The aftermath of floods, hurricanes and other disasters can be hardest on older rural Americans – here’s how families and neighbors can help
Hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather do not distinguish between urban and rural boundaries. But when a disaster strikes, there are big differences in how well people are able to respond and recover – and older adults in rural areas are especially vulnerable. If a disaster causes injuries, getting health care can take longer in rural areas. Many rural hospitals have closed, leaving patients traveling longer distances for care. At the same time, rural areas have higher percentages of older adults, a group that is more likely to have chronic health problems that make experiencing natural disasters especially dangerous. Medical treatments, such as dialysis, can be disrupted when power goes out or clinics are damaged, and injuries are more likely around property damaged by flooding or powerful winds. As a sociologist who studies rural issues and directs the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, I believe that understanding the risks is essential for ensuring healthier lives for older adults. I see many different ways rural communities are helping reduce their vulnerability in disasters.
Disasters disrupt health care, especially in isolated rural regions
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 20% of the country’s rural population is age 65 and over, compared with only 16% of urban residents. That’s about 10 million older adults living in rural areas. There are three primary reasons rural America has been aging faster than the rest of the country: Young people have been leaving for college and job opportunities, meaning fewer residents are starting new families. Many older rural residents are choosing to “age in place” where they have strong social ties. And some rural areas are gaining older adults who choose to retire there. An aging population means rural areas tend to have a larger percentage of residents with chronic disease, such as dementia, heart disease, respiratory illness and diabetes. According to research from the National Council on Aging, nearly 95% of adults age 60 and older have at least one chronic condition, while more than 78% have two or more. Rural areas also have higher rates of death from chronic diseases, particularly heart disease. At the same time, health care access in rural areas is rapidly declining. Nearly 200 rural hospitals have closed or stopped providing in-patient care since 2005. Over 700 more — one-third of the nation’s remaining rural hospitals — were considered to be at risk of closing even before the cuts to Medicaid that the president signed in July 2025. Hospital closures have left rural residents traveling about 20 miles farther for common in-patient health care services than they did two decades ago, and even farther for specialist care. Those miles might seem trivial, but in emergencies when roads are damaged or flooded, they can mean losing access to care and treatment. After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, 44% of patients on dialysis missed at least one treatment session, and almost 17% missed three or more. When Hurricanes Matthew and Florence hit rural Robeson County, North Carolina, in 2016 and 2018, some patients who relied on insulin to manage their blood sugar levels went without insulin for weeks. The county had high rates of poverty and poor health already, and the healthy foods people needed to manage the disease were also hard to find after the storm. Insulin is important for treating diabetes – a chronic disease estimated to affect nearly one-third of adults age 65 and older. But a sufficient supply can be harder to maintain when a disaster knocks out power, because insulin should be kept cool, and medical facilities and drugstores may be harder for patients to reach. Rural residents also often live farther from community centers, schools or other facilities that can serve as cooling centers during heat waves or evacuation centers in times of crisis.
Alzheimer’s disease can make evacuation difficult
Cognitive decline also affects older adults’ ability to manage disasters. Over 11% of Americans age 65 and older – more than 7 million people – have Alzheimer’s disease or related dementia, and the prevalence is higher in rural areas’ older populations compared with urban areas. Caregivers for family members living with dementia may struggle to find time to prepare for disasters. And when disaster strikes, they face unique challenges. Disasters disrupt routines, which can cause agitation for people with Alzheimer’s, and patients may resist evacuation. Living through a disaster can also worsen brain health over the long run. Older adults who lived through the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami were found to have greater cognitive decline over the following decade, especially those who lost their homes or jobs, or whose health care routines were disrupted.
Social safety nets are essential
One thing that many rural communities have that helps is a strong social fabric. Those social connections can help reduce older adults’ vulnerability when disasters strike. Following severe flooding in Colorado in 2013, social connections helped older adults navigate the maze of paperwork required for disaster aid, and some even provided personal loans.Community support through churches, like this one whose building was hit by a tornado in rural Argyle, Wis., in 2024, and other groups can help older adults recover from disasters.Ross Harried/NurPhoto via Getty Images Friends, family and neighbors in rural areas often check in on seniors, particularly those living alone. They can help them develop disaster response plans to ensure older residents have access to medications and medical treatment, and that they have an evacuation plan. Rural communities and local groups can also help build up older adults’ mental and physical health before and after storms by developing educational, social and exercise programs. Better health and social connections can improve resilience, including older adults’ ability to respond to alerts and recover after disasters. Ensuring that everyone in the community has that kind of support is important in rural areas and cities alike as storm and flood risks worsen, particularly for older adults. Lori Hunter, Professor of Sociology, Director of the Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
We’re only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.
