During the 2020 Labor Day fires in Oregon, Sierra Lindsey Kos saw firsthand the effects of climate change.
As she rushed to take her sick newborn to a hospital in Portland, she traversed through burning fires, a red sky and ash all around her, filling her with fear.
As reported in the New York Times, she would then help found and lead Extreme Weather Survivors, a support group and advocacy network that has grown to more than 2,500 people.
Amy Dishion is one of those members. Before moving to Salem, Oregon, she lost her husband to extreme heat in Arizona. Dishion and Kos join us to share their stories and the work the group does for survivors across the country.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to Extreme Weather Survivors. The support group and advocacy network was co-founded three years ago by Sierra Lindsey Kos after Oregon’s Labor Day fires in 2020. As reported recently in The New York Times, it’s grown to include more than 2,500 people who have experienced floods, fire, hurricane, and more. Amy Dishion is one of them. She lives in Salem now. Four years ago, she lost her 32-year-old husband, Evan, to extreme heatstroke in Arizona. Sierra Lindsey Kos and Amy Dishion join me now. Welcome to you both.
Sierra Lindsey Kos: Hi, thanks for having us.
Amy Dishion: Hello, thank you.
Miller: Sierra. First, can you tell us about your experiences during the 2020 Labor Day fires in Oregon?
Kos: Yeah. So, it was during COVID, and I was a new mom, my son was just a few months old. We were living in Yachats, Oregon, and my son just got really sick and we didn’t know what was happening. And at a certain point, his temperature got so high that we drove through Oregon to the Portland Hospital, and we were there for a week. He was hospitalized, and he’s now healthy and safe, but it was a really trying experience and we had such relief as we were sort of leaving the hospital.
But as we got in our car and drove out of the garage, we basically drove through a fire for several minutes. I mean, the sky was orange, ash was flying all around us, and it really just was like a life changing experience. It really seized me that I can’t keep my kids safe, and as a new mom, that was really trying. And that’s really, I mean, it took a few years to then get things going, but that moment really solidified for me, this is how Americans and humans are going to be experiencing climate change and really start to understand this novel weather and what’s happening around us.
Miller: Amy, do you mind telling us your story of how you came to be a part of this network?
Dishion: Yes, of course. Well, my husband died of heat stroke. Our baby was 3 months old. We were together for 12 years. Evan was the most amazing person I’ve ever met and he was my best friend. He went out for a hike early, early in the morning. But the temperatures climbed really quickly, and it was unseasonably hot, even for Arizona. So he passed away of heatstroke. They got lost on the trail. And that moment just completely ruined my life.
And Sierra and I connected because I was asked by a wonderful woman who’s recently passed, named Hazel Chandler, I was asked to speak at a webinar, a virtual town hall about my experience, and Sierra heard me talk and we connected and became friends, and I’ve just been so honored to be part of this community. It’s a club none of us want to be a part of, but I’m so grateful that we have the club.
Miller: Sierra, what were your hopes for this group, this club, as Amy calls it, when you started? What was your intent?
Kos: My background is really like, I came up as a filmmaker and creative. My co-founder built and led the Survivor network from scratch, called Everytown and Mom’s Demand, connecting people who have lived through unimaginable loss. And I mean basically, what I really landed on was the fastest growing population in the U.S. and the world are people harmed by extreme weather. And the question that kept nagging at me was, who is supporting, mobilizing, organizing them? And when I found that really there was no national group connecting people across these experiences. There was a lot of hopes I had just in terms of making these horrific experiences less horrible, but also what I found through my colleague, who built the Everytown Survivor Network…
Miller: And am I right that that’s really about gun violence and also gun law advocacy connected to it, right?
Kos: That’s correct.
Miller: OK.
Kos: Yeah, that’s correct, yeah. But what he found was when you’ve lost a loved one to gun violence or have been traumatized by gun violence, connecting people to one another is so critical, because there’s so many people that don’t know that experience, and so how beneficial it can be to be proactively building community and connecting people. And what’s sort of beautiful that came out of that community, and that is already coming out of our community, is that you build these friendships through the shared loss.
And so I think the big hope that I had for the organization was really making these experiences less horrible, helping people get through the early days and the years after. And really working together to create change. And so that’s a lot of what we do. We provide no cost sort of emotional support services. We have support group calls where people come on and there’s no politics, there’s no policy talk. It’s just an emotional support space where people from Texas floods and Hurricane Helena in North Carolina and all over the country are able to just work through their grief and their trauma and their laughter.
