From Governing: Central Florida Already Struggled to Provide Health Care and Affordable Housing. Then Hurricane Refugees Poured In. The region is coping with one of the biggest influxes of Puerto Ricans fleeing the hurricane-ravaged island.
Several articles have appeared lately citing comments from FEMA Administrator Block Long. Clearly reality has set in, and it is messy! Long is contemplating what his agency can and cannot do. See: Top Emergency Management Official: Hit the ‘Reset Button’ on Disaster Recovery Roles.
Note: the Diva is not familiar with the source of this article, the website called route fifty. But the article raises a no. of issues worth considering. From their website: “Route Fifty is a digital news publication from Atlantic Media’s Government Executive Media Group, which also publishes Government Executive magazine, GovExec, Nextgov and Defense One.”
Here is a great starting place for a useful debate. From Politico: Why FEMA is making a big mistake in Puerto Rico. The agency is proposing one mega-contract for delivering relief to the island. Here’s a better way.
What do you think?
From the Guardian: Upsurge in big earthquakes predicted for 2018 as Earth rotation slows. Scientists say number of severe quakes is likely to rise strongly next year because of a periodic slowing of the Earth’s rotation.
Insurers face new challenges after long series of natural disasters. Following a season of hurricanes, flooding, and earthquakes around the world, customers and governments are facing rising insurance rates. Experts suggest that insurance companies should re-evaluate their repricing strategies as disasters become more common.
First the federal disaster relief problems take a hit and now Congress wants to diminish the capacity of charitable and philanthropic organizations. Just how are we going to provide disaster relief? See: Congress’s Assault on Charities
Update: Here is a related story: How local charities are affected when major disasters strike
Mr. Trump’s Paper Towels Aren’t Helping Puerto Rico
Two months after Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, a sense of desperation seems to be yielding to resignation at best. More than half of the island is still without power, and hundreds of thousands of residents are fleeing to the American mainland in an extraordinary exodus.
It has been weeks since President Trump visited to jovially toss rolls of paper towels to needy fellow Americans and brag about how successful the recovery effort was. But true evidence of progress has been hard to come by. Even the simplest symbols of government, like traffic lights, remain useless. Most of the Pentagon’s emergency troops have begun pulling out, except for those working on the island’s shattered power grid.
Post-Harvey Houston faces a dilemma: how to rebuild with integrity
A new report paints a startling picture of the inequality faced by immigrants doing the hard work of reconstruction. Can a more equitable vision prevail?
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has received information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), after filing Freedom of Information requests. See Environmental Defense Fund Obtains Information on Over 1,900 Climate-Related Items Removed from or Modified on EPA Website.
[Update: here is more info from the Environment Data and Governance Initiative.]
It is a sad commentary about the current EPA Administrator that the important information is no longer available on the agency’s website.
Here is an account of the fundamental problem, from the N.Y. Times: Censoring Climate Change
The Trump administration is making it harder to find government information about climate change on the web. If you searched Google for the words “climate change” a little over six months ago, one of the first hits would have been the Environmental Protection Agency’s website.
But that was before April 28, when the agency began systematically dismantling its climate change website, which had survived Democratic and Republican administrations and was a leading source of information on a global problem that the president, as a candidate, labeled “a hoax.”
From Elsevier a free, 52 page report titled: A Global Outlook on Disaster Science.
The Diva has not yet had time to read it, but welcomes comments and reviews from readers.
Recovery Diva 