In February, President Joe Biden gave orders to shoot down three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs. Then, the alleged leaked footage from a Navy pilot of a UFO, and then news of a whistleblower’s report on a possible U.S. government cover-up about UFO research. Most recently, an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs might have been collected by a clandestine agency of the U.S. government.
If any actual evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether from whistleblower testimony or an admission of a cover-up, humans would face a historic paradigm shift.
As members of an Indigenous studies working group who were asked to lend our disciplinary expertise to a workshop affiliated with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, we have studied centuries of culture contacts and their outcomes from around the globe. Our collaborative preparations for the workshop drew from transdisciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.
In its final form, our group statement illustrated the need for diverse perspectives on the ethics of listening for alien life and a broadening of what defines “intelligence” and “life.” Based on our findings, we consider first contact less as an event and more as a long process that has already begun.
Who’s in charge of first contact
The question of who is “in charge” of preparing for contact with alien life immediately comes to mind. The communities – and their interpretive lenses – most likely to engage in any contact scenario would be military, corporate and scientific.
By giving Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 could mean that corporations will be the first to find signs of extraterrestrial societies. Otherwise, while detecting unidentified aerial phenomena is usually a military matter, and NASA takes the lead on sending messages from Earth, most activities around extraterrestrial communications and evidence fall to a program called SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI investigators are virtually always STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – scholars. Few in the social science and humanities fields have been afforded opportunities to contribute to concepts of and preparations for contact.
In a promising act of disciplinary inclusion, the Berkeley SETI Research Center in 2018 invited working groups – including our Indigenous studies working group – from outside STEM fields to craft perspective papers for SETI scientists to consider.
Ethics of listening
Neither Breakthough Listen nor SETI’s site features a current statement of ethics beyond a commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this issue. And while the SETI Institute and certain research centers have included ethics in their event programming, it seems relevant to ask who NASA and SETI answer to, and what ethical guidelines they’re following for a potential first contact scenario.
SETI’s Post-Detection Hub – another rare exception to SETI’s STEM-centrism – seems the most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. The possible circumstances imagined include finding ET artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with linguistic incompatibility, finding microbial organisms in space or on other planets, and biological contamination of either their or our species. Whether the U.S. government or heads of military would heed these scenarios is another matter.
SETI-affiliated scholars tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening for technosignatures are benevolent, since “what harm could come from simply listening?” The chair emeritus of SETI Research, Jill Tarter, defended listening because any ET civilization would perceive our listening techniques as immature or elementary.
But our working group drew upon the history of colonial contacts to show the dangers of thinking that whole civilizations are comparatively advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to the Americas, those relationships were shaped by the preconceived notion that the “Indians” were less advanced due to their lack of writing. This led to decades of Indigenous servitude in the Americas.This 16th century engraving shows Christopher Columbus landing in the Americas, where he and his explorers deemed the Indigenous people there as ‘primitive,’ as they had no writing system. Theodor de Bry/Wikimedia Commons
The working group statement also suggested that the act of listening is itself already within a “phase of contact.” Like colonialism itself, contact might best be thought of as a series of events that starts with planning, rather than a singular event. Seen this way, isn’t listening potentially without permission just another form of surveillance? To listen intently but indiscriminately seemed to our working group like a type of eavesdropping.
It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening in without their permission while actively working to stop other countries from listening to certain U.S. communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or careless, ET contact could more likely lead to their colonization of us.
Histories of contact
Throughout histories of Western colonization, even in those few cases when contactees were intended to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, enslavement and genocide.
James Cook’s 1768 voyage on the HMS Endeavor was initiated by the Royal Society. This prestigious British academic society charged him with calculating the solar distance between the Earth and the Sun by measuring the visible movement of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. The society strictly forbade him from any colonial engagements.
Though he achieved his scientific goals, Cook also received orders from the Crown to map and claim as much territory as possible on the return voyage. Cook’s actions put into motion wide-scale colonization and Indigenous dispossession across Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.
The Royal Society gave Cook a “prime directive” of doing no harm and to only conduct research that would broadly benefit humanity. However, explorers are rarely independent from their funders, and their explorations reflect the political contexts of their time.
As scholars attuned to both research ethics and histories of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to showcase why SETI might want to explicitly disentangle their intentions from those of corporations, the military and the government.
Although separated by vast time and space, both Cook’s voyage and SETI share key qualities, including their appeal to celestial science in the service of all humanity. They also share a mismatch between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term impacts of their success. https://www.youtube.com/embed/5gZwLGrJQrM?wmode=transparent&start=0 This BBC video describes the modern ramifications of Captain James Cook’s colonial legacy in New Zealand.
