When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022, the U.S. colony had still not fully recovered from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017. Collapsed bridges had not been rebuilt, houses still lacked roofs, and most recovery funds had not been distributed.

Fiona’s rains only added to the woes, causing house collapses on the interior part of the island, devastating mudslides, and a widespread power outage that lasted for weeks. There was no drinking water: The Puerto Rico Aqueducts and Sewers Authority failed to acquire power generators before the storm hit, and drinking water or sewage systems run mainly on electricity. Simple tasks such as getting gas for the generator (for those who had one) or obtaining drinking water could take a whole day—and become life-and-death situations for people with chronic illnesses who needed ventilators or refrigerated insulin.

The three hurricanes severely impacted the island’s wellbeing. But their effects aren’t simply the result of intense storms. These “natural disasters” are political, stemming from a long colonial history culminating in years of austerity imposed by the U.S. With federal and local government support at a standstill, people in the colony are pulling together to make things better. Mutual aid groups and rural water systems have driven recovery pathways across the island, creating a new model for effective disaster recovery.

Puerto Rico’s history is one of exploitation. The island became a Spanish possession in the 1500s, with a colonial governance built on the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the mistreatment of land and animals to develop the coffee, tobacco, and sugar industries.

After the U.S. took control of the island in 1898, tax incentives for U.S. corporations have come and gone, driving increases in poverty, unemployment and emigration. Starting in the 1950s, Operation Bootstrap allowed companies to establish themselves on the island without paying Puerto Rican taxes; then, in 2006, the federal government swung in the other direction, repealing a corporate tax exemption on income originating from U.S. territories. Companies left the island, and the economy plummeted. Currently, 45% of Puerto Rico’s population lives below the poverty line, and its debt is estimated to be more than $70 billion—a debt that has never been audited and was pushed by Wall Street interests.

The U.S. government’s response—decreasing Puerto Rico’s debt through austerity measures—has made the island ever more vulnerable in the face of disaster. Under President Obama, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico was created to develop a deal for debt repayment between Puerto Rico and its creditors. However, the Board knew that paying back the debt would be disastrous for the island. Drastic cuts to the island’s education and health systems, including emergency medical technicians, meant that when Hurricane María hit the island, local agencies had minimal capacity to respond. Another measure, a new public-private partnership for the electric grid, has raised energy costs for consumers and caused regular power outages that create daily disruptions in education, water delivery, and health services. In disaster situations, these become catastrophic.

The U.S. and Puerto Rican governments’ disaster recovery efforts have fallen short for Puerto Ricans. Instead, it is community strategies that have enabled life on the island to continue. Mutual aid efforts—defined as collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually growing from awareness that top-down systems aren’t working—have picked up the slack, establishing relief actions for the island such as providing water, food, shelter, and medicine in remote, mountainous regions.

One of the most important of these solidarity efforts are community aqueducts, which provide drinking water infrastructure to areas that the government’s water utility does not serve. The aqueducts usually consist of a water pump or gravity-driven channel that moves water from wells or small rivers to a central water reservoir. The water is then treated by a chlorine disinfection process, and distributed through pipes to houses, schools, churches, and public pick-up stations.

There are 241 of these aqueducts in Puerto Rico, and they are managed largely by the community residents who they serve. Most systems are operated by neighbors that take care of everything from initial installation to day-to-day oversight. (Aqueducts with greater financial resources tend to hire external operators.) Some members oversee physical components, including daily operations and pipe and plume repairs; others take charge of organizational duties, like organizing and running their assemblies and accounting. The aqueduct organizations can take many forms. Many have one person in charge, others have an informal board of trustees, and a few have 501(c)(3) status and a well-defined structure with positions such as president and chief operator.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, community aqueducts were often the only means communities had to access potable water. Having clean water allowed Puerto Ricans to recover some sort of normality, allowing them to clean, do laundry, and flush toilets. In addition, having drinking water saved residents hours that would otherwise be invested in buying or collecting it from public pickup stations.

The network created by the aqueducts also served a more expansive mutual aid role, becoming a conduit for collecting essential goods from foundations and NGOs and redistributing them to residents in need. Members drew on the aqueducts’ networks to facilitate resource-sharing. For example, a member of one community aqueduct in Añasco shared with me that because one person in the community had an excavator available to loan to the post-María cleanup effort, aqueduct managers were able to quickly remove debris and get their system back up and running.

