When Disaster Strikes, Who Gets Left Behind?

As America continues to celebrate our 250 years of independence, we are once again reminded of the words that define our national promise: liberty and justice for all.

But for some Americans, justice is apparently conditional.

Ask the families in Gary, Indiana, who went nearly two weeks without electricity after unprecedented storms. Ask the families in Indianapolis’ Ravenswood neighborhood who watched floodwaters invade their homes and displace them. Ask the neighbors who organized food, cleanup efforts and emotional support because they could not wait for someone else to come to their rescue. Then ask the uncomfortable question:

Why does it so often seem that when disaster strikes, the people with the fewest resources are expected to endure the most?

The consequences of severe weather are felt equally– bridges collapse, roads flood, electricity disappears, homes become uninhabitable. But recovery time and access to resources aren’t quite as equal.

FEMA came to Indiana to assess the damage, including touring a collapsed bridge. That attention was warranted, but where was the same urgency for communities like Gary, where residents endured days without electricity and families and businesses absorbed enormous economic and emotional losses?

And what about Ravenswood? Flooding forced families from their homes. Yet neighbors became the safety net, collecting food, cleaning homes, helping families salvage what they could and providing emotional support.

While these neighbors deserve to be celebrated, it raises the question of why they had to become the emergency infrastructure for their own community in the first place.

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America has seen this before.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposed how poverty, race, infrastructure and geography can determine who escapes, who receives help and who is left waiting. Flint, Michigan, demonstrated what can happen when residents sound the alarm about contaminated water and government fails to respond with urgency. Love Canal became a national symbol of the consequences of exposing families to environmental hazards. And Louisiana's "Cancer Alley" continues to raise difficult questions about pollution, industry and the communities living closest to it.

Different disasters. Different communities. Different decades. But the same question remains:

Who pays the price when America fails to protect its most vulnerable?

Environmental injustice does not always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like aging infrastructure, an underfunded neighborhood, a prolonged power outage or a family without the savings to replace spoiled food. Sometimes it is a small business that cannot survive two weeks without electricity. Sometimes it is a homeowner who cannot afford to leave.

And sometimes, it looks like silence.

The storm may be natural. The inequity is not.

Gary should not have to beg for attention. Ravenswood families should not have to rely solely on neighbors to rebuild their lives. No community should have to wonder whether its ZIP code, income or racial makeup will determine how quickly help arrives.

America has the resources to respond. The question is whether we have the will to respond equitably.

Two hundred and fifty years after declaring that all people are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we should be mature enough to acknowledge that the promise has never been equally experienced.

That does not diminish America. It challenges us to make America better. Because patriotism is not pretending injustice does not exist. It’s demanding that our nation's highest ideals become someone's lived reality.

Liberty and justice for all cannot mean liberty and justice for those who can afford it. It has to mean all. Especially when the waters rise.