How a Series of Climate Disasters Connected a Group of Strangers

He was off for a sunrise hike with friends through the hills outside Phoenix and was supposed to return that afternoon. Around 11 a.m., Amy got a text from him; it was getting hot, but he was doing well.

By afternoon, Evan’s group had summitted Elephant Mountain but had gotten lost and run out of water. Temperatures reached 109 degrees — extremely hot even for summer in Arizona. One hiker started hallucinating. Another began to stumble. When Evan passed out, there was no cell signal to call for help.

As the hours went by, Amy grew anxious, their newborn daughter at her side. “I had just been waiting and waiting,” she says. “I knew something was wrong.” Then, around 4:30 p.m., Amy got a call from Abrazo Cave Creek Hospital. Her husband, who was 32, had died from severe heat stroke.

His death left Amy in shock. She returned to Oregon and moved in with his family. “Evan was my entire life,” she says. “He was my whole world. I was pretty much incapacitated emotionally for a couple years after that.”

While Dishion navigated her grief, she found some solace in talking about her experience and the dangers of extreme heat as global temperatures continue to rise. In 2023, she spoke at a virtual town hall with legislators; among those watching was Sierra Lindsey Kos, who had just helped create a group for people like Dishion.

The group, Extreme Weather Survivors, was started three years ago by Kos and Chris Kocher, an attorney and professional social organizer who had helped set up networks for survivors of gun violence and Covid-19. Kos had been galvanized by the 2020 Labor Day fires in Oregon, during which her newborn son was hospitalized with a serious illness. She had to drive through the burning landscape with him, surrounded by ash and red skies. She remembers being gripped in that moment by a feeling that she couldn’t keep her son safe from climate disaster; it was happening everywhere.

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.

In June, Dishion traveled to Washington with group members to hold public events and meet with congressional offices. While preparing for the lobbying efforts, she befriended Alan and Cindy Bickford, a couple from Pine Island, Fla., who were struggling to rebuild after their home was hit by multiple hurricanes. The three of them talked about loss and the frustrations of dealing with a government that seemed not to understand the scale of devastation they were facing.

Back then, riding out a hurricane was manageable with the help of some friends on the block and a little rum. “Neighbors would go check on each other and have a cocktail,” he says.

That sense of a community that could weather the storms together was foundational for Bickford, who worked as an engineer for AT&T for 30 years, doing repairs up and down the Florida coast. “It was kind of built into me as a kid,” he says, “until things started changing.”

What changed, Bickford says, was the climate. In recent years, the sea level has risen and the frequency of hurricanes has increased. When he bought his waterfront home on Pine Island, off Fort Myers, in 1997, the sea wall kept his property dry, even at high tide. In the years since, he has had to raise the wall by 20 inches.

As Hurricane Ian bore down on the Bickfords’ home in 2022, they fled to the mainland. When they returned, they found their house swamped with ankle-deep mud. The ocean had destroyed the walls, and the house had to be stripped to the studs.

Two years later, the Bickfords’ home had been mostly rebuilt. And then came Hurricane Helene. Then Hurricane Milton. During those storms, Bickford was able to keep the water at bay. But the hurricanes have taken a toll. He has spent more than $60,000 out of pocket on repairs, and his flood insurance has more than doubled, pushing him into debt.

Recovery has been a tedious, complex process. But it got a little easier when the Bickfords joined Extreme Weather Survivors and connected with another member, a record producer and sound engineer from Los Angeles named Derek Sample.

Bickford and Sample had met at the Washington lobbying day in June and struck up an instant friendship. Sample’s home and recording studio, where he has worked with artists like Prince and Dr. Dre, were badly damaged by the Eaton fire in January 2025.

This August, Sample traveled to Pine Island to visit the Bickfords. The two men traded notes about insurance battles over margaritas and ribs. “It was like he was an old friend,” Bickford says.

He recalls driving home from the doctor’s appointment, watching the smoke on the horizon, thinking, At least nothing could make this day worse.

As the fire began to consume their neighborhood, Sample was evacuated, but he sneaked back to his house to fend off the embers with a pressure washer. In the end, his home was spared. But the debris that accumulated in a nearby creek bed contained dangerous amounts of toxic chemicals, which have infiltrated the house he loved and made it, for now, unlivable. During one of his brief visits back to the property, his dogs were exposed to the contaminants, resulting in nearly $50,000 in veterinarian bills. Sample and his wife have yet to return home and are mired in insurance claims and legal bills.

Sample learned about Extreme Weather Survivors while searching for resources online. He got a crash course in disaster recovery and insurance red tape from one group member in particular: Erica Solove, whose life was turned upside down by a different wildfire. “She didn’t just listen to my story,” Sample says. “She really trained me.”

“We lived in a highly densely populated suburban area,” she says. “I could walk to Target and Costco and Whole Foods, so it was very much not a place where fire was ever expected to touch.” Solove and her family fled with nothing and found themselves displaced and possessionless.

“It literally looked like Noah’s ark,” she says. “People were in a hotel lobby with all their assorted pets, laundry baskets full of the most random imaginable things.”

After noticing Solove’s posts in various Facebook support groups for other wildfire victims, Kos and Kocher reached out and told her about Extreme Weather Survivors. As Solove learned more about the group’s mission, she decided to join the staff.

“I held to my neighbors, and that’s how I personally survived,” Solove says. “Material help, social support, everything you can imagine. And then I just realized, Oh, this is so much bigger than my neighborhood.”

Last year, she met Marisa Aguayo, whose family home in San Diego was flooded by severe rain. Aguayo, who found Extreme Weather Survivors after meeting a member who lived nearby, reached out to Solove because she wanted advice on how to help and organize the flood survivors from her largely Spanish-speaking community. Solove and Aguayo ended up talking for hours.

Her father had bought the property years earlier and gradually built homes for the expanding brood.

Rains had come and gone before, but on this day, Aguayo remembers seeing water arrive in a great rush. Chollas Creek, which runs next to their land, overflowed. “I couldn’t see the ground,” Aguayo says.

As the water rose, Aguayo picked up her pit bull, and she and her family fled to a nearby hill, where they watched the waters swamp their homes. “It was honestly devastating while we were standing out there on that little hill, looking back at our community,” she says. “Police weren’t coming. Firefighters were not coming.”

More than two years later, Aguayo and her family are still struggling to recover. Along with more than 1,000 other victims of the flooding, they have sued the city, accusing it of knowing about the risk but failing to act.

Connecting with other members of Extreme Weather Survivors has fortified her though all of it. “I realized that our stories weren’t really that different, and so I learned I wasn’t alone,” she told me. She’s now working on putting together an exhibit of writing and artwork from flood survivors. Her hope is that others will then “be able to go back and see what happened,” she says, “and the people it happened to.”