While community aqueducts have had success, they are not immune to the political and economic factors that constrain life in Puerto Rico. They deal with high costs for water tests and privatized energy, and marginalization from local agencies. But they are paving the way for new directions in the recovery and collective organizing. They underscore how collaboration can put even limited resources in motion to tackle emergency needs, in ways that are often more effective than government-sponsored relief efforts.

Mutual aid’s success doesn’t mean that governments should walk away. On the contrary, the U.S. and Puerto Rico should learn from these community strategies how to better respond in times of need. They should support community aqueducts and mutual aid groups, heeding their needs and concerns, and removing bureaucratic hurdles to accessing funds. There is progress: Legislation introduced on the island this year includes community aqueducts on an advisory committee developing drinking water strategies for the island.

As more and more extreme weather events take place across the world, building and maintaining solidarity networks that recognize our mutual interdependence are crucial to a resilient future. Puerto Rico’s mutual aid strategies offer an example to follow as we rethink disaster preparedness.

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From 2012 to 2017, Blatty, a New Orleans-based photographer, drove to small towns and villages on the bayous to document a way of life that is rapidly disappearing. The causes of this decline include the growth of the city of New Orleans and its levees, the hurricanes, and the oil industry. In Blatty’s evocative photos, though, these communities are very much alive: You can smell the mud of the marshes, the shrimp and crabs piled up to be sold, and the oil powering the motorboats. And in quotations from the individuals she photographed you can feel their love and longing for family, tradition, and place.

In the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we’ve become aware of the intermittent extreme dangers faced by these communities. Blatty’s work, as collected in Fish Town: Down the Road to Louisiana’s Vanishing Fishing Communities, published by George F. Thompson Publishing and distributed by University of Virginia Press, shows the everyday precariousness of their world.

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As a sociologist who studies disasters, I wasn’t surprised. I study the role that communities play in avoiding, preparing, responding to, and recovering from disasters. This view holds that while natural hazards are common, they become disasters due to the social conditions in which they happen.

So if a hurricane strikes a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, that’s not considered a disaster. But when a hurricane hits an island that has been in crisis for many years, as was the case in Puerto Rico, the disaster can be very large.

Hurricane Maria lifted the veil on the “broken system” governing everyday life on the island. One common theme in the many conversations I have had with people in Puerto Rico is that Hurricane Maria did not create these conditions. These were the result of years of a weak economy, a political system with little power, underinvestment in infrastructure, and fiscal mismanagement.

This system, broken as it is, has proven to be resilient. In other words: While disasters often provide an opportunity for communities to confront their social and economic realities, it doesn’t always happen that way. There’s no reason to assume that pre-disaster conditions are going to magically be erased after a catastrophic event like a hurricane. They certainly weren’t in Puerto Rico.

One could argue that the current disaster has been centuries in the making. Discovered by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493, Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony for almost 400 years, until it became a territory of the United States after the Spanish-American War. Between 1898 and 1948, Puerto Rican governors were appointed, at first by the U.S. military and later by U.S. presidents with some congressional oversight. It was not until 1948 that Puerto Ricans could elect their own governor. To this day, although they are U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans residing in Puerto Rico cannot vote in presidential elections.

In the mid-1940s, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín developed Operation Bootstrap to modernize Puerto Rico from an agricultural economy into an industrial one—using federal funding to increase manufacturing. This accelerated the economic prospects of the island, but it also led to massive urban developments and an economic system that was fundamentally dependent on federal resources.

By 2016, the government was facing a financial crisis with an outstanding debt of more than $70 billion. Fiscal mismanagement, political pandering, corruption, and nepotism created an ongoing financial and economic crisis that led to a 7 percent population loss from 2010 to 2015, which continues to this day. While the winds of Hurricane Maria eventually stopped, the fury of the financial crisis still pounds the island.

The big challenge for Puerto Rico is how to overcome the realities that Maria revealed. The task is not only how to help the island recover from the current crisis, but how to transform the system so that residents avoid the trap of returning to the broken system that led to the catastrophe in the first place.

