When Hurricane Helene plowed over the Southeast last September, it caused more inland deaths than any hurricane in recorded history. The highest per capita death toll occurred in Yancey County, a rural expanse in the rugged Black Mountains of North Carolina devastated by flash flooding and landslides.
On Monday, we published a story recounting what happened in Yancey. Our intent was to show, through those horrific events, how highly accurate weather warnings did not reach many of those most in harm’s way — and that inland communities are not nearly as prepared for catastrophic storms as coastal ones. No one in Yancey received evacuation orders.
With the official start of hurricane season less than a week away, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is facing a storm of its own. Donald Trump’s administration has begun gutting the agency, slashing budgets and cutting staff. The president has made clear from the start of his term that he wants to shift the financial burden for disaster relief from the federal government to…
Sandra Anderson didn’t think the storm would be too bad. When her grandchildren asked if the dogs should be brought in, Anderson demurred, saying they’d be fine. But later that night, an alert on her phone warned her of a tornado tearing through her hometown of London, Kentucky. Seconds later, it hit her neighborhood. “I hollered for my handicapped son to hit the hallway,” Anderson said.
The sky turned an eerie green over St. Louis on May 16. Rapper and activist Antoine White, better known as T-Dubb-O, recognized the ominous hue immediately. Having family in the heart of Tornado Alley in Tennessee, he knew what was coming. With his wife and son beside him after a school field day lunch in Clayton, a suburb of St. Louis, he made the split-second decision to flee north…
Sandra Anderson didn’t think the storm would be too bad. When her grandchildren asked if the dogs should be brought in, Anderson demurred, saying they’d be fine. But later that night, an alert on her phone warned her of a tornado tearing through her hometown of London, Kentucky. Seconds later, it hit her neighborhood.
“I hollered for my handicapped son to hit the hallway,” Anderson said. “Windows were exploding. There was such a horrifying howl before it hit.”
Tornadoes are measured using what’s called the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which ranks them on a scale of one to five according to their wind speed and potential for damage. The mile-wide twister that blew out Anderson’s windows and flattened entire neighborhoods traveled over 50 miles and clocked in at EF-4, making it a particularly violent one. Meanwhile, an EF-3 funnel cloud cut a 23-mile path through the St. Louis area.
Both were part of a broader system that stretched from Missouri to Kentucky, spawning over 70 tornadoes that killed at least 28 people and leveled or damaged thousands of structures. Eastern Kentucky bore the brunt of the fury; 18 people died there. Seven more were killed in Missouri.
The storms come as the Trump administration makes deep cuts to the National Weather Service, or NWS, and its parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Together, the two agencies provide accurate and timely forecasts to meteorologists and others, and play a key role in forecasting tornadoes and warning people of impending danger. Meteorologists and other experts warn that the administration’s cuts to the agency could cost lives.
The NWS has lost 600 people through layoffs and retirements, according to the New York Times, leaving many local weather stations scrambling to cover shortfalls. The office in Jackson, Kentucky, for example, is one of eight nationwide to abruptly end 24/7 forecasting after losing an overnight forecaster, and is now short about 31 percent of its staff. The Jackson office serves a large swath of eastern Kentucky, a rural region with patchy access to cell and internet, and which has been repeatedly battered by storms and floods over the past five years.
All of this comes as the private forecasting company Accuweather warns that the United States is facing its worst tornado season in more than a decade.
Even as the twister in eastern Kentucky passed, people began to speculate that NWS staffing cuts contributed to the death toll. Their suspicion stemmed from the tornado warning’s upgrade to a Particularly Dangerous Situation, a designation reserved for particularly severe situations with an imminent threat to life and property. That warning, meant to convey the need to take cover immediately, came shortly before the tornado touched down at around 11:07 PM, several officials told Grist.
Sandra Anderson and her grandchildren survived the deadly tornado in eastern Kentucky. The twister was more than a mile wide and left a trail of damage more than 50 miles long.
Katie Myers / Grist
That designation, called a PDS, came after the popular YouTube forecaster Ryan Hall Y’all, who is based in eastern Kentucky, urged everyone in the storm’s path to seek shelter around 10:45 pm. Local television news meteorologists did so about the same time. “We just have to hope we’re doing a good job of getting that message out there, because otherwise nobody would know,” Hall, who does not have formal meteorology training, told his audience around 10:54 PM.
Although the NWS issued 90 alerts on May 16, including warnings about flash flooding and impending tornados, someone who identified himself as an NWS-trained weather spotter left a comment on Hall’s feed saying the agency issued the PDS only after he raised the issue. “I called the NWS in Wilmington, Ohio, who relayed my report to the Jackson weather office,” he posted. “A couple minutes after that, it was upgraded to a PDS confirmed by weather spotters.” Many commenters credited Hall with saving lives.
Neither Hall or the commenter who identified himself as a weather spotter could be reached for comment. Chase Carson, a tourism commissioner in London, followed a forecasting livestream on Facebook as the storm developed. He spent the day after the twister volunteering at the city’s emergency response center, responding to the crisis. “You have people who had nicer homes but still didn’t think that the tornado was going to hit their area because we didn’t receive enough warning prior,” he said. “Just a lot of X, Y, and Z’s that went wrong to keep us from being able to be prepared.”
The National Weather Service defended its handling of the storm and the timeliness of its warnings in Kentucky, telling Grist in a statement that its offices in Louisville, Jackson and Paducah “provided forecast information, timely warnings and decision support in the days and hours leading up to the severe weather on May 16.”
“Information was conveyed to the public through multiple routine means, including official products, social media, and NOAA Weather Radio, as well as to partners through advance conference calls and webinars. As planned in advance, neighboring offices provided staffing support to the office in Jackson, KY. Additionally, the Jackson office remained fully staffed through the duration of the event using surge staffing. Weather forecast offices in the Central Region continue to evaluate storm damage and other impacts from this tragic event.”
Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees’ Organization, said the offices were fully staffed, and weather forecasting offices in multiple cities typically collaborate when extreme weather is expected. “People make sacrifices,” he said. “You don’t have the night off, you got to come to work.” According to Fahy, that’s part of the life of service NWS forecasters sign up for — which might intensify as offices lose staff.
People on the north side of St. Louis were equally suspicious of the NWS response after they did not hear warning sirens go off, even though the system had been tested the day before the tornado. However, the city runs that system, and Mayor Cara Spencer blamed the problem on “human failure” because the municipal emergency management protocol was “not exceptionally clear” on who is to activate the system. To that end, the city tested the warning sirens again Tuesday and Wednesday, and Spencer issued an executive order placing the fire department in charge of activating the warning system.
Aliya Lyons only knew to take shelter thanks to the St. Louis University emergency alert system. “I didn’t hear any sirens,” she said. “And that was a major failure on the city’s part. Lives were lost. I can’t say if it was entirely because of the sirens. But it’s really heartbreaking – elders may not have a cell phone, cell phones might be dead.”
She worries that the situation will only get worse; the Trump administration has proposed cutting NOAA’s budget by more than 25 percent. “Even with the current National Weather Service, horrible things can happen — now is not the time to gut them. We should be making it more robust.”
Fahy said the NWS and its union are collaborating to realign staff to meet a “reduced service schedule.” The expectation will be that stations will work together to fill in gaps as needed.
That may not do much to ease Bobby Day’s mind. He is the interim police chief in London and, worked with city officials and first responders on emergency planning with city officials, days before the tornado. He’s long counted on the Weather Service to do his job, and is never without his NOAA weather radio. He still recalls a wild and destructive storm that hit London out of the blue on a clear night a few years ago. The agency’s forecasts and warnings were essential in timing evacuations.
“Almost to the minute they said it was going to happen, it happened,” he said.
NOAA and the National Weather Service may well continue to deliver that level of precision even as the Trump administration slashes its budget and staffing. But meteorologists and others who deal with extreme weather worry that the suspicion and speculation that followed the tornadoes will only mount, undermining confidence in the agencies even as they become more vital to public safety. This frustrates Jim Caldwell, a meteorologist at local station WYMT-TV, who worries people will turn away from reputable, if strained, resources in favor of social media personalities like Hall — although Caldwell did not specifically mention him by name. Some of them are good forecasters, he said, but others favor sensationalization to calm preparation in a bid to gain viewers or virality.
“With the uprise of social media and these fake weather people out there in the weather world that are not real,” he said. “We need more assistance from the government to issue warnings, issue watches, and to make sure that these hype-casters are cut off, because we need an official word.”
The Uhuru Movement’s Black Power Blueprint project is mobilizing black community recovery efforts in areas of North St. Louis that were devastated by at least one severe tornado on Friday, May 16, 2025. The National Weather Service (NWS) said they believe the tornado was an EF-3 with winds between 100-165 mph and was up to a mile wide at times. More than 80,000 buildings remain without power.
Immediately after the storm, activists with the Uhuru Movement began to mobilize support and resources for neighbors in need. From the Uhuru House black community center at 4101 W. Florissant Avenue, they organized a drive for tools and supplies. On Sunday, they set-up a charging station, as well as a grill and gave away hot food.
The Uhuru Movement’s Black Power Blueprint project is mobilizing black community recovery efforts in areas of North St. Louis that were devastated by at least one severe tornado on Friday, May 16, 2025. The National Weather Service (NWS) said they believe the tornado was an EF-3 with winds between 100-165 mph and was up to a mile wide at times. More than 80,000 buildings remain without power.
Immediately after the storm, activists with the Uhuru Movement began to mobilize support and resources for neighbors in need. From the Uhuru House black community center at 4101 W. Florissant Avenue, they organized a drive for tools and supplies. On Sunday, they set-up a charging station, as well as a grill and gave away hot food.
As climate disasters strain state budgets, a growing number of lawmakers want fossil fuel companies to pay for damages caused by their greenhouse gas emissions. Last May, Vermont became the first state to pass a climate Superfund law. The concept is modeled after the 1980 federal Superfund law, which holds companies responsible for the costs of cleaning up their hazardous waste spills.
After devastating fires tore through Los Angeles in January, a crew of more than 300 young people showed up to help, many of them members of the national service program AmeriCorps. Among them was Julian Nava-Cortez, who traveled from northern California to assist survivors at a disaster recovery center near Altadena, where the Eaton Fire had nearly destroyed the entire neighborhood. People arrived in tears, overwhelmed and angry, he said.
“We were the first faces that they’d see,” said Nava-Cortez, a 23-year-old member of the California Emergency Response Corps, one of two AmeriCorps programs that sent 74 workers to the fires. He guided people to the resources they needed to secure emergency housing, navigate insurance claims, and go through the process of debris removal. He sometimes worked 11-hour, emotionally draining shifts, listening to stories of what survivors had lost. What kept him going was how grateful people were for his help.
Volunteers like Nava-Cortez have helped 47,000 households affected by the fires, according to California Volunteers, the state service commission under the governor’s office. But in late April, Nava-Cortez and his team at the California Emergency Response Corps were suddenly placed on leave. Another program helping with the recovery in L.A., the California AmeriCorps Disaster Team, also abruptly shut down as a result of cuts to AmeriCorps.
Both were casualties of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, which has gutted the 30-year-old national service agency in a matter of weeks. In April, AmeriCorps placed 85 percent of its 500 staff on leave and canceled nearly $400 million in grants out of a $1 billion budget. The move effectively ended the service of an estimated 32,000 AmeriCorps workers across the country. The agency puts more than 200,000 people, young and old, in service roles every year.
Across California, the cuts meant that about a dozen programs working on climate change, conservation, and disaster response were forced to “reduce service projects, limit recruitment, and scale back support in high-need communities,” said Joyia Emard, the communications deputy director at California Volunteers.
That work is just a tiny slice of what AmeriCorps does across the country. DOGE’s attempt to dismantle the agency has unraveled all kinds of programs — tutoring centers in elementary schools, efforts to reduce poverty, and trail maintenance crews. If you saw a team of young people running an after-school program, helping out in a soup kitchen, or cleaning up after a hurricane, there’s a good chance it was connected to AmeriCorps in some way.
Most people “didn’t realize the degree to which it was everywhere and was doing so much good,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University’s School of International Service who studies how service programs can help communities respond to and recover from disasters, as well as prepare for future ones. Following floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, AmeriCorps volunteers have helped manage donation centers, clear out debris, and “muck and gut” buildings, often in coordination with other agencies and local nonprofits.
Fisher calls AmeriCorps the “connective tissue” that makes it easier to coordinate after disasters, thanks to its connections across the country. The agency boasts that it is “often the first to respond and the last to leave,” with members sometimes working months or years after a disaster strikes.
“This will be disastrous to communities,” Fisher said about the Trump administration’s gutting the program. “And the thing that’s really unfortunate is we won’t feel it until after disaster hits.”
Disaster preparedness is being weakened across the federal government, even as heat waves, flooding, and other extreme weather are becoming more extreme as the climate warms. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is operating at such diminished levels that experts are warning hurricane forecasts will be less accurate ahead of what’s predicted to be a brutal hurricane season. President Donald Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which handles relief and recovery after extreme weather.
Two members of AmeriCorps install a door frame in a house damaged by Hurricane Sandy in Brooklyn, New York.
Jewel Samad / AFP via Getty Images
The loss of staffing and programs at AmeriCorps is one more blow to the country’s ability to respond to and recover from disasters. In mid-April, AmeriCorps abruptly pulled teams of workers with its National Civilian Community Corps off their jobs rebuilding homes destroyed in storms, distributing supplies for hurricane recovery, and more. “People were very upset, very sad, and a lot of people just did not know what they were going to do, because this was our plan for our year,” said Rachel Suber, a 22-year-old member of FEMA Corps, an AmeriCorps NCCC program. Suber had been helping Pennsylvanians rebuild after Hurricane Debby last year.
At the end of April, two dozen states, including California, sued the Trump administration over the cuts to AmeriCorps, alleging that DOGE illegally gutted an agency that Congress created and funded. A separate lawsuit filed last week by AmeriCorps grant recipients is also trying to block the cuts. Nava-Cortez was told that the outcome of his program is up to the courts, so he’s waiting until the end of the month to see what happens. He’d been hoping to move to San Jose for school after his term ended this summer, but now he’s not even sure he can cover this month’s rent.
It’s a long tradition in the United States to provide low-paying service jobs for young people. “Your pay will be low; the conditions of your labor will often be difficult,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1964, when the first cohort of volunteers were sworn in with VISTA, a service program to alleviate poverty. “But you will have the satisfaction of leading a great national effort.” Congress established AmeriCorps in 1993 under President Bill Clinton, folding in VISTA and NCCC, and continued to expand the program with bipartisan support.
AmeriCorps had expanded its environmental work by almost $160 million in recent years, Michael Smith, the former CEO of AmeriCorps, told Grist last year. Under the Biden administration, climate service work around the country was collected under the short-lived American Climate Corps, which was quietly ended in January ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
After Trump took office, some programs had the opportunity to modify any wording in their grants that conflicted with the president’s executive orders, such as removing language about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or swapping the word “conservation” for “climate change,” said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of The Corps Network, a national association of service programs. She was told that some state commissions that distribute AmeriCorps funding did not allow their grant recipients the chance to rewrite their grants, which may explain why those programs have been hit especially hard by DOGE.
And there may be more cuts coming. “There are a lot of signs that the Trump administration is not done yet with AmeriCorps,” Fisher said. In more recent years, some Republicans have argued that AmeriCorps misspent money and that it had repeatedly failed to provide proper statements for audits. Yet a number of Republicans in Congress support AmeriCorps because of the impact it’s had in their districts, Sprenkel said. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, for example, posted on social media that he objected to cutting AmeriCorps grants that support veterans and provide “crucial support after hurricanes.”
AmeriCorps workers receive what the agency calls a “modest living allowance” to pay for their basic expenses. The amount varies by program: VISTA members typically are paid about $2,000 a month, while NCCC and FEMA Corps members receive about $400 a month plus housing and money for food. In terms of bang for its buck, AmeriCorps pays for itself. Every dollar invested in environmental work generated many in return, according to an assessment from the agency’s Office of Research and Evaluation from December. The Montana Conservation Corps, for example, earned returns as high as $35.84 for each dollar spent.
“If it’s a financial decision to close AmeriCorps, then it doesn’t really make sense,” said Sky Hawk Bressette, 26, who had been working in the parks department for Bellingham, Washington. As part of the Washington Service Corps, he and his colleague taught 5th graders about native plants and coordinated volunteers who planted thousands of trees and removed invasive species — but much of that work is now on pause after funding cuts. “It’s a huge loss for the 1,000 students that we work with in our city alone, and just multiply that by every city that uses AmeriCorps around the country,” Bressette said.
Sky Hawk Bressette teaches a group of fifth graders about removing invasive English holly at Lowell Park in Bellingham, Washington. Allison Greener Grant
Most organizations within The Corps Network rely on AmeriCorps for somewhere between 15 and 50 percent of their budget, according to Bobby Tillett, director of member services at the network. As they try to scrape together funding and continue the work they can, he said, they’re unsure what to tell the people accepted for summer programs that are supposed to start in June.
“All of those programs were part of this amazing network of service that basically gave nobody high-paying jobs, but gave so much back to communities,” Fisher said. “And all of that is being lost.”
Zoya Teirstein contributed reporting to this story.
Nearly 30 billion-dollar storms rocked the United States last year. Thanks to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s disaster tracking database, we know that catastrophes are getting more expensive overall, and we’re seeing more of them crossing the 10-figure threshold. But the era of billion-dollar disasters is over, because the Trump administration announced late last week that it will no longer update the database.
