Untrained Volunteers Add to Chaos of Animal Rescue During Wildfires. Every natural disaster is different, but in many ways they’re the same — power failures, debris fields, rampant misinformation. Mix fear, haste and panic with the good intentions of people not always equipped or empowered to help, and sometimes you get chaos.
From Vox: 3 key solutions to California’s wildfire safety blackout mess. Grid hardening, land-use reform, and restructuring PG&E, oh my.
California Wildfire Preparedness Now Focused on ‘Scientific and Social’ Vulnerability
California Gov. Gavin Newsom began his term this week by signing an executive order directing new wildfire risk mitigation efforts that include assessing “socioeconomic factors and vulnerable populations that exacerbate the human toll of wildfires.”
Paradise lost; its residents found
Cell phone location data helps uncover where the residents of Paradise, Calif., went as the historic fire bore down on their homes.
The rising cost of climate-driven disasters including hurricanes and fires is prompting Fema to shift more responsibility to states
FEMA has kept a lower profile in Camp Fire than after hurricanes. Here’s the reason.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has directed far less resources to helping California cope with the devastating Camp Fire than it typically sends to states dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane, or other natural disasters. But experts say that’s by design, as California’s robust disaster response planning and operations make the feds less necessary in the early stages of fighting a disaster.
From the NYTimes, this balanced article about the role of FEMA in response to the CA wildfires: What FEMA Is Doing, and Not Doing, in Response to California’s Fires
FEMA won’t enact a major housing program that would help California wildfire survivors. Homelessness after the fires is both “predictable and preventable,” housing advocates told ThinkProgress. An excerpt from the article:
FEMA told ThinkProgress in an email that as of Tuesday morning, only 49 families (120 individual people) have checked into hotels through FEMA’s Transitional Sheltering Assistance (TSA) program. The TSA program pays for hotel sheltering for people displaced in emergencies.
But there are other programs available to FEMA. The agency has thus far refused to enact a Department of Housing and Urban Development-administered program that would provide essential housing relief to those people in desperate need of stable housing. The Disaster Housing Assistance Program (DHAP), created in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, provides housing subsidies to survivors and evacuees, and covers the cost of rent, security deposit, and utilities.
Recovery Diva 