Indeed, the experiences of many with whom I spoke suggest that certain issues of the “broken system” manifested themselves before, during, and after the storm. Among them: emergency management plans that were not followed (if they were ever completed, practiced, or implemented); a broken emergency communication system that prevented timely and efficient response by the central government; no-bid contracts; inadequate distribution of supplies at the ports; and the very slow federal response.

The hurricane also revealed the resilient spirit of the Puerto Rican communities, many of which responded quickly during and after the storm. There are countless stories of neighbors checking on the welfare of others, of people finding ways to communicate, and of individuals cooperating to remove debris and get supplies to people when no other services were available.

Another resource has been the Puerto Rican diaspora, which mobilized to get supplies and bring attention to conditions on the island. There are approximately 5.1 million Puerto Ricans living stateside that are concerned about the future of the island and want to be part of the solution. The Puerto Rican diaspora, particularly in Florida, has the political power to hold the federal government responsible for failures in the response to the disaster.

Courting the Puerto Rican electorate has become an essential campaign strategy for political candidates. Nonetheless, much of the courting will likely dissipate if Puerto Ricans do not vote or get involved in the political process. The diaspora also has more financial resources to take on temporary assistance to family members moving stateside looking for better opportunities. However, the diaspora is ideologically divided, particularly over the political status of the island of Puerto Rico, and these divisions have prevented the diaspora from really imposing its considerable power on issues facing the island.

There is no doubt that federal resources are important to the recovery of the island in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis. And the island will certainly be dependent upon the federal government to rebuild the physical structure of the island, particularly its power grid.

Still, it’s a myth that communities without financial resources are helpless in the face of disasters—they still have the capacity to adapt. Social resources are extremely important in disasters. For instance, in my research, I explored how a community of farmworkers in Central Florida was able to build a food shelter and a community emergency plan with little to no financial resources.

Thus, for the people of Puerto Rico, recovery will imply more than financial resources. It will require a new way of thinking, a new beginning driven by innovative ideas to account for the multitude of problems the island is facing. It will require uncomfortable and necessary discussions on past practices that allowed the island to reach this point. In all, it will require a dramatic shift from a dependent path to one that accounts for the realities of being an island nation with economic challenges but enormous social and human capital resources.

Puerto Rico faces a long recovery. While the hurricane was one of the worst disasters to strike the island, not transforming the seemingly resilient “broken system” will have lasting consequences for its future. This is a moment when Puerto Rico can make a break with the past, and move forward in ways that enable all of its communities to mitigate, prepare, respond, and recover from future hurricanes and threats.

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When I visited, six months after Maria, the roadside debris still hadn’t been removed. Electric lines drooped from trees or lay abandoned on the shoulder. Tattered blue tarps served as makeshift roofs. Other houses stood abandoned, missing doors and windows. Power to many rural areas hadn’t been restored, which meant that thousands of people were living without refrigerators and other necessities that we take for granted. Many people had left the island to escape these conditions, and a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that several thousand people may have died because of the storm.

Hurricanes are a natural occurrence, and the island and its people know them well. If you want to study what happens when hurricanes hit tropical forests—which they are doing with increasing frequency—then El Yunque is where you want to be. The forest here was hit hard by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, had considerable damage from Georges in 1998, was side-swiped by Irma in early September 2017 and then floored two weeks later by Maria and her 140-mile-per-hour winds.

For nearly a century, scientists have been observing how El Yunque handles hurricanes. Ecological systems don’t function separately from human systems. Rather, the two are always intertwined. Researchers at El Yunque attempt to parse how human actions—such as building roads, harvesting timber, and diverting water for domestic and municipal use—affect how this forest deals with its periodic hurricanes.

El Yunque is uniquely positioned for not only observing but also measuring what happens when hurricanes “batter” the forest, though scientists like Zimmerman actually use the word “affect.” This is not simply a scientist adhering to a language standard, it’s how the scientists at the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research site routinely describe what happens here. Changes this dramatic and on this grand a scale are natural. These forests have evolved with hurricanes, so they are remarkably resilient. “Everybody asks, ‘How’s the forest?’ It’s a hurricane forest, it has gone through this before. It looks pretty bad right now, but you wait,” Zimmerman said.