Policymakers, elected officials, and experts in building, insurance, and real estate say that while the elimination of this essential resource feels politically motivated, its economic value was clear-cut, and often helped cities and companies assess risk with reliable, publicly accessible, and unbiased data.
NOAA created the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database in 1980 to track storms, floods, and other catastrophes that caused at least that much in damage. (NOAA did not respond to a request to comment for this story.) Although such events are rare, they account for more than 80 percent of the nation’s weather- and climate-related damages. In the 45 years since its launch, the database amassed 403 entries, totaling more than $3 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars.
By scrupulously recording this data, NOAA could spot trends, including steep increases in the cost and frequency of disasters from one year to the next and one decade to the next. Insurance companies, state and local governments, researchers, and the public used this information to track climate risk over time, project it into the future, and plan accordingly.
Much of this record-keeping occurred at the National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI. The agency and its trove of climate data happens to sit in Asheville, North Carolina. The city is just one of many in six states that saw the blunt end of Hurricane Helene, the $78.7 billion storm that walloped the southeast in September. Western North Carolina saw one of the highest disaster costs per million residents last year, according to the database’s own calculations.
Local and state authorities gather their own data on disaster costs, but it’s often piecemeal. Avril Pinder, the Buncombe County manager, said the county’s preliminary calculations peg the losses from Helene at something like $80 million, the picture is not as complete as the more comprehensive insights NOAA provides. “We would all do our own [cost estimates] but NOAA has that bigger picture,” Pinder said.
Local governments rely on consultants and engineers to track disaster costs, but officials in Asheville told Grist that resilience measures meant to protect residents from future disasters are highly dependent on federal projections. For instance, in 2021, the city used NOAA data to make the case for major reconstruction of the dam at North Fork Reservoir, which provides 70 percent of Buncombe County’s water. That work, completed in 2021, is believed to have kept the dam from failing during the flooding that followed Helene. “Losing that broader national benchmark will likely make it harder to illustrate the growing scale of disasters and the importance of proactive investments like this,” Jessica Hughes, a city of Asheville communications officer, said.
This comes as the region’s assessment of its climate risk experiences a seismic shift. Many people believed they were largely immune to the climate crisis. “After Hurricane Helene, which occurred in an area that had once been hailed as a climate haven in western North Carolina, all the way up in the mountains, we now know that climate havens don’t really exist,” said Carly Fabian, a senior insurance policy advocate at consumer rights nonprofit Public Citizen.
According to Asheville realtor Hadley Cropp, people do deep research before deciding where to move. Helene called into question the idea of a “climate haven,” leading homebuyers to begin asking new questions and seeking detailed climate data before deciding whether and where to buy. “Helene has kind of shifted the landscape a little bit,” Cropp said. “Floodplains have been expanded and redesigned, and so people before Helene never even really asked about that kind of thing unless it was specifically in an obvious floodplain.”
Although insurance companies rely on several datasets to set rates, NOAA’s information was widely trusted, said Jason Tyson, spokesman for North Carolina’s Department of Insurance. “Because it’s coming from the government, it’s not encumbered by the rival databases that might have some sort of agenda,” he said. The industry is broadly understood to acknowledge climate change apolitically — because it’s costing them a lot of money, they simply have to understand it, predicting future risk in order to better guard against losses.
The database did not meticulously detail how climate change is fueling bigger and hotter wildfires, intensifying hurricanes, and exacerbating flooding. It provided economic quantification of what a given disaster cost, and how those costs mounted: In the 1980s, the U.S. experienced a little over three billion-dollar disasters a year. That tally skyrocketed to 23 annually between 2020 and 2024. “It is definitely not a plot of climate-change-increased disasters over time,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s a plot of increased disaster losses for a variety of reasons that includes climate change, but it’s certainly not limited to it, and maybe isn’t even the primary driver in many cases.”
Yes, without a doubt, climate change has been making disasters more expensive for victims, government, and insurers. But at the same time, more people have been settling where hurricanes make landfall along the Gulf Coast, and in the wildland-urban interfaces where housing developments abut forested areas. That’s putting more and more structures in harm’s way. The U.S. has also been getting richer, meaning larger homes filled with more stuff.
Still, researchers used the database to help them understand how billion-dollar disasters are becoming more common, and what role climate change has to play in making hurricanes, heat waves, and floods worse. “It’s surprisingly difficult to get high-quality, reliable estimates of the economic damages associated with events, and the health effects associated with events,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central, a research and communication nonprofit. “So it’s a real loss there to the ability to start using that database to try to parse out the economic damages associated with climate change.”
NOAA was uniquely positioned to maintain such a database, as some of the information it ingested came from insurance companies. “They don’t necessarily want to disclose that to their competitors, but they were willing to disclose it to this nonpartisan science agency,” Swain said. “And so NOAA was able to get information to go into this database that it’s not clear anyone else is going to be able to have access to.” It’s unlikely, then, that anyone in the private sector will be able to build a comparable dataset. “This is to the dismay and even alarm of many people, for example, in the insurance industry,” Swain said, “which would be the industry best suited to potentially develop an alternative.”
Losing the database will have ripple effects, Swain added, because there’s a very long list of entities that use this information to determine where to rebuild after a disaster, where to regrow crops, and where to insure: federal agencies, local governments, the construction industry, the real estate industry, agricultural interests, and insurers. “Really,” Swain said, “who doesn’t need this information in some form starts to become maybe an easier question to answer.”
With or without the database, billion-dollar disasters will keep happening, and almost certainly with more frequency as the planet warms. “Just because we stop reporting this information, doesn’t mean that the disasters are stopping and that the damages are ending,” Dahl said. “It really just leaves us more in the dark as a nation.”
Lauren Bacchus is one of many people in Asheville who are strangely enamored with the city’s sinkholes.
She’s a member of the Asheville Sinkhole Group, an online watering hole of more than 3,400 people in and around this North Carolina city who eagerly discuss the chasms that mysteriously emerge from time to time. She even owns a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “For the love of all things holey.” Bacchus concedes sinkholes are an odd thing to be passionate about, but they speak to the impermanence of things made by human hands.
“I don’t want to discredit that sinkholes can cause a lot of damage and hurt people, but they do evoke this feeling of excitement and curiosity and mystery,” she said. “It’s a void that opens up where you thought something was solid. That’s the reality of the ground we walk on all the time.”
The Facebook group recently enjoyed renewed interest when a small pit appeared at an intersection near a storm-damaged area on the outskirts of town late last month. “Oh, we’re so back,” one user wrote.
Given the flooding and busted pipes that followed Hurricane Helene, sinkholes have become a pressing problem for a vast swath of the region. Roads already battered by record flooding are pocked by the blemishes, which can be anywhere from a few inches to several feet in diameter — though particularly monstrous ones can reach hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet deep. A marked increase in their numbers has been keeping road crews busy In Asheville, according to spokesperson Kim Miller.
“The uptick has impacted staff workload,” she said.
Such dints can appear quickly, or over long periods of time. They also can occur naturally, or as the result of humans altering the landscape. Whatever their speed and cause, they are almost always the result of something or someone altering the natural flow of water underground — a problem exacerbated by the extreme rain often brought on by climate change. Over time, these anomalies grow and grow, unseen, until reaching the surface and causing an abrupt cave-in.
Two passersby peer ever so carefully into a sinkhole that swallowed a section of road in Chatsville, California, during torrential rain on Jan. 10, 2023. Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The country’s biggest open sinkhole, Golly Hole, opened 52 years ago in Alabama, creating a rift 350 feet wide and 100 feet deep. But even small ones can be horrendously expensive; all told, sinkholes may have cost the country over $300 million annually during the past 15 years. No one maintains a master list of them, and the U.S. Geological Survey says most are probably never reported. Still, there’s enough data to know the majority occur in states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, and Pennsylvania, where soft, porous bedrock is liable to dissolve.
The “sinkhole capital” award might go to Florida, which has seen these craters proliferate after large storms like Tropical Storm Debby in August and Hurricane Milton in October, devouring backyards and chunks of road. Some experts on the matter say that “sinkhole season” takes over as hurricane season winds down.
Sinkholes are also complicated to resolve: Many states don’t requireask homeowners’ insurance to cover them, leaving many people to deal with a big problem on their own. Florida and Tennessee are among the few states that require disclosing past occurrences to anyone buying a house, though those laws are antiquated and lawmakers have been pushing for updates.
Regardless of the annoyance, sinkholes have seen a lot of love in Asheville.
Bacchus joined the sinkhole group just after its founding in 2019, when a particularly monstrous example swallowed a parking lot in a cavity 36 feet wide and 30 feet deep. That story made national headlines. The owners of the land tried, without success, to fill it with concrete before the city declared that the building on the site was too dangerous to occupy. It remained vacant for years while the corroded piping that caused the sinkhole was repaired.
Late last year, a Waffle House in the nearby Mars Hill suffered a similar fate. The day before Helene brought record flooding, a sinkhole took out much of the diner’s parking lot, ultimately leading the owners to shut down.
Much of Appalachia sits on porous limestone, made of the compressed shells of sea creatures that, millions of years ago, swam and scuttled in shallow seas. This topography, called karst, is full of tunnels and caves. USGS maps paint much of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia in a bright-red high-risk sinkhole zone. The nuisances have threatened, among other things, a Corvette museum in Kentucky, a police station in West Virginia, and a shopping mall in East Tennessee. For years, a sinkhole at the bottom of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Boone Dam drained it like a bathtub. These geologic formations are an expensive nuisance, and occasionally tragic. A Pennsylvania grandmother died late last year after falling into one while looking for her missing cat.
In Western North Carolina, and other areas with notably no limestone, sinkholes are mainly the result of human intervention – construction fill, bad plumbing, and choices made by developers and builders that result in water going places it shouldn’t.
However they arise, sinkholes have an insatiable quality to them, often expanding in ways that make them difficult and sometimes impossible to repair. But they also create a sense of wonder and fascination – the feeling of peering into another time. By opening a window into a subterranean world of water, fossils, and caves, they offer a glimpse of what came before.
And, experts say, we might see more of them as a warming world makes big storms more common. Ernst Kastning, a retired geology professor who taught at Radford University in Virginia, said sinkholes are often a natural reaction to a sudden change, like torrential rain. They can form as all that precipitation flows downhill, such as via an underground cave system. “The water has to come out somewhere,” Kastning said.
The Undertow Café in Woodfin, North Carolina, was temporarily closed in 2024 due to a sinkhole in its parking lot. Jason Sandford
After an intense downpour or sudden inundation, the land attempts to restore equilibrium, which often means water and soil move into inconvenient places. Geologists colloquially call this the earth’s “plumbing system” — the complex network of underground drainage pathways that are a part of the water cycle. Human-caused sinkholes can force a similar reaction through artificially creating what scientists call “void space” in the ground. This affects how much water the soil can hold and can cause it to collapse.
“If you come in there and dig something or put in something or build something or modify the water flow … you’re likely to have nature react to that,” Kastning said. In particular, pumping water out of aquifers and pouring concrete or asphalt, for foundations or roads, for example, causes depressions and allows sinkholes to form.
While these depressions can be caused by a variety of factors, the main culprit is rain. Warm temperatures can also make the ground and the rock within it softer. Sinkholes after a storm like Helene, Kastning said, are part of nature’s way of righting itself. But if big storms happen more often, so will sinkholes. “The frequency of these things is increasing,” he said.
But so too are the unique opportunities they present.
On a sunny April afternoon, three scientists walked across an ancient sinkhole, long since filled in and covered in grass, on the Gray Fossil Site in Gray, Tennessee. Active archaeological digs are currently covered with black plastic and protected by fences.
The 4.5-acre, 144-foot deep pit and surrounding forest once provided water to prehistoric animals and, when they died, served as their grave. As museum collections manager Matthew Inabinett put it, “When a place is a good place to live, it’s also a good place to die!”
Gray Fossil allows scientists to peer 4.5 million years into the past. Of course, they’ve only (literally) scraped the surface. “We’ve estimated a few tens of thousands of years at current rates to excavate to the bottom,” said fossil site Americorps member Shay Maden. “So we’ve got job security on that front for sure.”
They’ve found fossils of exciting species like giant flying squirrels and mastodons, but also have seen more familiar faces, including rhinos (one of which the team named Papaw, since he died at an advanced age) and tropical reptiles. The site, Inabinett said, has become a scrying glass to understand climate conditions of the past. It can also suggest what things might look like in a world a few degrees warmer than today.
Many of the fossils found so far are from the Pliocene epoch, which ended about 2.6 million years ago and was about 3 degrees Celsius warmer than now. That’s also about how much warmer Earth is projected to grow by 2100. Oceans were about 25 feet higher back then, and alligators lived in Appalachia. The region’s biodiversity, once among the greatest in the world, survived multiple periods of extreme heat and cold. Later, the humid climate of the Pliocene quickly succumbed to the Ice Age.
Because silt flows toward the ocean, the Appalachian region has few easily accessible fossils, making Gray Fossil a primary window into the ancient past. “The Southern Appalachians are one of the most biodiverse regions in North America,” Inabinett said. “To study this time period, the early Pliocene, is really useful for understanding how that diversity originated.”
While not every sinkhole opens a prehistoric portal, even the most mundane of them taps into something primal. For Bacchus, who goes on regular walks to check new and growing sinkholes, they represent the concept of “the void,” and bring an opportunity for people to reflect on concepts bigger than themselves.
“I am attracted to sinkholes because of the humbling feeling they evoke,” she said. “I am reminded I am a small animal on this planet, and there’s more going on below the surface than we may realize.”
TheFederal Emergency Management Agency is making significant changes to how it will respond to disasters on the ground this season, including ending federal door-to-door canvassing of survivors in disaster areas, Wired has learned.
A memo reviewed by Wired, dated May 2 and addressed to regional FEMA leaders from Cameron Hamilton, a senior official performing the duties of the administrator, instructs program offices to “take steps to implement” five “key reforms” for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire season.
Under the first reform, titled Prioritize Survivor Assistance at Fixed Facilities, the memo states that “FEMA will discontinue unaccompanied FEMA door-to-door canvassing to focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues, improving access to those in need, and increasing collaboration with [state, local, tribal, and territorial] partners and nonprofit service providers.”
FEMA has for years deployed staff to travel door-to-door in disaster areas, interacting directly with survivors in their homes to give an overview of FEMA aid application processes and help them register for federal aid. This group of workers is part of a larger cadre often called FEMA’s “boots on the ground” in disaster areas.
Ending door-to-door canvassing, one FEMA worker said, will “severely hamper our ability to reach vulnerable people.” The assistance provided by workers going door-to-door, they said, “has usually focused on the most impacted and the most vulnerable communities where there may be people who are elderly or with disabilities or lack of transportation and are unable to reach Disaster Recovery Centers.” This person spoke to Wired on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.
“Door-to-door canvassing is another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” Geoff Harbaugh, FEMA’s associate administrator for the Office of External Affairs, told Wired in an email. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, FEMA is changing how it operates and reforming its policies to better support disaster survivors and the American people. President Trump’s recent executive orders empower states to effectively respond to natural disasters and provide resources at the community level.”
Todd DeVoe, the emergency management coordinator for the city of Inglewood, California, and the second vice president at the International Association of Emergency Managers, said that in his years of working in disaster management he has seen how many survivors don’t get information about recovery or resources without door-to-door outreach — despite emergency managers using strategies like direct mailers and radio and newspaper ads.
“Going door-to-door, especially in critically hit areas, to share information is very important,” he said. “There’s a need for it. Can it be done more efficiently? Probably, but getting rid of it completely is really going to hamper some things.”
FEMA’s door-to-door canvassing became a political flash point last year during Hurricane Milton, when an agency whistleblower alerted the conservative news site The Daily Wire that one official had told workers in Florida to avoid approaching homes with Trump yard signs. Former FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability during a hearing last year that the incident was isolated to one employee, who had since been fired. The employee, in turn, claimed that she acted on orders from a superior and that the issue was a pattern of “hostile encounters” with survivors who had Trump yard signs.
Republicans on the Oversight Committee alleged that they had received information indicating “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” throughout FEMA. In March, the agency fired three more employees following an internal investigation into the issue.
The Office of Professional Responsibility “investigation found no evidence that this was a systemic problem, nor that it was directed by agency or field leadership,” Hamilton wrote in a letter sent to Oversight chair James Comer.
The canvassing controversy made it into the White House’s 2026 budget, released on May 2, which decries “woke FEMA grant programs” and proposes cutting $646 million from “non-disaster” FEMA programs.
“FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the president in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated,” the budget document states. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There is no mention in the FEMA memo of the investigation or recent controversy and no reasoning provided for ending the door-to-door canvassing process. FEMA has deployed door-to-door canvassing in states with federal disaster declarations approved under the Trump administration: An agency press release from March mentions teams going door-to-door in West Virginia following February’s severe storms.
The memo comes at a turbulent time for the agency as it prepares for disaster season. In late April, CNN reported that FEMA stood to lose around 20 percent of its staff in buyouts as part of cuts related to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Last week, Politico reported that the administration had stopped approving allocations for a crucial hazard-mitigation program just a few weeks after news broke that the agency would end one of the federal government’s biggest climate-adaptation programs.
