Food Pantries Mark Hidden Disaster Hotspots in Rural South Carolina

When hurricanes and floods sweep through the American Southeast, the damage they leave behind is never distributed evenly. A new cross-sectional study published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences has quantified just how unevenly, comparing the disaster and climate hazard experiences of rural food pantry users in Williamsburg County, South Carolina, with a neighboring suburban community sample in Horry County. The findings reveal a stark pattern of compounded vulnerability: although both groups faced storms with similar frequency, the food pantry cohort suffered dramatically greater financial losses, longer power outages, and deeper reliance on federal recovery assistance.

The research team, led by Natasha Malmin of Georgia State University, surveyed 133 adults visiting a rural food pantry in Williamsburg County during July 2023 and 96 members of the general community in Horry County between October and November of the same year. The pantry serves roughly 1,500 people each month through a drive-through distribution model, and researchers approached every vehicle in the line over two days of data collection, achieving an impressive 93 percent eligibility and completion rate among those who volunteered. The Horry County comparison group was recruited at community festivals, cultural events, and shopping centers, selected deliberately because the suburban county has a considerably wealthier and more educated population.

The demographic contrasts between the two cohorts were striking. The pantry cohort had a median age of 64 years, while the community cohort skewed far younger. Some 76 percent of pantry participants identified as non-Hispanic African American, compared with just 14 percent of the community sample, which was 67 percent non-Hispanic White. Educational attainment diverged sharply as well: half of pantry respondents had only a high school diploma or less, whereas the community group contained large proportions of bachelor’s and graduate degree holders. Williamsburg County itself, where the pantry sits, has a poverty rate of 23 percent and a median household income of $43,471, against Horry County’s 12.6 percent poverty rate and $61,063 median income.

Health burdens told a similarly stark story. The pantry cohort reported hypertension at a rate of 71 percent and diabetes at 41 percent, conditions that carry serious implications for disaster resilience, since chronic disease management depends on uninterrupted access to medication, refrigeration, and care. Only 10 percent of pantry respondents rated their general health as excellent, compared with 23 percent of the community cohort. In an unexpected twist, the community group reported substantially higher rates of self-diagnosed anxiety, at 65 percent, and depression, at 52 percent. The researchers caution that this pattern should be treated as hypothesis-generating rather than conclusive, noting that Williamsburg County lies within a designated mental health care desert, where limited access to diagnosis and care may suppress reported prevalence rather than reflect true differences in mental health burden.

The most consequential findings emerged when respondents described their experiences with federally declared disasters. Both cohorts reported similar frequencies of exposure to the string of storms that have battered the region since 2015, including the Great Flood, Hurricane Matthew, Hurricane Florence, Hurricane Dorian, Hurricane Ian, and Tropical Storm Idalia. Yet when the researchers examined the consequences of that exposure, the divergence was unmistakable. Among those reporting damage, 69 percent of pantry users suffered losses exceeding $3,000, while a majority of the community cohort reported losses below $1,000. Power outages followed the same pattern: 28 percent of pantry respondents sat in the dark for six to ten days, and 18 percent for eleven to twenty days, whereas nearly half of community respondents reported outages shorter than three days.

One structural factor looms particularly large in explaining these disparities: heirs’ property. This form of ownership, in which land passes informally through generations without formal title documentation, is disproportionately common among African American households in the South due to historic exclusion from formal legal systems. Some 57 percent of pantry participants reported heirs’ property ownership, compared with just 19 percent of the community cohort. The consequences are severe, because FEMA disaster assistance historically required documented ownership verification. After Hurricane Katrina, more than 20,000 heirs’ property owners were denied aid, and after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, 80,000 applicants were rejected over land title issues. Within South Carolina alone, researchers have estimated 162,803 acres of heirs’ property, carrying an assessed value of $34.6 million.

The study found that disaster-experienced pantry users relied on FEMA aid at a statistically significantly higher rate than their community counterparts, a seemingly paradoxical result given the documented barriers heirs’ property owners face. FEMA announced policy changes in 2021 intended to ease the application burden for residents of inherited land, but many of the storm impacts reported by pantry users date back to before those reforms, and the authors note that policy implementation often lags, particularly for communities simultaneously navigating age, disability, and educational barriers. The longer outages and larger losses in the pantry cohort also align with emerging evidence that rural and minoritized communities experience slower power restoration after disasters, and with earlier research showing that homes in lower-income areas sustain greater physical damage from comparable hazard exposure, likely reflecting aging housing stock and deferred maintenance.

Climate hazard experiences added further nuance. Fully 80 percent of pantry users reported encountering at least one climate-related hazard, compared with 67 percent of the community sample, a statistically significant difference. Flooding and heatwaves were more commonly reported by the pantry cohort, though not significantly so. Curiously, the community cohort reported significantly more experience with drought, at 15 percent versus 4 percent, and wildfire, at 13 percent versus 1 percent, even though federal wildfire risk indicators rate Williamsburg County as riskier than more than 80 percent of United States counties, against Horry County’s medium ranking above 63 percent. The authors suggest that differences in awareness, hazard salience, and media coverage may drive this perception gap. Heatwave reporting offered another curious wrinkle: pantry users were surveyed during an active National Weather Service heat advisory in July, yet only 24 percent reported having experienced a heatwave, suggesting that even direct exposure does not reliably translate into recognized risk.

The study’s limitations deserve honest mention. Both samples were non-probability convenience samples, so the findings cannot be generalized to all county residents, and the modest sample sizes restricted the analysis to descriptive comparisons using Fisher’s exact tests rather than causal inference. Food security was not measured with a validated scale; instead, pantry use served as a pragmatic proxy for concentrated structural vulnerability, an assumption grounded in prior South Carolina research showing that households with very low food security had 5.9 times higher odds of using food pantries than food-secure households. Timing differences also complicated direct comparison, since Tropical Storm Idalia struck coastal South Carolina between the two survey windows, affecting the Horry sample’s recent experience but not the pantry cohort’s.

Nevertheless, the policy implications are clear and potentially transformative. The authors argue that food pantries, as trusted anchor institutions that already reach populations traditional public health systems often miss, are ideally positioned to serve as hubs for disaster communication, preparedness outreach, early warnings, and heat-health alerts. Prior pantry-based interventions covering nutrition education and chronic disease management demonstrate that these settings can effectively engage hard-to-reach residents, although sustainable implementation will require addressing capacity constraints within pantry systems. As climate change intensifies the frequency and severity of extreme weather across the Southeast, one of the nation’s least climate-prepared regions, the study’s central message resonates beyond South Carolina: communities seeking to build genuine resilience must look not only at hazard maps, but at the food pantry lines, where the most vulnerable residents are already gathered and where recovery, too often, begins from the furthest behind.

Subject of Research: Comparative disaster and climate hazard vulnerability of rural food pantry users in South Carolina

Article Title: Compounded vulnerability: comparing disaster and climate hazard experiences of rural food pantry users with a neighboring suburban community in the Southeastern US

Article References: Malmin, N., Dzokoto, M., Height, T., Le Moal, T., Idowu, O., Driffin, A., & Pressley, T. (2026). Compounded vulnerability: comparing disaster and climate hazard experiences of rural food pantry users with a neighboring suburban community in the Southeastern US. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01140-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01140-w

Keywords: food insecurity, food pantries, disaster recovery, climate hazards, rural health, heirs' property, FEMA assistance, South Carolina, social vulnerability, power outages, chronic disease, hurricanes