You can't ensure that "disasters never happen." You CAN ensure that areas and communities are 1) properly warned, and 2) as well prepared as they can be for when they happen.
Katrina: warning was good. Preparation was shit. Levees were shit, in large part due to local corruption, due to entrenched power structures that existed for generations (sound familiar? Leadership getting locked in place, with no changes or challenges, is usually bad news).
Helene: better warnings would have been good. Shit, I recall Inka and I looking at the forecast rainfall, and commenting 24-48 hours beforehand "that shit is going to be really bad in the mountains."
California wildfires, Maui fires: wildfires are often really tough. Step 1 in many cases is "avoid building a lot of structures in areas that really, really want to burn," but that ship has usually sailed. Having resources available, with a game plan to use them, is key. In both of those cases, weather conditions were such that the resources at hand either couldn't be deployed or were just overwhelmed. Interestingly, just last week, I spent an hour watching California respond to a local wildfire in an area of hills and canyons. It was a spectacle. They fucking know what they are doing, and they pour resources onto a fire early, to make sure it doesn't get bigger. Truly, it was pro squad level work. So, believe it or not, for wildfire fighting, I'd say "learn from California," and even then, we know there's only so much they can do.
Texas Winter Storm outage disaster: who should you vote for? Maybe people who didn't purposefully design a grid set up to fail, starting with SB-7 in 1997 and continuing for decades. The Uri outage was a predictable, natural result of policy choices made by our leadership. And not much meaningful has been done to change that state of affairs.
Kerrville floods: read the meeting minutes of Kerr County rejecting flood warning systems. We'll learn plenty more, but that's a pretty good start.
Disasters are inevitable. The full measure of human and economic costs of same often are not inevitable. Things are better when you act instead of react. Shit, in the current environment, if we didn't already have the Highland Lakes system built (which prevents Austin from being hammered by river floods), there is a 0% chance they would be built today. Because fuck doing something that provides benefit to the public.