Some of the other reforms in the memo include directives for the agency to “emphasize assistance available from other partners” over federal aid, as well as to emphasize efforts to rely on local- and state-run recovery centers rather than federally-run ones, “reducing the need to establish FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers and optimizing support for state and locally led recovery efforts.” The memo emphasizes that the agency intends to “respect the primacy of states, territories, and Tribal Nations in disaster response.”
“Our role is to support our partners, not replace them,” the memo states. “FEMA does not act alone.”
DeVoe said that like many of the responsibilities being shifted from FEMA to local response, the task of surveying survivors door-to-door will now fall to local and state responders. These groups may be hard-pressed to find the budget and manpower, especially as federal programs and grants keep getting cut.
“California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Florida, Texas — they’re going to be OK,” he said. “It’s going to be those smaller states — are they going to be OK?”
On Thursday, the Trump administration forced Cameron Hamilton, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency out of his job. The move came one day after Hamilton told lawmakers that the agency, which the administration favors dismantling, shouldn’t be eliminated.
“I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton told members of the House homeland security subcommittee. President Donald J. Trump named him acting head of the agency — more specifically, the senior official performing the duties of the Administrator — in January. His bio no longer appears on the FEMA, as the agency is known, website.
Hamilton’s statement directly contradicted one made a day earlier by his boss, Kristi Noem. She leads the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, which oversees FEMA. Addressing the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, she said, “The president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today.”
Neither FEMA or DHS explained why Hamilton is not longer in position.
Tension between Hamilton and Noem has been mounting for weeks. In late March, after news leaked that DHS was considering downsizing FEMA, the department suspected Hamilton of leaking the information and gave him a lie detector test, which cleared him. Politico was the first to report his ouster.
“I think Cam did the best he could with what he was facing,” one person who recently left the agency and asked to remain anonymous told Grist. “He earned a lot of respect from FEMA staff.”
FEMA employed more than 20,000 people at the start of the Trump administration. Is stated mission is “helping people before, during and after disasters.” For many Americans, the agency is the face of the federal government’s response to events such as Hurricane Helene, the Los Angeles fires, and other disasters. It also runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which covers millions of American homes.
As climate change fuels more extreme weather, the long-underfunded agency has strained to keep pace with its mandates. Hamilton’s departure is happening as the country heads into an Atlantic hurricane season that begins June 1 and is expected to be especially active.
Both FEMA and DHS confirmed that David Richardson, the assistant secretary at DHS’s countering weapons of mass destruction office, will take over for Hamilton. Richardson, who previously served as a Marine in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa, takes the helm at a time when the future of FEMA remains both unclear, and in peril.
Noem has already begun to dismantle the agency. In early April, she announced that it would discontinue mitigation-related grant initiatives. The cancellations include the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, program — the agency’s main climate adaptation program — which was launched during Trump’s first term and has helped hundreds of communities across the country prepare for the impacts of climate change.
DHS has also recently revived President Trump’s earlier ‘Fork in the Road’ approach to downsizing, which gave employees various options to leave voluntarily, such as early retirement, deferred resignation or a buyout. It’s unclear how many FEMA employees took the offer.
“When Disaster Strikes, We’re Here to Help,” the FEMA’s website reads. The worry among the agency’s supporters is that, in removing Hamilton, the Trump administration may be clearing the path for broader rollbacks — or ensuring that FEMA doesn’t exist at all.
At the beginning of last month, the National Weather Service discontinued its automated emergency-weather translation services in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Samoan. The agency had decided not to renew its contract with Lilt, an AI-translation platform.
Then, just about three weeks after the contract lapsed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the NWS is a subagency, shared an update: The automated translation services would be back up and running as of Monday, April 28.
The agency’s back and forth turned April into a monthlong test case: How well would communities around the U.S. fare without adequate information during extreme weather events?
In the span of a single week, belts of Louisiana were battered by flash flooding, while severe storms brought deadly hail and heavy rain to parts of Oklahoma and Texas and a succession of destructive tornadoes touched down in nine states. Alarms flashed across screens and blared on radios warning people to get to safety. Many of those messages, however, were issued only in English.
One thing that’s certain is that the increasing frequency and strength, due to climate change, of these events will make life harder for people everywhere. NOAA’s decision sparked an uproar across the country, as advocates and policymakers spoke out against the Trump administration — and the millions of people it put at undue risk.
Monica Bozeman, who leads the National Weather Service’s automated language translations, told Grist that the agency’s contract with Lilt has been renewed for another year. A week after NOAA’s update, however, that restoration is still underway. “We are in the process of standing back up the last few translation sites,” said Bozeman.
The agency confirmed that Lilt’s software will, once again, generate translations for 30 of its regional weather forecast offices throughout the nation, in addition to the National Hurricane Center. The Lilt models automatically translate urgent updates and warnings from the NWS, which are then posted on websites like weather.gov and hurricanes.gov, and voiced over NOAA’s weather radio. The agency is still “working to restart AI translations,” said Bozeman, to populate those websites and broadcasts.
“The NWS is committed to enhancing the accessibility of vital, life-saving weather information by making urgent weather alerts available to the public in multiple languages,” said Bozeman. “Utilizing artificial intelligence allows us to keep up with this level of demand.”
When asked about the NWS shuttering radio translations in the southern region, as previously first reported by Grist, Bozeman said the agency is “working to turn on that capability for the NOAA Weather Radio to broadcast the translated information coming from Lilt AI translations at the affected sites.”
Neither Bozeman nor a national NOAA spokesperson addressed Grist’s requests for further information.
For instance, the agency has remained tight-lipped about why translation services were suspended in the first place, and has not clarified why it moved to reinstate the contract. They also did not provide a timeline on when to expect all stalled translations to be restored to their former capacity or address whether the ongoing workforce cuts have impeded their progress. Representatives from Lilt did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Analysts say the reasons for the initial decision may be linked to what they see as the administration’s “act first, ask questions later” approach to policy. Public response is also likely to have helped propel the weather agency’s sudden backtrack.
“What I’m noticing with this administration is a huge trend where certain pressures really work on them when it comes to walking back the things that they’re doing,” said Priya Pandey, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy. Those include economic levers, as seen with tariffs, she noted, as well as the court of public opinion. “Republican Congress members that have some of these weather centers in their districts were putting pressure on the administration to look into this, and look into the impacts of the rollbacks on NOAA.”
The New York Times reported that, as of May 2, about 10 percent of the weather service’s total staff have been terminated or accepted buyout offers. Now, it appears that more turbulence is in store for the agency: President Trump’s budget proposal includes significant cuts to NOAA’s budget and the dismantling of its research arm. Five former NWS leaders wrote in a letter, dated Friday, that they feared the cuts would lead to understaffing in weather forecast offices and “needless loss of life.”
With the exceptions of New York and Hawaiʻi, which mandate their own statewide emergency translation services, few other states have adopted similar comprehensive models enforcing multilingual information accessibility in the event of a disaster.
Pandey thinks that could very well now change, as the federal government’s anti-immigrant approach could prompt some states to adopt their own inclusive emergency management policies, while also ramping up the need for community-led efforts.
The executive order that Trump signed in March that designated English as the country’s official language and rescinded a Clinton-era mandate for federally funded agencies and entities to provide language aid to non-English speakers, said Pandey, “doesn’t prohibit people from translating things outright.”
Still, she noted, the order does make what used to be a prerequisite entirely voluntary, and provides government institutions such as the NWS or NOAA, in addition to state and county-level emergency management operations, the ability to “outright ignore providing translations.”
In the days following the initial announcement from the NWS, the Nebraska Commission on Latino-Americans doubled down on their commitment to provide translated extreme weather alerts to residents statewide. Executive Director María Arriaga told Grist the “pivotal” decision exposed how vulnerable non-English-speaking communities become “when translation infrastructure disappears overnight,” and pushed the commission into action.
They’ve since accelerated conversations with state agencies to develop the framework for a multilingual emergency information plan, initially serving Spanish speakers, with the goal to also support K’iche’, Arabic, and Vietnamese-speaking residents.
“While we are not a weather agency, we step in as a connector, disseminating accurate and timely information where we see that essential communication is missing or inaccessible,” said Arriaga. “Language should never be a barrier when lives are at stake.”
Deep in the bowels of .gov web addresses sits a site that houses the climate adaptation plans for more than two dozen federal agencies. They outline everything from the Smithsonian protecting the National Museum of American History from flooding to the Department of Defense “incorporat[ing] climate considerations into wargames.”
The fact that these documents remain available — including on the recently updated Environmental Protection Agency site — stands in stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s broader purge of climate-related programming from the federal government. Even the rest of the sustainability.gov website where they reside has largely been wiped clean since Trump’s inauguration.
“I don’t know if leaving [them] up was intentional,” said Elizabeth Losos, an executive in residence at Duke University, who provided technical support for the plans. She said it could be an oversight and the plans will be taken down eventually. Or it could be a sign that some within the administration want to tackle issues related to natural disaster and climate preparedness.
“There are folks there who know that if you screw this up too much it comes back and bites you,” Losos said. She also said she believes that “they aren’t nearly as hostile to climate adaptation and resiliency as they are climate mitigation.”
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including one sent to the Council on Environmental Quality, which spearheaded the plans. Grist also reached out to all 30 government entities that produced the documents. Only a handful responded, though they avoided referencing “climate change.”
“The [State] Department will continue to plan for and seek to mitigate disruptions to its critical operations from a range of possible disruptions, including natural hazards,” said one agency spokesperson in an email. Another wrote that the “EPA takes very seriously how natural hazards and disasters can affect human health and the environment.” Neither agency responded to follow up questions.
The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility, directly addressed the future of its plan, confirming that “no changes to the current plan have been identified.” Press secretary Charlotte Taylor dismissed questions about the Department of Interior’s plan by email, writing, “A leftist blog’s interpretation of the federal government’s actions is not a matter of concern.”
The Biden administration released the first comprehensive climate adaptation plans in 2021, and the latest versions came out in 2024. They run through 2027 and range from 15 (the National Archives and Records Administration) to 115 (State Department) pages long.
“Some of the plans were stronger than others,” said one person who worked on the plans and asked to remain anonymous to discuss them candidly. While the plans were largely unfunded, this person says they were important for setting departmental strategy and priorities. And, most importantly, the goal was to protect government assets and save taxpayers money.
“It falls into efficiency and smart government use of funds,” the person told Grist. “I think it’s a really good federal investment for the long run.”
According to the Government Accountability Office, GAO, the federal government is the largest property owner in the United States and spends billions of dollars running and maintaining its assets. But a 2021 GAO report found no specific directives for incorporating natural disaster resilience into decisions for managing that vast portfolio.
“The federal government does not have a strategic federal approach for investing in the highest priority climate-resilience projects,” the report read. Disaster-resilient assets, it continued, “can reduce potential physical damages, and thus, may also reduce future needs for Congress to appropriate supplemental funds.”
Saving money would fit with the Trump administration’s stated goals of slashing the cost of government. Climate-friendly policies wouldn’t. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, for example, recently shuttered its ‘Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities’ program. Thousands of people have been, or are slated to be, laid off at agencies that help address climate issues, such as the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Rollbacks like these make the presence of the Climate Adaptation Plans particularly puzzling.
“It’s hard to reconcile with other actions,” said Hannah Persl, a senior staff attorney with the Harvard Environmental & Energy Law Program. She added that there likely isn’t anything requiring the administration to keep them online or in effect.
Despite a lack of anything requiring the climate adaptation plan, they remain intact and a GAO report from last year found that all 13 agencies it looked at were incorporating climate vulnerabilities into their investment decisions. But most observers are skeptical of their continued utility under Trump.
“They’re meaningful to the extent agency leadership are committed to implementing them,” said Perls. “If we collect the breadcrumbs and put them all in a row, it would suggest [this administration is] not really interested in meaningfully implementing these plans.”
AmeriCorps, the US federal agency that oversees volunteerism and service work, abruptly pulled teams of young people out of a variety of community service projects across the country on Tuesday. The work stoppage was due to cuts attributed to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, volunteers were informed Tuesday afternoon.
WIRED spoke with seven workers with the National Civilian Community Corps, better known as AmeriCorps NCCC, who say that they were told to stop working on projects ranging from rebuilding homes destroyed in storms, to readying a summer camp for kids, to distributing supplies for hurricane recovery, and prepare to immediately travel back to their homes.
Aadharsh Jeyasakthivel, a 23-year-old from Boston, was serving at a county food bank in rural Pennsylvania when he and his fellow volunteers were suddenly pulled from service.
“Non Americorps ppl are still distributing,” he wrote to WIRED in a Signal message, sending a photo of yellow-vested volunteers working on a line in a parking lot.
The AmeriCorps NCCC program was established under the Clinton administration by the National and Community Service Trust Act, signed in 1993. Each year, it recruits 2,200 people between the ages of 18 to 26 to serve in teams working across the country on different projects. Some volunteers also work directly alongside staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Forest Service, as part of smaller programs that are run within the NCCC. Graduates of the program get access to an award to help pay off federal student loans.
“In alignment with the Trump-Vance Administration priorities and Executive Order 14222, ‘Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Cost Efficiency Initiative,’ AmeriCorps NCCC is working within new operational parameters that impact the program’s ability to sustain program operations,” reads an email sent April 15 to NCCC volunteers seen by WIRED. A separate memo, also seen by WIRED, sent to workers signed by NCCC national director Ken Goodson, releases volunteers from the program and informs them that their benefits will be discontinued April 30. Volunteers’ “early departure,” that memo states, “results from program circumstances beyond your control.” (Workers who had completed at least 15 percent of the program, the first email notes, would be eligible for a prorated education award.)
AmeriCorps did not respond to a request for comment.
In early April, an AmeriCorps representative told Politico Playbook that DOGE staff “are currently working at AmeriCorps headquarters and the agency is supporting their requests.” A day later, The Washington Post reported that the agency was considering a 50 percent cut to its budget. In 2024, the NCCC program made up $37.7 million of the agency’s $1.2 billion budget.
The volunteer cuts, which included young people who told WIRED they were tasked with making forests more resilient to wildfires and helping out FEMA staff at the agency’s headquarters, come just weeks before the official start of hurricane season.
“NCCC and FEMA Corps represent a critical flexible workforce that is able to support disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery efforts across the country,” says Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. “The loss of the people who make up these programs will be felt immediately, and especially in the next major disaster.”
AmeriCorps and the NCCC program have come under scrutiny in past years. Last year, the Government Accountability Office found that AmeriCorps needed to take more steps to prevent fraud in its grantmaking, while a 2017 Office of Inspector General report found that the NCCC program, which provides volunteers room and board, clothing, and any specialized training they might need, was four to eight times more expensive than other AmeriCorps programs.
Volunteers who spoke to WIRED said they and their team members had gotten job training in a variety of disciplines during their deployment, from data management to forklift operation to wildland firefighting certification.
“These programs are an important pathway for young people looking to have careers in emergency management and disaster work more broadly, so impacts will be felt in that way too,” Montano says.
AmeriCorps has historically been a target for some right-wing media figures and organizations, including Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, and the Heritage Foundation. The first Trump administration’s 2017 budget proposal attempted to slash funding for the agency altogether.
The long-term fate of the NCCC program is not immediately clear. An informational page on applying to the Fall 2025 cohort is still active on the AmeriCorps website, but a separate application portal lists no positions accepting applications.
For volunteers unexpectedly traveling home on Thursday, the loss cuts deep.
“I understand that the [Trump administration] has been cutting and gutting so many important programs, but I want people to know about what they did to Americorps. For many of us, this was our way to pay for college, to get away from home, to figure out what to do with our lives, it was a big step,” says 19-year-old Coloradan Noe Felix Burns, who was rebuilding houses in Philadelphia damaged by 2021’s Hurricane Ida. “And they just ripped it out from under us without even a two-week’s notice.”
In the months after Hurricane Helene leveled thousands of acres in Pisgah National Forest, John Beaudet and other volunteers cleared downed trees from the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Chopping them up and moving them aside was back-breaking work, but essential to ensuring safe passage for hikers. So he was dismayed to learn that a section of the trail in western North Carolina could remain closed for more than a year because the National Forest Service wants that timber left alone so logging companies can clear it.
“Rather than cut those logs out of the trail and open the trail up, the U.S. Forest Service wanted to salvage those trees as timber,” said Beaudet, an avid hiker who lives near Erwin, Tennessee. Such operations, common after natural disasters like hurricanes and fires, are typically subjected to environmental review, and the government solicits feedback from the public. But when Beaudet tried to comment on the process, he found that was not an option. “For the army of volunteers that work so hard to clear the trail out, it’s kind of a kick in the shins,” he said. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy worked with the Forest Service and local hiking clubs to reroute the trail, but it does not have a timeline for completion for the salvage project, a point of uncertainty for hikers and trail advocates.
Of the nearly 800,000 acres of trees that Helene downed, about 187,000 lie in national forests. Salvage logging is the Forest Service’s primary method of handling such a large disturbance. However, scientists and forest advocates have long questioned whether salvage logging, which brings its own ecological damage, is the best approach and believe it denies nature time to heal. Others argue that such operations are motivated more by profit than safety or environmental concern, and often provide cover for taking healthy trees that still stand.
The fast-track approach to environmental review following Helene has many people concerned that the public isn’t being given any chance to inform the process. According to forest advocates who have been in communication with the Forest Service, the government reportedly plans to announce 15 salvage projects in western North Carolina, including some 2,300 acres in Pisgah alone. The agency did reach out to the state Fish and Wildfire Service and the historic preservation office for consultation, but did not detail what those communications entailed.