He’s confident in its recovery because he and his colleagues have seen it happen before. Since the 1940s, foresters then ecologists and biogeochemists at El Yunque have been staking out their study plots, delineating them with surveyors’ pin flags and white PVC pipe. The forest is further festooned with mesh baskets to measure how many seeds and leaves fall from trees and plants, flagging tape (green, orange, yellow, red) to mark study areas that are monitored regularly, small solar collectors to run equipment, and instruments for recording all sorts of data, including soil nutrients, temperature and humidity, tree diameters, and outputs of methane and nitrous oxide.

The Luquillo research site spans the whole national forest, and Zimmerman is its lead principal investigator as well as director of the El Verde field station—one of two in the forest. Right after Hurricane Maria hit, while the rest of the island was reeling from the loss of power, the scientists at the forest were in a race against time to get back to their measurements. Some of their equipment was buried by leaves and branches torn from the trees above. “In Hurricane Georges, we had some gaps in the data, and I didn’t want that to happen again, so I was just focused on keeping up that rhythm and getting out to all those different plots,” Zimmerman said. “I don’t think I picked up my computer for three weeks.”

The roof to the research building had been blown off, and trees were leaning on other buildings. After assessing the damage, and locating some tarps to stretch over the missing roof, Zimmerman led a crew out to the forest. His staff, along with some researchers and volunteers, used hand saws and a lot of grunt labor to open the trails to the various study plots. They worked steadily and with a sense of urgency, as a number of the experiments relied on timely data collection. For instance, the staff measures nitrate and potassium levels in the soil water every two weeks, and understanding Maria’s effects on these nutrients was crucial. “It’s samples like that you don’t want to lose the rhythm to in an event like this,” Zimmerman explained.

The most striking thing about the forest in those first days was its new color: brown. If you gazed up at a once verdant hillside, you might think it had been burnt—all the green leaves were gone.

No mature tree, anywhere, can withstand 140-mile-per-hour winds. Along with the leaves, something has to give, and it will be the weakest part of the structure: the roots, the trunk, or the crown. In temperate forests where hurricanes are a rarity—as in much of the mainland United States—most large trees are uprooted because the roots are the weak link. In the tropical forest at El Yunque, the roots held, some of the trunks were snapped, but nearly all of the crowns blew apart. The vast majority of the trees—maybe 95 percent of them—remained upright, even though they’d lost most of their limbs, branches, and leaves. It was as if someone had replaced trees with telephone poles.

During Hurricane Maria, high winds snapped all of the branches off the crowns of trees in the forest, leaving these bottle brush-like trees. Photo courtesy of Stephen Long.

Six months after the hurricane, when I visited Luquillo and walked out into the forest with Zimmerman, the green had returned. The telephone poles had already transformed into bottle brushes—their green leaves growing like bristles from the upper stem. Unlike mainland forests, a tropical forest has no dormant season, so the palm, the tabonuco (known for grafting its roots to those of its neighbors), the ausubo, with deep buttresses at its base, and all the other trees began sprouting branches and putting on leaves almost immediately. The trees had no time to waste, because they continue to respire and the only way to replenish the storeroom of carbohydrates is through photosynthesis—which requires leaves.

Luquillo’s forests are primary forests, which means that they were never cleared for agriculture, unlike most of Puerto Rico’s forests. There has been some sporadic logging, but that ended 70 years ago. So some of the larger ausubos and tabonucos are surely hundreds of years old, though it’s impossible to know, since the lack of a dormant season also means there are no annual tree rings to count.

It’s safe to assume that many of these trees stood through San Felipe II in 1928, the most recent hurricane comparable in strength to Maria. The strategy that has enabled them to survive this long is that they sacrifice their crowns, like sailors reefing their sails when the wind gets too rough. Any species less windfirm has been knocked off the mountain by now. Researchers have shown that selection for hurricane resistance also operates within species. Palms and mahoganies grown from seeds from hurricane-prone areas are more windfirm than those from areas lacking hurricanes.

Even though the greening of the canopy overhead was spectacular, it was no match for what was happening on the ground, where a sea of verdant jade was flooding in around us. Zimmerman pointed out the pioneer tree species soaking up the sun. These species cannot grow in the deep shade of a rainforest, but when a hurricane blows the canopy away, they seize the day. Seeds that were deposited in the soil decades ago—the last time the canopy was wide open—suddenly have enough sunlight to germinate. They do so by the thousands. One of these pioneers, the cecropia, gathers light with a leaf so huge it could function as an umbrella.

