When Disaster Becomes Real
The wildfires in Maui in August 2023 were a visible, devastating reminder that disasters do not follow schedules or respect boundaries. For emergency preparedness professionals, events like this serve as a moment of reflection, not just about the immediate response but about how we talk with communities, especially young people, about disasters before, during, and after they occur.
Schools returned to session in many parts of the country in the days and weeks following the fires. Educators walked into classrooms knowing that some students had watched the news, seen images, or had family connections to affected areas. How to acknowledge that reality while keeping school a stable, grounded space is a question that does not have a single right answer.
What practitioners generally agree on is that pretending nothing happened is not a useful strategy. Children and adolescents are aware of major disasters. They form their own interpretations without adult input if none is offered. Those interpretations are often more distressing than the event itself warrants.
The Language We Choose
Words matter in disaster communication, and they matter especially with children. The framing adults use shapes how young people process and store their understanding of what happened. Language that catastrophizes or uses vivid, graphic descriptions can increase distress. Language that is vague or dismissive can feel dishonest to students who already know something serious occurred.
A useful middle ground is factual, calm, and oriented toward human response. Describing what happened clearly, acknowledging the loss and difficulty, and then moving toward what people did to help tends to leave students with a more stable cognitive and emotional frame. It is not spin. It is accurate, because disasters reliably generate enormous outpourings of organized response.
The same principle applies to how schools communicate with families. Post-disaster messaging that is grounded in fact, acknowledges difficulty without amplifying it, and points toward concrete support resources models the tone educators are also trying to hold in classrooms.
Connecting Disaster to Preparedness
One thing major disasters create is a window of genuine attention to preparedness. After Maui, families who had not previously thought about evacuation plans or emergency supplies found themselves thinking about those things. Schools are well-positioned to use that attention constructively, offering resources or conversation that connects the news event to practical, locally relevant preparation.
This does not mean leveraging a tragedy for programmatic purposes. It means recognizing that people are already thinking about risk and meeting them where they are. A calm, practical conversation about what families can do to be prepared for local hazards specific to your geography is genuinely useful when attention is already engaged.
Schools that have well-maintained emergency plans and clear communication protocols are also better equipped to lead these conversations because they can speak from a position of having already worked through the questions. Credibility in disaster discussions comes from demonstrated preparation, not from expertise performed at a distance.
What We Owe Each Other
There is a relational dimension to disaster communication that sometimes gets lost in the procedural focus of emergency management. When a community experiences or witnesses a major disaster, people need acknowledgment before they need information. Recognizing that dimension, taking a moment to sit with what happened before moving to action steps, is not inefficiency. It is good practice.
For school communities in particular, the adults in a building set the emotional tone. Teachers who are visibly overwhelmed or who avoid the topic entirely signal to students that the situation is either frightening or not worth acknowledging. Neither message is useful. Adults who can hold steadiness alongside honest acknowledgment of difficulty give children something to orient to.
Post-Maui, as after any significant disaster, the most important thing practitioners can offer communities is not a better checklist. It is a model of what thoughtful, grounded engagement with hard events looks like. That model, demonstrated consistently, builds the kind of community resilience that technical preparation alone cannot create.