Such projects are meant to remove flammable dead trees, create “fuel breaks” where a fire can be halted or slowed, and promote ecosystem regeneration. James Melonas, the supervisor for national forests in North Carolina, said urgency is warranted due to an active and ongoing fire season creating a state of emergency. Beyond providing fuel for conflagrations like those that burned North Carolina last month, felled trees still block many roads.
“Really it’s about reducing that immediate fire risk,” he said. “We’re not really focused at this point on the kind of longer-term forest restoration, which will come.”
A drone photo taken on October 28, 2024, shows trees leveled by Hurricane Helene in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
Ted Richardson / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Timber salvage is a complex process that requires surveying immense tracts of land, much of it remote and occasionally treacherous, to determine the damage, its impact, and how best to clear it. A scientific assessment, which typically takes about six months, determines the environmental impact of the operation. After that, the environmental impact statement is subject to public comment, after which it is revised into a final version. Once all of that is done, bids are solicited. The cost varies with the scale of the project, any roads that must be built or improved, and other factors, but the baseline is 25 cents per cubic foot of lumber. Then, salvage begins.
Such work is difficult and dangerous. “It’s brutal,” said Bryan Box, a timber cruiser involved in a Helene-related operation in Georgia. His job includes choosing trees for removal and estimating how many trees are hauled off for sale. Clearing them requires working with immense machinery in rugged, often steep, terrain. Accidents can be deadly, and crews toil far from help should anything go wrong.
Salvaging is ecologically disruptive. It can cause erosion, introduce fire-prone invasive plants, alter natural habitat, and impact water quality. That is why it is, like other logging projects, regulated under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. A forester’s job, Box said, is to use those guidelines to mitigate risks while protecting any endangered species, archaeological sites, or rare habitat. Box has been involved in NEPA reviews around the country, and understands the scientific questions and ecological intricacies involved with salvage.
“The wildlife biologist comes in and says, ‘OK, here’s where our known hawk nests were prior to the storm,” he offered as an example. Or botanists might look for threatened plants like American ginseng. “They have to have language in the environmental impact statement going over that sort of biological analysis.” All of that information is presented in an environmental impact statement and published so the public can review it.
Salvage logging isn’t necessarily profitable, and companies often see it as a chance to squeeze a few dollars out of wood that otherwise might be left to rot. A forest disturbance like a hurricane can devastate local timber markets by making wood suddenly abundant, driving down its value. It doesn’t help that downed trees are less valuable than freshly-cut trees. Box said timber companies sometimes take healthy trees along with the salvage to make more money.
“As long as it’s a targeted salvage project whose aim is simply to remove dead and downed wood, that’s a worthy goal,” said Will Harlan, of the Center for Biological Diversity, who signed a letter asking the Forest Service to allow the public to comment on the projects. “What we get worried about is when the project expands beyond salvage logging to include intact, healthy, mature forests that are nearby, being lumped into the project just to make money.”
The Forest Service does have ways to prevent this. It requires a timber sale administrator to visit logging sites every 14 days to make sure everything is on the up and up. Ideally, these agency employees are “watching like hawks,” Box said. But in reality, there are often so many projects going on at once that an administrator might have over a dozen projects to oversee. And the agency, already stretched thin, may soon see further staffing cuts.
It doesn’t help that there is currently little regulatory pressure from above to enforce the National Environmental Policy Act. Recently released federal directives for the Forest Service invoke the need for logging as a means for preventing fires and promoting biodiversity, and point towards streamlining NEPA and eradicating it where possible.
Some forest ecologists believe salvage is a flawed fire prevention strategy because removing so much timber can actually increase fire risk. Trees, even fallen ones, keep the ground moist and cool; without them, it dries out. “Big logs are creating shade and humidity and don’t dry out that well,” said Josh Kelly, a forest ecologist with conservation nonprofit MountainTrue. “They can actually slow a fire down.” He isn’t opposed to clearing down trees, “so long as salvage really is aimed at reducing wildfire risk and logging debris is dealt with after logging and either chipped or mulched or pulled away from roads. I just really wish there wasn’t this secrecy surrounding it.”
Critics also argue that salvage logging does more harm than good and a damaged forest ought to be left to recover on its own, especially given the trauma it has already endured. “If you look at Webster’s dictionary, salvage is taking something of value from something that’s been destroyed,” said conservation biologist Dominick DelaSalla, an ardent opponent of the practice.
Blowdowns are part of the natural cycles that create the diverse habitats needed to ensure forest health and diversity, he said. Those downed logs have greater value in nurturing life by cycling nutrients and creating habitat, two benefits that outweigh any financial gain gleaned from their harvest. Removing them, he said, can interrupt or alter the process of regrowth, especially when many forest types, like some in Appalachia, are fire-adapted. Rather than clearing downed trees and old growth, DelaSalla said fire mitigation should focus on creating fuel breaks, promoting fire safety education, fireproofing homes, and adopting zoning regulations that minimize further expansion into the wildland-urban interface.
Kelly said while smaller twigs downed by Helene may be linked to the fires that burned last month, and the downed trees littering Pisgah and other forests may not pose a threat until they’ve had a few years to dry out. Other factors post a far greater threat, he said. “The Southeast in general has been having a very active fire season due to global warming and weather,” he said. Last month was the lowest-humidity March on record for much of the region.
Ultimately, conservationists would prefer a stewardship-based approach to letting damaged forests regenerate at their own pace. That approach can conflict with the pressure to maintain public safety, the federal government’s interest in increasing logging, and the economic benefits recreation and tourism bring to communities. Such tensions will only increase as climate change brings more frequent, and more intense storms like Helene and the nation’s forests grow increasingly vulnerable.
“What we’re going to continue to see is probably increased rates of canopy turnover, increased mortality rates of the older trees, and a changing species composition and conditions,” said Kelly. “There won’t be an equilibrium until the climate and weather reach an equilibrium.”
When an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore through the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, one family was slow to act, not because they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know that they should do anything.
The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the tornado alert that appeared on their cell phones in English. “I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly,” Rosa, identified only by her first name, told researchers for a study on how immigrant communities responded to the warnings.
Another alert popped up in Spanish, and Rosa and her family rushed downstairs to shelter. Ten minutes later, a tornado destroyed the second floor where they’d been.
For at least 30 years, the National Weather Service had been providing time- and labor-intensive manual translations into Spanish. Researchers have found that even delayed translations have contributed to missed evacuations, injuries, and preventable deaths. These kinds of tragedies prompted efforts to improve the speed and scope of translating weather alerts at local, state, and national levels.
Early into the Biden administration, the agency began a series of experimental pilot projects to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the country. The AI translating company Lilt was behind one of them. By the end of 2023, the agency had rolled out a product using Lilt’s artificial intelligence software to automate translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Chinese.
“By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press release announcing the 2023 launch. Since then, the service also added automatic translations into Vietnamese, French, and Samoan. The machine learning system could translate alerts in just two to three minutes — what might take a human translator an hour — said Joseph Trujillo Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose work supported the program.
And now those alerts are gone. The National Weather Service has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier.
“Because these translations are no longer available, communities who do not understand English are significantly less safe and less aware of the hazardous weather that might be happening in their area,” said a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee familiar with the translation project, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of alerts were translated by the Lilt AI language model, the employee said.
An internal memo reviewed by Grist showed that the National Weather Service has stopped radio translations for offices in its southern region, where 77 million people live, and does not plan to revert to a previous method of translation — meaning that its broadcasts will no longer contain Spanish translations of forecasts and warnings. The move enraged some workers at local NWS offices, according to conversations relayed to the employee, as the decision not to restart radio translations was due to the workload burden as the service’s workforce faces cuts under the Trump administration.
No clear reason was given as to why the contract lapsed and the agency has discontinued its translations, the employee said. “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” NOAA weather service spokesperson Michael Musher told Grist in a statement. Musher did not address whether the NWS plans to resume translations, nor did he address Grist’s additional requests for clarification. Lilt did not respond to a request for comment.
Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.” Rivera also pointed to how, within hours of the president’s inauguration, the Trump administration shut down the Spanish-language version of the White House website. Trump’s mandate rescinded a decades-old order enacted by former President Bill Clinton that federal agencies and recipients of federal money must provide language aid to non-English speakers.
“At the end of the day, there’s things that shouldn’t be politicized,” Rivera said.
Of the millions of people living in the U.S. who don’t speak English at home, the vast majority speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Now that the contract with Lilt has lapsed, it’ll be difficult to fulfill the Federal Communications Commission’s pre-Trump ruling on January 8 that wireless providers support emergency alerts in the 13 most common languages spoken in the U.S., said Trujillo Falcón, the researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The gap will have to be filled by doing translations by hand, or by using less accurate automated translations that can lead to confusion. Google Translate, for example, has been known to use “tornado clock” for “tornado watch” and grab the word for “hairbrush” for “brush fires” when translating English warnings to Spanish. Lilt, by contrast, trained its model specifically on weather-related terminologies to improve its accuracy.
While urban areas might have news outlets like Telemundo or Univision that could help reach Spanish-speaking audiences, rural areas don’t typically have these resources, Trujillo Falcón said: “That’s often where a lot of multilingual communities go to work in factories and on farms. They won’t have access to this life-saving information whatsoever. And so that’s what truly worries me.”
It’s an issue even in states with a large population of Spanish speakers, like California. “It’s assumed that automatic translations of emergency information is commonplace and ubiquitous throughout California, but that’s not the case, particularly in our rural, agricultural areas where we have farmworkers and a large migrant population,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine.
Méndez said that Spanish speakers have been targeted by misinformation during extreme weather. A study in November found that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were more susceptible to false political narratives pertaining to natural disaster relief and other issues than those who use English-language media. The National Weather Service alerts were “an important tool for people to get the correct information, particularly now, from a trusted source that’s vetted,” Méndez said.
Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, sees it only placing a “deeper burden” on local communities and states to fill in the gaps. In the days since the weather service contract news first broke, a smattering of local organizations across the country have already announced they will be doubling down on their work offering non-English emergency information.
But local and state disaster systems also tend to be riddled with issues concerning language access services. A Natural Hazards Center report released last year found that in hurricane hotspots like Florida, state- and county-level emergency management resources for those with limited English proficiency are scarce and inconsistent. All told, the lack of national multilingual emergency weather alerts “will have pretty deep ripple effects,” said Liebman. “It’s a life or death impact.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina.
Earlier this year, elected officials from 18 towns and counties devastated by Hurricane Helene gathered outside the Madison County courthouse in Marshall, North Carolina. Standing in a street still stained with the mud left behind when the French River overran its banks, they called for swifter state and federal help rebuilding their communities.
Everyone stood in the chill of a late January day because the first floor of the courthouse, built in 1907, remains empty, everything inside having been washed away in the flood. The county’s judicial affairs are conducted in temporary offices as local leaders wrangle state and federal funding to rebuild. Local officials hope to restore the historic downtown, and its most critical public buildings, without changing too much about it. They, like most of the people impacted by Hurricane Helene’s rampage in September, don’t doubt another flood is coming. But they are also hesitant to move out of its way.
“When you talk about what was flooded and moving it, it would be everything, and that’s just not realistic,” said Forrest Gillium, the town administrator. “We’re not going to give up on our town.”
They may not have to. FEMA is no longer enforcing rules, first adopted during the Obama administration, that required many federally funded construction projects to adopt strict siting and building standards to reduce the risk of future flooding. The rules were withdrawn by the first Trump administration and then re-implemented by executive order under Biden. Now, they’ve been withdrawn by Trump for the second time.
The change eases regulations dictating things like the elevation and floodproofing of water systems, fire stations, and other critical buildings and infrastructure built with federal dollars. Ultimately, the rules were intended to save taxpayers money in the long run. Many other federal, state, and local guidelines still apply to the programs that help homeowners and businesses rebuild. Still, FEMA said rolling back the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will speed up recovery.
“Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements,” the agency said in a statement released March 25.
President Trump rescinded the standard through an executive order on Jan 20. It required federal agencies to evaluate the impact of climate change on future flood risk and weather patterns to determine whether 500- and 100-year floodplains could shift and, if so, consider that before committing taxpayer money to rebuilding. The guideline required building critical facilities like fire stations and hospitals 3 feet above the floodplain elevation, and all other projects receiving federal funding at least 2 feet above it, said Chad Berginnis, who leads the Association of State Floodplain Managers. The idea was to locate these projects so they were beyond areas vulnerable to flooding or design them to withstand it if they could not be moved.
Easing the standard comes even as communities across the United States experience unprecedented, and often repeated, flooding. Homeowners and businesses in Florida, along the Mississippi River, and throughout central Appalachia have endured the exhausting cycle of losing everything and rebuilding it, only to see it wash away again. The Federal Flood Risk Management Standard was meant to break that cycle and ensure everything rebuilt with taxpayer money isn’t destroyed when the next inundation hits.
“Why on Earth would the federal government want it to be rebuilt to a lower standard and waste our money so that when the flood hits if it gets destroyed again, we’re spending yet more money to rebuild it?” Berginnis said.
Last fall, federal climate scientists found that climate change increases the likelihood of extreme and dangerous rainfall of the sort Helene brought to the southeast. Such events will be as much as 15 to 25 percent more likely if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. With more extreme rainfall come challenges for infrastructure that was designed for a less extreme climate.
“You’re going to have storm sewers overwhelmed. You’re going to have basins that were designed to hold a certain kind of flood that don’t do it anymore,” Berginnis said. “You’re going to have bridges that no longer can pass through that water like it used to. You have all of this infrastructure that’s designed for an older event.”
The National Resources Defense Council said the Obama-era standard was developed “because it is no longer safe or adequate to build for the flood risks of the past” and with the rollback, “the federal government is setting up public infrastructure to be damaged by flooding and wasting taxpayer dollars.”
Officials across western North Carolina have expressed frustration with the pace of rebuilding while acknowledging that they don’t want to endure the same problems over and over again.
Canton, North Carolina continues recovering from its third major flood in 20 years. “Everything that flooded in 2004, flooded in ’21. Everything that flooded in ‘21, flooded in 2024,” Mayor Zeb Smathers said. Stategies like new river gauges and emergency warning systems, coupled with land buyouts, have helped mitigate the threat. However, mitigation brings its own risk. The town has seen its tax base dwindle as people who lost their homes moved on after accepting buyouts or deciding that rebuilding was too much effort. When it comes to public buildings, Smathers struggles with the idea of moving something like the school, which has seen its football field flooded in each storm. He feels it is more cost-effective to rebuild than to move, and saves energy and hassle, too.
“I don’t think it’s a one size fits all situation,” he said. “But in the mountains, we’re limited on land and where we can go.”
Much of downtown Canton lies in a floodplain next to the Pigeon River. Smathers wants more flexibility from FEMA and greater trust in local decisions rather than more rules about where and how to build.
Though local governments fronted some of the cost of rebuilding according to FFRMS standards, much of that required work has been federally subsidized.
Josh Harrold, the town manager of Black Mountain, said the Obama-era rules weren’t onerous. Helene decimated the town’s water system, municipal building, and numerous buildings and homes. “We know this is going to happen again,” he said. “No one knows what that’s going to be like, but we are taking the approach of, we just don’t want to build it back exactly like it was. We want to build it back differently.”
Harrold and other officials said they don’t yet know how Trump’s order rescinding the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will impact reconstruction. And it comes as some municipalities adopt and refine stricter floodplain rebuilding rules of their own. In January, Asheville adopted city ordinance amendments to comply with the rebuilding requirements set forth by the National Flood Insurance Program. It is not clear what Trump’s order might mean for that. City officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Berginnis said communities may not see immediate results from this change – but the effects will be felt in the future if leaders bypass the added protection it required: “Everything that gets rebuilt using federal funds will be less safe when the next flood comes.”
A major storm took hold across swaths of the central and southern United States on Wednesday unleashing extreme flooding and huge tornadoes from Arkansas up to Michigan. And conditions are expected to worsen on Friday as soils become saturated and water piles up: The National Weather Service is warning of a “life-threatening, catastrophic, and potentially historic flash flood event,” along with a risk of very large hail and more twisters. Eight people are so far confirmed dead, while 33 million are under flood watches across 11 states.
While scientists will need to do proper research to suss out exactly how much climate change is contributing to these storms, what’s known as an attribution study, they can say generally how planetary warming might worsen an event like this. It’s not necessarily that climate change created this storm — it could have happened independent of all the extra carbon that humanity has pumped into the atmosphere — but there are some clear trends making rainfall worse.
“In a world without the burning of fossil fuels, this event would happen once in a lifetime — that’s kind of what the National Weather Service is saying,” said Marc Alessi, a climate science fellow at the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “But with the burning of fossil fuels, with more heat-trapping emissions, with a warming planet, this event will become more frequent.”
Rainfall is changing because Earth sweats. When the sun evaporates water off Earth’s surface, that moisture rises into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls as rain. But greenhouse gases trap heat up there, so the planet sweats more in response. In other words, it strikes an energy balance.
A warmer atmosphere also gets “thirstier”: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the air can hold 6 to 7 percent more water. That means more moisture is available to fall as rain: This weekend, the slow-moving storm is forecasted to dump as much as 15 inches of rainfall in some areas. “The sponge, which is the atmosphere in this case, will become bigger, which allows the sponge to hold more water and carry it from oceans farther inland,” Alessi said. “That could be tied into this event here.”