After the hurricane removed the dense tree cover that shielded the forest floor, sunlight awakened seeds—some of which had been waiting for decades—and the green understory sprang to life. Photo courtesy of Stephen Long.

“We’re seeing a lot of herbs that we haven’t seen,” Zimmerman said, pointing to a lush heliconia, a wild plantain. “There are huge patches of these heliconia, and they were virtually non-existent before the storm. I’ve seen pokeweed. That’s a pasture plant, not a forest plant. In two or three years there will be tons of shrubs in the understory. This is their time to grow, to flower, and to produce fruit to fill up the seed banks and to wait for the next hurricane. This is their opportunity to go.”

Grasses, vines that completely envelop tree trunks, begonias, tree ferns, all of these plants thriving in the sudden gift of sunlight are turning what was once an open park into a puckerbrush. But they are racing against the clock. This is a very dynamic time at Luquillo. Can any of the new trees grow fast enough to make it to the canopy? Sprouts on residual trees become branches, branches become limbs, and the canopy fills in the gaps. The 30 percent canopy cover of today will return once again to a full canopy, leading to light levels near the ground low enough to make photographers weep. And the live-fast, die-young pioneer species will indeed die young, starved of sunlight, though they will most likely have made plenty of deposits in the seed bank.

The ecological concept of resilience is surprisingly straightforward. It is a measure of how long it takes for a system to return to pre-disturbance conditions after an event like a hurricane. The forests of El Yunque have shown that within 25 years, they can return to pre-hurricane conditions. Only time will tell if Puerto Rico’s political, social, and economic systems will be able to make the kind of recovery that we can expect to see from its treasured rainforest.

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Fall foliage and hurricane season go hand in hand in New England. But what few people realize is that the spectacular blazing colors from our hardwood forests are the result of the great hurricane of 1938, which brought 100 mph winds inland to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine 79 years ago on September 21.

The storm that came to be known as “Thirty-Eight” (the system of naming hurricanes didn’t begin until 1953) was the first Category 2 hurricane to reach Vermont and New Hampshire, and it came without warning. Thirty-Eight made landfall on Long Island, crossed the Long Island Sound into Connecticut and Rhode Island, and raced through Massachusetts and Vermont. It had been at least a generation since any hurricane had hit the region, even the coast.

Because of the lack of warning, or preparedness, more than 600 people died, most of them from the storm surge that swept beachfront houses into the sea. Floods and high winds—the fiercest wind was measured near Boston at 186 miles per hour—destroyed roads, bridges, houses, barns, and railroad tracks.

Inland, these winds uprooted nearly 1,000 square miles of forest, ripping holes in the tree canopy ranging from the size of a city yard to as large as 90 acres. And in doing so, the hurricane created a new forest across much of New England.

Most of the people who lived through the hurricane are gone, but I have been fortunate to hear the stories of many of them. One dramatic story came from Fred Hunt, at the time a 14-year-old boy playing hooky in the woods in Rindge, New Hampshire. Late in the day, a huge pine—more than 100 feet tall—was uprooted and landed five steps behind him, its trunk parallel to the ground. Thinking quickly, he scrambled into the space beneath the trunk of the fallen pine and stayed there for 10 minutes while the winds howled mercilessly and blew down every other tree in the forest. When there were no more trees left standing, Fred scrambled through the tangle of downed trees the last half-mile to home.

The white pine that served as Fred’s refuge happened to be growing in that spot because of the history of the area’s land, which was typical of much of rural New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In the 17th and 18th centuries, farmers cleared most of the original forest to grow crops and raise livestock. With the advance of the Industrial Revolution, these farmers left to work in the mills. Starting in 1860, the cleared fields reverted to forests. In New England, there’s no need to replant trees because they happily grow on their own. One of the most prolific colonizers of farm fields is white pine.

So when Thirty-Eight raged through, forests covered 80 percent of the land in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much of that forest was white pine. Before the storm, many rural families saw their woodlots as living bank accounts, where a few trees could be cut and sold when they needed money. Ninety percent of the trees that were blown down were white pine.

