Author name: moderat ereport

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway. Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm? Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it. President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable. Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods. We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck. The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall. There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.” That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000. The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just

by Jeremy Lindenfeld, Capital & Main This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capital & Main, a 2022-2023 LRN partner. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. In January, Katie Clark’s one-bedroom rental of more than 15 years, and nearly everything inside, was incinerated by Los Angeles County’s Eaton fire, one of the most destructive wildfires in California history. For her troubles, she received a one-time payment of $770 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she used to replace clothes, food and a crate for her dog. While it was only a fraction of what she needed, the money was at least available while she waited for other funding. As an organizer with the Altadena Tenants Union who has been helping renters with their FEMA applications, Clark knows just how common her experience has been for fire survivors. She believes federal and local agencies severely underestimated the need and cost of housing for the 150,000 people displaced by the fires, leaving many still struggling to recover. A FEMA spokesperson denied the accusation, saying the agency’s “ongoing assessments indicate that the current Rental Assistance program is effectively meeting the housing needs of survivors eligible for FEMA assistance.” The disaster response “has been so shockingly bad,” Clark said, but she recognizes that without FEMA’s help in responding to fires that killed at least 30 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, “it could have been so, so, so much worse.” “We would have seen a whole lot more people left to their own devices. And what that would mean is homelessness. It would mean people just abandoned,” Clark said. Even before President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom squared off over Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to quell immigration protests, before Newsom likened Trump to a dictator and Trump endorsed the idea of arresting the governor, the question of how much California could continue to rely on FEMA was front and center. It’s a critical question in a state — with its earthquakes, wildfires, floods, drought and extreme heat — that frequently suffers some of the costliest disasters in the country. Since Trump’s inauguration, his administration has floated sweeping proposals that would slash FEMA dollars and make disasters harder to declare. This has left both blue and red states wrestling with scenarios in which they must pay for what FEMA will not. States have long counted on FEMA to cover at least 75% of declared major disaster response and recovery costs. In just the past few months, FEMA has denied federal assistance for devastating floods in West Virginia and a destructive windstorm in Washington. The agency approved such funding for deadly tornadoes in Arkansas after Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appealed an initial denial and personally begged the president for help. Last month, ProPublica reported that FEMA missed a May deadline to open the application process for many grants, including funding that states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. The delay, which the agency has not explained, appears to have little precedent. In California, Trump has cast doubt on whether he will approve the $40 billion Newsom has requested to help pay for recovery costs associated with the fires, including $16.8 billion from FEMA to rebuild property, infrastructure and remove debris. That’s on top of the almost $140 million the agency has already provided to individual survivors. The president told reporters last month that states need to be weaned off FEMA and that the federal government will start distributing less federal aid after hurricane season ends in November. The questions now are: How much will be approved? Will it be enough? And, if not, what then? A FEMA spokesperson did not directly respond to questions from Capital & Main about anticipated funding cuts and potential impacts on state and local communities, but said the agency “asserts that disasters are best managed when they’re federally supported, state managed and locally executed.” The uncertainty makes it “very hard” to plan, said Heather Gonzalez, principal fiscal and policy analyst for emergency services at California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. “The little bean-counters in the back are stressing out right now trying to figure out ‘what are we going to have to work with?’” The recent “dust-ups” between Newsom and Trump, she said, have only underscored the unpredictability. For his part, Newsom said he prefers the “open hand” of cooperation over the “closed fist” of fighting when it comes to disaster response. “Emergency preparedness and emergency planning, recovery and renewal — period, full stop — that should be nonpolitical,” he said on Monday, which marked six months since the fires. A firefighter battles a blaze in Altadena during the Eaton Fire. (Jeremy Lindenfeld/Capital & Main) The Rising Cost of Disasters Since at least the 1980s, California has endured a rapidly growing number of billion-dollar disasters, with 18 occurring between 2015 and 2024 alone. As the frequency and severity of California’s disasters increase, so too does its reliance on federal assistance to respond. In the aftermath of January’s Eaton and Palisades fires — the second and third most destructive wildfires in California history, respectively — FEMA has already provided $139 million for everything from home repair costs to medical expenses, and the agency “has allocated billions of dollars for debris removal,” according to a FEMA spokesperson. Over 5,000 properties have already been cleared of ash and fire debris. The ruins of a bank that was destroyed in the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades. The wildfire was the third most destructive in California history. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica) Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management Communications Director Emily Montanez said recovery efforts for the fires likely won’t be complete for many years and are heavily dependent on FEMA. “After the Northridge earthquake in 1994, FEMA had field offices here for 28 years,” Montanez said. “We see this as being no different. This was way more devastation, way more impact. So this could be years, definitely