Four months before the close of 2023, the United States has already broken its record for the number of weather and climate disasters with damages exceeding $1 billion in a calendar year.
There have been 23 “billion-dollar disasters” to date this year, according to a monthly report issued Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, or NOAA. The last calendar-year record was set in 2020, with 22 disasters costing $1 billion. (NOAA adjusts its count of past years’ billion-dollar disasters to account for inflation.) This year’s 23 disasters have cost Americans a total of nearly $58 billion and caused at least 253 deaths.
The events include Hurricane Idalia, the strongest hurricane to hit Florida’s Big Bend region in 125 years, and the Lahaina fire storm, the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in more than a century. A winter storm in the Northeast, flooding in California and Vermont, and 18 severe storm events — including thunderstorms, tornado outbreaks, and hail storms — also contributed to the record.
The 23 billion-dollar disasters to date this year included a hurricane, a wildfire, two floods, a winter storm, and 18 severe storm events. Courtesy of NOAA
With 12 weeks remaining in the Atlantic hurricane season and autumn wildfires common in the West, the U.S. is likely to end the year with an even higher number of billion-dollar disasters. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, much of the country faces above-normal risk of significant wildfires in September, though parts of southern California are expected to have below-normal potential.
In a statement released Monday, Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the NOAA report “sobering,” and “the latest confirmation of a worsening trend in costly disasters, many of which bear the undeniable fingerprints of climate change.”
Cleetus said the staggering financial losses underscored the need for more funding and attention toward climate resilience and adaptation. “It’s imperative that U.S. policymakers invest much more in getting out ahead of disasters before they strike rather than forcing communities to just pick up the pieces after the fact,” she said.
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included nearly $50 billion for climate resilience projects and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act added several billion more, including $2.6 billion for coastal communities, $235 million for tribes, and $25 million for Native Hawaiians.
It will be years before the country sees the possible benefits of those investments. In the meantime, the federal government is struggling to keep up with the immediate impacts of natural disasters.
As part of a supplemental funding request that Congress is currently considering, the Biden administration requested $16 billion dollars in additional funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to get the agency’s disaster relief fund through the fiscal year, which closes at the end of September.
“The science is clear that adapting to runaway climate change is an impossible feat,” said Cleetus, “so we must also sharply curtail the use of fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis.”
New polling indicates that Americans are not only aware that the climate crisis is happening (in spite of some presidential candidates falsely describing it as “a hoax”), but that nearly half have recently experienced the effects of the crisis. A USA Today/Ipsos poll conducted in July and published this week found that 49 percent of Americans had experienced an extreme weather event within the…
Burning Man, the transient bacchanal that attracts more than 70,000 party-goers to the remote Nevada desert for eight days every August, prides itself on its environmental bona fides. One of the festival’s main operational tenets is “leave no trace,” an essentially impossible feat for an event of its size. The Burning Man Project, the organization that runs the festival, has set a goal of becoming “carbon negative” — removing more emissions from the environment than the festival produces — by 2030.
It’s a tall order: The festival generates around 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year, the equivalent of burning over 100 million pounds of coal. A series of disasters at this year’s festival have brought the gap between Burning Man’s rhetoric and reality into sharp relief: First, a half dozen protesters demanding stronger environmental commitments from the organization blocked the festival’s entrance for roughly an hour before they were forcibly removed. Days later, torrential rain — the kind of event made more likely and extreme by climate change — stranded revelers in a dystopian free-for-all. But the greatest irony of all may be Burning Man’s less-publicized opposition to renewable energy in its own backyard.
Burning Man’s problems began on August 27, the first day of this year’s festival, when a blockade of climate protesters created a miles-long traffic jam on the two-lane highway into the dry lakebed of the Black Rock Desert, about 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada, where Burning Man takes place. In addition to calling for “systemic change,” they demanded that festival organizers take immediate steps to decrease the event’s carbon footprint. Burning Man, which started out as a small gathering of artists on a beach in San Francisco in the 1980s, has grown into a massive event that attracts a growing percentage of the world’s ultra-wealthy every year. The protestors, who were ultimately dispersed by police, demanded the festival “ban private jets, single-use plastics, unnecessary propane burning, and unlimited generator use per capita,” among other requests.
Cars wait in line to get into the Burning Man festival, held 120 miles from Reno, Nevada. Jordan England-Nelson/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Then, torrential rain spurred by a late-August hurricane and the onset of monsoon season in the desert turned the festival into a gargantuan mud pit, stranding attendees and forcing Burning Man to close the roads into and out of the festival from Friday until Monday afternoon, when conditions improved. Since no supplies could be trucked in or out, partiers were forced to ration water and other supplies. Some people, including the DJ Diplo and the comedian Chris Rock, abandoned their vehicles in the desert and walked out of Black Rock City, as the festival site is known, on foot. (It’s 15 miles from Black Rock City to Gerlach, the nearest town.) The rain caught festivalgoers off guard, but experts say floods like the one that inundated Black Rock City are a forecasted consequence of climate change.
“The well-known southwestern summer monsoon is expected to yield larger amounts of rainfall in a warming climate,” Michael Mann, presidential distinguished professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science, told Wired.
Attendees walk through a muddy desert plain on September 3, 2023, after heavy rains turned the annual Burning Man festival site in Nevada’s Black Rock desert into a mud pit.
JULIE JAMMOT/AFP via Getty Images
A broad consensus exists, of course, on how to slow the climactic changes that are beginning to wreak havoc like this: replace the fossil fuels that currently power much of the world with a wide variety of carbon-free sources. In fact, the federal government approved one such project, a geothermal energy initiative in the Nevada desert a mile outside of Gerlach, last year. The exploratory project, funded by an international renewable energy company called Ormat Technologies, aims to find out whether geothermal — which taps naturally-occurring heat under the earth’s surface to produce clean energy — is commercially viable in the Nevada desert.
But the venture faced immediate pushback from the Burning Man Project, one of a group of plaintiffs that sued the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, over its approval of up to 19 exploratory geothermal wells in the Black Rock National Conservation Area. The Burning Man Project, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, also worked with residents of the tiny town of Gerlach, the hamlet closest to the geothermal development, to appeal the BLM’s decision. The wells, the organization said, would “threaten the viability” of Burning Man’s various projects in Nevada by potentially jeopardizing local hot springs in the area and disrupting the desert ecosystem. The plaintiffs argued that BLM had approved the project without adequate environmental review and hadn’t sufficiently consulted local communities, including the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, in its permitting process.
“People travel to Gerlach to experience the solitude of the vast open spaces and undeveloped vistas present in the Black Rock Desert,” the lawsuit said, “as well as to attend numerous events and to pursue a variety of recreation experiences in the undeveloped desert.”
After the lawsuit was filed, the Washoe County Commission in Reno ultimately voted 3-2 against the proposed geothermal project, a move that baffled clean energy experts and overturned the county’s prior approval of the project.
The claim that the region remains relatively undisturbed, given the 70,000-person party that rolls in every year, rang particularly hollow.
“Some of the hype around Gerlach has been disturbing from a scientific point of view,” James Faulds, Nevada’s State Geologist, told Grist. “The Gerlach area has already been disturbed by man.”
Faulds added that no hot springs in the area besides the ones located immediately above the actual geothermal wells would be affected by the development, and that the geothermal power plant itself wouldn’t be visible from the Burning Man festival. (The Burning Man Project did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.)
Ormat may try to appeal the county’s decision or scrap the project and apply to build new geothermal development elsewhere in the state instead. “Ormat will continue to press forward with exploration and development of its renewable energy projects throughout the State of Nevada to help the state and federal government meet their renewable energy goals,” the company said in a statement following the county commission’s vote.
A single megawatt of geothermal energy can provide enough power for up to 1,000 residential homes year-round. That gives it a smaller land-use footprint than either wind or solar power, Faulds pointed out.
“Let’s say that power plant is producing 30 megawatts. You could drive by that and say ‘huh, that’s 30,000 homes,’” Faulds said. “That could be a big chunk of homes in a city in southern California or northern California, wherever the power is being sold to — where a lot of the Burning Man folks, of course, come from.”
Sometimes the heat makes you vomit, said Carmen Garcia, a farmworker in the San Joaquin Valley of California. She and her husband spent July in the garlic fields, kneeling on the scorched earth as temperatures hovered above 105 degrees. Her husband had such severe fatigue and nausea that he stayed home from work for three days. He drank lime water instead of seeing a doctor because the couple…
As Hurricane Idalia left a wake of destruction Wednesday, President Joe Biden said, “I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore.” Climate activist and scientist Peter Kalmus calls for Biden to declare a climate emergency in order to unleash the government’s ability to transition away from fossil fuels. “The public just doesn’t understand, in my opinion…
Mike Strain, the commissioner who runs the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, stared out the window of a Black Hawk helicopter on Tuesday, hovering over land that had become unrecognizable. From thousands of feet up in the air, he could observe the transformative effects of the drought that had gripped the state all summer long. Lakes and ponds lay completely empty, their beds cracked. Swatches of earth that would be, on a normal year, lush and green had turned brown. Acres of evergreen trees — oaks and magnolias and azaleas, signatures of the state — had begun to wither.
“It looks like West Texas,” Strain told Grist, the surprise evident in his voice.
These dry conditions have helped to ignite a spate of wildfires across the state. In an average year, wildfires burn roughly 8,000 acres in Louisiana; fires in August alone have set alight more than 60,000. The worst of them, the Tiger Island Fire, currently burning near the southwest border with Texas, has taken out 30,000 acres so far, and is being called the largest wildfire that Louisiana has seen in 80 years. Two towns near that fire have been evacuated, and Strain announced a state-wide burn ban as his agency and the state Fire Marshal’s office have struggled to respond to a kind of natural disaster uncommon in the swampy state, one of the country’s wettest.
The fires follow a summer of record breaking heat and dryness across Louisiana. Shreveport in northwest Louisiana had its second warmest summer on record, New Orleans had its second driest. According to Danielle Manning, a lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service New Orleans/Baton Rouge forecast office, the city of Alexandria in Central Louisiana had its warmest summer on record by a large margin — by nearly two full degrees — and a nearby fire led the police to close roads over the weekend.
Manning traced the unusually hot and dry conditions to late May, when a system of high pressure air parked over the state and stuck around since. Some places haven’t seen rain since the spring.
“It’s not unusual to be underneath high pressure [air] at times during the summer but for it to be as persistent as it was this summer is extremely unusual,” Manning said, adding that the frequency of extreme conditions like these are expected to increase in a warming climate.
The drought, in combination with record breaking heat, has sucked many of Louisiana’s characteristic bayous dry. Stock ponds that farmers have relied on for generations to water their cattle are empty. The detritus left from hurricanes in recent years have made these conditions even riper for wildfires — fallen timber from Hurricane Laura, Delta, and Ida lay across approximately one million acres of the state, according to Strain. In such conditions, wildfires start easily, Manning said. A single lighting strike or trailer chains dragging along a highway could set one off.
Officials that Grist spoke to said that they plan to request help from the state to fight future wildfires, in case this summer’s conditions turn out not to be an anomaly. Strain hopes to expand his fire fighting force by 50 personnel and to obtain additional fire-fighting equipment like bulldozers and air tankers. Ashley Rodrigue, a spokesperson in the state Fire Marshal’s office, said that while her agency has never dealt with wildfires of this magnitude before, the experience of working in a disaster prone state has helped to mobilize quickly.
“You can think of it like football — the game is the same,” Rodrigue said. “But the play calling based on where you’re at in the game is what changes, and in this instance, the play is for wildfires.”
Nonetheless, there have been some challenges.: When a fire department is depleted of energy or equipment, the Fire Marshal’s office is supposed to step in and support them by finding additional resources. One of the things that they’re finding, Roderigue said, is that some fire departments don’t always know what to ask for, because they haven’t dealt with anything of this scale before.
The National Climate Prediction Center has forecasted a 50 to 60 percent chance that conditions across Louisiana return to normal by mid-September. The Tiger Island Fire doubled in size over the weekend, but in a visit to the town of DeRidder on Tuesday, Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said that recent rain has slowed the blaze. That fire was 50 percent contained as of Tuesday.
This year’s first major hurricane made landfall early Wednesday morning, bringing 125-mile-per-hour winds to Florida’s Big Bend region. Officials and residents told Grist that the sparsely populated coastal area, which stretches from near Gainesville to just south of Tallahassee, was wholly unprepared for Hurricane Idalia, a category 3 storm fueled by exceptionally hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The area hasn’t been struck directly by a hurricane in more than a century.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mandy Lemmermen, the battalion chief for the Dixie County fire department, who was hunkered down in an operations center in the county seat of Cross City when she spoke to Grist on Tuesday evening. “You can’t survive this.”
After taking shape in the Gulf of Mexico, Idalia underwent a process known as “rapid intensification,” swiftly strengthening from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane as it passed over the hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico, then weakening just before it made landfall. The most devastating Atlantic hurricanes of the past few years, including 2022’s Ian and 2021’s Ida, have all undergone this process. Scientists believe that climate change is making it more common.
