Deanne Criswell, the first woman to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in April took over a 20,000-person operation exhausted by managing responses to disasters linked to global warming: wildfires and the 2020 hurricane season, the most active on record. …
On Aug. 25, the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Harvey, which dumped about 50 inches of rain on Houston, Mayor Sylvester Turner announced that the city “is safer today as it prepares to move forward.” Now comes Tropical Storm Nicholas as …
With remnants of Ida delivering downpours and fierce winds from North Carolina to New Jersey, U.S. government methods for assessing flood risks may be put to the test this week. While coastal communities would seem to have the biggest risk …
If you’re having trouble wrapping your mind around the spree of natural catastrophes currently plaguing the world—from deadly July floods in Germany and China to the wildfires still burning in Greece, California and Siberia —you may be interested to know …
Lawmakers in Washington are gearing up for the Biden administration’s first major legislative challenge: a set of measures on long-term economic priorities, including infrastructure and jobs, expected to cost roughly $3 trillion. Key to President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better …
Passaic County in New Jersey is not in the hurricane belt nor is it on the banks of a major river, and yet 810 properties there received $170 million of taxpayer money through the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) since …
The annual flow of plastics into our oceans is on a trajectory to triple over the next 20 years, which could add up to 110 pounds of plastic trash for every meter of coastline worldwide, a new report finds. That …
First Street Foundation, a nonprofit agency, is making accurate climate change-adjusted flood scores available for every property in the U.S. today. There are government-produced maps showing 8.7 million homes and properties at significant flood risk—and it turns out those may …
On March 5, Tennessee governor Bill Lee announced the state’s first confirmed case of Covid-19. Three weeks later on Easter Sunday, tornadoes touched down outside of Chattanooga, killing four people and flattening 2,000 structures. Since the start of the pandemic, …
It wasn’t until Wednesday, five days after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it was “leading the federal coordination” to the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. While the disaster-response agency is better …