With the disaster, the federal government saw a need to get involved. The Great Depression had not yet ended, and in the forested areas of New England the New Deal make-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were well-established. Fearing the kind of fires seen in the West each summer, the U.S. Forest Service directed the WPA and CCC to strip the downed trees of their branches, twigs, and needles to reduce the fire danger. Simultaneously it created the Northeast Timber Salvage Administration to purchase logs from the blowdown. Five times the annual harvest of trees had been blown down in a five-hour period, creating a huge glut of wood. NETSA created a market for the logs and purchased nearly half of the salvageable timber, providing some income to the 30,000 families that otherwise would have lost their woodland bank accounts.

And so, New England’s largest hurricane was followed by its largest logging job, and this one-two punch brought about the forest that we see today. When the towering canopy of white pine blew down, what was left were the seedlings and saplings of deciduous hardwood trees. If they hadn’t been blown down in 1938, those pines might still be there, holding the ground until they died from wind, disease, or logging. Instead, the mix of maple, birch, and oak that relished the new sunlight (having been released from the shade of the pines) grew vigorously. This new forest closely approximates the species mix of the original forest that had greeted the settlers, and its vibrant display of turning leaves attracts leaf peepers from around the globe.

Not all of New England experienced Thirty-Eight the same way. In Vermont, for example, farming had continued well into the 1930s, so only half of the state was covered in forests. So hurricane damage appeared mostly in woodlots on top of ridges and in the sugar maple orchards that produced the springtime crop of maple syrup. Maple syrup was a hugely important crop in Vermont, because dairy farmers used the income from syrup to pay a year’s wages for hired help. With so many sugar orchards laying in ruins, many Vermont farmers had no choice but to get out of farming. The regrowth of the forest began in Vermont 80 years later than in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the process was different because Vermont’s soils are better than those of its neighbors. Vermont’s forest cover has now reached 80 percent, and the vast majority of it is the mix of northern hardwoods—maple, beech, and birch—that makes the hills come alive in the fall.

When I last spoke to Fred Hunt, just months before he died at 87, he said, “I’ve always been a white pine man.” He told me that after graduating with a degree in forestry from the University of New Hampshire, he ran a logging business for 10 years, specializing in thinning pine plantations. He then earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts studying white pine and its effect on the water supply. Along the way, his master’s thesis served as the first management plan for the 58,000-acre forest surrounding Quabbin Reservoir, which provides the drinking water for Boston and 40 other nearby towns. He then taught forest management and managed a large forest deep in the Adirondacks for 10 years before he decided at the age of 54 to make his final career change, moving back to Reading, Vermont and tending his own forest.

Hunt spent a lifetime working to grow superior white pine because it provided a good living and because he loved the practice of forestry. But it’s possible that his lifelong affinity for white pine could have little to do with money or forestry. It could have more to do with an event when he was 14 years old. On that day, as New England’s most destructive hurricane passed through, a white pine saved his life.

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In the near future, information technology may provide new, more effective ways to organize disaster response. We’ve already seen the power of Twitter to coordinate political revolution, and we’ve seen the Pokémon Go augmented reality game motivate tens of thousands of people to get outdoors and chase imaginary monsters. What if, in response to crises, augmented and alternate reality games like Pokémon Go switched into a mode that rewarded players for donating blood? Delivering water bottles? Filling sandbags? Offering temporary housing? Or evacuating areas threatened by storm, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, or other hazards?

Author and game designer Jane McGonigal popularized the notion of gamification, in which players can get points, badges, or other rewards for ordinarily mundane tasks. According to McGonigal and others like Ian Bogost, gamification can motivate us to recover from personal setbacks including injury, depression, or distress, and improve our lives by forming new habits or skills. For example, Duolingo allows people to learn a language online while translating online documents and websites. Students earn skill points as they complete lessons or translate web content, and the complexity of sentences increases as the user progresses. Other games use competition and peer pressure among neighbors to reduce electricity consumption when appeals to saving money and the environment don’t work.

So gamification can work in our private lives. But what if we combined gamification and the sharing economy to coordinate the manpower of gamers for the public good in response to disaster? Already Airbnb’s disaster response unit allows hosts to open their homes to storm victims. Uber has offered free rides to facilitate evacuation of areas during emergencies like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Dallas police shootings. In this way, the sharing economy taps into the empathetic human impulse to do meaningful and pro-social work in response to need. Maybe all Pokémon Go players need is a little nudge in the direction of emergency response tasks when disaster strikes.