The initial domino of a public ET message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizing. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth illustrates that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one can know for sure how engagement with extraterrestrials would go, though it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.
This article has been updated to correct the date of James Cook’s voyage.
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Most of us still call them UFOs – unidentified flying objects. NASA recently adopted the term “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP. Either way, every few years popular claims resurface that these things are not of our world, or that the U.S. government has some stored away.
I’m a sociologist who focuses on the interplay between individuals and groups, especially concerning shared beliefs and misconceptions. As for why UFOs and their alleged occupants enthrall the public, I’ve found that normal human perceptual and social processes explain UFO buzz as much as anything up in the sky.
Historical context
Like political scandals and high-waisted jeans, UFOs trend in and out of collective awareness but never fully disappear. Thirty years of polling find that 25%-50% of surveyed Americans believe at least some UFOs are alien spacecraft. Today in the U.S., over 100 million adults think our galactic neighbors pay us visits.
It wasn’t always so. Linking objects in the sky with visiting extraterrestrials has risen in popularity only in the past 75 years. Some of this is probably market-driven. Early UFO stories boosted newspaper and magazine sales, and today they are reliable clickbait online.
In 1980, a popular book called “The Roswell Incident” by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore described an alleged flying saucer crash and government cover-up 33 years prior near Roswell, New Mexico. The only evidence ever to emerge from this story was a small string of downed weather balloons. Nevertheless, the book coincided with a resurgence of interest in UFOs. From there, a steady stream of UFO-themed TV shows, films, and pseudo-documentaries has fueled public interest. Perhaps inevitably, conspiracy theories about government cover-ups have risen in parallel.
Some UFO cases inevitably remain unresolved. But despite the growing interest, multiple investigations have found no evidence that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin – other than the occasional meteor or misidentification of Venus.
But the U.S. Navy’s 2017 Gimbal video continues to appear in the media. It shows strange objects filmed by fighter jets, often interpreted as evidence of alien spacecraft. And in June 2023, an otherwise credible Air Force veteran and former intelligence officer made the stunning claim that the U.S. government is storing numerous downed alien spacecraft and their dead occupants. https://www.youtube.com/embed/2TumprpOwHY?wmode=transparent&start=0 UFO videos released by the U.S. Navy, often taken as evidence of alien spaceships.
Human factors contributing to UFO beliefs
Only a small percentage of UFO believers are eyewitnesses. The rest base their opinions on eerie images and videos strewn across both social media and traditional mass media. There are astronomical and biological reasons to be skeptical of UFO claims. But less often discussed are the psychological and social factors that bring them to the popular forefront.
Many people would love to know whether or not we’re alone in the universe. But so far, the evidence on UFO origins is ambiguous at best. Being averse to ambiguity, people want answers. However, being highly motivated to find those answers can bias judgments. People are more likely to accept weak evidence or fall prey to optical illusions if they support preexisting beliefs.
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For example, in the 2017 Navy video, the UFO appears as a cylindrical aircraft moving rapidly over the background, rotating and darting in a manner unlike any terrestrial machine. Science writer Mick West’s analysis challenged this interpretation using data displayed on the tracking screen and some basic geometry. He explained how the movements attributed to the blurry UFO are an illusion. They stem from the plane’s trajectory relative to the object, the quick adjustments of the belly-mounted camera, and misperceptions based on our tendency to assume cameras and backgrounds are stationary.
West found the UFO’s flight characteristics were more like a bird’s or a weather balloon’s than an acrobatic interstellar spacecraft. But the illusion is compelling, especially with the Navy’s still deeming the object unidentified.
Anyone, including pilots and intelligence officers, can be socially influenced to see things that aren’t there. Research shows that hearing from others who claim to have seen something extraordinary is enough to induce similar judgments. The effect is heightened when the influencers are numerous or higher in status. Even recognized experts aren’t immune from misjudging unfamiliar images obtained under unusual conditions.
Group factors contributing to UFO beliefs
“Pics or it didn’t happen” is a popular expression on social media. True to form, users are posting countless shaky images and videos of UFOs. Usually they’re nondescript lights in the sky captured on cellphone cameras. But they can go viral on social media and reach millions of users. With no higher authority or organization propelling the content, social scientists call this a bottom-up social diffusion process.
