Hurricane Isaias came ashore near Destin, Florida, on Friday night, 9 October, as a Category 2 storm, with sustained winds of 105 mph. By Saturday morning, hundreds of thousands of customers across Florida and Alabama had lost power, and some emergency response operations had been suspended because conditions were too dangerous. The storm had been forecast. The danger was known. The preparations were under way before landfall.
Forecasters had warned of dangerous storm surge, heavy rainfall and flooding. Isaias delivered the destructive winds and widespread outages they feared. Even the United States, with its formidable forecasting capacity, could not prevent the damage. What it could do was prepare for the aftermath.
That is the useful lesson here, and it applies well beyond Florida. A forecast is the cheapest part of disaster management. The expensive part is everything that must exist before the forecast arrives: trained crews, equipment, stockpiles, evacuation routes and working communications.
A forecast is only useful to the extent that a country has prepared to act on it.
Alabama Power reported that thousands of additional workers from other states were mobilised to help restore electricity. The wider utility industry had activated emergency plans, positioned equipment and coordinated restoration crews before the storm arrived. The Edison Electric Institute later reported that more than 25,000 workers from at least 25 states were supporting recovery efforts.
Utilities do not assemble that kind of workforce on the morning after a hurricane. Someone has to negotiate mutual-aid agreements, maintain equipment, fund standby capacity and rehearse the logistics long before a storm has a name. The outage is the visible event. The preparation that makes recovery possible is the less visible work that came before it.
Zimbabwe has more reason to care about this than most countries, and considerably less room for complacency. Droughts, floods and cyclones threaten lives and livelihoods, sometimes within the same agricultural season. The country’s exposure is familiar. So is the recurring question of whether its institutions are equipped to manage the consequences.
El Niño conditions have repeatedly complicated Zimbabwe’s rainfall outlook, bringing the risk of poor harvests and water shortages. When heavy rains arrive, they can bring flash floods, damaged roads, displaced families and communities cut off from essential services. A country that struggles to prepare for one kind of emergency cannot assume the next will politely wait its turn.
Reporting by the Thomson Reuters Foundation on earlier flooding in Zimbabwe highlighted concerns about inadequate early-warning systems and the Civil Protection Unit’s capacity to respond. The broader problem was not that officials lacked the ability to describe a disaster after it happened. It was that warnings, resources and local preparedness did not reliably translate into protection before people were in danger.
The budget figures from the period around Cyclone Idai in 2019 were particularly stark. Zimbabwe’s Civil Protection Unit was allocated about US$2.36 million for the year, with just US$68,000 earmarked for goods and services, according to contemporary reporting. These are historical figures, not a statement of the department’s current budget, but they illustrate the scale of the capacity problem confronting the country at the time.
Cyclone Idai exposed the consequences of inadequate preparation in devastating fashion. Communities were left dealing with deaths, destroyed homes, damaged infrastructure and interrupted livelihoods. The disaster required a vast humanitarian response, including assistance from organisations and governments outside Zimbabwe.
Years later, officials continued to emphasise disaster preparedness. Ahead of the 2025-26 rainy season, the government said response systems were being activated from national to grassroots level. The language was encouraging, but reports also acknowledged that some projects remained unfinished because of funding constraints. Activation is a useful announcement. Completed projects, working equipment and supplies already in the districts are more useful still.
In early 2024, reports also cited a figure of US$300 million for the disaster-management department’s needs. The precise amount required depends on what is included in the estimate, and a funding request is not automatically an independently established measure of need. But the gap between the resources required to protect vulnerable communities and the resources available to do so deserves public scrutiny.
The arithmetic of prevention is compelling, even if the exact savings depend on the disaster and the intervention. An EU humanitarian official has cited the estimate that every dollar invested in preparedness can save seven dollars in disaster damage and reconstruction. That is an estimate, not a universal law. Yet the basic logic is difficult to dispute: pre-positioned supplies, safe evacuation centres and warnings that reach people in time are generally cheaper than rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, replacing lost assets and responding to avoidable deaths.
Zimbabwe’s dependence on donor support for parts of its humanitarian and preparedness work should also prompt questions about the state’s own priorities. Donors can fund early-warning projects, provide emergency supplies and help communities prepare. They cannot be expected to permanently substitute for a government that must plan its budget around risks it knows are coming.
A government cannot be held responsible for the weather. Nobody serious asks it to prevent a cyclone or summon rain during a drought. It can, however, be held responsible for what it does with the warning time, the money available and the years between disasters.
Florida’s utilities used their warning time to position crews and equipment across state lines, and hundreds of thousands of customers still lost power. The measure of preparedness was not whether the storm caused damage. It was whether a recovery system was ready to begin work as soon as conditions allowed.
Zimbabwe should ask what it would do with the same notice. Are emergency supplies already in flood-prone districts? Are evacuation centres usable, accessible and adequately stocked? Can warnings reach rural communities in the languages people speak, through the phones and communication channels they actually use? Do local officials have the transport, fuel and equipment to act, or are they expected to improvise after the roads have flooded?
The remedies are not glamorous. They involve a disaster budget that is published, protected and spent before the season; supplies positioned where they are likely to be needed; tested communication systems; functioning evacuation routes; and regular exercises that reveal failures before lives depend on them. They also require the government to report what has been completed, what remains unfunded and who is responsible for closing the gaps.
The rains will come, or fail to come, whatever the heavens decide. What matters is how many people, by then, have somewhere safe to go and something to eat.
Zimbabwe does not need to predict every disaster perfectly. It needs to stop treating each one as though the warning arrived out of nowhere. The next drought, flood or cyclone will test the systems that exist when it comes, not the promises made after the last one.
Forecasts give a country time. Budgets, equipment, planning and competent institutions determine what that time is worth.
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