The body of water in question here is the Gulf of Mexico. An outbreak of tornadoes and heavy rain is typical for this time of year as warming waters send moisture into the southern and central United States. And at the moment, the Gulf of Mexico is exceptionally warm. “There’s a lot more fuel for these rain-producing storms to lead to more flooding,” Alessi said. (The influence of climate change on tornadoes in the U.S., though, isn’t as clear.)
So a warmer Gulf of Mexico is not only producing more moisture, but the atmosphere is also able to soak up more of that moisture than it could before human-caused climate change. Indeed, the U.S. government’s own climate assessments warn that precipitation is already getting more extreme across the country, as are the economic damages from the resulting flooding. That’s projected to get worse with every bit of additional warming.
The problem is that American cities aren’t built to withstand this new atmospheric reality. Urban planners designed them for a different climate of yesteryear, with gutters and sewers that whisk away rainwater as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. With ever more extreme rainfall, that infrastructure can’t keep up, so water builds up and floods. And with storms that last for days, like those tearing through Arkansas and Kentucky right now, soils get saturated until they can hold no more water, exacerbating flooding even more. On Thursday, rescue crews in Nashville, Tennessee were scrambling to save people trapped by surging water levels.
Now scientists will have to pick through the data to figure out, for instance, how much additional rain the storm dropped because of the sponge effect and warming of the Gulf of Mexico. But the overall trend is abundantly clear: As the planet warms, it doesn’t always get drier, but wetter, too.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is known for responding to extreme weather like hurricanes and wildfires — the kinds of disasters that are becoming more intense and common as climate change gets worse. But the agency also has a program that sends billions of dollars to communities, municipalities, and states proactively so that they can prepare for these events before they hit.
Adrinda Kelly watched from New York as Hurricane Katrina swallowed her hometown of New Orleans in 2005. Floodwaters rose, neighborhoods disappeared underwater, and she felt a familiar ache deepen.
Her family was safe, but devastation quickly compounded a painful realization: Black children were portrayed as disposable, and New Orleans’ education system was almost completely privatized. Black students’ test scores faltered.
Almost two decades later and nearly 2,000 miles away, similar echoes reverberated in Altadena, California, as wildfires swept through Los Angeles County in January.
As Earth heats up, the growing frequency and intensity of disasters like catastrophic storms and heat waves are becoming a mounting problem for the people who grow the planet’s food. Warming is no longer solely eroding agricultural productivity and food security in distant nations or arid climates. It’s throttling production in the United States.
Farmers and ranchers across the country lost at least $20.3 billion in crops and rangeland to extreme weather last year, according to a new Farm Bureau report that crowned the 2024 hurricane season “one of the most destructive in U.S. history” and outlined a long list of other climate-fueled impacts.
Texas experienced the highest losses for the third year in a row. Extreme drought, excessive heat, and high winds took out more than $3.4 billion worth of crops like cotton and wheat, and damaged rangeland. Flooding cost Minnesota some $1.45 billion in corn, soybeans, and forage, among other crops. California endured nearly all the same weather challenges as the south-central U.S. and the upper Midwest, costing its agricultural sector $1.4 billion.
And then there was the one-two punch of hurricanes Helene and Milton that tore through the Southeast. Georgia’s agricultural sector sustained over $459 million in losses as Helene wiped out crops like peanuts, pecans, and cotton. The same storm destroyed some $174 million worth of tobacco, blueberries, and apples in North Carolina. Florida’s ag industry lost nearly twice that to the two hurricanes, adding to the problems pummeling citrus production, all of them caused by previous storms, water scarcity, and disease.
Those tallies are but a snapshot of the economic impact of last year’s disasters on U.S. farm production, as they only account for damages wrought by major weather events such as billion-dollar disasters. They also don’t figure in most livestock or infrastructure losses following Helene and Milton, which significantly hike up total agricultural economic impacts for states like Georgia and Florida.
By the end of the year, farmers from coast to coast were left with diminished income, unpaid bills, and little recourse. Those financial stressors were compounded by inflation, surging labor and production costs, disruptions to global supply and demand, and increased price volatility. So in December, Congress authorized nearly $31 billion in emergency assistance to help struggling producers.
Last week, the USDA opened those disaster aid applications and said it was expediting disbursements. But there’s a catch: The funding pot the agency is gearing up to distribute makes up just a third of the assistance Congress approved.
That $10 billion is intended for farmers growing traditional commodities, such as corn, cotton, and soybeans, and is available to those who experienced most any kind of loss, not just those stemming from extreme weather. Payouts are determined by multiplying a flat commodity rate, based on calculated economic loss, with acres planted. It significantly limits eligibility, said Billy Hackett, policy analyst at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and funnels help away from smaller farmers into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. Fewer than 6 percent of U.S. farms sold more than three-fourths of all agricultural products between 2017 and 2022. “[The program] works exceedingly well for the largest farms, but leaves behind smaller farms,” said Hackett.
The USDA has not yet said when or how the remaining $21 billion will be distributed. That funding was, in fact, allocated for producers impacted by weather-related disasters in 2023 and 2024. But unlike the package structured for commodity growers, which had a 90-day timeline for implementation, Hackett noted that the USDA doesn’t necessarily have to act quickly on it. The American Relief Act that authorized the funding gives the USDA 120 days to begin reporting on its implementation progress, but no hard deadline for actually disbursing money. That means the $21 billion program isn’t on the same ticking congressional clock.
Ultimately, lawmakers did not provide clear reasoning for why they split the pot and crafted different disbursement mechanisms, with one measure of relief pushed through over the other. Hackett noted that it could be a reflection of who policymakers in Washington are hearing from most: “Who is the loudest? Who has the most meetings? It doesn’t always reflect who is in the most need.”
That lack of a deadline also doesn’t mean the agency shouldn’t move quickly, said Hackett. The $21 billion program is primed to help many more farmers, he said, particularly those that are underserved and passed over by other federal programs such as crop insurance. Farms without crop insurance tend to be small and medium-sized, while the bulk of larger farms have coverage. Speciality crop farms — those producing fruits, vegetables, nuts, horticulture, and nursery crops — are also less likely to be covered than those that produce commodities. Just 15 percent were insured in 2022, compared to nearly two-thirds of oilseed and grain farms.
Hackett worries that the application process may end up being unduly demanding or complicated, and that small or uninsured operators and historically excluded farmers that have faced issues with federal disaster relief eligibility and coverage in the past will be shut out. That has been the case with previous supplemental disaster relief programs, including the Wildfire, Hurricane, and Indemnity Program enacted in 2017 under the first Trump administration.
In a briefing last week, Brooke Appleton, the deputy undersecretary for farm production and conservation, told reporters that more information on the $21 billion program should be “coming soon.” This followed remarks Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made late last month when she noted the agency would hit the congressional deadline of March 21 for sending out the full $31 billion — despite that deadline not applying to two-thirds of the money. The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, farmers like Daniel Spatz are left wondering what’s next. Last spring, he lost roughly $20,000 because “intense” rain waterlogged his central Arkansas fields, leaving him unable to plant 70 acres of rice. The year before, a prolonged drought cost him much more. Spatz is among the 13 percent or so of farmers with crop insurance, but recouped no more than $2,000 after the heavy rains. He’s unsure if he’s eligible for this disaster aid program, which he sees as another sign that the Trump administration is supporting large farmers “at the expense” of small operators like himself. Above all, he’s concerned about calamities yet to come.
“It appears to me that we’re depending more and more on the government to bail us out of these climate-induced disasters,” he said. The USDA shelled out more than $16 billion to farmers from 2022 through 2024 for crops lost to extreme weather events alone. “My question to the Trump administration would be, ‘How much do we have to spend as a society, bailing out people, rebuilding and putting public funds into rescuing people, citizens? What does that price tag have to be before climate change is understood as real, and a public threat, a threat to our future?’”
President Donald Trump appears to be serious about getting the federal government out of disaster response. Earlier this week, his secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, said in a Cabinet meeting that she would move to “eliminate” the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the beleaguered agency that handles relief and recovery after extreme weather events, and has reportedly conferred with FEMA’s Trump-appointed interim leader about winding down the agency.
Noem’s announcement was just the latest in a series of Trump administration moves to radically decrease or eliminate the federal government’s role in responding to climate-driven disasters. Just after taking office, the president mused about eliminating FEMA and then convened a council to consider the agency’s future. In recent weeks, he has laid off hundreds of staff who work on resilience and preparedness. And last week, Trump signed an executive order that called for state and local governments to “play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness” and directed agencies to “streamline” their disaster resilience efforts.
Trump’s unprecedented efforts to weaken FEMA come at a time when many disasters are intensifying due to climate change. A study of more than 750 recent heat waves, wildfires, and flood events found that around 75 percent of these events had been made significantly worse by human-caused warming. Though experts say there is merit in the idea of beefing up state and local emergency preparedness, they also caution that the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to remaking the federal government could backfire when it comes to FEMA. While they acknowledge that disaster response needs reform, they also argue that a total withdrawal by the federal government would leave many communities in the lurch, especially those that can’t fund disaster recovery on their own.
For much of American history, a state that suffered a disaster had to plead with Congress for a one-off infusion of money, then figure out how to spend that money on its own. In 1980, the Carter administration created FEMA to speed up the government’s response to worsening disasters. The agency got its own multibillion-dollar pot of money to reimburse states for disaster response, including for disasters that are too small to get a special transfer from Congress. Over the past 45 years, it has distributed billions of dollars in grants to help local areas prepare for future disasters, reduce flood risk, and — more recently — address climate change. The agency also coordinates multistate responses to large disasters, summoning search-and-rescue and cleanup teams from across the country after big hurricanes.
In the decades since FEMA’s botched response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the agency has been a frequent target of criticism by politicians and the public. Local officials often complain that federal involvement tends to slow down disaster response, and emergency management experts warn that it disincentivizes state and local authorities from taking action to reduce climate risks. FEMA’s programs to increase disaster resilience come with reams of paperwork, and the agency often pays to rebuild the same areas over and over again without reducing actual risk.
Trump’s recent executive order pushing for a bigger state and local role in disaster response echoes some past criticism of the agency, calling for reforms “to reduce complexity and better protect and serve Americans.”
“A lot of this stuff in the order, I look at it, and it just sounds like Emergency Management 101,” said W. Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA administrator under then-president Barack Obama. He said emergency managers have long maintained that state and local governments should not rely on federal aid and to make them whole after disasters, and need to find their own ways to reduce risk over the long run.
However, other experts fear that what Trump is proposing could leave cities and states unable to pay for much-needed resilience projects—and that a rapid shuttering of FEMA would leave most states and local governments unprepared to fill the gap.
“The Trump administration aims to shift most of the responsibility for disaster preparedness to state and local governments, asking them to make more expensive infrastructure investments without outlining what support the federal government will provide,” said Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization.
Trump’s public statements and executive orders on the issue have been vague — so vague, in fact, that Udvardy called them “baffling.” If Noem and Trump tried to wind down the agency altogether, the move would likely face similar legal challenges as his attempts to destroy the Department of Education — neither agency can lawfully be closed without congressional approval. But in theory, if the administration prevailed in closing FEMA, or moved some of its operations to the Department of Homeland Security, there are a few ways the change could play out.
Then-candidate Donald Trump appears with then-South Dakota governor Kristi Noem during a campaign rally in October 2024. Trump selected Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA. Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images
One scenario would be a return to the situation that existed before FEMA, when states had to seek direct help from Congress or another federal agency every time they suffered a disaster. Congress works differently now than it did in the decades before FEMA existed — it often takes months or years for lawmakers to send out long-term recovery money after a disaster such as the 2023 Maui wildfires, which can make it hard for local governments to find money to develop replacement housing and restore public infrastructure. Congress is also far more polarized than it used to be, even on the issue of disaster aid — Republican leaders have suggested they might impose political “conditions” on wildfire assistance to California, goading the state to change its policies on immigration or water management.
Without a centralized disaster fund like the one FEMA has, the party in control of Congress would control who gets relief money, which could delay or derail rebuilding efforts in states run by the out-party.
Another possibility, whether or not FEMA is abolished, would be for Congress to provide a flat amount of preparedness money to each state and let states decide how to spend it, which is how some other big federal programs work. But this scenario could also be subject to political maneuvering: When the Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed its own disaster recovery block grant to Texas after Hurricane Harvey, the state government allegedly favored white and rural areas over Black and Latino residents in Houston, according to a federal probe.
If FEMA shrank or disappeared, it’s unclear who would coordinate lifesaving aid between states during large disasters. But if states continued to receive robust disaster funds from Congress, and if they distributed this money equitably, it could potentially speed up a spending process that is often described as being slow and bureaucratic.
For instance, in Harris County, Texas, which encompasses the massive Houston metro area, floodplain officials said that removing federal oversight could accelerate the process of acquiring and demolishing so-called “repetitive-loss” homes — those that flood multiple times. Officials would no longer be subject to federal paperwork requirements before they bought out homes.
“Currently, every level of government is involved when utilizing federal grant programs for flood mitigation,” said James Wade, who leads the county’s home buyout program. “Removing one level of government may help expedite the process.” Wade’s program could certainly use some paperwork relief. Thanks in large part to federal grant requirements, it can take as long as five years for the county to purchase and destroy a flooded home, during which time flood victims have no choice but to wait or flip their homes to private buyers.
But if Trump’s reforms led to a reduction in overall federal disaster funding — as seems likely, given his focus on cutting spending — the county might not be able to keep up its current pace of adaptation projects. The county flood control district has applied for no fewer than 14 FEMA grants, for stormwater upgrades as well as buyouts, and a shift away from national funding could make it harder to fund these essential projects.
The district “relies heavily on federal programs to leverage the local funds for flood mitigation,” said Wade. Under Trump’s new approach, “The question is who decides how to allocate the funds to the states and how much each is allocated.”
A reduction in federal grant money for resilience projects could force local governments to make harder choices. This wouldn’t always be a bad thing. Fugate pointed to the state of Florida, which rolled out strong building codes after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, forcing developers to build houses that could withstand strong winds. The move led to up-front costs for builders, but reduced damage in the long run.
The problem with this tough-love approach is that many states and local governments aren’t ready to handle disaster resilience on their own — they don’t have the expertise to design new building codes or plan for climate change, and they don’t have the money to build infrastructure that can protect against existing flood and fire risk. Past administrations have rolled out a number of reforms to help these communities design and fund such infrastructure projects: In 2020, FEMA began providing “direct technical assistance” to help rural communities and low-income areas figure out their vulnerabilities and design projects. It also changed its scoring for grant applications to privilege rural and disadvantaged communities more. (The direct technical assistance page is now unavailable on FEMA’s website.)
Udvardy, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that taking FEMA out of the resilience equation would leave smaller and poorer communities in the lurch, without either the money or expertise they needed to reduce their risk. This would cost the government and disaster victims more in the long run.
“Based on the indiscriminate way this administration has laid off staff with deep expertise and upended critical science … I am very concerned that the implications of this order will mean less support for communities to help them prepare for and recover from the disasters to come,” said Udvardy.
The worst-affected places would be rural areas in poor states like West Virginia, where the federal government is the only entity with the resources to finance even basic adaptation projects like flood retention ponds or home elevations. Many of these areas supported Trump last year by wide margins.
A resident of Treasure Island, Florida, cleans up debris from Hurricane Helene in September 2024 as she prepares for incoming Hurricane Milton. Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images
The rural city of Grants Pass, Oregon, is already experiencing the potential consequences of such a federal shift. The city has been working to secure $50 million from a FEMA grant program designed to enhance climate resilience. The city’s water treatment plant is almost 100 old, and it sits right next to the flood-prone Rogue River. In the event of a big storm or earthquake, the plant could flood or collapse, leaving locals without clean drinking water.
Grants Pass has already raised utility rates on its 33,000 customers to fund the construction of a new plant, but it was still falling short of the money it needed for such a large project. In 2023, FEMA advanced the city’s grant application to build a new treatment plant away from the floodplain, which the local public works director called “incredible good fortune.”
But late in February, the state of Oregon informed Grants Pass that FEMA had canceled all coordination meetings around the grant program, and now city officials have no idea if they’ll receive the money they’ve spent years counting on.
“This grant is a critical piece of our funding strategy,” said Jason Canady, the city’s public works director. “We are concerned, but at this point we are not sure what actions can be taken to ensure an award will be forthcoming.”
Fugate, the former FEMA administrator, said that cuts to federal resilience funding would split the nation into haves and have-nots. States and cities that have the staffing and money to pursue adaptation efforts would do so, and might even be able to complete some projects faster than they can right now. But rural areas would no longer have access to federal money that enables them to even consider reducing climate risk. People living in those places will have less protection from future disasters, exposing them to the risk of death or injury, and will have a harder time recovering after disasters, which could push them into poverty.
“They’ll have more flexibility — with less money,” said Fugate.
Professor Maritza Barreto Orta had planned to complete two federal funding applications crucial for her research on coastal erosion in Puerto Rico. However, these funding opportunities “disappeared” from the websites of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) due to new policies imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump. These policies limit funding for academic research on climate change.
Research on sea level rise, coastal erosion, coral bleaching, renewable energy, heatwaves, climate-related diseases like dengue, and extreme weather events like hurricanes is at risk under Trump’s climate policies, which have withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement and international climate financing plans. Studies examining the climate’s influence on cancer rates in Puerto Rico are also jeopardized.
Puerto Rico ranks sixth among the countries most affected by the climate crisis, according to the latest Climate Risk Index published by the international organization Germanwatch. This index measures the impact of extreme weather, climate, and hydrological events on people and the economy.