By early morning Wednesday, just minutes after landfall, the storm had already pushed more than six feet of storm surge over the island town of Cedar Key, submerging many buildings in the beachfront area. A similar tide was flowing up the Steinhatchee River, where it was poised to cause similar flooding. More than 160,000 customers in the state had lost power, and more than 20 counties across the state had issued some form of mandatory evacuation order. Areas as far north as Georgia and South Carolina were expected to see rain damage, and areas as far south as Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg had already experienced flooding as winds pushed storm surge into city streets.
But the longest-lasting effects are likely to be in the rural communities along the remote Big Bend coast.
“It’s Waterworld there,” said Kathryn Frank, a professor of urban planning at the University of Florida who has worked with Big Bend communities on climate adaptation. “You have water coming from every direction, and that’s why it hasn’t developed much.”
Because the area is so flat, storm surge reaches farther inland than it does even in other parts of Florida. In Levy County, for instance, Frank’s team found that a Category 3 storm could inundate terrain as far as 20 miles away from the water’s edge.
The coastal shelf along the Big Bend is shallow and flat as well, which leads to much higher waves, increasing the depth of hurricane flooding. The National Hurricane Center estimated yesterday that Idalia would produce 12-foot surges along the coast, but Dixie County’s own hazard mitigation plan estimates that surges could reach as high as 24 feet, large enough to inundate almost every structure in coastal towns like Horseshoe Beach. The fact that the storm is arriving during a full moon, which produces higher tides, will make the surge even worse.
The region also floods from the inland side, because it sits atop the Floridan Aquifer, an underground water layer that discharges up to the surface when it rains. Rivers like the Suwanee and the Steinhatchee often flood for weeks at a time. The vast majority of land area in areas like Taylor County sits inside the hundred-year floodplain, indicating a level of risk that many cities like Houston, Texas, have deemed unsustainable for development.
To make matters worse, residents often have limited resources to deal with flooding. The median household income in Dixie County is around $44,000, far below the national average. A recent report from United Way of the Big Bend found that far more families in the region are struggling to meet basic needs than in the rest of the state.
Some residents in Dixie County have already experienced prolonged displacement from even minor rainfall events. A series of floods back in the spring and summer of 2021 brought five feet of water to many houses in the county’s Old Town neighborhood, which sits on the Suwannee River, and locals were still waiting to get back into their homes in January of the following year.
“It feels like living in a swamp,” said Deena Long, who moved to a manufactured home in the area from Georgia back in 2018. “The first two years, everything was underwater. It came right up to our trailer and our well house, and everything else was totally underwater, and it was the same for our neighbors on both sides.”
Long said she and her husband have to wear galoshes to walk through her yard, and they often see snakes floating around in the water. Nevertheless, she planned to stick it out at home during Hurricane Idalia. Long and other residents have blamed the county for not maintaining the area’s drainage infrastructure.
“There’s not enough culverts, there’s not enough drainage. It’s poor planning on the government’s part,” she told Grist. “It’s been a strong conversation, but nothing ever happens. It gets pushed back under the rug.”
Even several miles inland, in areas that sit higher off the ground, the winds were substantial on Wednesday.
“There are trees down in all directions,” said Rebecca Greenberg, a criminology graduate student who stayed behind in Dixie County to keep track of her dogs and horse. “I can hear loud booms. I think it’s trees or trailers or propane tanks getting blown down.”
Having struggled with even minor flood events, the Big Bend’s infrastructure is nowhere near prepared for a storm of Idalia’s magnitude. As of 2015, more than 30 percent of residents in Taylor and Dixie counties lived in mobile or manufactured homes, which can sustain huge damage or collapse altogether during big wind storms. A large portion also use residential septic systems, which can fail and backflow into homes. When Frank conducted a study of sea-level rise in Levy County, her team found that many coastal roads and wastewater plants would sink several feet underwater during even a mild storm.
“Even during dry seasons, it’s wet, so when you get a storm like this one, with a big storm surge, it can travel really far inland,” said Frank. “That’s very bad for environmental health.” It’s possible that septic and drinking water systems could be inoperable for weeks or months, she added.
Unlike in rural parts of the Louisiana coast, there are no levees or shoreline protection projects that can control flooding. In the three coastal counties in Idalia’s path, which have a combined population of around 80,000, just 2,000 households buy flood insurance from the federal government, according to FEMA data. The state’s Resilient Florida grant program, which has spent millions on climate adaptation projects, has only funded a few planning initiatives in the Big Bend.
The roads in Long’s area are made out of dirt, so they become muddy and impassable even during mild rain. During the worst flood events over the past few years, she has relied on her neighbor to drive her out of the area on a tractor.
Idalia’s track over the rural Big Bend will likely ensure that overall monetary damages from the storm are far lower than for storms like Hurricane Ian, which hit a densely populated area. But for the people who do live in the Big Bend, the devastation could be total, according to Frank.
“The eye is going straight at these little towns, like Steinhatchee, that are just trying to make the best of it,” she said. “My heart goes out to that little little small town.”
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
As the days get shorter and kids head back to school, it may seem like the worst of summer heat is over. But the thermometer tells a different story: Last week saw dangerous heat domes descend over both the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, and it’s late summer that often brings the most sizzling weeks of the season — last year, parts of the West experienced their hottest September on record. And climate scientists agree: Our summers are only going to get hotter from here.
To that end, Grist asked a dozen experts for their best tips, tricks, and hacks when it comes to keeping ourselves, our loved ones, and our surroundings safe in an extreme heat event.
We’ll be posting shareable versions of this guide on Instagram — follow us @Grist to share these tips with your network.
How to treat heat illness
With advice fromKaipo Kelley, firefighter and paramedic, Escondido Fire Department
Grist / Getty Images
You have to know the signs of heat illness to recognize when you or someone around you is suffering from it. Symptoms typically begin with heat cramps, which left untreated can worsen into heat exhaustion or a potentially fatal heat stroke, says Kaipo Kelley, a first responder in California. Here’s how to identify heat distress, and how to help.
Pay attention to cramping: Cramps typically occur while doing physical activity in heat. But what may feel like normal workout cramps are actually signs of serious dehydration.Look out for fatigue, sweating, and cramps in the legs, arms, and shoulders.
Move to a cool space: Get the person to shade or air conditioning, and have them hydrate with water and (if possible) electrolytes. Take off any unnecessary layers, such as jackets and backpacks, to help sweat evaporate, and massage the muscles to allow more blood flow to that area.
Recognize heat exhaustion: If a person ignores heat cramps, they could develop heat exhaustion as the body tries to preserve its vital organs by sending blood primarily to the core instead of the extremities. Signs include muscle aches or cramps; headache; excessive sweating and thirst; feeling lightheaded or dizzy; nausea or vomiting; and pale, cool, clammy skin, especially on the extremities.
Actively cool: In addition to removing heavy clothes, providing water, and moving to shade or A/C, help the person lay down and elevate their legs. Actively bring body temperature down by applying damp cloths, and spray them with water or a fan mister if available.
Watch out for heat stroke: Heat stroke occurs when the body’s temperature has reached dangerously high levels. A temperature at or above 103 degrees is life-threatening and can cause permanent injury to the brain. Signs of heat stroke include altered mental status; confusion, irritability, or unresponsiveness; severe fatigue; a fast pulse; nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea; lack of sweat (though sweating is possible too); and hot and dry skin.
Act fast: If you think someone is experiencing heat stroke, call 911, then take actions to quickly lower their temperature.In addition to the steps above, place ice packs on areas near large blood vessels, like the groin, armpits, neck, and core — or dunk them in cold or iced water. Only provide drinking water if they can maintain a gag reflex.
Go deeper: Red Cross offers a wide variety of first-aid training for individuals and organizations. NOLS’ Wilderness First Responder course teaches skills that are applicable to more than just the outdoors — you can also take their courses through your local REI store. Kelley also suggests looking up paramedic or EMT 101 courses at your local community college.
Even if you don’t have air conditioning, there’s a lot you can do to alleviate the heat in your home before and during a heat wave. We asked sustainable-buildings experts for their best home hacks, retrofits, and gear that can help keep cool air in and hot air out.
Get an energy audit: Hire a professional to do a home assessment. Using specialized equipment, they can identify the places where hot air is seeping in and recommend energy-saving ways to prevent it — or you can do the audit yourself.
Seal your house: Close any openings around windows, doors, and attics to prevent hot air from entering. If you don’t know where or how to start, a weatherization contractor can help (the Department of Energy offers financial assistance and many utilities offer rebates). Interior storm inserts can help keep seal older windows, too.
Consider retrofits: Energy Star-certified reflective roofs and insulated interior shades with reflective outer layers help reject heat, better insulation and newer windows will help keep hot air out, and installing exterior overhangs above windows can block the sun.
Dehumidify ahead of time: Heat is most dangerous when it’s paired with humidity, which impedes the body’s ability to sweat. If you can’t afford a whole-home dehumidifier, get a standalone one and run it before a heatwave to get indoor humidity down to about 40 percent.
“Night flush” when it cools off: At nighttime when the outside air tends to be cooler than inside, place a box fan in the window of the warmest room to pull the hot air out. Then crack windows on the cooler sides of the house (probably the north side).
Go DIY: If you live in a dry climate, hang damp towels in front of windows to lower interior temperatures, or make your own air conditioner with a bucket of water, a fan, and some tubing — there are plenty of tutorials online.
Take advantage of tax credits: An energy-efficient home is often a cooler one, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has introduced dozens of incentives in this regard. There are tax credits for energy audits, air sealing, insulation materials, energy-efficient doors and windows, and heat pumps, which use less electricity than air conditioners.
With advice from Jennifer Louie, senior clinical psychologist at Child Mind Institute; Elizabeth Bechard, senior policy analyst at Moms Clean Air Force; and Mary DeMocker, author of The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution
Grist / Getty Images
Children are especially vulnerable to excessive heat — smaller bodies can’t regulate temperature as efficiently as bigger, adult ones. It can also be more difficult for them to understand climate emergencies, leading to anxiety. We asked a psychologist, mental health policy analyst, and family advocate for ways to keep kids healthy and happy when temperatures are dangerous.
Be candid: Help kids understand heat waves by talking about the climate, what’s making it worse, and how families can fight back. For most kids 7 and up, be honest. For younger ones, children’s books can be especially helpful. Use the indoor time together to learn about the many science-based solutions within our collective reach.
Address their emotions: If kids express climate anxiety, be sure to listen, and acknowledge how they’re feeling. Tell them that you believe they can handle the fear, and that you’re there to help. Taking action to fight climate change, like composting or organizing a fundraiser, can also be empowering for kids of all ages.
Make a family plan: Ease feelings of uncertainty by working together on a course of action. Identify cool spaces to go, such as a family member’s house with A/C or a public library, and safe activities like visiting a pool, shady park, or movie theater. Review the signs of heat illness and discuss healthy things to eat and drink for cooling and hydration.
Keep kids hydrated: Make sure your kids are drinking cold water. If they’re resistant, try to make it tastier with some electrolyte powders, and add in cool, water-heavy foods, like watermelon, smoothies and fruit-juice popsicles.
Focus on indoor fun: Unplug! Stock your home with used puzzles, board games, art supplies, and even puppets for some imaginative play. Turn your living room into an art gallery: Challenge everyone to make a masterpiece and tack it to the wall. If your home is cool enough, get a little movement going by cranking the dance music, or trying indoor foam darts, hacky sacks, or juggling balls.
Loop in caretakers: Talk to your children’s teachers, childcare providers, and camp counselors to ensure everyone caring for your children knows what to do to prevent and treat heat-related illness. If your child takes medication, ask their doctor if it may make them more sensitive to extreme heat, and if so, make sure to tell any other caretakers.
Take care of yourself, too: Extreme heat can be profoundly stressful for parents, who need and deserve support as well. Tend to your own emotions about climate change by attending a peer climate support group or a Good Grief Network group, or even talking to a climate-aware therapist. Have as much compassion for yourself as possible.
With advice from Scott James, social entrepreneur and author of Prepared Neighborhoods: Creating Resilience One Street at a Time
Grist / Getty Images
In a climate emergency like a heat wave, neighbors are our first line of defense — but only if we know who they are. Creating a neighbor network allows communities to gather contact information, pool resources, share skills, and identify who is most vulnerable in a crisis, says social entrepreneur Scott James, who wrote a book on the subject.
Host a meet-and-greet: Organize a neighborhood potluck for 20 or fewer people (keep your “pod” to a manageable size). Invite people whose homes are close together; in an emergency, that will make it easier to physically reach anyone who may need help. You don’t have to use the whole time for discussion, but leave at least 45 minutes for planning.
ID vulnerable neighbors: Make a contact list with everyone’s information and create a group text or social media group to be used in emergencies. Identify the elderly and those with medical conditions, no A/C, or other vulnerabilities, and designate who will check on them. Some of these neighbors may not have been able to attend your potluck, so go door-to-door if you need.
