If you knew a major storm or fire was approaching your home, what would you save? Maybe your pet? A box with letters in it? The blanket your grandma knitted for you when you were a baby?
A pop-up exhibition led by the Climate Action Campaign and curated by Hurricane Helen survivor and artist Sam Hartman asks visitors that question. Built in a space the size of a shipping container in Constitution Gardens on the National Mall, the exhibit brings together artifacts and stories from survivors of extreme weather events across the country to the nation’s political nerve center.
“You can’t look at someone’s face and tell what storms they’ve weathered, but when you look at the artifacts in their home, you can tell immediately what happened to them,” Hartman said in a video promoting the event.
The exhibit, called the Museum of Unnatural Disasters, hosted roundtable discussions with climate experts, members of Congress, and disaster survivors to discuss the economic pain caused by extreme weather events and what can be done to protect people in the future.
Kimberly Wills, director of strategic partnerships for the Climate Action Campaign, said the organization hopes that sharing these experiences will motivate people to demand action from their leaders as they become more aware of the impact extreme weather events have on their lives.
“We are doing a lot of work to press Congressional leaders to do more to combat the climate crisis,” she said. “So many people understand that climate change is real and that it’s happening through the framework of extreme weather events because they can see it.”
One wall of the museum features a U.S. map of extreme weather events over the past two years that have caused more than $1 million in damage, along with news headlines for each. Next to the map is a rectangular glass display case displaying artifacts such as broken household items and asthma inhalers, as well as a small table with a handheld fan and coalition brochures. Wills said the artifacts and story characters displayed in the exhibit “could be any of us.”
The exhibition featured kitchen utensils from a home destroyed in the 2018 Wolseley Fire in California. Credit: Gabriel Matias Castilho/Inside Climate News
A map displayed in a pop-up exhibit displays headlines related to deadly extreme weather events across the United States. Credit: Gabriel Matias Castilho/Inside Climate News
Wildfire experts are particularly concerned about this year’s wildfire season in the U.S., where a milder hurricane season is expected in the Atlantic, but widespread drought and snow in the mountains in the West.
At the first scheduled discussion on extreme heat, held in a tent next to the main exhibit space, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) warned of the dangers of inaction in the face of extreme heat.
“There’s going to be flooding because there’s no snow in New Mexico. We’re not building infrastructure,” Grijalva said. “People say, ‘I know about heat,’ and I say, ‘I know, but I don’t know about 117 degree heat the second week of June. There’s no way we’re going to have triple-digit temperatures in May. It’s affected things that we’ve traditionally done outside, like high school graduations.’
The roundtable was also attended by Congresswoman Dina Titus (D-Nev.) and Hannah Safford, deputy director of the Federation of American Scientists. “Heat is unavoidable, and it’s transmitted to your internal organs,” Safford says.
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Deirdre Radford, a Nevada resident who participated in the panel discussion, spoke about the personal effects she faces as a result of the extreme heat. “For me, that means more asthma and allergies, which leads to infections,” she says. “I have been fighting one infection after another caused by high fever and poor air quality. This affects the elderly and it also affects children. For me it is a constant battle.”
Titus said there is still a lot of education and advocacy to be done in this country about heat, and that heat doesn’t make for “good TV” like floods, hurricanes or tornadoes.
“What we can say is that heat is still the stepchild of natural disasters,” Titus said. “Whenever you try to argue with your colleagues in legal and regulatory language, you have to present extreme heat and extreme cold to gain their support. You can’t just talk about heat because they don’t understand.”
Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nevada) speaks during a roundtable discussion on extreme heat at the Museum of Unnatural Disasters. Credit: Gabriel Matias Castilho/Inside Climate News
Syl Foisy (centre) said she walked “roughly a marathon distance in a day” during a march from New York to Washington, D.C., to raise money for climate change funding. Credit: Gabriel Matias Castilho/Inside Climate News
Dr. Syl Foisy, an atmospheric science candidate at Columbia University, was marching on foot from New York to Washington, D.C. for 12 days to support climate change funding. He and two other researchers and science communicators stopped by the exhibit before filing a petition on Capitol Hill to stop the demolition of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Foisy and his colleagues were concerned about the future of their profession. They wore shirts emblazoned with the logo of the Weather & Climate Livestream, a 50-hour livestream that runs June 1-3 and covers a variety of weather topics.
“We all face weather and disasters,” he said. “We get a warning on our phones telling us to stay out of there, and that saves lives. I think being here is a great example of telling people that not only are these forecasts helpful, but they’re important because storms are intensifying and extreme events are becoming more extreme from what we know from studying the Earth.”
The Museum of Unnatural Hazards at Constitution Gardens is open daily until June 14th.
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Gabriel Matias Castillo
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Gabriel Matias Castillo reports on the Washington, DC area. Previously, he worked at Capitol News in Illinois, covering environmental policy, energy and utilities across the state. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Northwestern University.
