Hurricane Florence Bathed North Carolina in Raw Sewage. New Figures Show It Was Even Worse Than We Thought.
Polluted flood waters swamped coal ash ponds at power plants. Rising waters engulfed private septic systems in back yards. The unwholesome mix inundated hog waste lagoons on farms. And the torrent overwhelmed municipal waste water treatment plants in towns large and small.
After Back-to-Back Hurricanes, North Carolina Reconsiders Climate Change. In a state where lawmakers once rejected sea level rise warnings, polls show a growing concern among residents and a desire for better policies.
From the WashPost: Disruptive, disappointing, chaotic: Shutdown upends scientific research
In research labs and field sites across the world, the week-long government shutdown has ground scientific progress to a halt. Thousands of scientists are among the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors who must stay at home without pay. The furlough is expected to persist into the new year, which would mean a rocky start to 2019 for American science.
The partial shutdown, caused by President Trump’s rejection of a bipartisan spending deal that not allocate billions of dollars for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, curtailed scientific operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Agriculture Department, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey. Furloughed government scientists are prohibited from checking on experiments, performing observations, collecting data, conducting tests or sharing their results.
If the budget impasse extends into the new year, scientists say, it will harm critical research. “Any shutdown of the federal government can disrupt or delay research projects, lead to uncertainty over new research, and reduce researcher access to agency data and infrastructure. . . . Continuing resolutions and short-term extensions are no way to run a government,” said Rush Holt, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in a statement.
From the HuffPost: This Year’s Natural Disasters Show Climate Change’s Dire Consequences Are Already Here. In 2018, record-breaking wildfires and historic levels of rain have hit the U.S.
From the NYTimes: The Story of 2018 Was Climate Change. Future generations may ask why we were distracted by lesser matters. The historic hurricane chart in this article is especially interesting.
Shutdown Leaves Government Contractors Without Work And Likely No Back Pay
While federal employees will likely get retroactively paid, many contractors will not.
The rising cost of climate-driven disasters including hurricanes and fires is prompting Fema to shift more responsibility to states
What we learned from the disasters that hammered the US in 2018. Why wildfires, hurricanes, and floods cost us hundreds of lives and billions of dollars this year.
From Politico: FEMA’s staffing lags well behind its post-Puerto Rico goals.The disaster agency promised to hire more people and improve training after 2017. It failed to meet its targets for both.
But 15 months after Hurricane Maria crashed into Puerto Rico, killing 2,975 people, and almost six months after FEMA released its after-action assessment, the agency is lagging significantly behind its targets in training and recruiting, according to a POLITICO review.
The Diva just got an email from DHS saying: Due to the Lapse in Federal Funding, This Website Will Not Be Actively Managed.
She chuckled and wants to assure readers of this blog, since we get no federal funding (and no other funding, other than donations), we will carry on without interruption.
P.S. If you are a person who is working but cannot get news or new product info out via federally-funded channels, let me know and I will share it with this audience.
After two devastating floods in recent years, this historic city is conflicted over how to mitigate against future floods. See: In Ellicott City, painful debate on preventing deadly floods in historic district.
Recovery Diva 