Create an asset map: Write down which neighbors might have useful skills in a heat emergency — like medical training or handyman abilities — as well as helpful equipment, like a portable power station or extra fans. Designate a “hub” where people can go if they need help and lack cell phone battery or signal.
Designate heat captains: Co-captains are best in case someone is out of town or needs help themselves. Create teams of people who are in charge of various tasks, whether that’s checking on elderly neighbors or setting up outdoor shade structures.
Draft an emergency plan: Compile all the info you’ve gleaned into a detailed outline or spreadsheet that can be printed and passed out or emailed to your pod. Keep a copy near your bed so that it’s easy to find if something happens in the middle of the night.
Prepare your resources: Keep a backup power bank charged as well as extra water, electrolytes, coolers, and ice on hand. Check that all fans are in working order to deploy to neighbors who need them. Store a tarp and rope to create shaded outdoor areas for people whose houses get too hot, as well as a bucket, water, and fan to make a “swamp cooler.”
Go deeper: This Map Your Neighborhood, or MYN, discussion guide from the Washington state Emergency Management Department can help anyone get started. The department also offers additional MYN planning documents. Joining or founding a Community Emergency Response Team, or CERT, is another great way to get your neighborhood ready for a climate event.
Working in sweltering conditions not only stifles productivity, it makes injuries more likely and poses a serious health risk. Many on-the-job heat emergencies are preventable — as long as your employer has a policy in place. Here’s what labor experts recommend when prepping a workplace to handle excessively hot temperatures.
Know the rules (and your rights): Employers are required by federal law to provide a workplace “free from recognized hazards,” including heat, that could cause employees harm. Some states, such as California and Minnesota, have also adopted their own heat standards. Familiarize yourself with employer obligations and employee rights on OSHA’s website, and remember that you can file a complaint with OSHA if your job doesn’t feel safe.
Get ahead of risk: Work as a group to identify existing and potential hazards and what could be done to mitigate them. Maybe there’s a room with a faulty A/C, a pipe that always gets too hot, or a broken water fountain — be proactive about addressing dangers.
Train the team: Employees should be informed on the signs of heat illness and how to treat it. OSHA developed a printable heat-related illness prevention guide for employers, which doubles as a training aid and is also available in Spanish. Better yet, offer a comprehensive first-aid course, and make sure someone is always on the clock who is trained in first aid.
Appoint a heat captain: Designate someone who will monitor coworkers for heat illness and who is authorized to stop work if conditions are too dangerous. Allow them to adjust work hours to cooler times of the day and make other accommodations, if possible.
Keep resources accessible: Make sure the following are always available, at no cost to employees: water, electrolytes, shady or cool areas, and PPE that protects from hot surfaces (like gloves). Make sure workers are getting enough fluids, but discourage them from consuming energy drinks, which can worsen dehydration. Implement mandatory paid rest breaks, and when it’s really hot, make them more frequent.
Go slow: Bodies need time to gradually adjust to hot conditions. No workers should be going straight from an air-conditioned room to extreme heat. Gradually increase the amount of time spent in hot conditions before taking a break, and pay close attention to anyone returning from leave who may need additional time for their bodies to reacclimate to the heat.
Seek guidance: Small and midsize businesses can get assistance with identifying and mitigating workplace hazards at no cost through OSHA’s On-Site Consultation Program. It’s available in all 50 states and some U.S. territories.
Go deeper: In addition to a trove of resources on preventing heat illness at work, OSHA also teamed up with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, to create a heat-safety app that helps you evaluate when it might be unsafe to do outdoor work.
Wildfires raged through Maui this month, leaving a wake of devastation as residents struggled to survive. More than 100 people are confirmed dead, while thousands remain missing. The wildfires began from multiple unrelated fires, some igniting because of power lines that were fanned by strong hurricane season winds. The emergency alert system didn’t activate, leaving residents unprepared.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Inflation is finally easing. Americans are paying less for gas than they were a year ago. Furniture, television, and airfare prices have all fallen since last summer. Even the used car market is cooling off after its meteoric rise. But one unsuspecting staple in many American kitchens has become a prominent outlier: olive oil. The price of the already pricey liquid fat has soared to a record high this summer.
It’s the latest chapter in the annals of heatflation — when scorching temperatures harm crops and push food prices up. A yearlong drought and a spring of extreme heat in Spain, the world’s largest olive oil producer, devastated the country’s olive groves. Spanish olive oil production fell by a half — from an estimated 1.3 million to 610,000 metric tons — over the past year. Now fears are mounting over the very real possibility that the country’s inventory will run out before the next harvest begins, in October.
“For Spaniards, this is a real crisis,” Bloomberg columnist Javier Bias recently wrote. “We generously coat our food in olive oil.”
It’s also a big deal for the rest of us, given that something like half of the world’s olive oil comes from Spain. As barrels run dry, cooks around the world are paying an almost unheard of premium for the nutty, liquid gold that makes lettuce more palatable and bread more nutritious. Worldwide, olive oil now costs $8,600 per metric ton, more than twice as much as it did a year ago and nearly 14 times more than crude oil. (It would set you back around $720 to fill up the typical car’s 12-gallon tank with olive oil found on Amazon.)
What’s happening is “not normal at all,” said Kyle Holland, a vegetable oils analyst at Mintec, a food market research firm. “It was just too hot and too dry for too long.”
Olive oil is one of many foods — one of many condiments, even — that are threatened by the severe and unpredictable weather brought on by climate change. As the global temperature ticks up, droughts are occurring more frequently, heat is getting harder for farmers to manage, and wildfires and floods are becoming more menacing to growers around the world. As a result, grocery store shelves aren’t getting stocked and food prices are going up. Ultra-dry conditions in Mexico have withered peppers, leading to a sriracha shortage in the United States. Record warming has decimated Georgia’s famed peaches, which require a few weeks of cool weather each winter to blossom. Ketchup, coffee, and wine all could end up on the chopping block, too.
Olive trees are no strangers to heat, and they don’t need much water compared to other crops, like tomatoes. Humans have been cultivating them in the Mediterranean’s warm climate — and crushing them for oil — for at least 6,000 years. But even hardy olives have their limits. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can impair their ability to convert sunlight into energy, and prolonged dry spells can keep them from producing shoots, buds, flowers, and fruit.
Growers in the Mediterranean, a region warming 20 percent faster than the rest of the world and the source of 95 percent of olive oil production, are especially vulnerable. Drought caused Tunisia’s grain harvest to decline by 60 percent this year. And dry conditions led to poor yields for wheat and rice farmers last year in Italy, whose produce has helped build the country’s legacy of pizza, pasta, and risotto. This summer, they’ve had to contend with extreme heat, historic floods, and freak hailstorms, according to Davide Cammarano, a professor of agroecology at Aarhus University in Denmark. With such variability in weather, “it becomes very hard to manage a crop in the Mediterranean,” he said.
In a study published last year, Cammarano and his colleagues found that rising temperatures could cut the production of processing tomatoes — the sort used to make tomato sauce and ketchup — by 6 percent in Italy, the U.S., and other countries within the next three decades.
Perhaps no one this year has had it as bad as olive growers in Spain. Between October and May, the country received 28 percent less rain than usual, with the driest conditions in southern, olive-growing areas. “It’s a catastrophe,” Primitivo Fernandez, head of Spain’s National Association of Edible Oil Bottlers, told Reuters in March. Spain experienced its hottest April on record, with temperatures rising above 100 degrees F. And the heat has only gotten more punishing since, with the country now in the midst of its third heat wave of the year.
As a result, researchers predict that drought and heat waves associated with climate change will continue to take their toll on olives from the Iberian Peninsula to Lebanon. Hot and dry conditions last year scorched groves not only in Spain but also in Italy and Portugal, two of the world’s top four olive oil producers.
In the United States, too, severe weather is a concern for olive farmers, although unlike orchards in Spain that rely on rainfall, most in the U.S. are irrigated, which makes them more resistant to drought. Producers in California, the state that churns out the most olives but still contributes less than 3 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S., reportedly harvested one-fifth less than their historic average this season, following years of little rain that made some farmers’ wells go dry.
Winter and spring storms last spring in California eased the drought, but the cool weather and heavy precipitation slowed flowering and potentially lowered the amount of oil in each olive, according to Jim Lipman, chief operating officer at California Olive Ranch in Chico, the country’s biggest olive oil producer.
In an email to Grist, Lipman said that the high prices in Europe have increased demand for California oil and that California Olive Ranch has a strong crop heading into the upcoming harvest season, which starts in October. That said, early warming followed by frost has resulted in crop disasters in two of the last five seasons.
At Burroughs Family Farm in Denair, California, production has been fairly steady over the past few years, but “this year we are on the lower side” possibly as a result of an “incredible” amount of rain, said Benina Montes, managing partner at the regenerative almond and olive farm in California’s Central Valley. In a good year, the farm’s 10 acres of olives produce up to 40 tons of oil. This year, they yielded about three-quarters of that amount.
Montes said she hadn’t been following news of the shortage in Europe. But she figures the rise in demand caused by Spain’s low inventory might have helped her business. “No wonder our olive oil has been selling well on Amazon.”
Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall in Mexico and crossed into California over the weekend, knocking out power and drenching wide swaths of southern California. Parts of the desert terrain in the region, which typically receives less than a quarter inch of rainfall a year, received between two and four inches of rain. According to the National Weather Service, downtown Los Angeles received 2.48 inches of rain on Sunday, breaking a single-day record from 1906 of 0.03 inches.
The downpour felled trees, caused mudslides, and closed roads. East of Los Angeles, in San Bernardino, police ordered evacuations in several communities. More than 35,000 Californians are out of power as of Monday, and several school districts canceled classes to assess the damage of the storm. Major sporting events including a Major League Soccer match and several Major League Baseball games over the weekend were also rescheduled.
The storm made landfall as the rest of the country was grappling with other climate-fueled disasters. Devastating wildfires in Lahaina, a historic town in Maui, Hawai’i, killed more than 110 people and caused billions in damage. Across the country, dangerous heat conditions persisted, with the National Weather Service warning that a heat dome will “consume” the Plains and Mississippi Valley into the South this week. Two major fires burning in Spokane, Washington, have also torched a combined 20,000 acres, leading officials to order the evacuation of the nearby town of Medical Lake. On the East Coast, meteorologists are tracking two storms brewing in the Atlantic.
Hilary strengthened in a hurry last week. On Thursday, the National Weather Service reported that it was a Category 3 hurricane with wind speeds of 120 miles per hour, and by Friday, it had strengthened into a powerful Category 4 storm. The center warned that Hilary would bring “life-threatening and potentially catastrophic flooding” over the weekend. The forecasts triggered California’s first-ever tropical storm warning. But as the hurricane crossed cooler waters off the coast of southern California, it lost its strength and was downgraded to a tropical storm.
Still, Tropical Storm Hilary “really did produce all-time, record-breaking summer rainfall across most of the region,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In terms of the incredible frenetic pace of global extremes we’re seeing this summer, that is only going to get worse as the climate continues to warm.”
Tropical storms and hurricanes rarely make landfall in California. That’s because powerful storms need warm waters to gather moisture and energy, and the eastern Pacific Ocean is generally much cooler than the western Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico — typically as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
This year, however, after record heat in July, the waters in the Pacific are not as cold. In fact, temperatures off the coast of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico are about the same as the waters around Key West, Florida, which helped Hilary intensify rapidly before reaching California waters.
El Niño, a weather pattern that also leads to warmer Pacific temperatures, appears to have played a role in Hilary’s formation. The climate phenomenon affects a hurricane’s wind shear, a term used to describe the change in wind speed at a given height. If a hurricane has high wind shear, it will dissipate quickly. El Niño creates the conditions in the Pacific for low wind shear, which aids in the formation of stable hurricanes.
The weather pattern “tends to decrease vertical wind shear in the eastern Pacific off the coast of California and so allows more hurricanes to develop,” said Ned Kleiner, an atmospheric scientist at the risk assessment firm Verisk. “And so we’ve seen a series of hurricanes in the eastern Pacific, including Hurricane Dora, which is partially responsible for the really damaging winds which fueled the wildfires in Maui.”
While the exact role that climate change played in Tropical Storm Hilary’s formation is not yet fully known, Kleiner said climate scientists are confident that rising temperatures are leading to the formation of more intense hurricanes. After all, oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. As hurricanes pass over these warmer waters, they pick up more moisture, which leads to more intense rainfall. Research also shows that hurricanes are stalling more often, giving them more time to drop rain over an area. Forward motion speeds of Atlantic hurricanes have decreased 17 percent compared to previous decades.
The science for hurricanes in the eastern Pacific is less clear. Since few storms develop off the West Coast in the first place, scientists have less data to work with. “There are certainly theories that there will be more intense landfalling storms on the West Coast, but it’s just a very difficult thing to be confident in because it’s so rare,” said Kleiner.
Hilary is likely to bring more rainfall and flooding as it makes its way across Nevada on Monday. The storm is expected to bring between 1 to 3 inches of rainfall in Idaho and Oregon through Tuesday morning.
