Hurricanes Harvey and Maria—which both struck the United States in 2017—left vastly different reactions in their wake. The federal government’s response to Hurricane Harvey elicited praise and gratitude from survivors in Texas. However, the federal response to Hurricane Maria is still a source of disappointment and resentment among storm survivors in Puerto Rico.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”) had vastly different responses to the communities struggling with the hurricanes. And the President of the United States had drastically different responses towards the different communities after their respective storms. The federal government’s response to Hurricane Harvey was faster, greater, and more compassionate than its response to Hurricane Maria. The imbalance in the recovery effort can be measured by objective indicators and inferred through subjective interpretations of comments made by White House officials. It is hard to imagine the source of the disparate treatment.
One possible theory is that government officials—despite the longstanding presumption that legal and political processes are rooted in reason—were influenced by emotions following the storms. Their emotions impacted their decision-making. The framework for evaluating the impact of emotion on cognition has been labeled “emotional appraisals.” An understanding of emotional appraisal helps concretize the impact of emotions on cognition and provide some insight to disparate treatment among Hurricane Harvey and Maria survivors. Most importantly, it may provide some guidance in improving government accountability in future natural disasters.
This Article highlights the enormous gap in the federal response to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria. It examines measurable data, comments, and actions to demonstrate the different responses to very similar storms. It discusses the dimensions of emotional appraisals advanced by psychologist Klaus R. Scherer as a means to explain the elicitation of emotion and reaction patterns. Examining the federal responses to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria under the emotional appraisal framework offers a cogent explanation for why the storms’ survivors received such disparate treatment from the Trump administration.
A better consideration of the emotional appraisals and cognition can minimize disparate treatment in disaster recovery efforts. These discussions could help to prevent similar disparate treatment in response to future storms. Like most emotionally charged responses, awareness is the first step toward regulating our responses. Understanding the ways in which emotion and cognition influence judgments may improve the government’s treatment of all citizens following natural disasters.