In contrast, top-down diffusion occurs when information emanates from centralized agents or organizations. In the case of UFOs, sources have included social institutions like the military, individuals with large public platforms like U.S. senators, and major media outlets like CBS.The left image shows bottom-up diffusion, in which information spreads from person to person. The right shows top-down, in which information spreads from one authority. Barry Markovsky
Amateur organizations also promote active personal involvement for many thousands of members, the Mutual UFO Network being among the oldest and largest. But as Sharon A. Hill points out in her book “Scientifical Americans,” these groups apply questionable standards, spread misinformation and garner little respect within mainstream scientific communities.
Top-down and bottom-up diffusion processes can combine into self-reinforcing loops. Mass media spreads UFO content and piques worldwide interest in UFOs. More people aim their cameras at the skies, creating more opportunities to capture and share odd-looking content. Poorly documented UFO pics and videos spread on social media, leading media outlets to grab and republish the most intriguing. Whistleblowers emerge periodically, fanning the flames with claims of secret evidence.
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How Water Towers Work: The Simple System That Keeps Water Flowing in American Cities
Learn how water towers work in the United States, why they are so tall, and how gravity helps cities maintain water pressure and emergency water supplies.
Water towers are one of the most recognizable pieces of infrastructure across the United States. Rising above towns, suburbs, and cities, these elevated tanks quietly perform a vital function every day: maintaining water pressure and storing emergency water for local communities.
Although they may look simple, water towers are an essential part of modern municipal water systems and remain one of the most reliable ways to deliver water to homes and businesses.
The Basic Science Behind Water Towers
Water towers work using a simple principle of physics: gravity.
Water from treatment plants or underground wells is pumped into a storage tank located high above the ground—typically between 100 and 200 feet tall. Because the tank is elevated, gravity naturally pushes the water downward through the city’s pipeline network.
This gravitational force creates the water pressure needed to supply homes, businesses, irrigation systems, and fire hydrants throughout the community.
Most residential plumbing systems in the United States operate best at 40 to 60 PSI (pounds per square inch), which water towers can easily provide through elevation alone.
Ever wondered why cities build giant water towers? 💧 It’s all about gravity. Water is pumped up into the tower and gravity pushes it through city pipes, creating the pressure that delivers water to homes, businesses, and fire hydrants. Simple engineering that keeps entire towns running. Now you know. Hashtags NowYouKnow WaterTower Infrastructure EngineeringExplained HowItWorks DidYouKnow CityInfrastructure UrbanEngineering STMDailyNews EducationalContent ♬ original sound – STMDailyNews – STMDailyNews
Why Water Towers Are Built So Tall
The height of a water tower determines how much pressure it can create. Engineers use a common rule:
For example, a water tower standing 120 feet tall can generate roughly 50 PSI of pressure—perfect for delivering water throughout a residential neighborhood.
Why Cities Still Use Water Towers
While modern pumping systems could theoretically move water through pipes continuously, water towers provide several major advantages that make them a preferred design in many municipal systems.
Stable Water Pressure – Water towers maintain consistent pressure even during peak usage times.
Energy Efficiency – Pumps can refill towers overnight when electricity demand is lower.
Emergency Water Supply – If power fails, gravity can continue delivering water.
Fire Protection – Fire hydrants depend on strong, immediate water pressure.
The Daily Fill-and-Use Cycle
Water towers typically operate on a daily cycle based on community demand.
Night: Pumps refill the tower while water demand is low.
Morning: Water levels drop as residents shower and prepare for the day.
Daytime: Businesses and homes continue drawing water from the tower.
Evening: The system begins refilling the tank for the next day.
How Much Water Can a Tower Store?
Water towers come in many sizes depending on the population they serve.
Small towns: 50,000–300,000 gallons
Suburban communities: 500,000–1 million gallons
Larger urban systems: up to 2 million gallons or more
Even a single tower holding one million gallons can supply thousands of homes for several hours during peak demand or emergencies.
Modern Technology Inside Water Towers
Today’s water towers are equipped with advanced monitoring systems that help utilities maintain safe and reliable water supplies.
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Digital water level sensors
Automated pump controls
Water quality monitoring
Protective interior coatings
Regular inspections and maintenance
Landmarks in the American Skyline
Many cities turn their water towers into local landmarks by painting them with city names, mascots, or community slogans. Some towns even design towers shaped like giant objects such as fruit, coffee cups, or sports balls.
Despite their distinctive appearance, water towers remain one of the simplest and most reliable engineering solutions for delivering clean water to millions of Americans every day.
Next time you see a water tower rising above a town skyline, remember: it’s not just a landmark—it’s the gravity-powered system that keeps water flowing.
Related External Coverage
For more information about how water towers and municipal water systems work, explore the following resources:
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