“Across the Southwestern United States, the ongoing and historic amount of rainfall is expected to cause life-threatening flash, urban, and arroyo flooding including landslides, mudslides, and debris flows today,” the National Hurricane Center warned on Monday.
In Canada, the province of British Columbia has declared a state of emergency where entire towns have been burned to the ground in the country’s worst wildfire season ever. Evacuation orders are in place for more than 35,000 people, and 30,000 more have been told to be prepared to evacuate. Nearly all 20,000 residents have already left the city of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest…
This story was originally published by Borderless.
The day before Independence Day, the summer sun beat down on dozens of clothes and shoes strewn across the backyard and fence of the Cicero, Illinois, home where Delia and Ramon Vasquez have lived for over 20 years.
A nearly nine-inch deluge of rain that fell on Chicago and its suburbs the night before had flooded their basement where the items were stored in plastic bins. Among the casualties of the flood were their washer, dryer, water heater and basement cable setup. The rain left them with a basement’s worth of things to dry, appliances and keepsakes to trash, and mounting bills.
The July flood was one of the worst storms the Chicago region has seen in recent years and over a month later many families like the Vasquezes are still scrambling for solutions. Without immediate access to flood insurance, the couple was left on their own to deal with the costs of repairing the damage and subsequent mold, Delia said. The costs of the recent flood come as the Vasquez family is still repaying an $8,000 loan they got to cover damages to their house from a flood in 2009.
Delia and Ramon Vasquez discover that a storage cabinet in their basement remains flooded over 24 hours after a storm that caused significant flooding in Cicero, Ill., July 3, 2023. The couple was still evaluating the extent of the damage and were wary of checking for water and mold in their crawlspace and under the carpet because of the potential dangers to their health.
Efrain Soriano/Borderless Magazine
Aggravated by climate change, flooding problems are intensifying in the Chicago region because of aging infrastructure, increased rainfall and rising lake levels. An analysis by Borderless Magazine found that in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, extreme weather events and heavy rainfall disproportionately affect people of color and those from immigrant backgrounds. These same communities often face barriers to receiving funding for flood damage or prevention due to their immigration status – many undocumented people cannot get FEMA assistance – as well as language or political barriers.
“You feel hopeless because you think the government is going to help you, and they don’t,” Delia said. “You’re on your own.”
The lack of a political voice and access to public services has been a common complaint in Cicero, a western suburb of Chicago where Latinos account for more than four out of five residents, the highest such percentage among Illinois communities.
One potential solution for communities like Cicero could come from Cook County and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) in the form of their RainReady program, which links community input with funding for flood prevention. The program has already been tried out in a handful of suburbs and is now being implemented in the Calumet region, a historically industrial area connected by the Little Calumet River on the southern end of Cook County. The RainReady Calumet Corridor project would provide towns with customized programs and resources to avoid flooding. Like previous RainReady projects, it relies on nature-based solutions, such as planting flora and using soil to hold water better.
Fourteen Dolton residents raise their hands to vote on various flood mitigation projects proposed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology as part of the first RainReady steering committee meeting in Dolton, Ill., Aug. 3, 2023. The committee ultimately voted to prioritize projects that would directly aid residential areas with personal rain gardens and grants for homeowners dealing with flooding damage. Efrain Soriano/Borderless Magazine
CNT received $6 million from Cook County as part of the county’s $100 million investment in sustainability efforts and climate change mitigation. Once launched, six Illinois communities — Blue Island, Calumet City, Calumet Park, Dolton, Riverdale and Robbins — would establish the RainReady Calumet Corridor.
At least three of the six communities are holding steering committee meetings as part of the ongoing RainReady Calumet process that will continue through 2026. Some participants hope it could be a solution for residents experiencing chronic flooding issues who have been left out of past discussions about flooding.
“We really need this stuff done and the infrastructure is crumbling,” longtime Dolton resident Sherry Hatcher-Britton said after the town’s first RainReady steering committee meeting. “It’s almost like our village will be going underwater because nobody is even thinking about it. They might say it in a campaign but nobody is putting any effort into it. So I feel anything to slow [the flooding] — when you’re working with very limited funds — that’s just what you have to do.”
The basement apartment that Marisol Nuñez shares with her mother and their dog, Princess, was flooded with about three and a half feet of water during the storm in Cicero, Ill. July 2, 2023.
Photo courtesy of Marisol Nuñez
Where’s the money?
In Cicero and other low-income and minority communities in the Chicago region where floods prevail, the key problem is a lack of flood prevention resources, experts and community activists say.
Amalia Nieto-Gomez, executive director of Alliance of the Southeast, a multicultural activist coalition that serves Chicago’s Southeast Side — another area with flooding woes — laments the disparity between the places where flooding is most devastating and the funds the communities receive to deal with it.
“Looking at this with a racial equity lens … the solutions to climate change have not been located in minority communities,” Nieto-Gomez said.
The alley behind Juan Jose Avila’s home is full of garbage bags of clothes and torn-up couches damaged by flooding in Cicero, Ill., July 3, 2023. Avila says this photo represents a fraction of the estimated $10,000 in damages in the family’s house caused by the flooding. Efrain Soriano/Borderless Magazine
Efrain Soriano/Borderless Magazine
CNT’s Flood Equity Map, which shows racial disparities in flooding by Chicago ZIP codes, found that 87 percent of flood damage insurance claims were paid in communities of color from 2007 to 2016. Additionally, three-fourths of flood damage claims in Chicago during that time came from only 13 ZIP codes, areas where more than nine out of 10 residents are people of color.
Despite the money flowing to these communities through insurance payouts, community members living in impacted regions say they are not seeing enough of that funding. Flood insurance may be in the name of landlords who may not pass payouts on to tenants, for example, explains Debra Kutska of the Cook County Department of Environment and Sustainability, which is partnering with CNT on the RainReady effort.
Those who do receive money often get it in the form of loans that require repayment and don’t always cover the total damages, aggravating their post-flood financial difficulties. More than half of the households in flood-impacted communities had an income of less than $50,000 and more than a quarter were below the poverty line, according to CNT.
Listening to community members
CNT and Cook County are looking at ways to make the region’s flooding mitigation efforts more targeted by using demographic and flood data on the communities to understand what projects would be most accessible and suitable for them. At the same time, they are trying to engage often-overlooked community voices in creating plans to address the flooding, by using community input to inform the building of rain gardens, bioswales, natural detention basins, green alleys and permeable pavers.
One improvement that came out of the RainReady plan was the town’s Natalie Creek Flood Control Project to reduce overbank flooding by widening the channel and creating a new stormwater storage basin. Midlothian also installed a rain garden and parking lot with permeable pavers not far from its Veterans of Foreign Wars building, and is working to address drainage issues at Kostner Park.
The stormwater storage basin alongside Natalie Creek in Midlothian, Ill., Aug. 5, 2023. During heavy storms, this 1.8-million-gallon detention basin fills up like a pond to mitigate flooding along the creek. Efrain Soriano/Borderless Magazine
Efrain Soriano/Borderless Magazine
Kathy Caveney, a Midlothian village trustee, said the RainReady project is important to the town’s ongoing efforts to manage its flood-prone creeks and waterways. Such management, she says, helps “people to stop losing personal effects, and furnaces, and water heaters and freezers full of food every time it rains.”
Like in the Midlothian project, CNT is working with residents in the Calumet region through steering committees that collect information on the flood solutions community members prefer, said Brandon Evans, an outreach and engagement associate at CNT. As a result, much of the green infrastructure CNT hopes to establish throughout the Calumet Corridor was recommended by its own community members, he said.
“We’ve got recommendations from the plans, and a part of the conversation with those residents and committee members is input on what are the issues that you guys see, and then how does that, in turn, turn into what you guys want in the community,” Evans said.
The progress of the RainReady Calumet Corridor project varies across the six communities involved, but final implementation for each area is expected to begin between fall 2023 and spring 2025, Evans said. If the plan is successful, CNT hopes to replicate it in other parts of Cook County and nationwide, he said.
Despite efforts like these, Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District argues that the scale of the flooding problem in the Chicago region is so large that a foolproof solution would be “prohibitively expensive.” Instead, communities should work toward flood mitigation with the understanding that the region will continue to flood for years to come with climate change. And because mitigation efforts will need to be different in each community, community members should be the ones who decide what’s best for them, says Fitzpatrick.
In communities like Cicero, which has yet to see a RainReady project, local groups have often filled in the gaps left by the government. Cicero community groups like the Cicero Community Collaborative, for example, have started their own flood relief fund for residents impacted by the early July storm, through a gift from the Healthy Communities Foundation.
Meanwhile, the Vasquez family will seek financial assistance from the town of Cicero, which was declared a disaster area by town president Larry Dominick and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker after the July storm. The governor’s declaration enables Cicero to request assistance for affected families from FEMA.
But the flooding dangers persist.
The day after her home flooded, a neighbor suggested to Delia Vasquez that she move to a flood-free area. Despite loving her house, she has had such a thought. But like many neighbors, she also knows she can’t afford to move. She worries about where she can go.
“If water comes in here,” Vasquez said, “what tells me that if I move somewhere else, it’s not going to be the same, right?”
Efrain Soriano contributed reporting to this story.
This piece is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless, Ensia, Grist, Planet Detroit, Sahan Journal and Wisconsin Watch, as well as the Guardian and Inside Climate News. The project was supported by the Joyce Foundation.
Editor’s Note: As noted above both this project and the Center for Neighborhood Technology receive funding from Joyce Foundation. Borderless also receives funding from the Healthy Communities Foundation. Our news judgments are made independently — not based on or influenced by donors.
Tune into news from about any part of the planet, and there will likely be a headline about extreme weather. While these stories will be specific to the location, they all tend to include the amplifying effects of climate change.
Flooding in Slovenia recently left three people dead and caused an estimated €500 million in damage.
At the same time, rainfall in Beijing has exceeded a 140-year record, causing wide-scale flooding and leaving 21 dead.
These northern hemisphere summer events mirror what happened last summer in Auckland, classified as a one-in-200-year event, and elsewhere in the North Island.
So far this year, rainfall at Auckland Airport has surpassed all records dating back to 1964.
Given more rainfall is one of the likeliest symptoms of a changing climate, the new report from the Helen Clark Foundation and WSP – Sponge Cities: Can they help us survive more intense rainfall? – is a timely (and sobering) reminder of the urgency of the challenge.
Cumulative daily rainfall by month for Auckland Airport (1964-2023). Graph: NIWA, CC BY-NC-ND
Pipe dreams
The “sponge city” concept is gaining traction as a way to mitigate extreme weather, save lives and even make cities more pleasant places to live.
This is particularly important when existing urban stormwater infrastructure is often already ageing and inadequate. Auckland has even been cutting spending on critical stormwater repairs for at least the past two years.
A new report sets out the practical ways New Zealand can improve its urban resilience to flooding due to climate change.
— The Conversation – Australia + New Zealand (@ConversationEDU) August 14, 2023
Politically at least, this isn’t surprising. Stormwater infrastructure, as it is currently built and planned, is costly to develop and maintain. As the Helen Clark Foundation report makes clear, New Zealand’s pipes simply “were not designed for the huge volumes they will have to manage with rising seas and increasing extreme rainfall events”.
The country’s current combined stormwater infrastructure involves a 17,000 kilometre pipe network – enough to span the length of the country ten times. The cost of upgrading the entire water system, which encompasses stormwater, could reach NZ$180 billion.
This contrasts starkly with the $1.5 billion councils now spend annually on water pipes. The report makes clear that implementing sponge city principles won’t wholly solve flooding, but it can significantly reduce flood risks.
Trees and green spaces
The real bonus, though, lies in the potential for sponge city design to reduce dependence on expensive and high-maintenance infrastructure.
There are already examples in Auckland’s Hobsonville Point and Northcote. Both communities have incorporated green infrastructure, such as floodable parks and planted wetlands, which kept nearby homes from flooding.
But the report’s recommendations are at odds with some of the current political rhetoric around land use policy — in particular “greenfields” development that encourages urban sprawl.
The report urges that cities be built upwards rather than outwards, and pushes back on residential infill development encouraged by the Medium Density Residential Standards.
Citing a recent report on green space from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, the Helen Clark Foundation report argues for the preservation of urban green spaces — like backyards — as part of the flood mitigation approach.
Preserving tree cover is another urgent priority. Trees help absorb rainfall, reduce erosion and provide essential shade and cooling in urban areas — counteracting the dangerous urban “heat island” effect. Citing data from Global Forest Watch, the report states:
Auckland has lost as much as 19 percent of its tree cover in the past 20 years, Dunedin a staggering 24 percent, Greater Wellington around 11 percent and Christchurch 13 percent.
Incentives for homeowners
Making Aotearoa New Zealand more resilient to extreme weather, the report says, need not break the bank.
It recommends raising the national minimum standards governing the percentage of the total area of new developments that must be left unsealed. This would ensure the implementation of sponge city concepts, and see buildings clustered to maximise preserved green space.
The government should also require local councils to plan for and provide public green spaces, and to develop long-term sponge city plans — just as they do for other types of critical infrastructure.