But then also, I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned through working in extreme weather is nobody wants this expertise, but once you’ve lost your home to a fire or a flood, you are an expert at how to rebuild or fill out your insurance paperwork or your FEMA paperwork. And what we’ve found is so often people want to, especially if you’re one or two years out from it, you really want to help people that are most directly hit, most immediately, to help them navigate those early days.
And so that’s a lot of what we do as well is just making sure people have the access to experts, the best resources to help navigate getting through all this. But I also think, Amy and I, we really have become friends. We text about parenting stuff.
Dishion: Yeah.
Kos: So there’s a lot of advocacy work and there’s a lot of arguing for better policies and talking to policymakers and sharing our story, but there’s also just human connection built from the organization.
Miller: Amy, I’m curious about that human connection. Do you have a sense for what you’ve gotten from this very specific support group that you think you wouldn’t get from a general grief support group?
Dishion: Oh, this is absolutely the place I belong. And even with me, with extreme heat, I’m a bit of an outlier. I was not directly impacted, my husband died. I mean, I was directly impacted, but I wasn’t in the heat event so I’m a little bit of an outlier, but there’s a certain type of grief that comes with being a weather-related survivor, that we understand each other and can hold each other up in a special way.
And it’s such an honor and a joy to be part of this group, but also hearing survivor stories, whether it be fire, flood, hurricane, seeing in our support group what people are dealing with and seeing pictures of their wrecked homes and they’re displaced, it gives me such a feeling of even more I need to help. Like I want to help. It encourages me to just say yes to every opportunity, to try to make a positive change, even when it feels like swimming upstream, which it does.
Miller: What role do you think service to others, in the ways that you’re describing, what role has that played while you yourself have been grieving?
Dishion: So, when I have been able to be of service – and thank you to Sierra for giving me opportunities to be of service in this way – is really the only time I have felt better in my grief. I mean, there’s something so healing and life-giving about using my pain and my sorrow and my devastation to try to make the world a better place.
Miller: Sierra, as you mentioned, in addition to the emotional support that is one of the key components of what you’re helping people give to each other, provide for each other. There’s also sort of logistical help. I’m imagining challenges of dealing with FEMA or insurance companies. What kinds of practical information sharing has your group enabled?
Kos: Yeah, one of the things, in addition to the support groups, we have a digital community built and led by survivors. And there’s special breakouts, like there’s one for survivors of the Washington, Spokane fires, but there’s also just the national group. And a few things we do is, we call it an AMA, an Ask Me Anything, where there will be a day themed where we have industrial hygienists, which is a word that I never thought I would know, which is like, if you are navigating if your home is toxic, if you’re a smoke damaged home that still exists, but is there toxic stuff in there that will be unhealthy for you to move back in.
We offer these AMAs, these Ask Me Anything where we put experts in soil testing or in testing for carcinogens and toxins in your home. And what it allows is like, being a survivor is a full-time job, and a lot of times after a fire, there’ll be all these different webinars, and can you listen to a two-hour YouTube show on this stuff? And a full-time job means you’re also taking care of kids, you’re also working a job, you’re also doing all these other things. You may not have the time to listen to a two-hour thing where only one nugget of it is the question you’re actually trying to get answered.
And so what we do by having these special days where an expert is in the community, people can ask their question that’s often very unique. And if the expert doesn’t answer it completely because there’s a new piece of context, you can then follow up at a different time, right? But it’s happening all day long. You can drop the question and again with the caveat of, I need to know this piece of it. And the expert will respond to that. And so it really allows for connection from experts across the country into the community where you can get access.
I think the other thing I would say is just one of my most favorite examples is, after the LA fires, there was a lot of free therapy offered for children, in-person one-on- one therapy, and a mom got into our group on a Saturday and said, “I missed all of those moments of free therapy, and I’m realizing I think my kid is still traumatized from the evacuation, but it seems like I missed that moment. We’re now nine months out. Is there any chance someone has heard of other therapists that are still offering this?” And another mom jumped in and said, “Hey, I just called this place. They’re still accepting children therapy sessions. I already told them about your question, reach out.”
Miller: Sierra and Amy, we’re out of time. I hate to have to say goodbye…
Kos: Oh, sorry.
Miller:… but we do. But, Sierra Lindsey Kos and Amy Dishion, thank you very much for joining us.
Kos: Thank you so much.
Dishion: Thank you!
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