Just hours after the August 8, 2023, wildfires began raging across the Island of Maui, University of Hawaii Maui College Chancellor Lui Hokoana received a phone call asking for help.
The college operates a highly regarded culinary arts program, and there were about 900 tourists stranded at the airport without food service. The Salvation Army normally feeds people during an emergency, but its kitchen had burned down in the fires. Hokoana was asked: Could the college help out?
Culinary arts faculty and volunteers mobilized in response to the crisis. During the first 10 days, they made more than 12,000 meals per day for the island’s residents and tourists who lacked food, as well as the influx of emergency responders who had to be fed. When fall semester classes began on August 28, students learned cooking skills by preparing meals for those who needed assistance.
This article comes from the new issue of the Community College Journal, the bimonthly magazine of the American Association of Community Colleges.
“We were in uncharted territory,” Hokoana says. Over a 16-week period, the college prepared and delivered more than 200,000 meals altogether.
Disaster planning and response have always been essential parts of community college operations. But as extreme weather conditions have become more common as a result of global climate change, preparing for natural disasters has taken on even greater urgency.
Plan and test
Situated on the Gulf of Mexico, Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida, has more than five decades of experience in preparing for hurr icanes and other natural disasters. The college hasn’t noticed an increase in the intensity of storms in recent years, says Greg Rose, vice president of administration, but it has seen a rise in the number of hurricane-strength storms that make landfall.
Effective disaster planning, Rose says, requires colleges to designate teams with specific roles and responsibilities and to hold regular drills and training sessions so that everyone knows what to do in the event of an emergency.
At Hillsborough, about 50 people are directly responsible for disaster planning and response across the college’s five locations, he says. Most of the team members are employees in the public safety or facilities departments. Tabletop exercises are conducted at each campus at least once a semester to ensure readiness.
Financial readiness, too
Disaster readiness includes financial resilience as well. Like all Florida colleges, Hillsborough is required to set aside at least 7% of its operating budget in reserve for emergency situations.
The rise in extreme weather events hasn’t changed how Hillsborough plans for natural disasters, but it has made its impact felt through the rapidly ballooning insurance premiums the college pays. From 2021-22 to 2024-25, the college’s property insurance costs have risen 56%, or more than $10 million.
It’s not just colleges in the path of hurricanes that are experiencing this phenomenon. San Jacinto College (San Jac) in Texas will spend approximately $4.8 million for property insurance in the coming year, which is a 5% increase over the current year. But that’s a much smaller hike than the college experienced the previous year, when its rate went up 25%, says Teri Zamora, vice chancellor for fiscal affairs.
In 2023 alone, there were about two dozen severe weather events in the U.S. with recovery costs in excess of $1 billion, NPR reported in March 2024. These costly storms are driving up insurance premiums for colleges, businesses and homeowners alike.
As the costs associated with extreme weather events rise, colleges will have to plan for these additional expenses. Budgeting effectively for disasters begins with a robust threat identification process.
Related article: Rising insurance premiums at some community colleges
“We update our risk assessments annually and take a close look at historical trends,” Zamora says. “We also take a deep dive into our insurance policies to understand fully what our deductibles, coverage limits, and covered incident maximums are, as well as federal and state public assistance grants and their eligibility criteria. With that information, we can project a budget based on anticipated out-of-pocket costs for a high-criticality event.”
Zamora says the frequency of such events has increased over the last decade, and San Jac’s leadership team has learned they must be ready to manage multiple event lifecycles simultaneously.
“We have streamlined our fiscal processes to allow us to track transactions for multiple events separately with that reality in mind,” she notes.