Neighbourhoods could be retrofitted to include green roofs, permeable pavements and unsealed car parks. Land use and zoning could also encourage more vertical development, rather than sprawl or infill housing.
The government could also provide incentives and education for homeowners to encourage minimising sealed surfaces, unblocking stormwater flow paths, and replacing lawns with native plants and rain gardens.
More extreme weather and intense rainfall is a matter of when, not if. As the Helen Clark Foundation report makes clear, spending future billions is less of a priority than acting urgently now.
Early in the morning of November 8, 2018, a strong gust of wind blew down a power line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric, the power utility that serves most of California. As the line hit the ground, it ignited a bed of dry pine needles, starting a fire that soon spiraled out of control. The blaze, which became known as the Camp Fire, would go on to destroy more than 18,000 structures and kill dozens of people — ranking it as the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history.
In the years after the fire, PG&E faced a barrage of civil and criminal lawsuits from fire victims, municipal governments, and insurance companies, seeking to hold the utility accountable for starting the blaze. As the company’s stock tanked, it filed for bankruptcy protection, and later pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter over fire deaths. In order to exit bankruptcy, the company paid out $23 billion to various plaintiffs and creditors.
PG&E has since drafted a plan to spend $50 billion by 2026 on grid protection and repairs, but it’s struggled to make progress thus far. The utility can only borrow limited amounts of money thanks to its recent bankruptcy restructuring, and last year it laid off thousands of workers who trim trees around power lines to prevent fires. Starved for cash, the compan has raisex rates: the average PG&E customer’s bill will rise 18 percent this year, and 32 percent by 2026.
Power lines and other electrical infrastructure have ignited hundreds of fires in the American West over the past 10 years, and these wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes and burned millions of acres. In just the latest example, the deadly wildfires in Maui this month appear to have been ignited by power infrastructure. In the aftermath of these events, victims and insurers have increasingly sued large investor-owned utilities for billions of dollars in damages, laying blame for the fires at the feet of the corporations who control the electrical infrastructure that kickstarted the blazes.
“It seems like there’s this historic trend of utilities just paying for fires, paying for fires, and then there’s a catastrophic one and they get walloped,” said Todd Logan, an attorney at the law firm Edelson PC who has won lawsuits against PG&E and Pacificorp. “And then they actually start changing their practices.”
The trend began in California, where state law makes it easy to hold utilities accountable for starting fires, but it is now spreading to other states like Oregon, where fire victims won a trial last month against the Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility Pacificorp over a devastating 2020 wildfire, and Colorado, where victims sued the utility Xcel last month over the 2021 Marshall Fire. The payouts that stem from these lawsuits could cost these companies billions of dollars.
While these lawsuit victories are helping victims to rebuild their homes, some experts also believe this new wave of legal action,and the massive settlements that come with it, has made it harder for utilities to find money for grid upgrades that can actually prevent future fires. In many cases, as these investor-owned utilities work to fireproof their infrastructure, they’re passing the massive cost of system improvements and decades-delayed maintenance down to their customers in a region where electricity rates are already high.
“Ratepayers definitely have to pay for the cost of the utility doing things” like burying power lines and trimming trees, said Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford Law School and an expert on how climate change affects utilities. “With the lawsuits, too, there are significant penalties, and somebody’s going to have to pay for them — and the reality is it’s going to be the customers of the company.”
A large utility company like PG&E presides over a vast network of wires and transformers, extending over thousands of square miles of service territory. Almost any part of that network can cause a fire if it falls over or scrapes against flammable wood. It’s almost impossible for a utility to eliminate risk altogether, but there are a number of measures they can take to reduce it. Until the last few years, though, almost no utility had bothered to take them.
For a long time, most big utilities would keep energy flowing through their wires almost all the time, until a snowstorm or heat wave caused one of their lines to break. Instead of spending money to forecast weather disruptions or harden their power lines against those disruptions, they just spent money to fix them afterward. In the case of PG&E, this allowed legacy transmission lines to grow old and worn-down, increasing the risk of ignition.
“They basically used to run the system until it would break and then repair the part that broke,” said Wara. “It’s a cheap way to maintain a system, and the benefit was to customers because it kept rates lower. It is much more expensive to do preventative maintenance.”
But now that business model has come back to bite the utilities. The lawsuits against Pacificorp in Oregon and Xcel in Colorado both argue that the utilities should have cut power to vulnerable areas before the fire. The jury in the Pacificorp trial, for instance, found that the power company acted with “gross negligence” when it didn’t shut off electricity to 600,000 customers on the dry Labor Day weekend of 2020. That decision caused multiplefires that destroyed thousands of structures and killed 11 people. Hawaiian Electric, the utility that supplies power to Maui, is also facing criticism for failing to shut off power during the high-wind event that fueled the wildfires on the island. Video and data obtained by the Washington Post appear to show that a power line caused the island’s first fire.
Charred ruins in the city of Lahaina after wildfires struck the island of Maui. The island’s power utility, Hawaiian Electric, has been blamed for causing the fires.
Patrick Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
In the years since the record-breaking 2017 and 2018 fire seasons, California’s utilities have shifted away from that model, said Caroline Thomas Jacobs, the director of the state’s new Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, which was created in 2020 to prevent another Camp Fire-like blaze from devastating the region.
“We’re seeing exponential change in a short period of time,” said Thomas Jacobs. “Only five years ago, when I came into this whole space, it was fundamentally an analog business. They used paper to record everything, and they knew that your power was out because you called them.” Not only did they not plan for climate change, they didn’t assess fire risk at all.
Now, Thomas Jacobs says, the state’s utilities have entered the 21st century. Big power providers like PG&E and Southern California Edison have hired in-house meteorologists, invested millions in advanced fire modeling, and deployed hundreds of sensors across their grid networks so they can identify risky areas. They’ve also instituted a new regime for shutting off electricity when fire risk is high: PG&E can now cut power to precise areas with the flip of a switch.
But the larger challenge facing utilities like PG&E is upgrading physical infrastructure itself, which can cost tens of billions of dollars — money that gets harder to raise as settlements add up. Most utility-caused wildfires happen when falling trees or dead branches scrape up against power lines, or when those power lines blow over onto dry ground. The surest way to reduce ignitions is to trim vegetation around power lines, as well as by insulating lines or burying them underground. All these measures, however, come at significant cost.
California utilities have thus far struggled to keep up with the necessary pace of so-called “grid hardening.” PG&E has trimmed thousands of trees and undergrounded more than 300 miles of power lines, but Thomas Jacobs’s department chastised the utility earlier this year for its growing backlog of power line repairs, saying the company “has not been able to show that it has adequate resources or proper planning to address its backlog given the continual increase.” (PG&E says it is working to accelerate backlog repairs.)
Furthermore, in PG&E’s case, it’s unclear just how effective these infrastructure efforts have been thus far. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that PG&E scrapped its tree-trimming program altogether in the face of new evidence that it wasn’t reducing risk despite almost $2 billion in expenditures to date. (PG&E disputes this, saying that it is “focusing investment on programs to enable permanent risk reduction.”) Meanwhile, one recent study found that power line undergrounding in California tends to benefit wealthy communities and leave low-income areas behind.
The key question utilities are asking themselves is how much of this infrastructure improvement work they need to do in order to avoid being found liable for starting fires, says Wara. The answer depends on where the utility is. In every state except California, plaintiffs must prove that a power provider acted with recklessness or negligence. That’s what happened in the Oregon trial against Pacificorp, and it’s the argument in the Colorado case as well.
In California, though, a legal standard known as “inverse condemnation” means that a utility is liable for a wildfire as long as any part of its infrastructure helped start the blaze, even if the utility tried to prevent ignition. This standard led to numerous settlements over the years against utilities like SoCal Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, but most of them were small. That changed with the big lawsuits that followed the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons.
The threat of litigation imposes a dual financial obligation on utilities. On the one hand they have to pay out damages to victims and insurance companies, and on the other they have to spend on grid upgrades to avoid future lawsuits. PG&E is the most extreme example of this money crunch: The utility had to pay out a $23 billion settlement package to exit bankruptcy in 2020, and has since spent billions more on grid repairs, including ultra-expensive undergrounding. Meanwhile, in Oregon, Pacificorp may have to pay upwards of $1 billion in damages to victims of the 2020 fires that its infrastructure was found to have started.
Oregon firefighters put out embers in Mill City, Oregon, on September 10, 2020, as they battle the Santiam Fire, which ignited in part thanks to Pacificorp’s power infrastructure.
Kathryn Elsesser / AFP via Getty Images
As utilities spend to upgrade their grids and avoid future lawsuits, they also raise electricity prices on customers, making it more expensive for them to run their fridges and air conditioning units, says Logan. In order to raise rates, the companies must get permission from state regulators, but regulators tend to approve the increases without much hubbub.
In addition to PG&E’s double-digit rate increase this year, Oregon’s Pacificorp raised rates by 14 percent as it worked to implement its wildfire mitigation plan. That increase came before the utility lost at trial against fire victims last month. SoCal Edison already raised rates in 2021 to finance the insulation of its power lines, leading to a $12.41 monthly increase for the average customer; the utility is also facing multiplefirelawsuits and may have to raise rates still further.
Experts disagree about just how necessary these rate increases are. Logan, the Edelson attorney, says companies like Pacificorp return plenty of money to their shareholders and don’t need to pass costs onto consumers. Logan is also leading the lawsuit against Xcel in Colorado.
“The notion that they’re financially constrained to me is completely absurd,” he told Grist. “Investor-owned utilities get a guaranteed 16 percent year-over-year yield, and when it dips down, you can just go back to the ratepayers like a tax. It’s one of the most unbelievable business offerings ever.”
Logan points out that investment firms like Vanguard, Apollo, and Third Point have invested in PG&E. Meanwhile, Pacificorp is a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, a massive conglomerate led by one of the world’s richest men.
In response to a request for comment, PG&E said its “system has never been safer, and we continue to make it safer every day.” The company also said that damages from previous legal settlements “were paid by shareholders and did not impact customer bills.” Pacificorp declined to comment.
Even so, the task of upgrading an entire grid network is enormous, and the capital costs of vegetation management and grid hardening are unprecedented for most big power companies, says Kevin Schneider, a utility expert at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
“It’s fair to say that these are big companies and they have a lot of money, but also, look at what they’re being expected to do,” he told Grist. “These are big ledger values, and they were not originally set up as organizations that were meant to be tackling climate change problems. Now they’re trying to rethink a system that needs to be designed to last another 50 years.” He added that utilities in the West are also trying to prepare for the increased energy demand that will accompany the coming transition away from fossil fuels.
Adapting to climate change will require rebuilding roads, water systems, and transit lines, and local governments across the country are already struggling to keep up. When it comes to power infrastructure, though, the adaptation effort in the West is being led not by governments but by some of the nation’s largest companies, investor-owned businesses that must also think about returning profit to shareholders. This dynamic has meant that even when the law allows victims to wrest money away from the big utilities responsible for many of the region’s worst fires, it’s ordinary residents who end up footing the bill for adaptation.
When a hurricane or a wildfire strikes the continental United States, survivors tend to spread out over dozens or even hundreds of miles, moving into hotels and apartments wherever they find them. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, hauls in hundreds of trailers to provide shelter in the disaster zone.
Such efforts on Maui after last weekʻs deadly wildfires will be far more challenging. The island is only 735 square miles, and much of it is mountainous, which will make it difficult to find temporary homes for all the survivors. To make matters worse, the blazes on the island have destroyed upward of 2,200 structures, putting further pressure on an already strained housing market.
Furthermore, Hawaiʻi is more than 2,500 miles from the continental U.S., which will make it much harder for the federal government to provide supplemental housing. And unlike in other states, residents can’t just drive to the next-closest hotels and apartments —they have to buy plane tickets and show ID to reach other islands or the continental U.S.
Lynette “Pinky” Iverson, who fled Lahaina when the homes on her street caught on fire, told Grist that a FEMA convoy moved her earlier this week into the Royal Lahaina Resort hotel, just down the street from the burn area.
The people that are coming in after me, I’m looking at them, they’re teary eyed,” she told Grist. “They’re devastated, almost like zombies. As far as housing, I have no idea what the next step is. A lot of people are choosing to leave the island.”
In a press conference on Maui earlier this week, FEMA’s top official acknowledged that the agency will struggle to provide temporary shelter.
“We are working very closely with the governor to better understand all available options, whether that means longer term, we bring in tiny houses or our transitional housing units,” said administrator Deanne Criswell, who has led the agency since 2021. “We are not going to be able to rely on all of the traditional programs that we do in the continental United States.”
FEMA’s first response after a disaster is to place survivors in hotels and short-term rentals, reimbursing property owners at a flat rate. The agency covers these temporary housing costs for 18 months after a disaster occurs.
Given the size of its tourism industry, Maui has a larger concentration of hotels and vacation rentals most places in the U.S. Before the fires, the island had more than 20,000 hotel rooms, as well as thousands of Airbnbs and other options, although many of them were in the historic Lahaina area that sustained the worst fire damage.
