ICYMI: The New York Times Magazine Profiles Extreme Weather Survivors

The New York Times Magazine recently profiled Extreme Weather Survivors (EWS), a national survivor-led network bringing together people impacted by extreme heat, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, and other extreme weather disasters across the country.

The feature, “How a Series of Climate Disasters Connected a Group of Strangers,” follows six EWS members: Amy Dishion, whose husband died of heat stroke outside Phoenix in 2022; Alan and Cindy Bickford, who have rebuilt through Hurricanes Ian, Helene and Milton while their flood insurance more than doubled in Pine Island, FL.; Derek Sample, whose Altadena, CA., home was made unlivable by the Eaton fire; Erica Solove, who lost her home in Colorado’s 2021 Marshall fire; and Marisa Aguayo, whose San Diego family compound flooded in 2024.

 Strangers before disaster, they found one another through EWS and now share everything from navigating insurance and recovery to supporting one another through grief.

 In just a few years, Extreme Weather Survivors has grown to include more than 2,500 people whose lives have been upended by searing temperatures, roaring fires, torrential floods and intense storms. It is partly a climate advocacy group with a lobbying focus — but it’s also an unprecedented network of people from all over the country, survivors of many different forms of extreme weather, who have come to rely on one another for guidance and emotional support. They have bonded over insurance challenges and byzantine FEMA paperwork, over fights with local utility companies, over the question of how to hold the local authorities accountable for destruction that should, in retrospect, have been preventable.

 The story appears in the Magazine’s print edition on Sunday, Sept. 20. Read the full article here.