Such an emergency response system would be a logical extension of the emergency broadcast system. If you haven’t cut the cord, you’re probably familiar with the EBS regularly interrupting television and radio programming. And we all know about the alerts that get pushed out to our mobile phones to warn us of dangerous weather (or, as recently occurred in the New York City area, an alleged terrorist on the run). While these broadcasts go over public airwaves, they have always been delivered to our private communications equipment—temporarily seizing control of private property for a public purpose.

What the EBS system doesn’t do is facilitate or coordinate a response. A more appropriate emergency system for the social media age is one that does not merely push messages—but that also mobilizes communities, to collect intelligence from them or to take other action. Already apps like Google Maps, Waze, and Swift.ly collect real-time information on traffic flows and incidents. These kinds of apps would just need augmented reality disaster response modes that encourage coordinated emergency actions, helping create community resilience. We could call it an Emergency Interaction System.

That might sound a little techno-utopian, but there are precedents. Emergency response organizations like the Red Cross already have extensive experience using table-top simulations and simulation learning tools to train personnel and prepare adaptive responses. If the Red Cross integrated these simulations with networked sharing-economy apps and augmented reality games, it could mobilize and coordinate an extraordinary group of volunteers and private resources on a scale that might rival official government efforts.

An app called SwingVoter Go is an example of serious game inspired by Pokémon Go. The game sought to motivate people to become more engaged in the 2016 election by inspiring gamers who don’t live in swing states to influence voters who do. It would prompt you to pick any battleground state, like Florida or Pennsylvania, and use Facebook to find people in your social network from those states that you can engage in election-related conversations. SwingVoter Go provides “lures” that you can share on social media to draw undecided voters into a conversation with you with the goal of influencing them to vote for a particular candidate. If successful you increase the collective score of the game as well as get one step closer to becoming a “swing master.”

In a similar way, an emergency interactive disaster response system could use social media and augmented reality to connect people with needs to those who want to help. By building a “Red Cross mode” into existing apps, emergency response tasks could appear instead of Pokémons or other lures, and players could earn hero points for finding or distributing emergency supplies, providing transportation to shelters, making charitable donations, or helping clean up. Players could opt out, but building an emergency mode into existing apps would solve the problem of distributing the software ahead of time so that it could be mobilized at a moment’s notice.

Of course, potential catastrophes will require more than human resilience. An Emergency Interactive System does no good if it doesn’t function in an emergency, so technological infrastructure must also be adaptive to stress. We’ve already noticed a degradation of mobile phone signals at crowded venues like music concerts or sporting events, when uploading data-intensive videos and photos can overwhelm mobile phone towers. During massive events, relying on normal tower signals will only exacerbate the disaster—especially in cases that affect the towers themselves. For example, since the loss of service that accompanied hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, several measures have been taken to help make cell phone towers and service more resilient to disaster. Nevertheless, each new catastrophe seems to expose some previously unknown vulnerability, at the worst possible time. What we need from the Emergency Interactive System is a more resilient way of connecting people to one another, so that they can check in on loved ones and participate in recovery efforts.

Fortunately, smartphones are already equipped with the capacity to connect via mesh networks that could allow our disaster response players to drop in and out, bypassing mobile phone towers. For example, FireChat is an app that allows text messaging independent of Wi-Fi and mobile data. The app gained popularity in 2014 when hundreds of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong used it to communicate and coordinate without being intercepted by the Chinese government. Like many other peer-to-peer data sharing apps, FireChat can use Bluetooth connectivity to send messages between devices within about 200 feet of each other—perfect for dense crowds that typically overtax towers.

A new version called FireChat Alert even allows emergency responders to broadcast text messages during a crisis. Originally developed in collaboration with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, FireChat Alert is being tested in a Philippines pilot program to improve communication during and after typhoons. While the app is currently a one-way broadcast medium only, it proves the potential to adapt private, mobile technologies for public purposes, even without existing data towers.

By combining advances in augmented reality games with the sharing economy and mesh networking, we could be poised on the threshold of a revolution in disaster response that empowers the public to follow their natural helpful instincts in response to all kinds of crises, without getting in the way, and even when our electricity, Internet, and/or cell service fails.

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