Hawaiʻi Governor Josh Green said in a video posted on Twitter Wednesday afternoon that the state had made more than 1,000 hotel rooms and 1,000 Airbnb units available, and was setting aside a few hundred of them for disaster workers. The state had already filled up a hotel with victims and was working to fill up another.
In the weeks to come, though, the onus will be on hotels to volunteer their rooms, since neither FEMA nor the state government can commandeer them.
Some started accepting fire refugees of their own accord just days after FEMA activated its reimbursement program.
“We’ve already been taking people in, and we’re taking a lot more people than usual,” said Kyle Raquel, a front desk attendant at the 87-room Days Inn hotel in Wailea, a beachfront area that didn’t burn during the fires. “We’re calling the tourists who’re supposed to be flying in next week to cancel their reservations so we can make some room for people who actually need the housing.”
Richy Palalay, who was born and raised in the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, shows his “Lahaina Grown” tattoo at an evacuation shelter in Wailuku on Saturday, Aug. 12, 2023.
Audrey McAvoy / AP Photo
It remains to be seen how many hotels will follow suit and forego tourist revenue. A representative from the Four Seasons hotel, a five-star resort in Wailea, told Grist that it is setting aside rooms for survivors and first responders. About two-thirds of Maui’s hotel rooms were occupied in June, according to the state.
Representatives for the Hawaiʻi and Maui County emergency management agencies did not respond to interview requests. In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for FEMA said that the agency had registered 620 people for housing assistance so far, and said it was convening a task force to design “innovative sheltering and housing solutions for survivors.” The spokesperson said the agency could provide trailers or supplemental housing only once the state requests it.
“Can we get [temporary housing units] there? Yes, but it’s too early to start talking about a direct housing mission,” said Robert Barker, a spokesperson for FEMA’s West Coast regional office. “Direct housing is not our A, B or C card. It’s typically our F card.”
FEMA has in the past delivered hundreds of trailers (the official term is “manufactured housing units”) to fire and flood areas and even created temporary communities with streets and basic infrastructure. Such was the case after the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California, in November, 2018. The following May, FEMA opened a makeshift city in nearby Oroville, providing semi-permanent housing to 40 people.
But temporary housing is difficult to transport, and it sometimes takes months to arrive. That was the case in Louisiana in 2021 after Hurricane Ida, when residents waited three months for trailers.
Maui’s location will make it even harder. FEMA encountered these difficulties in 2017 when it responded to Hurricane Irma on Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. After determining that it would cost about a quarter-million dollars to ship a single trailer to the Virgin Islands, the agency scuttled plans to provide direct housing to the territory. Hawaiʻi is about twice as far from the continental U.S. as the Virgin Islands.
In testifying before Congress about efforts to restore power after Hurricane Irma, an official from the Department of Energy said in 2018 that the “complicated nature of an island response created significant logistical challenges as well as a response and recovery timeline that is longer than a continental United States disaster.”
Even after any trailers get on the ground, it’s essential that FEMA ensure they’re durable enough to last for months or even years. In past cases, some of them have developed mold after months of use, or exploded due to faulty propane tanks.
Still, direct housing relief will be all the more important in Maui, which was experiencing a severe housing shortage before the fires. Home prices increased by about 35 percent between 2019 and 2022, making it Hawaiʻi’s least affordable county for homeownership. Half of households spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent or mortgages.
West Maui, which includes Lahaina, in particular had a large population of renters and households with more than one family. According to the county’s hazard mitigation plan, 39 percent of housing units in the region were in multi-family developments like apartment buildings, and 16 percent of people lived in crowded quarters, among the highest rates in the county. The fires destroyed a large chunk of that affordable housing, including a 142-unit subsidized apartment complex in Lahaina.
Hawaiʻi National Guard members direct traffic outside the War Memorial Complex, which is acting as one of the main shelters for Maui’s wildfire survivors. Gabriela Aoun Angueria
“It’s gonna be really tough,” said Cassandra Abdul, the director of Nā Hale O Maui, a Maui-based nonprofit that works to develop permanent affordable housing. “We already have a really critical housing shortage, and it’s horribly expensive to rent. It takes a long time to get housing built here, because everything has to be imported, and the permitting process can take years.”
The lack of available housing will ensure that many victims reside in temporary shelter for months, said Mihir Parikh, a senior program director at Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing nonprofit.
“The emergency housing sometimes ends up becoming permanent housing,” he said. “Given the lack of availability of land on Hawaiʻi,” he added, “FEMA needs to explore other options, like modular homes, that can be added to over time.” These prefabricated units are anchored in place, unlike trailers, and can provide permanent housing if necessary. Parikh said that the county and state governments should loosen zoning requirements to allow for alternative housing types such as cottages and in-law units.
Abdul says she’s optimistic that the island will recover eventually, but says it will take several years to build enough affordable housing to replace what’s been lost. Nā Hale O Maui lost 15 below-market units during the fire. Without permanent replacements, she said, many people will end up leaving the island once disaster aid runs out.
“I suspect that there are going to be people that are going to move away,” she said. “Whether that’s going to be permanent or temporary, we don’t know.”
Gabriela Aoun Angueira contributed reporting to this story.
Inside the Hawaiian Canoe Club hale, or house, volunteers set out boxes filled with donated diapers, toiletries, and clothes for families to pick up. Against a backdrop of the bright blue waters of Kahului Harbor and the cloud-covered West Maui mountains, they filled trucks with gasoline cans, propane tanks, and coolers of ice behind a sign reading “Donate — We have convoy to Lahaina.”
A mile away, outside the entrance to the shelter at War Memorial Gym, a steady stream of cars pulled up along pallets stacked high with supplies. Drivers called out through their windows how many people they were delivering to, their ages and needs. An assembly line of volunteers led by Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiians, stuffed each vehicle with donations before moving on to the next.
And on a corner lot in a neighborhood near Maui High School, a Hawaiian family turned their front yard into a distribution center, collecting necessities for the dozens of people crammed into the homes of family or friends or living in their cars nearby. The family had taken to affectionately calling a large trailer in front of the house, where people could sift through carefully organized boxes of clothing, the “walk-in closet.”
Across Maui, community hubs like these have cropped up with dizzying speed in the days since wildfires swept through Maui on August 8, killing at least 99 (with the death toll expected to rise), destroying more than 2,200 buildings, and displacing thousands. They are led by the community, and grounded in the deeply held Hawaiian values of caring for, and sharing with, one another. But they are also driven by a growing concern that the people still in their homes around Lahaina and displaced across Maui are not getting enough help from authorities.
Volunteers distributed supplies to a line of cars outside oft he War Memorial shelter in Kahului on Saturday.
Gabriela Aoun / Grist
“A lot of people are mobilizing,” Leo Nahenahemailani Smith, one of the volunteers at the canoe club, said Sunday. “With aloha, you give whether people ask or not, it’s in our nature.”
In Wisconsin on Tuesday, President Joe Biden, noting that the wildfire was the deadliest the nation has seen in more than a century, vowed that the people of Maui will get all the help they need. “Every asset, every asset they need will be there for them, and we’ll be there on Maui as long as it takes, as long as it takes and I mean that sincerely.”
But in the week since the fires ravaged West Maui, much of the burden of helping survivors has fallen on local volunteers, with government assistance noticeably absent in some places.
On Sunday, volunteers arrived at the canoe club at 7:30 a.m. to put out boxes of donations. Others made calls to area shelters to see what they needed, then dispatched drivers with supplies. Most had been working for five days straight, sometimes 12-hour shifts. A few had set to work after helping neighbors and relatives fend off the fires that burned upcountry Maui.
A steady flow of people passed through the hale dropping off donations. A family from Hana, a two-hour drive away, stopped by on their way to Costco, asking what they could provide. They returned a couple hours later with propane and ice. A young man offered some two-way radios. A group of firefighters from Honolulu filled a truck with cases of water before heading off to a shelter. A couple with a baby strapped into the back seat of their car dropped off gas cans they’d filled themselves.
Members of the Honolulu Fire Department picked up donated water from the canoe club to take to a shelter in Napili.
Gabriela Aoun / Grist
Others came seeking items for themselves or for those they were caring for. A woman asked about baby wipes, which she hadn’t been able to find. A man who lost his home picked out a few shirts and shorts. A couple whose house had been spared in the upcountry fires filled their truck with supplies for their neighbors, all of whom had lost their homes.
Sunday afternoon, volunteers cooked and packed up hot meals before a convoy of pickup trucks arrived to transport food, gasoline, propane, and coolers of ice to Lahaina and the surrounding areas.
It is unclear how many people remain in Lahaina, but two sources estimated the number might exceed 1,000. Access to West Maui remains restricted, and the few entry points have at times been chaotic and tense. At first, residents were told they would not be allowed back if they left, so many chose to stay. Some had no other choice.
“They have nowhere else to go,” said Tiare Lawrence, one of the volunteers at the Hawaiian Canoe Club. Many of her relatives lost their houses, including one that had been in the family for four generations.
Others have been afraid to leave their homes for fear of looters and thieves. “A lot of people are hunkering down just to protect their homes,” Lawrence said.
Supplies are being taken into West Maui by people who can prove they live there or who have special passes. Those without them are finding workarounds. In the first days of the recovery, brigades of boats and jet skis ferried supplies.
So many deliveries of clothes and household goods have arrived that some are being turned away. But with power still out in portions of West Maui, volunteers have shifted their focus to the supplies needed to sustain residents in the long-term, like fuel for generators, ice, solar lamps, batteries, and water. West Maui residents have been warned against drinking the water even if it’s boiled because of wildfire contaminants. “That’s the hardest stuff to find right now, and it’s the stuff we most need,” said Chase Pico, a volunteer at the distribution site outside the War Memorial shelter.
Donation centers have shifted focus from clothing and food and are keeping families stocked with baby products, toiletries, and longer-term needs like fuel for generators and coolers of ice. Gabriela Aoun / Grist
Community members dropped off gas cans and propane tanks at the Hawaiian Canoe Club in Kahului to be delivered to families without power in Lahaina. Gabriela Aoun / Grist
Hubs inside the restricted zone offer food, water and other essentials, but volunteers worry they are not reaching people who can’t leave their homes or who live in more remote areas. They’re driving on back roads, going neighborhood by neighborhood to find people who aren’t being reached by state and federal authorities. Many told Grist they’re not seeing any indications of government aid around Lahaina beyond the disaster area.
“I haven’t seen people in uniform, only locals in trucks [making deliveries],” said Cheyanne Kaawa, who has spent days shuttling supplies into Lahaina and couldnʻt understand why Governor Josh Green had not yet requested U.S. military assistance. The Hawaii National Guard is on the ground on Maui, but the governor has not yet requested active-duty troops. The governor’s office did not return two requests for comment.
With multiple storms forecast to hit the area this week, Kaawa worried that the prolonged wait is endangering survivors, especially ones that lost their roofs. “Today is day eight, three fires are still going, our water is contaminated, and a lot of people still have no power or ways to communicate,” she said. “Vulnerable homes and lives that were spared in the first fire might not make it through the next storm.”
Paul Kaʻuhane Luʻuwai, head coach of the canoe club and one of the convoy drivers who had made multiple delivery trips, said on Sunday that he also had not seen anyone from FEMA in the neighborhoods. His family lost seven houses in the fire. “I want to know where the hell is the government,” he said. “Yes, theyʻre looking for remains, but it’s been five days. Where are they?”
A FEMA spokesperson said that the agency was providing the services that the state had requested of them, including facilitating shelter and registering residents so that they can receive aid, and that FEMA would enter Lahaina upon the state’s request.
Asked why the Red Cross had not yet gone into the restricted area to distribute aid and check on residents, a spokesperson for the agency, which is managing several shelters, also said they needed permission from state officials to do so.
After being turned away because there were too many volunteers at War Memorial shelter, a girls’ basketball team came to fold donations at a distribution center set up on a family’s front yard.
Gabriela Aoun / Grist
The need for aid extends well beyond those who remain in Lahaina. Around 2,100 people entered shelters after the fire, but countless evacuees remain dispersed across the island, staying with loved ones, in their cars, or even in tents in yards. Those who are hosting them are straining to support the displaced in addition to their own families.
Kekane and Josh Kuloloio set up a distribution center in their front yard after realizing that many people had taken shelter in homes and in parked cars around their neighborhood. Kekane said she knew of one house hosting 24 people. Theyʻd also met a man who was living in his car with his son.
The situation has put stress on the Kuloloios too, who have five children, two of them younger than 3. It’s been hard to find diapers because of the concentrated demand. “Itʻs an island-wide crisis,” said Josh Kuloloio.
He’s also frustrated by how difficult the government had made it to bring help or to even volunteer at official shelters.
Guided by the clothing sizes sheʻd written on her hand, a young volunteer rummaged through boxes at the Hawaiian Canoe Club to find clothes for a displaced family. Gabriela Aoun / Grist
“FEMA knows nothing about our culture of taking care of everybody, of nobody left behind,” he said. “They’re butting up against who we are.”
