NYU Law launches new center to help state AGs fight environmental rollbacks.
Thanks to Michael Bloomberg, who puts his money where his mouth is, a new legal aid center has been created to deal with environmental rollbacks from the Trump Administration.
Louisiana struggles to track impact of disasters
Exactly how many homes and businesses were impacted by the 2016 flooding?
Surprisingly, it’s a difficult question to answer.
Data collected after any disaster remains spotty and imprecise. But now state officials say they are looking for better ways to track their true impact.
“No one agency is empowered to perfectly capture this data now, but there could be value in collecting this information uniformly after a disaster,” Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Don Pierson tells Daily Report in a statement in response to a data request
Here is a 12 page guide: Solar Eclipse Planning Resources
Once again, an author expresses concern about the lack of federal preparedness for hurricanes in this administration. See: Donald Trump’s Hurricane Season.
The Trump speech on Tues. included a discussion of infrastructure, which for the most part received no press coverage owing to the many other topics he tackled spontaneously.
From Reuters: Trump infrastructure push rolls back environmental rules
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday rolled back rules regarding environmental reviews and restrictions on government-funded building projects in flood-prone areas as part of his proposal to spend $1 trillion to fix aging U.S. infrastructure.
Trump’s latest executive order would speed approvals of permits for highways, bridges, pipelines and other major building efforts. It revokes an Obama-era executive order aimed at reducing exposure to flooding, sea level rise and other consequences of climate change.
Update: Here is another take on the same topic from The Hill. [Thanks to Chris Jones for the citation.]
See this NBER paper on The Effect of Natural Disasters on Economic Activity in U.S. Counties: A Century of Data.
Note this 40 page paper is not an easy read, but the topic should be of interest to many. Thanks to John Plodinec for the citation.
If the Opioid Emergency were to get federal assistance, how would it be managed? See this account from NPR.
Update on August 25th. Still no action from the White House.
Seems to me this problem deserves a higher priority than the wall with Mexico…..
The Diva gave a talk to students at Georgetown University recently and told them about some free resources available to them. One is the annual Higher Education in Emergency Management Symposium organized by FEMA at the Emergency Management Institute and held each June. That program also offers a weekly newsletter.
And another is some informal groups on facebook. Three of the groups are:
There also are groups dealing with EM topics on LinkedIn.
From USAtoday: As Hurricane Andrew memories fade, Florida weakens building codes. Former FEMA Administrator, a FL resident, admonishes the state on that bad move.
Update: See the blunt comments on this issue from Eric Holdeman, a fellow blogger and former local emergency manager.
From The Guardian: Alaskan towns at risk from rising seas sound alarm as Trump pulls federal help. Communities at risk of falling into the sea say assistance from Washington has dried up: ‘It feels like a complete abdication of responsibility on climate change’
Recovery Diva 