In line with Trump’s executive orders, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have begun mass cancellations of research grants, cutting funding to active scientific projects that “do not align with the agency’s priorities.” These cuts target studies focused on environmental justice, climate change, transgender populations, gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as any research perceived as discriminatory based on race or ethnicity, according to a report by Nature magazine in early March.
Puerto Rico currently has 107 active NIH-funded grants totaling $78.5 million. Of these, 91 (85 percent) are led by University of Puerto Rico (UPR) scientists, while 25 are housed at private institutions, though none of the latter focus on climate and health intersections.
Coastal erosion has led to the loss of infrastructure, as seen on this beach in Yabucoa.
Nahira Montcourt / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
The Coastal Research and Planning Institute (CoRePI), led by Barreto Orta, is affiliated with the UPR’s School of Planning at the Río Piedras campus. Amid funding cuts to the university, the professor and her team rely on federal grants to conduct their studies and keep CoRePI operational. With current resources, the institute can operate only until April 2026 unless it secures new funding to continue.
Barreto Orta acknowledged that “the opportunity to seek more external funding has diminished.”
Currently, CoRePI has two main active projects, one funded by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) amounting to $2.4 million to assess erosion in coastal municipalities, and another $500,000 project funded by CDBG grants from the Department of Housing, aimed at training for coastal erosion studies.
According to a survey done by the NOOA in 2006, Puerto Rico has an estimated 700 miles of coastline (1,126 kilometers).
“Our last project will conclude in April 2026, and I’m unsure where I’ll be able to submit new proposals to keep the center running, which not only evaluates the state of coastal erosion but also provides mentorship and funding to students,” Barreto Orta explained.
Scientists from the public university system interviewed by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) said this uncertainty about the immediate future of climate crisis research in Puerto Rico has spread among UPR researchers, warning that these measures halt the search for solutions to face and anticipate natural disasters by limiting students’ academic training.
Studies on renewable energy, agriculture, and planning are also faltering. At the Río Piedras campus, professors Jorge Colón Rivera, from the Chemistry Department, and José Hernández Ayala, from the School of Planning, are also battling the avalanche of restrictions imposed by the federal government.
Colón Rivera leads research on renewable energy, an essential field for Puerto Rico’s energy future, while Hernández Ayala studies the effects of heat waves on the island’s schools. Both fear their projects will be cut short if they cannot secure grants to continue their studies in the coming years.
Colón Rivera said the U.S. Department of Energy removed all information related to the Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) program from its website, from which funds for studies conducted in collaboration with researchers from UPR in Humacao, Ana G. Méndez University, and Cornell University in New York originate. The chemist expressed concern about potential program cancellations that support research on finding renewable solutions for generating electricity.
Colón Rivera is part of four active investigations: two with grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and two with RENEW funds from the U.S. Department of Energy, exploring how solar energy can “generate green hydrogen, a clean and renewable fuel.” The four grants total $43.6 million distributed among all institutions collaborating on the studies.
He added that the program would not only be affected by its focus on identifying renewable energy sources but also because it sought to support institutions serving underrepresented communities in the sciences. Another of Trump’s policies, in the executive order of January 21, seeks to cancel all federal government diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Executive orders by President Donald Trump threaten the research at the Coastal Research and Planning Institute led by Professor Maritza Barreto Orta.
José E. Rodríguez / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“We are concerned that there may not be as many programs to fund climate science proposals, and perhaps programs will be eliminated. In the case of renewable energy, we worry that when we renew proposals, we may no longer be attractive for having students from an area of the population that is not the typical one participating in other programs,” he noted.
The UPR has ongoing research evaluating the environment from various academic perspectives and receiving federal funds from the NIH, NOAA, NSF, USGS, NASA, and CDBG funds awarded by the U.S. Department of Housing, among others.
The interim president of the UPR, Miguel Muñoz, told the CPI that the university administration has not received official notifications about the closure of any of these studies. However, he acknowledged that they have faced instability issues on some federal agency websites, limiting the possibility for some researchers to submit their progress reports.
“We have found that, on some occasions, the website or the agency’s page where the researcher has to submit their progress reports was closed one week, but the next week it opened, and the researcher could submit their progress reports. That continuity has been maintained, with very rare exceptions of one or two proposals (studies) where we have not been able to establish that contact, but we are hopeful that everything will normalize,” Muñoz said.
He could not specify which agencies or specific researchers he was referring to.
Amid the uncertainty about the future of their research, Hernández Ayala expressed concern that his investigation might stagnate because it focuses on climate change topics. A few weeks ago, he submitted a pre-proposal to the NSF to study the impact of heat on Puerto Rico’s public schools day to day operations, and although he was told his topic was promising and suggested which call for proposals he could apply to, he now fears the proposal will not be approved.
According to the latest Climate Risk Index, Puerto Rico ranks sixth among the jurisdictions most affected by the climate crisis.
Ricardo Arduengo / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Of the $26.6 million the NSF has awarded in Puerto Rico in fiscal year 2023, $18.6 million (70 percent) was awarded to the UPR. In its latest update on how Trump’s executive orders are being implemented, the NSF indicated that it maintains the agency’s usual practices focused on “evaluating the merit of the proposals they are considering” without ignoring federal standards.
“The review criteria remain consistent. Guidance on reviews and panel summaries has not changed. Program directors do not comment on activities outside of the purview of the panel. The reviews and panel summaries are advisory to NSF. As has always been the practice at NSF, we will consider this advisory material in conjunction with agency-wide guidance and applicable federal standards when making funding decisions,” the agency states on its website.
At the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus (known as RUM), agricultural economics professor Héctor Tavárez faces the possibility of not being able to access funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for his studies on sustainable and resilient agricultural practices because his work includes the term “climate change,” which contradicts the public policy decreed by Trump.
“Many of the proposals we fill out are to directly or indirectly address climate change. We are quite concerned that in the future, they will tell us: ‘no, this proposal is not authorized’ or ‘this proposal is not a priority.’ When just a year ago, it was precisely the type of proposal with the highest priority for the [federal] government,” he said.
Tavárez, like other researchers, fears that the restriction on research addressing climate change and its impact will lead to the loss of this type of agricultural study.
The National Science Foundation is one of the scientific entities that could see its research work diminished due to the Trump administration’s denial of climate change reality.
Courtesy photo
“Imagine running an agricultural research project on eggplant or coffee, only to have your funding suddenly frozen. We aren’t necessarily talking about future projects, but projects that are running. If you receive a budget cut because the study has to do with climate change, it’s not that the project is altered for a while, it’s that it is basically destroyed because we’re working with living beings,” warned the professor, who between 2022 and 2024 obtained $479,355 from three USDA grants.
The USDA suspended more than $100 million in grants to the University of Maine in March, which was put under investigation by the Trump administration for not complying with the president’s executive order prohibiting the participation of girls and transgender women in women’s sports. The cancellation of funds occurred after the state’s governor, Janet Mills, had a confrontation with Trump at the White House in February when the president threatened to withdraw funds from the Maine government if they did not comply with the executive orders related to gender.
The USDA also canceled a $10,000 grant this semester to the Inter American University, Barranquitas Campus, intended to train 100 Puerto Rican farmers in “climate-smart” agricultural practices, according to Rector Juan Negrón. “The main idea of the project was to improve food production, and in this case, it focused on the necessity of considering environmental conditions when practicing agriculture,” he said.
Negrón noted that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also canceled the evaluation of a proposal submitted to access $10 million for an environmental justice project in the communities of Orocovis. This project would have included analyses of river pollution in the area and community adaptation to disasters such as hurricanes. Researchers from the Mayagüez Campus and the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, were also set to participate in the project, the biochemist explained.
Trump’s public policy against climate change also wreaks havoc at UPR in Humacao, where the U.S. Forest Service put on hold a funding request submitted by the Transdisciplinary Institute for Research and Social Action (ITIAS, in Spanish) of the Department of Social Sciences to create a community climate justice network in eastern Puerto Rico, environmental sociologist Alejandro Torres Abreu claimed.
Ongoing research in Puerto Rico on renewable energy could also be affected.
José Reyes / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Torres Abreu said the proposal would allow ITIAS to access $300,000 from the U.S. Forest Service, complemented by $500,000 from the UPR program Sea Grant Puerto Rico.
“Due to Trump’s policy, federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service comply with that policy, and since [the funding request] was under evaluation and the agency had not signed it, the process was halted until it is clarified what will happen and what the guidelines are regarding those funding processes. So, it affects me because of the way I planned the project’s development,” said Torres Abreu, who directed ITIAS from 2016 to 2023.
Anticipating a “gag” on scientific innovation
The elimination of scientific research calls for proposals and the penalization of investigations that include terms like “climate change,” “race,” “diversity,” or “climate justice” could generate self-censorship and disinterest among researchers in submitting proposals for federal funds or even preferring to focus on other lines of research to avoid the pressure imposed by Trump, warned Professor Manuel Valdés Pizzini, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Coastal Studies (CIEL, in Spanish) established 19 years ago at the RUM.
“It’s a gag on innovation, integrity, and creativity in the scientific community,” he stated.
Valdés Pizzini is part of the Puerto Rico Adapted Flood Maps research project conducted by the Graduate School of Planning at the Río Piedras campus, in collaboration with the federal Sea Grant Puerto Rico Program and CIEL, with a $750,000 NOAA grant valid until 2027.
Miguel Muñoz Muñoz, interim president of the University of Puerto Rico.
Photo taken from Facebook
“Projects related to observing how the ocean behaves, if they are subject to cuts, we will no longer have that important data. An entire scientific component would be eliminated, which also has an educational component because we do all these projects to train a whole new crop of researchers. We will lose an entire cadre of people who will not enter these fields because there are no funds to work on research,” warned Valdés Pizzini.
For climatologist Rafael Méndez Tejeda, a physics professor at UPR in Carolina, climate research will also be limited by cuts, layoffs, and censorship experienced by federal agencies like NOAA in their operations, as the agencies will no longer have the capacity to collect information and data consulted by other scientists.
“Regardless of whether they don’t affect us yet, research will be limited because the executive orders are penalizing agencies like NOAA, FEMA, or NASA, which generate databases. If we have fewer people generating databases, and if [for example] we don’t have data from NOAA’s buoys and satellites, our research will be affected,” he said.
Meteorologist Ada Monzón warned that the National Weather Service (NWS), which is under NOAA, would not be launching “radiosonde” instruments with the usual frequency due to “staff limitations” in its offices. “These instruments provide information on the atmosphere’s vertical profile and are the data that feed the models meteorologists use to make forecasts,” Monzón explained in a Facebook post.
Héctor S. Tavárez Vargas, professor of the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at the College of Agricultural Sciences at UPR Mayagüez campus.
Courtesy photo
However, meteorologist Ernesto Morales from the NWS assured that the services that the agency provides for data collection and dissemination, at least in Puerto Rico, remain unchanged for now.
“There is a restructuring of the agency, and it’s not clear what will happen, but what is known is that services and the ways we collect information through satellites, weather stations, or radars will not be affected in the short term as part of this restructuring,” he told the CPI.
The Trump administration has cut at least 800 positions at NOAA at the central level, including critical duties at the National Hurricane Center and the Storm Prediction Center, as well as cuts at the Climate Prediction Center, which, among other things, provides critical weather data across Africa and tracks the El Niño-La Niña phenomenon, as well as the Weather Prediction Center, focused on South America.
Opinions clash over “adjustment” of language in research proposals
Among the researchers that the CPI interviewed, there are differing opinions about adjusting the language of their research proposals to dodge Trump’s restrictive policies on climate change.
Some, like Professor Tavárez from the RUM, consider modifying terms like “climate change” or “global warming” in their funding applications a necessary strategy to secure federal funding and move projects forward, while others argue that preserving the language is the way to maintain scientific integrity and honesty in their project proposals.
“Unfortunately, writing the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming,’ and ‘gender equity’ puts me at a disadvantage. Even if I feel uncomfortable and think it’s not ethically correct, I will have to do it [omit those words] because I think they wouldn’t approve the proposals,” said the agricultural economics professor.
Rainfall floods are becoming more powerful and damaging, but climate change research will be limited by cuts, layoffs, and censorship in federal agencies.
Gabriel López Albarrán / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
The director of Sea Grant in Puerto Rico, Ruperto Chaparro, also agrees with adjusting the language to evade funding limitations. He said the focus in proposal writing should prioritize the impacts caused by the environment, such as floods or heatwaves, and not on “umbrella” concepts like the climate crisis.
“There is a list of words that should not be used. Instead of talking about ‘climate change,’ you can talk about the impacts. You have to play the game and change the title and put something related that doesn’t mention those words. Here in Puerto Rico, we are used to the gag law because we are a (US) colony. When you learn to play the game, the outcome is what matters,” Chaparro said. Sea Grant operates with $2 million in funds awarded by NOAA, matched 50 percent by UPR.
Professor Pablo Méndez Lázaro, principal investigator of the Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network at the UPR Medical Sciences Campus, believes that other concepts like “climate oscillation” can be used if it becomes impossible to use the concept of climate change to apply for federal funds. The researcher is part of a study measuring the intersection between climate and cancer incidence in Puerto Rico with a $1.1 million NIH grant.
Although Hernández Ayala acknowledged that this situation would lead to having to “dress up” proposals to try to move them forward, he positioned himself against omitting concepts because “they are not to the liking of the current administration.”
“As a scientist, I cannot deny the reality of what we are experiencing globally and in Puerto Rico. I cannot deny climate change. No matter how much I want to say that extreme heat does not exist and is not related to climate change, it would be irresponsible of me to have to adjust my research just because this administration is uncomfortable with those words because they don’t align with their economic interests,” the planner said.
Barreto Orta stood on the same side, stating that she will continue to use the term climate change in her studies and research proposals.
“Personally, I will continue working on the topic of climate change. Even if there are people who do not favor that approach, I will not hide something I know is true. I have a responsibility as a researcher, although I may have to change strategies to convey the messages,” she said, referring to focusing more on communicating how these situations will impact people’s quality of life, such as those who cannot insure their homes because they are in flood zones, rather than the impact on the habitat.
Interim UPR president downplays the issue and its implications
The CPI learned from two separate sources that, at least in the UPR campuses of Río Piedras and Humacao, professors have been meeting to discuss how to address censorship by the Trump administration on academia, and according to the sources, there are positions for and against adjusting the language.
Although he sees no problem in adjusting the language of proposals to avoid funding cuts, the interim president of the UPR was not clear in saying whether that will be the university’s official stance on how to handle the public policy imposed by the Trump administration.
Professor Rafael Méndez Tejeda said it is urgent for the university administration to take clear positions on the application of executive orders.
Ricardo Rodríguez / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“When a call for proposals comes, it comes with specific guidelines and objectives. Saying there is an ethical conflict because one changed a proposal title, I don’t see any conflict. That proposal goes to a committee of colleagues who evaluate them (…) I think it’s an issue that is exaggerated in how it manifests because you respond to a proposal call. If I had an ethical conflict in terms of submitting a proposal, the decision is up to the researcher not to submit it,” Muñoz noted.
In this scenario, Méndez Tejeda said it is urgent for the university administration to take clear positions on how Trump’s executive orders will be applied, as he said these measures will not only affect research in natural sciences but also because climate change directly affects society, studies looking at climate intersections with social sciences could also be reduced.
“We are going back almost to the 60s or 70s if we continue with the limitation and censorship of a series of things that were already believed to be overcome. It’s censorship that will limit academia because if I can’t work on diversity, race, and inclusion topics, all those topics will be affected, not only in natural sciences but also in social sciences that will not be able to access proposals,” he warned.
Barreto Orta pointed out that in the scenario promoted by Trump’s policies, denial of climate change will increase, and advances in ecological awareness generated among citizens will be rolled back.
The National Weather Service could also be affected due to staff cuts at NOAA, particularly those working with instruments measuring atmospheric conditions.
Ricardo Arduego / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“The scenario is bad because, even without Trump’s policies, coastal erosion was not accepted as a threat to people. In recent years, there have been some small changes, and we have seen progress. Here the question is what the universities’ stance on these new positions will be because scientists will not stop,” she concluded.
All the researchers interviewed told the CPI that they have not received any official communication from the university administration instructing them on the course to follow with research that would be contrary to federal government orders. They agree they don’t know how the UPR will adopt Trump’s executive orders or what measures are being taken to identify funds that allow the institution and its research to continue operating.
The interim president denied the lack of communication and said that in his first meeting with the rectors of the 11 campuses after taking office on February 18, one of the main instructions he gave was for professors to keep following the guidelines of federal agencies regarding Trump’s executive orders.
“I was surprised by that comment because in my first meeting with all the rectors, this was one of the issues mentioned, and the rectors are constantly receiving those communications, and the researchers too. But since you bring up the issue, maybe what it tells me is that I have to reaffirm my instructions regarding that,” he told the CPI.
Ruperto Chaparro, director of Sea Grant in Puerto Rico.
Ricardo Rodríguez / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
In his first report to the UPR Board of Governors, Muñoz indicated that continuous follow-up is given to the guidelines and changes coming from federal agencies, but there is no specific process to notify the university community.
Professor Colón Rivera, meanwhile, warned that “if these projects are canceled after being peer-reviewed and approved by the agencies, and they still have four, two, or one year to go, and suddenly the money is blocked, I would think that one way Puerto Rico can continue doing research and helping students is to find a way to complement with local government funds And how can that be done? Either the Puerto Rico Government addresses it, or the Fiscal Control Board [JCF] must release the money it has taken from the UPR, or the Science and Technology Trust seeks to allocate something to prevent everything from falling apart. It would be disastrous for all research to fall apart.”
