Dry Season
The wind changed at 2:13 p.m.
Not a whisper of warning. Just a gust that turned the sky orange and set the ridge ablaze.
Maggie Thomas was still on the phone with the state emergency office when her porch caught fire.
“We’re aware of the situation in your county,” said the calm, utterly doomed voice. “Please shelter in place until responders arrive.”
“There are no responders,” Maggie said. “You fired them.”
The line crackled. “Ma’am, the State Emergency Management Agency is operating at reduced staffing levels due to federal restructuring. If this is a non-life-threatening call—”
“It's my porch.” The sound of crackling wood punctuated the sentence. “It’s literally on fire.”
A beat of silence. Then: “Please remain calm.”
#
When FEMA had still existed—back when disasters were treated as shared problems, not just personal failures—they would’ve had boots on the ground already. Hotshot crews, helicopters, pre-positioned supplies. But that was before the budget cuts. Before “local control” became code for you're on your own.
The federal system had been dismantled, reallocated, privatized.
Now, wildfires got assigned QR codes and color-coded urgency levels.
Maggie was currently flagged as “orange.” Not the worst. Not urgent. Just… pending.
#
Across the highway, the retirement park was already gone.
No water trucks. No radio updates. Just a drone overhead—contracted by StratEvac Solutions, scanning heat blooms for insurance verification.
Maggie didn’t own insurance. Not anymore. Premiums tripled after last year’s storm. The adjuster said she was in a "risk basin."
Funny how the basin kept getting bigger.
#
By the time the flames reached her mailbox, the sky was ash-gray and the cell towers were gone. Her neighbor’s daughter texted from three counties over:
evacuate now I don’t think they’re coming
Maggie replied:
who’s “they”?
And then she waited for a lie. Or a miracle.
But mostly, she watched the wind.
“Evacuate now.”“I don’t think they’re coming.”“Who’s ‘they’?”
That was the final message exchange from Dry Season, a flash fiction set in a near-future red state where the federal government has dismantled FEMA, and state-level disaster response is barely holding together with duct tape and prayer chains. Fiction?
Barely.
The Trump administration is already laying the groundwork. Not tomorrow. Not eventually.
Now.
🆘 What’s Happening to FEMA?
Let’s skip the sugarcoating: the Federal Emergency Management Agency is being slowly gutted and politically defanged. Current proposals—and quiet implementation steps—include:
- Slashing budgets and eliminating regional response coordinators
- Privatizing core services, from evacuation planning to shelter logistics
- Centralizing control under DHS, where disaster response is treated more like counterinsurgency than aid
- Removing pre-disaster mitigation programs, because "resilience isn't profitable"
- Delaying or denying aid to blue states or communities that vote the wrong way (already hinted at, now codified through policy filters)
We are watching disaster response become a luxury service, available only to those who live in the right zip code, vote the right way, and can afford to evacuate on their own dime.
🌪 What That Means on the Ground
Let’s say you live in a rural county in Oklahoma, or Louisiana, or northern Florida.
A wildfire starts. Or a tornado. Or the river jumps its banks and eats the freeway.
You call the state EMA. They’ve got one field office covering twelve counties.
The person who used to run regional coordination for FEMA? Gone. Their job “merged” with a private firm two time zones away that’s never set foot in your town.
No helicopters. No shelter logistics. No mobile hospital tents. Just a “please remain calm” while your porch burns and your neighbors drown.
🏛 This Isn’t Incompetence. It’s Ideology.
The dismantling of FEMA isn’t a fluke. It’s part of a broader agenda: shrink the federal government to the size where it can be drowned in a floodplain, then blame the states when it all falls apart.
It’s the same logic behind:
- Slashing the CDC’s public health monitoring
- Turning immigration detention into a for-profit nightmare
- Proposing an autism database to identify “undesirables”
- Declaring due process optional for deportations
The philosophy is simple: government only protects the chosen. Everyone else is a liability.
🔥 This Is the Warning
You don't need to wait for the future. Read the headlines. Or the smoke reports.
FEMA is being rolled back in real time. Disaster preparedness is being turned into a partisan weapon. And when the next storm hits—or the next fire, or quake, or flood—those left behind won’t be “unfortunate.”
They’ll be sacrificed.
Just like in Dry Season.
Because the fire doesn’t care what party you voted for. But apparently, this government does.
✊ So What Do We Do?
We resist. Loudly. Creatively. Vigorously.
We fight for federal disaster infrastructure like our lives depend on it—because they do.
We demand accountability from local and federal officials. We call out profiteering when public safety is sold off to the lowest bidder. We remind people, again and again, that the role of government is not to punish, exclude, or abandon. It is to protect. All of us.
Because if we don’t?
There won’t be anyone coming.
Not this time.
Not ever again.