Similar frustrations came up at the canoe club. A woman appeared with boxes of homemade fruit cups that she tried to donate at the War Memorial Gym shelter but had been turned away. “The aunties in there are tired of eating canned food, but they won’t even let me give them fruit,” she said.
A jeep with “Pray for West Side” written on its back window waited at a shelter to gather supplies to shuttle into Lahaina. Gabriela Aoun / Grist
Despite restrictions that many residents say limit them from caring for their own, community volunteers continue finding ways to offer whatever solace they can. When a little boy arrived at the canoe club missing the toy trucks he’d lost in the fire, volunteers rummaged through donations until they found a Hot Wheels car for him.
“Itʻs just a little bit of normalcy, a tad of comfort,” said Tahina Kinores, one of the coordinators. That evening, she stayed three hours past when the hub was scheduled to close, so that families who didn’t want to be seen asking for help could come get supplies in private.
Around 8:30 p.m. Kinores and some close friends who had been there for 13 hours moved all the boxes back into the hale. Someone turned on a reggae song, they opened beers, and swayed to the music. It was only a brief reprieve. The next morning, they’d do it all over again.
Grist senior staff writer Anita Hofschneider contributed reporting to this story.
The wind picked up on Maui the night before the fires broke out. By early morning on August 8, gusts were whipping fast enough to topple trees and rip roofs off buildings in the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, on Maui’s west coast. Then came the conflagrations. Fanned by the blistering winds, flames hurtled as fast as one mile per minute as they engulfed Lahaina and other towns in Maui, like Kula, killed at least 96 people, and incinerated homes, businesses, and churches.
As thousands of displaced people take refuge in makeshift shelters and hotels, cadaver dogs and search crews are still trying to determine the true scope of damage from the deadliest wildfires in the United States in more than a century. Photos from Lahaina show harrowing scenes: rows of charred buildings behind the scorched shells of cars, consumed by fire as they sat in traffic; corpses of boats burnt on the water; a historic church reduced to rubble.
“Ultimately all the pictures that you will see will be easy to understand,” said Josh Green, Hawaiʻi’s governor, “because that level of destruction in a fire hurricane — something new to us in this age of global warming — was the ultimate reason so many people perished.”
Wildfires are not new to Hawaiʻi. According to the state’s wildfire management organization, roughly 0.5 percent of its total land catches fire every year, on par with other U.S. states. But conditions — many of them connected to climate change — have evolved to make parts of the state more likely to ignite. The blazes in Maui, for instance, were brought on by a “flash drought,” a major hurricane south of the archipelago, invasive weeds that acted like kindling,and winds that ran as high as 81 mph, according to the governor. There are allegations that Hawaiian Electric’s power lines played a role in the fire, too. The result: a wildfire even deadlier than the Camp Fire that incinerated the town of Paradise, California, killing 85 people, in 2018.
Though it’s too early to say exactly how climate change contributed to Maui’s wildfires, scientists have long been saying that similar disasters, like wildfires in the western United States, should be expected with more frequency and intensity on a warming planet.
Climate change is “leading to these unpredictable or unforeseen combinations that we’re seeing right now and that are fueling this extreme fire weather,” Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia’s faculty of forestry, told the Associated Press.
This summer, parts of Hawaiʻi experienced a “flash drought,” a rapid drying-out of soil and plants that occurs when hot air sucks moisture out of the ground. The drought left parts of Maui especially dry and ready to combust. Such droughts are likely exacerbated by climate change — although a longer-term trend of declining precipitation, which also contributed to the fires, may not be directly connected to human-caused climate change, a scientist told the Washington Post.
Compounding the drought, a proliferation of grasslands on abandoned plantations made vast fields into fuel for the fires. “There’s all these huge, huge quantities of vegetation and it’s all papery thin and ready to go,” Clay Trauernicht, a wildfire scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi, told Grist. As much as one-quarter of the state is covered by invasive grasses.
Adding to the drought and fields of tinder were exceptionally high winds, running from 60 to 81 miles per hour. Experts have said that the winds were fueled in part by Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 storm that barreled across the Pacific south of Hawaiʻi. Dora created a difference in air pressure across the archipelago that led to unusually fierce winds — the sort that plied roofs from buildings before driving flames across Maui.
As climate change makes hurricanes more intense, not all will make landfall, but they still could help spur deadly disasters. On Maui, where the fires did an estimated $5.6 billion of damage, according to the governor, the death toll is likely to climb for at least 10 more days, Green said. “They will find 10 to 20 people per day probably, until they finish,” he told CBS News. Hundreds of people are still missing.
The death toll from the Maui wildfires is now about 100 and is expected to continue to climb in what is now the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century and the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history. As recovery efforts continue, many residents are asking why Hawaii’s early warning system, with about 80 alarms on the island of Maui alone, did not get activated to alert residents about the…
Nelly Niumatalolo couldn’t believe it when she heard it. A wildfire in Lahaina? The Oahu-born grandmother was just there in April, visiting her 39-year-old son, his fiancé, and her granddaughter. Surely it wasn’t like the fires she’d seen in her home state of California, where she’s lived for the past three decades, watching fire after fire sweep through towns with increasing ferocity.
But as Niumatalolo clicked through Facebook on Wednesday, the images and footage streaming out of the disaster unfolding in west Maui looked apocalyptic. There was Front Street, an ash-gray shell of itself, just blocks away from where her son had lived until Tuesday. There was the huge banyan tree near the shoreline, 150 years old, blackened, surrounded by empty plots of decimated buildings. There were the fishing boats where her son had worked for the past four years, burnt and floating or conspicuously gone.
Also missing was her son, Jake Atafua, who stopped responding to texts Tuesday afternoon after heading back to the fire when a friend called for help. Niumatalolo joined a chorus of people online posting photos, begging for any proof that he had survived what’s being called the worst natural disaster in Hawaii in 30 years.
“As a mother, it’s been heartbreaking, because you never expect anything like this to happen to you or to one of your children. I’m just, I’m not together, I’m just a little broken,” she said. “Somewhere deep in my heart I have faith, I know whatever happens, I know the Lord will give me that peace to know that he will be OK. But I’m very broken. Because that’s my son. He’s my only boy.”
The raging fires killed at least six people on Maui, destroying the historic town of Lahaina and causing what is expected to be billions of dollars in damages. More than two thousand people filled emergency shelters, with thousands more stranded at the airport trying to leave. Twenty people suffered serious burns as of Wednesday, with some airlifted to the state’s only burn unit on Oahu, and many more were missing.
Dozens of people jumped off of Lahaina Harbor to escape the smoke and flames, prompting a Coast Guard rescue and local effort to pull people into boats and later, collect the bodies floating by the seawall. The governor called in the National Guard, and opened the Hawaii Convention Center on Oahu to help house 4,000 tourists whom state officials asked to leave Maui. President Biden directed “all available federal assets” to help with the disaster response, including Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.
Hawaii state leaders were caught off guard by the fact that winds from Hurricane Dora passing south of the archipelago this week fueled the conflagration, for hours preventing helicopters from getting airborne to pour water on the flames.
Clay Trauernicht, a wildfire scientist at the University of Hawaii, said unmanaged non-native grasslands that proliferated with the shuttering of the state’s plantation economy over the past several decades created lots of fuel ready to spark.
“There’s all these huge, huge quantities of vegetation and it’s all papery thin and ready to go,” he said. “The landscape is primed to burn and so it makes us incredibly vulnerable when these weather conditions line up.”
And line up they did. Abby Frazier, a climatologist at Clark University, said it’s dry season and more than a third of Maui County is in drought. West Maui is the drier side of the island — added to that, it’s an El Niño year. The weather phenomenon is marked by unusually warm surface waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean that disrupt atmospheric circulation, leading to extreme weather conditions.
“You have a hurricane moving to the south of us and you have this high pressure system to the north and that’s creating really, really strong winds and low humidity, which is the prime thing you need for fire,” Frazier said, calling from a busy Honolulu airport. “You need dry fuels and you need these atmospheric conditions and that’s exactly what we have right now.”
The fires raged not only on Maui but also on Hawaii Island, where highways similarly closed and many were evacuated and lost power. But the brunt of the damage was on Maui, where firefighters still battled the flames Wednesday evening.
Trauernicht and Frazier said while many people don’t associate wildfires with Hawaii, they’re actually pretty common and becoming increasingly so. Three years ago, Hurricane Lane set aflame 3,000 acres both on Maui and Oahu. Climate change is expected to bring more drought and stronger, more frequent storms.
In some years as much as 1.5% of the state’s land will burn, a proportion comparable to some states in the American West, but firefighters usually prevent the flames from reaching homes. This time, they couldn’t. Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network, was brimming with grief as he watched the images of destruction on his home island and texted with friends rendered suddenly homeless.
The former state legislator says he wants people to know that Lahaina is not just a tourist town, a place where people go to tiki bars and shop. Its historic importance to Indigenous people like himself goes beyond its plantation houses — it was for a time the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, once the site of the palace of King Kamehameha III.
“If you walk end to end on Front Street, you’ll actually see it’s like a Disneyland ride of the timeline of commerce in Hawaii from royalty to whaling, sandalwood, sugar and pineapple, tourism and luxury,” he said. He sees the fire as a tragic symbol of the terminal point of that progression of colonization and capitalism: “where it all ends up if you continue down this trajectory.” He wants President Biden to take far more aggressive action to confront the climate crisis.
But this is not the end. Next year could be just as bad, or worse.
“One thing that makes me nervous is we tend to get more rainfall in the summer with El Niño and then we get drought in the winter, which builds up all these fire fuels and then dries them out,” said Frazier. “And so we can also expect a pretty bad wildfire season next year.”
Trauernicht hopes this prompts the state to take fire prevention seriously by establishing networks of fire breaks, incentivizing grazing and pursuing other ways to minimize risk.
“Because those fuels can be altered, we don’t have to be vulnerable. We can change them proactively,” he said.
But he added that one element of this week’s tragedy is new, and still needs to be grappled with: the emotional trauma of the sudden disaster.
It remains unclear how many people lost their homes, how many have died. Maui was already facing a major affordable housing crisis and it’s not clear where people will live, who will leave, whether they’ll have a choice. Many in West Maui still lacked cell service Wednesday, and others who were able to tell their stories said they felt shell-shocked.
“It was like a war zone,” Alan Barrios told Honolulu Civil Beat, explaining he had to leave one of his four cats behind while escaping Lahaina after the feline bolted. “There was explosions left and right.”
As of Wednesday evening, Niumatalolo still hadn’t heard from her son, feeling anxious and weighed down by the heaviness of not knowing. But she added one thing was certain: “I don’t think Maui will be the same.”
Climate disasters are unfolding so quickly one can barely keep track. Wildfires in Canada have already burned millions of acres and sent thick smoke across the entire East Coast of the U.S. Italy’s recent flooding has displaced more than 23,000 people. Heat waves in India, Spain, and beyond are devastating crops and killing people. And warming is not just increasing, it’s accelerating.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
People buy insurance to protect against unlikely but devastating events, big catastrophes that drive households and businesses to financial ruin and bankruptcy. That makes insurance most people’s first line of defense against climate disasters, which now destroy tens of billions of dollars of property in the United States every year. It makes good sense to pay a couple hundred dollars a month in premiums so you don’t go broke if a flood, hurricane, or wildfire destroys your house.
Heat has long been the exception to this rule among climate disasters. Because heat waves don’t tend to destroy homes and businesses, it’s not practical for most people to buy insurance against high temperatures, and thus there’s never been such a thing as widespread commercial “heat insurance.” Big farming operations may take out insurance to protect against a hot spring that kills crops, and retail companies may buy a policy to hedge against a decline in foot traffic on scorching days, but ordinary people historically don’t want or need financial protection against heat.
Over the past few years, as scorching heat waves have become more common with worsening climate change, that has begun to change. A new suite of unconventional heat insurance products has emerged in a range of countries around the world: Japanese insurers began to sell single-day heatstroke insurance; a charitable foundation launched a program to insure Indian workers against lost wages; and an experimental new policy emerged to protect British farmers against heat stress in cattle.
Some of these new products have drawn lots of media attention in the United States, but experts believe it’s unlikely that heat insurance will ever become a big commercial industry like fire and hurricane insurance are today. Instead, they say, heat insurance makes more sense as a financial tool to help protect people in developing countries against climate change — but only if it’s coupled with government policies that reduce the risks of heat for good.
The heat insurance trend broke into the mainstream last year when two major Japanese insurance companies rolled out novel heat stroke insurance products. The Asian country was enduring a sweltering summer, and the companies were aiming to capitalize on concern about heat exposure by offering short-term health insurance plans that exclusively covered heat stroke. The plans led to a flurry of media coverage in financial publications like Bloomberg, Fortune, and the Financial Times.