The Puerto Rico Science and Technology Trust did not respond to a request for comments from the CPI to learn if Trump’s restrictions have affected the research they conduct or the flow of funds..
Salt on the wound
The elimination of studies funded by federal funds for climate change research represents an additional challenge for UPR’s finances, which since 2017 has faced a 48 percent cut in its operating budget due to measures by the Fiscal Control Board (JCF).
The UPR also faces the possibility of losing another $5.4 million in health research funds if Trump’s proposal to limit up to 15 percent of funds for administrative and operational expenses of NIH grants is implemented.
Pablo A. Méndez Lázaro, professor and researcher at the UPR Medical Sciences Campus.
Brandon González Cruz / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“The University expects early-career professors like me — this is my first year at UPR — to submit proposals and secure research funding, but now it’s tougher. From the University, we must think about how we can reduce dependence on these funds and make the University receive funds from the Puerto Rico government or other global or nonprofit entities again,” said Professor Hernández Ayala.
Amid this scenario, Muñoz said that although several forums demand the reinstatement of the formula applied by law, which granted 9.6 percent of the Puerto Rican Government’s General Fund to the University, this measure is not viable due to the fiscal crisis facing the Puerto Rican Government.
“The reality is that thinking they will reinstate the formula is not a feasible reality. We have to take measures with the budget we have, use it with the greatest effectiveness and efficiency, and comply with a university restructuring,” Muñoz said.
This story is made possible through a collaboration between the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and Open Campus.
This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and thoroughly reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.
As climate-fueled disasters escalate, insurers are getting richer while leaving Americans in the lurch. Citing climate-related losses, many insurance companies are exorbitantly inflating rates, refusing to renew policies, and delaying, denying, or underpaying claims.
The latest of many examples is Los Angeles, where wildfires devoured over 40,000 acres and left thousands unhoused and unemployed.
Many families were dropped by their insurers or struggled to find affordable options before the fires. Some turned to the state’s coverage plan, which costs more and covers less.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina, WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region, and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Marie Richards sat in her living room in northern Michigan. She was having a hard time talking about her job at the U.S. Forest Service in the past tense.
“I absolutely loved my job,” she said. “I didn’t want to go.”
Richards, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, was a tribal relations specialist at the Huron-Manistee National Forests. In mid-February, she found out she was one of the some 3,400 workers who had been targeted for layoffs — an estimated 10 percent of the workforce — as part of the Trump administration’s move to cut costs and shrink the federal government.
Richards watched as some of her colleagues were laid off on February 14 — the so-called Valentine’s Day massacre, when the Trump administration laid off thousands of probationary employees, generally hired within the past two years. She got a call from her supervisor that Saturday informing her that she had been let go, too. The letter she received cited performance issues, even though she, along with others in a similar position, had received a pay raise less than two months earlier.
“None of us deserved this,” Richards said. “We all work hard and we’re dedicated to taking care of the land.”
The U.S. Forest Service, which stewards 193 million acres of public lands from Alaska to Florida, was in trouble even before Trump took office. Chronically understaffed, the service was already under a Biden-era hiring freeze, all the while on the front lines of fighting and recovering from back-to-back climate disasters across the country.
Marie Richards loved her job as a tribal relations specialist for the U.S. National Forest Service. She was one of 3,400 workers targeted for layoffs.
Izzy Ross / Grist
For now, workers with the Forest Service fear this isn’t just the end of the line for their dream careers, but also a turning point for public lands and what they mean in the United States.
“It’s catastrophic,” said Anders Reynolds with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit that litigates environmental issues in the southeastern U.S. “We are losing an entire generation of talent and passion.”
The federal agency does more than ensure that Americans have a place to hunt, hike, fish, or paddle. In the South, forest workers played a key role in helping western North Carolina and other communities recover from impacts of Hurricane Helene. In the West, they’re taking on fire risk mitigation and fighting wildfires. They’re also involved in fisheries management in places like Alaska. Across the country, agency biologists and foresters are busy working to strengthen the over 150 national forests and 20 grasslands it monitors in the face of changing climate.
Increasingly, the service is getting spread thin.
The agency has experienced a steady decrease in staffing over the last decade and the workers that remain are often overworked and underpaid, according to Reynolds.
“That means you’re going to see those campgrounds close, the trails go unmaintained, roads closed, you’re going to feel the effects of wildfire and hurricane recovery work that’s just going to remain undone,” said Reynolds. “Communities are going to struggle.”
The Forest Service has reduced its capacity over many years, causing headaches for staff.
A report from the National Association of Forest Service Retirees showed the agency losing a little over half of staff who supported specialty ecological restoration projects — meaning a whole range of jobs, from botanists to foresters to wildlife and fisheries biologists — between 1992 and 2018. As a result, understaffed Forest Service ranger districts, hemorrhaging staff positions, have consolidated.
Former employees report they saw serious financial and staffing shortages during their time. Bryan Box, a former timber sale administrator with the Forest Service who took some time out of the agency to care for his aging mother, said he found the working conditions unsuitable for a stable, normal life. Box worked for the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin, where he said he made so little he biked around on his off days rather than wasting money on gas. While he was working, multiple national forests around him consolidated, causing a downward spiral on organizational capacity.
“We decommissioned buildings, we decommissioned the infrastructure that we had back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when we had this huge staff,” Box said. “And that put us into a position where we couldn’t hire seasonal employees anymore because we didn’t have housing for them. In rural northern Wisconsin, you know, just there’s not any housing available really. I think at one point our firefighters were all living above a bar.”
Other foresters he knew failed to make rent and were evicted or lived itinerantly, couch-surfing, for the love of the work they did. For Box, the financial realities became untenable. So, too, had the restrictions on his work, which grew as budgets failed to grow.
Box’s program was expensive to run and required travel, often to reduce fire fuels by harvesting timber after an emergency. The program he worked for, Box said, ended up needing to reduce costs by cutting travel funds and ending overtime, making it difficult for him to do his job well.
Much of their work involves emergency response, not only fighting fires but also picking up the pieces after conflagrations and hurricanes leave potentially thousands of acres of dead timber.
Matthew Brossard works as the current business representative and organizer for the National Federation of Federal Employees, and was formerly the general vice president for the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Forest Service Council, which represents around 18,000 employees of the Forest Service, 6,000 of whom are probationary, meaning they have either recently been hired or moved to a new position within the agency. Typically, probation — a part of every federal hiring process — is one or two years. Probationary employees were primarily targeted in the layoffs, meaning a generation of hires is potentially interrupted. Brossard said even though the administration maintains they have not fired positions essential to public safety, there’s more to fighting fires than just the firefighters. Support and logistical personnel are essential. “Extra dispatchers, security to close off roads, food unit leaders, base camp managers, all these very important, 100 percent-needed positions. Those people are getting terminated right now,” Brossard said.
In another instance recounted by Brossard, someone on assignment to help with long-term hurricane recovery in Louisiana was fired while he was there. The employee lived in Oregon and reported having no financial support for his trip home.
The loss of a seasonal workforce will also be felt, Brossard added. “Without that influx of seasonal workforce, it puts a huge amount of work onto the permanent staff if they’re still employed to do all the work,” he said, meaning not only trailwork and campground maintenance, but also research and other essential work. “So the work that in the summer that should have been done by 15 or 20 people are now going to be done by five or six.”
As workers continue to struggle with the fallout of their abrupt firings, their union is jumping in to protect them, Brossard said. The NFFE-FSC has joined in multiple lawsuits to challenge the firings, including one filed February 12, provided to Grist, that aims to put a stop to the firings and reverse the ones that have already happened, on grounds that the terminations are unlawful. A decision on the lawsuit is still to come, with more potential legal action following, Brossard said.
“You’re not reducing, you know, the stereotypical bureaucrats,” Brossard said. “You’re reducing the boots on the ground that are going out and doing work.”
In an emailed statement to Grist, a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the new agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins, supported Trump’s directive to cut spending and inefficiencies while strengthening the department’s services. “As part of this effort, USDA has made the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service. To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters.”
The statement continued, “Released employees were probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary IRA funding. It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term. Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”
Back in northern Michigan, Marie Richards, the former tribal relations specialist, crunched down the snowy driveway, pointing toward the Huron-Manistee National Forests where she worked. It spans nearly 1 million acres and covers land tribal nations ceded in two treaties, which the federal government has a responsibility to keep in trust.
Richards said workers like her are also a vital part of pushing the federal government to meet its trust responsibility to tribal nations. She helped connect the region’s federally recognized tribes with officials and staff at the forest service, set up meetings, and ensured work was being carried out responsibly.
“It’s not just the damage to that trust relationship with the Forest Service,” said Richards, who left her job as a repatriation and historic preservation specialist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians to work at the agency. “It’s across the board for so many things, and tribes trying to work through that freeze, and making people understand that this isn’t DEI — that this is governmental affairs.”
Richards doesn’t know what’s next; she wants to finish her dissertation (about the impact of the lumber industry on traditional cultural landscapes and Anishinaabe bands and communities) and continue her work.
“It still really hurts that this dream of mine is kind of shattered, and we’ll see, and find a new dream,” she said. “But ultimately, my career, my livelihood, is in tribal relations for our heritage and I will find a home somewhere.”
Less than a month before the Eaton Fire engulfed Altadena, longtime residents thought they’d finally resolved a bruising debate over the California suburb’s future.
For months they’d debated a Los Angeles County government plan poised to dramatically alter the character of the quiet community of just over 40,000 people, which sits at the edge of the Angeles National Forest. The plan limited construction in Altadena’s fire-prone foothills and simultaneously increased buildable density in its commercial corridors, allowing for hundreds of new housing units in the flat downtown area. It promised to both relieve the region’s critical housing shortage and also reduce wildfire risk accelerated by climate change.
In prickly public meetings and press statements, prominent residents staked out opposing positions. One side was represented by Michael Bicay, a retired NASA scientist who has for decades opposed construction in the Altadena hills on ecological grounds. When county officials arrived with their plan to add population density in Altadena, Bicay was in the middle of a campaign to stop a proposed prep school sports complex in the hills. He used the rezoning as an occasion to push for limits on future development on the community’s wildland edges.
Simultaneously, however, he recognized that Altadena had a role to play in mitigating L.A.’s sky-high housing prices — the county faces a shortage of about half a million affordable homes — which could be achieved by building more apartments along Altadena’s commercial corridors, many blocks away from the tinderbox in the hills.
On the other side of the debate was another longtime resident, Alan Zorthian, who owns a 50-acre artists’ colony in the foothills. Zorthian’s father Jirayr, a famous bohemian artist who hosted parties for luminaries like Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, built the colony into a local curiosity and tourist attraction in the decades before his death in 2004, constructing idiosyncratic homes and sheds out of colored stone and scrap metal.
Faced with the prospect of a downzoning in the hills, the younger Zorthian and other nearby landowners fought back against what they called “regulatory taking” that could devalue their property by limiting possibilities for future development. At the same time, though, the landowners argued that new apartments in the commercial areas would mar Altadena’s historic character. The community was home to Queen Anne-style mansions like the famed Andrew McNally House as well as several exemplars of mid-century modernist architecture.
After months of debate, Bicay’s side won. In December, the county voted the plan forward, signaling a retreat from Altadena’s foothills and a commitment to development in its more urban core. But the timing could not have been worse: Just a few weeks later, the Eaton Fire tore through the foothills, incinerating more than 9,000 homes and ravaging not only the town’s recognized fire zones but its commercial flatlands as well. The blaze was one of the worst urban firestorms in United States history: Together with the Palisades Fire that struck the western part of Los Angeles County simultaneously, it has caused at least $95 billion in damages.
Alan Zorthian talks on the phone while he examines the ruins of the Zorthian Ranch, an artists’ colony in the Altadena foothills. Jake Bittle / Grist
Michael Bicay, a retired NASA astrophysicist, walks around his home, which survived the Eaton Fire. Jake Bittle / Grist
As Altadena begins to rebuild, residents and local officials are fearful that the once-affordable neighborhood will see rents spike and a hollowing out of its middle and working class. Real estate speculators have already descended on the area making lowball cash offers to fire victims, including Black families who lack the savings and insurance coverage to get back the homes they’ve had for generations. Some locals now worry that the county’s plan to open up Altadena for new construction, which was controversial even before the fire, could attract a rush of new development that will hasten this process of what some scholars call “climate gentrification.”
To thread this needle, local officials will have to look beyond the traditional housing debate in the United States. Most development debates in Los Angeles and other big cities pit NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) residents who oppose the disruption of new construction against YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) advocates who want to bring down housing costs by allowing the construction of as many new housing units as possible. Altadena’s divide is not so simple: Both the Bicay and Zorthian factions are simultaneously for and against new development in the town — they just have opposite views on where and how it should happen.
Sudden disasters fueled by climate change only complicate matters further. Altadena must now balance a need to shift its population away from its wildland edges, state and county policies pushing it to add housing capacity overall, and the demands of residents who want to return to their homes — homes that have burned down once and may well burn again in the future.
“We’re talking out of both sides of our mouth right now,” said Bicay. “I think it’s okay to [say] that we’re going to have a lower density in Altadena in the future. But the county, driven by the state, is allowing people to build. So there are going to be some tough decisions.”
The county’s zoning revision in Altadena was part of a broader effort to promote new housing development and reduce hazard risk. (About 15 percent of the county’s land area is classified as vulnerable to wildfire.) Los Angeles County controls 2,600 square miles of land in the region — everything that isn’t part of an incorporated city like Pasadena, Burbank, or the city of L.A. itself. This patchwork unincorporated territory is home to around a million people and includes dense neighborhoods near the Pacific Ocean as well as huge swaths of undeveloped mountain range.
As county planners confront both a housing crisis and a climate crisis, they are facing a difficult paradox. California requires them to enable the construction of thousands of new homes under a decades-old planning law, but they can’t let people build in areas prone to fire or flooding, or in protected nature areas. The housing demand in the region is so great, and the risk of disaster so widespread, that the county has no choice butto loosen zoning rules in safe areas in order to comply with the law — a move that in the United States nearly always triggers protests and pushback from residents opposed to growth in their own neighborhoods.
An aerial view of homes that burned in the Eaton Fire on January 19, 2025, in Altadena, California. Mario Tama / Getty Images
In the summer of 2023, county officials announced that they would rework Altadena’s decades-old zoning restrictions, which only allowed for single-family homes and a handful of multi-story buildings, to further this housing mandate. After a series of meetings and hearings, none of which drew much attention, planners unveiled a two-pronged proposal. First, the plan would upzone to allow new housing in Altadena’s commercial corridors like Lincoln Avenue, a semi-blighted west end corridor home to little more than a few churches and Mexican restaurants. Second, the proposal would limit development in the fire-prone foothills, where subdivisions have crept up steep slopes alongside forest preserves and hiking trails.
The plan also included a light-touch version of what climate experts often call “managed retreat,” or the government-sponsored relocation away from areas vulnerable to disaster. Most places pursue managed retreat only once it’s too late, for example by buying out homes that flood repeatedly, but the county was hoping to reduce risk over the long run by nudging investment away from the hills and preserving undeveloped space.
At first, the community was warm to the idea of new housing on Altadena’s main streets, according to Amy Bodek, the planning director for Los Angeles County.
“Altadena is very accepting of density in appropriate locations, and is very accepting of new residential units,” she said, describing the community as more amenable to growth than other parts of Los Angeles where the county has worked. “That was a really big benefit to working with that community.”
But that may have only been true of the small subset of engaged residents who bothered to chime in on the zoning plan. A typical Altadena town council election draws a few hundred voters at most — hardly surprising in an unincorporated area that most people see as just another part of sprawling Los Angeles — and just a couple dozen people showed up to the county’s “visioning workshops” about rezoning in the summer of 2023. Bicay pushed other local preservation organizations to support the plan, and that was enough to get it to the final stages.
The former site of Altadena Hardware, a long-running neighborhood business that sat just off Altadena’s main commercial corridor, Lake Avenue. Jake Bittle / Grist
Only in the last months of 2024 did a few outspoken residents start to gin up opposition to the plan, saying the county was devaluing their property by depriving them of the right to build on it. Zorthian joined together with a few other large landowners who had contemplated new construction and a few business owners on commercial corridors who opposed new affordable housing, fearing it might worsen traffic and bring in low-income residents.
“We found out what the plan was doing to the handful of us left who still have larger property, and we don’t want people telling us what to do,” said Zorthian.
The Eaton Fire changed everything. Tearing west through the San Gabriel Mountains toward Altadena, it burned almost the entirety of the Zorthian ranch, including several homes in the artists’ colony and much of Jirayr Zorthian’s remaining artworks. Embers from the fire then spiraled down into the denser flatlands and burned thousands of homes, including all but a few on Bicay’s cul-de-sac block, which sits right at the base of the hills. (The zoning on his own block has not changed, but the surrounding areas have been downzoned.) The blaze then continued west and destroyed a patchwork of homes and businesses along Lincoln Avenue, turning the northern stretches of the corridor into a moonscape.
