubling down on giving interviews. At this point, it's pretty rare for me to say no to an interview, even if I don't have time for it or whatnot, just because I know how difficult that situation is for a lot of these issues that like we cover related to climate change, especially, but also equity issues in disasters as well. So that is one major issue. You know, the other thing, and I'm so curious to see if you have had this experience with journalists. I also am just encountering a lot of journalists who themselves are completely overwhelmed by what is happening. I have had more journalists cry on the phone with me during an interview than ever before. And I had a lot during the pandemic, but this is is far worse this past year. And so that is another thing that I've been thinking a lot about of how am I presenting information to journalists and how how do you talk them through to make sure that they are really understanding all the critical elements of a breakdown in a grant program or something, and really making sure that they understand those implications, even when those implications are completely overwhelming, and trying to be a guide and support for that. I think, in terms of talking to communities, this is probably the hardest one for me right now. There are some things you can do as a community to try and come together and organize and hold more localized preparedness events and whatnot. But the reality is a small community is not going to be able to make up the tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that are needed to fix the roads and the sewer system in their community after a flood, right? And so talking with community organizations, trying to figure out what's the best use of their time and resources right now, knowing that it's not going to be enough, is I think particularly challenging, but again, also needs to happen, especially in the absence of that information coming from government where it kind of typically would come from. So those are the things I'm seeing right now, you know. But and one other one too, because there are so many big changes happening so fast, not just to emergency management, but across everything, there's just not enough capacity and like time for journalists to cover everything. So one of the other things that I've been doing is try, you know, when something happens in emergency management world that I think is a big deal, I try to do more outreach to journalists. In the past, that's not something that I've done. I kind of just let them come to me. But this year I have reached out to journalists more than I ever have before to say, hey, this thing happened. I know it seems really obscure, but it could be really impactful to try and get that on their radar. It's it's tough right now.
Faith Kearns:Yeah, and I will say, like, I have watched your public communications and been in awe of your ability to still sort of speak to things in the way that I feel that you always have been consistent about it. And it's a challenging time. You know, it's it nobody is quite sure what the rules of their institution are or what what's stepping over a line or what isn't. And so I've been like, you know, I wonder if you Sam has good institutional support or you're just doing it anyway, because I think that's a challenge for folks.
Samantha Montano:For sure. So kind of both, right? So I made a very conscious decision the day after the election that I would not be changing how I approach doing public engagement in terms of backing off doing anything. That was a very intentional, conscious choice that I made. But yes, also I do have I have multiple layers of protection in a way that most of these other disaster researchers I'm talking about do not have. And so I am about as protected as you could be in this moment. And so there's also, of course, that comes with, I think, an extra responsibility to speak out when I think of some of my colleagues in Florida who absolutely cannot talk to journalists who are even scared to talk to them off the record. Those of us who are in a position to be better protected need to make up for that until we're back in a situation where they're able to speak out. So, yeah, that is definitely a huge part of it. My perspective on doing public engagement work is that the reason that I am, you know, an academic is to be in a position to be able to use research to help communities across the country, right? Like the whole reason that I do this work is to try and make a more effective, efficient, and just emergency management system. And I could not live with myself if I stopped doing that right at the moment, that again it is most needed. So there is a personal element of it where going back years was strategic about which state I taught in, which institution I taught in to try and best enable myself to be able to do that work.
Samuel Sandoval:Samantha, thank you so much. Thank you for your time, the time that you're putting on this, your expertise, and what I also call the institutional memory, that you are coming back with all these past and you know what has happened, and that expertise is uh definitely important and the responsibility, the ethics that you're having towards these issues. We always like to end our conversation with if there is something else that you want to share with our audience, or and um how can we support your work?
Samantha Montano:Yeah, my shout out to everybody right now is to engage with your local emergency management agencies, right? Find out who is your town's emergency manager, look up what their budget is, think about whether or not they have enough money, see if there's any community organizations that are doing any kind of disaster mitigation advocacy work, like fighting for flood infrastructure in your community or whatever the case may be. If you have uh communities near you that are going through recovery, check-ins, see if they need volunteers, even if it's you know been a couple of years, there may still be ways for you to help. You know, this is a time where engaging at the local level is again more important than ever. And I think it also gives folks like a more tangible thing to get out there and do at a time where it's easy to feel helpless by all of the big things that are happening around us. In terms of where else you can find me, you can go to my website, disaster-ology.com. There are links to all my social media on there, link to the book, and also a link to subscribe to my monthly newsletter where I most often am doing like a news roundup of all the disaster things that have happened over the course of the past month.
Faith Kearns:Great. Thank you so much, Samantha. And I will definitely put in a plug for following Sam's Substack. Is it on Substack? Yes. Newsletter, which is awesome. I use it every month to just get the deeper download on some of the emergency management related stuff. Um the book is awesome, and Sam is super fun to follow on social media.
Samantha Montano:Thanks for having me.
Samuel Sandoval:So Faith, what was your parting gift of our conversation with uh Samantha Montano?
Faith Kearns:Well, for me, it's a little bit cathartic. Like Sam talked about, it's nice to have peers during this time, uh especially, but always. And so I think, you know, just just hearing from Sam about what she's seen, uh, probably particularly on the public engagement side where I have heard very similar things. I was at a Society for Environmental Journalists meeting in I think January earlier this year, and people were really already noticing that many of the scientific experts that they normally call on were not able to take calls from reporters. And I know it was really a challenging thing for a lot of journalists to have to then rethink how they're doing their jobs too. So I think that that was really interesting. And I think Sam also raised that, you know, working at the community level is both sort of necessary and challenging right now. And I will say that, you know, at least for me, the community level work that I've been doing lately is definitely the bright spot. Like I just see so many people wrestling with a changing world and kind of coming out the other end and sort of deciding we've gotta, we've got to take care of ourselves here. And that's been a sort of interesting and liberating process to be a part of. So I just appreciate hearing from other folks who are who are working in this space and wrestling with some of the changes that we've seen this year. How about you, Sam?
Samuel Sandoval:For me, it is how she explained in terms of doubling down on her activity in these times, uh leading by the sample. So basically thinking that she's not gonna change what uh she was doing and that she will now be upfront engaging into these conversations with uh uh reporters and uh generally uh science communication. Uh uh also mentioning the privilege that she has that that uh some of us have in terms of uh having these conversations and being uh this expert that can speak up on in this time. Uh so that for me was one of the best parting gifts. The other one was when she starts reminding all of us about our uh mental health and some very uh specific steps, activities that we can do towards keeping our mental health. And we had an amazing conversation about disasters and emergency management, learning a lot of that. It was a great conversation.
Faith Kearns:Until next time. Thank you for listening to the Water Talk Podcast. I'm Faith Kearns and I'm the Director of Research Communications with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at Arizona State University.
Samuel Sandoval:My name is Samuel Sandoval. I'm a professor at UC Davis and a cooperative extension specialist in water resources management at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Mallika Nocco:I'm Mallika Nocco, Assistant Professor and State Extension Specialist in Agricultural Water Management at the University of Wisconsin Madison. If you enjoy our show, please review, listen, like, and subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. Please find transcripts and additional content at WaterTalkPodcast.com. Original music by Paloma Herrera Thomas.