The question now, in light of the fire, is whether the county’s pre-existing plan to bring fire-conscious growth to Altadena is the right path out of this devastation, or whether a surge of new development will hasten gentrification and displacement. The county plan proposed to build new apartments on commercial corridors and direct investment toward the city’s west side, but planners had assumed that these changes would happen over years or even decades. Now, as burned-out residents tangle with real estate speculators in every corner of the town, there’s a chance that this shift could happen in a matter of a year or two. Developers could take advantage of the new zoning to buy up fire victims’ damaged homes and develop large apartment complexes allowed under the new paradigm.
Altadena residents take to the street to protest land developers trying to buy their land immediately following the catastrophic Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, on January 18, 2025. Katie McTiernan / Anadolu via Getty Images
Some locals who supported the plan are now wary of the upzoning effort. The longtime manager of Mota’s Mexican Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue, Lupe, said she worried that a big developer could buy up multiple lots and build expensive new housing that the former residents of those lots couldn’t afford. (In an interview with Grist, Lupe only provided her first name.) Her own house suffered smoke damage in the fire, and she has been living there while waiting on a contractor to fix it.
“[The county plan] is a good idea, but only if they do it the right way,” she said. “But if people don’t have insurance, and they come and want to take your property to do whatever they want to do, I don’t like that way.”
“Gentrification had already started, and I would think fire would speed it up,” said Veronica Jones, president of the Altadena Historical Society and former president of the Altadena town council who represents a census tract on the more disinvested west side of the town, home to many. She pointed to the fact that wine bars and yoga studios had opened in recent years, a change that residents referred to as the “Pasadena-fication” of Altadena.
“I think it’s a good idea to put more housing, but now it’s going to have to be rethought,” she added.
Bodek, the county planner, said she understood the fear of gentrification and vowed that the county will work to prevent developers from snapping up victims’ homes or buying out longtime businesses.
Sisters Emilee and Natalee De Santiago sit together on the front porch of what remains of their home on January 19, 2025, in Altadena, California. Brandon Bell / Getty Images
But there’s also the matter of fire risk. The Altadena plan discouraged development in the foothills because the state of California classifies them as extremely vulnerable to wildfire, but the Eaton Fire burned almost the entirety of the town, reaching almost two miles south of the fire zone and destroying homes that had never been seen as risky.
That means it’s possible the county’s original plan didn’t go far enough. Bicay, who was a lead advocate for the plan, now says it might be necessary to reduce the density of Altadena’s flatlands by between 5 and 10 percent, which would require leaving many burned-out lots empty without rebuilding them. Nic Arnzen, another member of the town council, says the town might consider leaving vacant some lots that residents don’t want to rebuild, carving out a larger zone of open space near the hills. An analysis from the climate risks firm First Street Foundation, which home listers like Zillow use to inform prospective buyers of property hazards, shows a much broader area of fire danger than that shown on maps from CAL FIRE, the state firefighting agency.
Zorthian, who opposed the plan, acknowledges that the fire risk in the hills was greater than he had assumed. But he now sees the county plan as hypocritical: If almost the whole town burned down, why should he and a few other large landowners be the only ones with new limits on what they can build?
“It’s going to change the character of Altadena,” he said. “You’re going to have behemoth apartments like you have all over Los Angeles.” For his part, he’s trying not to let the new plan affect him. Once he’s finished cleaning up the scarred ranch, he plans to forge ahead with his vision to erect a museum in honor of his father, and he’s hoping to reacquire some of his father’s works to replace the ones lost in the fire.
Alan Zorthian used a water pump to draw from this swimming pool in his effort to fight the Eaton fire burning through Zorthian Ranch. Numerous structures were destroyed.
Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Except for supporters like Bicay and opponents like Zorthian, not many Altadena residents engaged in the debate around the county’s original plan. Now, though, a larger agglomeration of residents and community groups have emerged to help steer the town’s rebuild. There are nonprofit associations like Altadena Strong and Rebuild Altadena, existing preservation groups like Altadena Heritage, plus a new foundation run by real estate magnate Rick Caruso and an informal recovery council that Bicay serves on. The county will also convene its own commission.
Other fire-struck areas in the Golden State have dealt with similar questions in recent years, with mixed results. The northern California mountain town of Paradise, for instance, saw a furious debate over where and how to rebuild after the deadly 2018 Camp Fire. It ended up imposing a strict barrier of undeveloped land that now functions as a firebreak. In Santa Rosa, meanwhile, the neighborhood of Coffey Park built back on its original footprint after the 2017 Tubbs Fire, with almost all residents returning to single-family homes that are still vulnerable to wildfire.
Nicole Lambrou, an Altadena resident as well as an architect and urban planner at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, said that local governments vary in their commitment to changing the built environment when they rebuild after a fire.
In many cases, she said, governments bow to political pressure from fire victims, scrap planned reforms and try to get everyone back in their homes as soon as possible. But such a rushed recovery is often bad for the long-term resilience of a community in the wildland-urban interface. Residents end up rebuilding the same flammable homes in the same vulnerable areas, ensuring future losses and more displacement.
“A lot of times the measure of success is, ‘is it a one-to-one rebuild?’ That emphasis on building back what was there as soon as possible makes bypassing existing plans much easier,” she said. On the other hand, she added, the scale of loss in a place like Altadena might force the community and its elected officials to reconsider the assumptions behind their previous commitment to more density — after all, the effort to build more homes is premised on the belief that Altadena is a safe place to live.
“The plan was put in place with a certain baseline of a built environment that is no longer there,” she said.
Bodek, the county planner, says she thinks that building more density in Altadena’s downtown core is still the right move. As she sees it, to declare Altadena too risky would be to write off huge sections of California’s exurban sprawl, much of which sits well within range of flying embers from mountain fires.
“I’m looking at this as a once in a lifetime, catastrophic event,” she said. “If this is going to be the new norm, then everyone, not just Altadena, but everyone in the entire state, is going to have to reassess their land use policies. That could mean the demise of, you know, 200 years of the way of life in California. And I’m not going to go there.”
When the rivers and creeks running through eastern Kentucky jumped their banks and flooded a wide swath of the region for the second time in as many years, Cara Ellis set to work.
One week later, she’s hardly let up. Ellis has spent countless hours helping friends in her hometown of Pikeville evacuate and delivering supplies to people who have lost their homes. “I’ve been here, there, everywhere in the county,” she said. “It’s overwhelming. There’s been a lot of devastation.”
Ellis spoke during a brief moment of rest in the chaos. Her home was spared when storms brought torrential rain to central Appalachia during the weekend of February 15. The water came down so quickly that the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River soon inundated houses and a portion of downtown. The torrent prompted more than 100 rescues in Pike County alone and left several neighborhoods and rural communities without running water. The record-setting winter flood, which killed 21 people statewide and two others in West Virginia, was not the first time Ellis has seen a disaster strike, and she fears it won’t be the last.
“We know there’s going to be a next time,” she said.
More than 8 inches of rain doused Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, soaking already sodden ground. The resulting inundation came less than three years after flooding throughout eastern Kentucky killed more than 40 people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage across 13 counties. Hurricane Helene brought similar inundations to western North Carolina, southern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee just six months ago. The extreme weather fueling these floods will only grow more common as the world warms.
“These unprecedented storms really do represent our new reality,” said Nicolas Pierre Zegre, a forest hydrologist at West Virginia University who studies flood adaptation in the region. “Acknowledging that things have been changing kind of opens up the door on other conversations, like why are things changing?”
The severity and frequency of these floods has accelerated. Climate change brings ever more extreme precipitation, which causes flash flooding as it soaks mountain slopes and narrow valleys. All of Appalachia is vulnerable, and the places at greatest risk are rural communities that can quickly find themselves isolated by landslides, downed trees, and inundated roads.
Even if help is on the way, it may not come quickly. That has promoted people to step in, an informal response that has grown more organized with each crisis. “We all need to be our own first responders because these things are happening really really fast,” Zegre said.
Willa Johnson, a lifelong eastern Kentuckian, lived in McRoberts when the 2022 flood overturned her life. She fled rising water, and returned several days later to find her home had been destroyed, along with her church, her son’s school, and the arts and culture center where she worked. And now, this. She wasn’t flooded this time, but seeing neighbors suffer again weighs on her. “These last few years have been brutal,” she said. “It changes the landscape, it changes the people.”
The flooding that inundated central Appalachia during the weekend of February 15 promoted hundreds of water rescues, like this one in Clarksville, Tennessee, as people found themselves trapped by rising water.
Clarksville Fire Rescue via Getty Images
Still, she and others throughout the area feel their experience has prepared them to face future disasters with strength, and, when other rural communities go through the same experience, understand what they face and how best to help them. “It weighed heavy on us here” when Helene hit North Carolina, Johnson said.
She organized supply drives for Helene survivors and sought donations outside Walmart, where those who endured the 2022 flood offered what they could. “Someone who lost their entire home would hand us $10 out of their pocket and say, ‘We know what it’s like,’” Johnson said. Volunteers loaded cars with medical supplies and water and propane heaters and drove to the remote corners of western North Carolina. They called the initiative It’s Our Turn EKY, as in, it’s our turn to help.
This week, it was North Carolina’s turn to help. Volunteers with the nonprofit BeLoved Asheville drove a truck full of supplies to Perry County. The City of Asheville Fire Department dispatched a its swiftwater rescue team to help pull survivors from homes in Hazard.
“It’s really exhausting to feel we are just going from one disaster to another constantly and people don’t have time to feel tired anymore,” Johnson said, her voice thick with emotion. “But it’s also really beautiful because these groups that we were contacting and saying, “What do you need? ‘How do we get this to you?’ are now reaching back out and saying, ‘Here’s what we have. Here’s what we can send.’ It’s this system of mutual aid that just keeps crossing state lines and people just reaching out to each other.”
Chelsea White-Hoglen, a community organizer in Haywood County, North Carolina, has been helping coordinate runs to eastern Kentucky and west Virginia. She said people through Appalachia increasingly understand the challenges of rural disaster relief, and the difficulties facing communities where much of the population is elderly, disabled, or living in poverty, and tight town budgets struggle to handle aging infrastructure. State and federal officials do what they can, but they often lack first-hand knowledge of what communities need. “These networks and human-to-human relationships are going to be the strongest and most reliable when we confront these kinds of catastrophes,” White-Hoglen said.
These networks grow stronger with each disaster as volunteers like Johnson find better, more efficient ways of bringing together those who need and those who can provide it. They’ve started using Google forms to bring donors and recipients together. They’ve organized donation drop-off locations and delivery caravans. They’ve designated community resource hubs like churches and warehouses where folks can go for help. They create and manage schedules so people don’t burn out. These volunteer-driven efforts have started working with local officials to identify needs and fill them, because they’re in the best position to know.
“I’m glad that we are learning as we go,” Johnson said.
Cara Ellis said the floods have helped her appreciate the solidarity that comes from repeated experiences with disaster across the region. As she’s seen mountain infrastructure buckle under more and more intense storms, she says, neighbors will need to have these networks and supply lines organized and ready to go.
“From my perspective, climate change is very real and we are the brunt,” Ellis said.
“It’s just what are we gonna do next time to be more prepared, and what does that look like?” Ellis added. It’s out of necessity that ordinary people need to look out for one another.”Because at this point, it feels like nothing’s being done on a global scale or even on a federal scale to prevent these disasters.”
Note: Katie Myers worked with Willa Johnson at Appalshop, a nonprofit media, arts, and education center in Whitesburg, Kentucky, from 2021 through 2023.
Almost everyone has heard of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its offshoot, the National Weather Service. Meteorologists depend upon it to offer accurate local forecasts, and its alerts and advisories warn millions of people about dangerous conditions. But they may not know it is part of the Department of Commerce, and, more surprising, that its mission has specifically included “protecting life and property.”
Without the agency, known as NOAA, weather forecasts wouldn’t be as reliable, and the impacts of extreme weather on a less prepared public could be devastating. “Everyone would be shocked about the negative things that could happen,” said Alan Sealls, president-elect of the American Meteorological Society and former chief meteorologist at WKRG-TV in Mobile, Alabama. “Those compromises will be not just unpleasant, and not just uncomfortable, but truly dangerous.”
It remains unclear just what President Donald Trump has in mind for NOAA. His nominee for commerce secretary, financier Howard Lutnick, has vowed to keep it intact. But Project 2025, the conservative roadmap to a second Trump term, calls for it to be “broken up and downsized,” and Russell Vought, an architect of that blueprint, now leads the federal Office of Management and Budget. In late January, employees at NOAA’s Asheville, North Carolina, office were told to remove internal web pages and cancel events and meetings. Last week, Elon Musk sent a Department of Government Efficiency team to the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in what has for other agencies been the start of radical downsizing.
“I’m in fear of losing my job every day,” said a National Weather Service employee who requested anonymity. So far, most cuts seem to have targeted diversity programs, including the organization’s head of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, who was put on leave after a right-wing social media account targeted them. As to what might happen next, this person said, “pretty much everybody is in the dark.”
President Richard Nixon established NOAA in 1970, but its roots stretch back to 1807 and the creation of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to chart the nation’s coastline. The Weather Bureau followed in 1870 and the Commission of Fish and Fisheries one year later. NOAA still fulfills these roles through divisions like the National Weather Service, or NWS, and Marine Fisheries Service, which helps ensure sustainable harvesting of the oceans and a safe food supply.
Today, the agency employs about 12,000 people worldwide; over half are scientists and engineers. Its current budget is $6.5 billion. Of that, about $1.4 billion goes to the NWS, or about $4 for every citizen. In addition to providing free weather data, forecasts, and alerts, that allocation saves taxpayers money. The agency’s work predicting hurricanes saves billions in avoided damage alone, and allows crisis managers and first responders to better prepare for disasters. By one estimate, every dollar invested in the NWS reaps more than $9 in return.
“It’s a great deal for the American public,” said Pat Spoden, who was a National Weather Service meteorologist from 1987 to 2022. “A lot of people don’t understand or know where the weather data comes from and how much the Weather Service, and NOAA, provides.”
The agency manages 18 satellites, nearly 100 weather balloon launch sites, and around 250 oceanic buoys that produce billions of observations each day. That information goes to 122 forecasting offices, where meteorologists generate weather projections that are disseminated across the country, including on a network of 1,000 NWS radio stations. Beyond providing the basis for weather watch and warning alerts, these reports are the foundation upon which private weather services like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel stand.
“AccuWeather does not have their own fleet of satellites and weather radar and ground stations. They do not operate their own weather predictive models,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “All these private weather enterprises are built upon the public backbone of data.” They’re either using NOAA data directly, Swain added, or adjusting it in some proprietary way.
The private sector also relies on NOAA’s vast research archive, housed at the four offices of the National Centers for Environmental Information. This trove includes historical records detailing changes in Earth’s oceans, land masses, ice sheets, atmosphere, and magnetic field. These repositories offer a wealth of local, national, and international climate findings and modeling, and have recorded nearly real-time analysis of temperature and precipitation changes since 2000. All of this info is invaluable to researchers, analysts, and myriad industries that predict future conditions.
“What most people don’t realize is insurance companies base your rates on that data record and how it is projected to go forward,” said Craig McLean, the agency’s former research division director. “Banking, finance, real estate, the transportation industry, agriculture, they all look in the futures market at data that is stored historically, but also collected daily around the world.”
Yet NOAA’s critics consider the agency, and its information, a threat. Thomas Gilman, who served in the Commerce Department, wrote in Project 2025 that it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to the future of U.S. prosperity.” That document notes “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
Project 2025 seems to favor maintaining only those functions that serve corporate interests, noting that, “because private companies rely on this data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
When floods devastated eastern Kentucky in 2022, local meteorologists relied upon data from the National Weather Service to provide accurate and timely forecasts and flood warnings.
Seth Herald / AFP via Getty Images
Critics of such a move argue that putting such an essential resource behind a paywall would harm the public. Megan Duzmal, a meteorologist at WYMT, a small TV station in eastern Kentucky, relies upon NOAA data to do her job. The station serves a largely rural area that those in larger markets like Louisville do not focus on.
“They don’t look individually at these communities, but we are able to, as a smaller market, zoom into the small cities here,” Duzmal said, with enough precision to “point out road names.”
The station provided essential information to viewers during a spate of recent floods, most recently after Hurricane Helene. When a storm is brewing, Duzmal receives information about flash flooding risks from a hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Jackson, Kentucky. Assessing the danger requires analyzing complex factors like soil moisture, previous drought conditions, and topography. It demands a firm grasp of both science and local conditions. If the tools she and countless other local meteorologists rely upon are privatized, they could become too expensive for small stations in rural areas. That could prove deadly to residents of communities that already lack robust cellular service and reliable internet providers.
Privatization could also create varying forecasts from competing companies, leading to confusion. “Without the one voice, you run into issues of what do you believe or who do you believe,” said Spoden, the former NWS meteorologist. “It’s just so important to have an official source.”
That raises perhaps the most important question about privatization: What services would companies even be willing to take on? It’s unclear, for instance, that any private enterprise would want to be responsible, and thus liable, for issuing warnings or alerts. Spoden also wonders whether private sector meteorologists would deploy to disaster areas to brief emergency responders, like NWS employees did during the fires in Los Angeles.
“They are the most dedicated group of civil servants you’re going to find,” said Spoden. “It would be very difficult for any private company to do what the National Weather Service does.”
It remains to be seen what the Trump administration will do. It’s an open question, for instance, whether the National Weather Service Employees Organization’s collective bargaining agreement, which runs through 2029, will hold up against any efforts to dismantle the organization. But the employee who fears for their job says the president’s attacks on NOAA feel unprecedented.
“He’s going no holds barred,” they said. “It’s very aggressive.”