Even in a national insurance market known for innovation, the Sumitomo Life heat stroke program stands out as unusual. Using a mobile app, a customer pays the equivalent of about 70 cents for a one-day insurance policy that kicks in at 10 o’clock in the morning. If the buyer suffers heat stroke over the course of the day and ends up in the hospital, the policy covers the costs of an intravenous drip and most other medical treatment. (Japan has a universal health care system funded by tax revenue and premiums, but patients still pay a copay for most health services and treatments.) A customer can also pay about $1.57 for a plan that lasts an entire month. The program offered by the other company, Sompo, works more or less the same way.
More than 80,000 people have enrolled in Sumimoto Life’s program since it launched last summer, said Junichiro Kaneda, a spokesperson for the insurance company. During the hottest stretch of last summer, several thousand people purchased the coverage per day.
“Due to the abnormal weather conditions in the summer, the risk of heat stroke has been reported daily in the media, leading to an increase in people’s potential anxiety,” said Kaneda in response to questions from Grist. “Therefore, it is expected that the market will expand.”
Another heat insurance program in the north of India drew a similarrush of mediaattention this spring. The program, led by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation, provides “heat income micro-insurance” to thousands of women who work outdoors in the state of Gujarat, aiming to protect them from losing wages on the days when it’s too hot to work.
Arsht-Rockefeller, which has also endowed “chief heat officer” positions in cities around the world, partnered with the insurance startup Blue Marble to enroll 21,000 women in the program. The women are members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a trade union that represents more than 2.5 million female day laborers in northern India who work in a wide variety of jobs from salt harvesting to street food vending. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited India in February to see how salt harvesters were dealing with high temperatures and later announced that she would serve as Arsht-Rock’s “global ambassador for heat, health, and gender.”
A woman in New Delhi waits to fill her vessels with drinking water from a tanker. The city experienced a water crisis last year thanks to a severe heat wave.
Sonu Mehta / Hindustan Times via Getty Images
In contrast to the traditional insurance model, where a customer receives a payout only after filing a claim for a specific amount of damage, the program uses what’s known as a “parametric” system, meaning that it pays out when measurable conditions meet certain parameters. The women pay a $3 enrollment fee to enroll, equivalent to about a day’s wages, and if local temperatures average above 90 degrees for three straight days, they receive a digital cash transfer worth a few days’ wages, allowing them to stay home from work. (The enrollment fee doesn’t reflect the full cost of the premiums, which Arsht-Rock and an anonymous donor paid for.) The foundation also distributed gloves to protect workers from hot surfaces and electrolyte tablets to help them stay hydrated.
“The solution for heat right now, while the workers have blisters on their hands, is something immediate,” said Kathy Baughman-McLeod, the director of Arsht-Rock. “The main thing to worry about is, of course, their income, because they have to feed their kids even if they can’t work, right?”
The program went through a two-month test run earlier this year, but even though India suffered through an extended heat wave for most of the spring, the temperature never got high enough to trigger a payout. But the foundation plans to expand the program to millions more women in India over the next few years, and also plans to add an early warning system that alerts workers about heat via WhatsApp.
For the moment, though, all these programs are still niche initiatives. The Arsht-Rock adaptation initiative and the Sumitomo insurance plan reached just a few tens of thousands of people each, and other heat insurance products are even smaller. A parametric insurance program for heat-stressed cattle that launched in the United Kingdom this year is still in a trial phase. That program distributes immediate payments to dairy farmers during heat waves, accounting for the fact that cows can get sick or even die during hot spells.
Heat insurance is unlikely to become a big commercial market in the Global North anytime soon, says Jisung Park, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies climate risk and finance. The Sumitomo heat stroke program might sell well in Japan, a very elderly country where many people are anxious about heat, but Park says most people in the United States and other developed countries likely wouldn’t feel the need to get extra coverage.
“In terms of salience, [heat] is certainly not up there as a big perceived risk,” he told Grist. For most Americans, he said, “the idea of expanding your health insurance coverage for a risk that you’re going to incur by going outside is really kind of unusual. It’s sort of like the salesman at the rental car agency trying to scare you into buying additional coverage even though you already have coverage.”
Pedestrians protect themselves from the sunshine with umbrellas on a day where the temperatures reached over 96 degrees Fahrenheit in Tokyo.
Stanislav Kogiku / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
By the same token, the income insurance that Arsht-Rock designed for Indian workers likely wouldn’t appeal to workers in developed countries who have robust workplace protections, paid sick leave, or unemployment benefits. Rather, it’s meant to protect vulnerable self-employed populations who don’t have a safety net. Even though this kind of heat income micro-insurance might appeal to workers in the U.S. who don’t have a centralized employer and who face extreme risk working outdoors on hot days — like day laborers, delivery workers, and agricultural workers — Arsht Rock is focusing for the moment on expanding it in the Global South.
Instead of spurring new types of insurance products, heat waves are more likely to place more stress on existing insurance markets in the United States and other developed countries. Most U.S. states require employers to carry worker’s compensation insurance that cover on-the-job injuries, including those related to heat. Park’s own research shows that heat waves make on-the-job injuries much more likely, which could one day place a new strain on the worker’s comp system and drive up premiums.
In the developing world, though, parametric insurance will be an essential part of adapting to climate change, said Ekhosuehi Iyahen, the secretary general of the Insurance Development Forum, a partnership between the World Bank and major insurers that aims to design new climate insurance for developing countries.
“In the developing world context, we’re dealing with markets where insurance is not readily available, accessible, affordable,” Iyahen told Grist. “There’s a huge protection gap that exists there, and that’s very different from most developed markets where insurance in most instances is built out.”
Even so, said Iyahen, the best solution might not be heat insurance as such. For outdoor workers like the women in Gujarat, the temperature outside is the most important factor in whether it’s safe to work, but heat can also cause droughts, wildfires, or crop failures. Adapting to climate change requires cushioning people in developing countries from the losses that follow big disasters, and parametric insurance can help do that. The programs allow people to insure themselves against all kinds of calamities, not just the ones that destroy property, and it also makes payouts faster and easier, removing the need to file and authenticate claims.
“I often am a little bit reserved when you talk about heat insurance,” said Iyahen. “Heat is really a much more complex hazard than it’s sometimes perceived, because heat can manifest itself in different ways. You can have heat that’s linked to drought, absence of water, which can have an impact on agriculture. It can have an impact on your ability to generate electricity, or your health.”
Indeed, Baughman-McLeod of Arsht-Rock says that the insurance initiative only makes sense as part of a broader climate adaptation program. An insurance plan that protects workers against lost wages on hot days only makes sense alongside initiatives that make homes and workplaces more resilient to heat over the long term, whether by developing stronger labor protections or improving residential access to air conditioning.
“The program is going to be successful because it also has physical equipment and the early warning system,” she said. “Insurance alone is not going to do this.”
When the 60-day trial in northern India ended without a heat wave that triggered payment, Arsht-Rock asked the Self-Employed Women’s Association about reimbursing the participating women for the fees they’d paid to participate. Baughman-McLeod said the women declined the reimbursement, saying the protective gear was more than worth the money they paid to enroll. They never got a payout, but they were still safer than they would have been.
A new bill in Congress would establish special advisors across federal agencies to specialize in U.S. territories and certain Pacific nations.
The move could be especially important for those island communities as climate change exacerbates coral bleaching, sea level rise, worsening storms, and other environmental threats that require federal support to address.
“The standards that work at a national level just often don’t make as much sense in each of the territories, and so there can be different impacts that are negative, even if well-intentioned,” said Neil Weare, co-founder of the organization Right to Democracy that advocates for the rights of people in U.S. territories. “Having some sensitivity to addressing those unique needs, I think will be better for the people in the territories, but also then better for the goal of environmental protection.”
More than 3.5 million residents live in U.S. territories – Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands – but lack voting power either for president or for voting members of Congress. Each territory has a seat in the House of Representatives but can’t vote on legislation, and don’t have any voice or seat in the Senate. They’re also home to thousands of Indigenous peoples, such as Samoans and Carolinians.
The bill also includes the independent Pacific nations of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands who rely on U.S. funding in exchange for lending their land, airspace and surrounding waters to the U.S. military. The Marshall Islands in particular are grappling with the effects of sea-level rise on low-lying atolls as well as the legacy of U.S. nuclear testing.
But a lack of awareness at the federal level about each territory and country’s unique history often leads to confusion, frustration and inconsistencies. H.R. 5001 aims to address that.
“The unique circumstances of the Marianas and other Insular Areas are too easily overlooked when federal agencies set national policies,” said Rep. Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan from Northern Mariana Islands, who co-sponsored the measure, adding the bill would lead to better community input and communication.
On Guam, the U.S. Marine Corps is building a new live-fire training range while the Biden administration has been pushing to expand a national marine monument in the Pacific despite concerns from local fisheries. Federal emergency officials have been grappling with the after-effects of major hurricanes and typhoons like Hurricane Maria and Super Typhoon Yutu, including currently Typhoon Mawar on Guam.
Esther Kiaʻāina, former Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Insular Areas under the Obama administration, says H.R. 5001 is a good idea but thinks the new positions would need to be placed at a high level within each department to be effective.
She also thinks many of the problems could be avoided if the Office of Management and Budget were required to analyze all legislation for its impact on U.S. territories prior to the bills becoming law. Such analysis could have long-lasting impacts. In 1996, for example, migrants from the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau lost their access to programs like federal disaster aid after eligibility definitions were changed that inadvertently left them out.
Weare from Right to Democracy said the conversation about the government’s role in the territories is particularly relevant this year, which marks 125 years since the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico, Guam and other territories through the Spanish-American War.
“The United States needs to grapple with the reality that it has an undemocratic colonial framework governing 3.6 million people in the five U.S. territories,” he said. “So while this is a positive step forward, there really needs to be a recognition from the president, from Congress, that the United States has a colonial problem that is urgent to address.”
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
The heatwave enveloping much of the world is so deadly that, in Europe, it has acquired two hellish mythical names: Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards Hades, and Charon, the man who, legend has it, ferries the dead to the afterlife.
Workers are taking a stand against the brutal conditions, using walkouts, strikes, and protests to call attention to the outsize danger the heat poses to the people who must work outdoors or in conditions where air condition isn’t available. The ongoing threat has taken the lives of people, from a construction worker in the Italian city of Lodi to farmworkers in Florida, and letter carriers in Texas.
The organizing efforts started in Greece, where workers in the tourism industry — which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP — are chafing under the strain. Athens’s most famous archaeological site, the Acropolis, closed for a few days earlier this month, but even as the government reopened it, temperatures continued soaring to 111 degrees Fahrenheit. The Acropolis’s staff, which is unionized through the Panhellenic Union for the Guarding of Antiquities voted to strike during the hottest four hours of each day.
Workers are fed up in Italy, too. Bus drivers have threatened to bring Rome and Naples to a halt, citing oven-like heat and the lack of air conditioning in their vehicles. Even the employees of a McDonald’s staged a walkout, also citing lack of A/C, which most of the country’s restaurant kitchens lack, according to the Italian General Confederation of Labor.
In the U.S., the heat has prompted strikes by Amazon delivery drivers, and Union of Southern Service Workers members in Atlanta rallied for relief after a Burger King refused to fix its broken air conditioning. Currently, the United States relies on employers to enforce heat safety guidelines, and many do not appear interested in doing so — some agricultural and construction companies even going so far as to actively oppose federal heat regulations. Some say it’s counterproductive to do so, as research shows that working under extreme heat yields diminishing returns – after a certain point, workers’ minds and bodies become impaired, and research has shown the cumulative impact of working in extreme heat is costing the U.S. billions in worker productivity.
OSHA started the rulemaking process for a workplace standard on heat exposure in 2021, but there’s still no firm rule in place. Calls for one have ramped up of late, and the Biden administration responded with the nation’s first-ever heat hazard alert and investments in more accurate weather forecasting, among other measures.
Labor organizations, though, are holding firm in their demand for stronger heat protections. Organizers and workers in Texas are particularly concerned that the state has taken a sharp and deadly turn. A new law strips cities of the right to maintain independent worker safety ordinances such as mandating breaks. The bill, which takes effect September 1, will leave many of those decisions to employers, and many workers don’t trust them to operate in good faith.
“As a single mother who depended on construction work for 20 years to run a household alone, I have witnessed how each summer becomes more perilous for my co-workers,” said Marisol Gayosso, a member of Workers Defense Project who lives in Dallas. “Workers are dying in 100-plus degree weather and the brutality of the climate crisis will only exasperate this reality.”
In response to the bill, organized labor and environmental groups, in concert with Texas House Rep. Greg Casar, rallied on July 25 on the front steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. to demand a federal heat standard for U.S. workers. The coalition included workers, members, and staff from United Farmworkers, the Texas AFL-CIO, the Sunrise Movement, and other organizations.
The event was preceded by a public letter, released on July 24 and signed by Casar and 110 colleagues. In it, House lawmakers called on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to develop a federal safety standard for heat exposure, arguing that it would require employers and states to comply with safety measures like providing regular breaks and ample water and shade.
Casar, who was previously an organizer with the Workers Defense Project, billed the action as a “thirst strike,” refusing to drink water, eat, or take a break for the entire day.
Ana Gonzales, the Texas AFL-CIO’s deputy director of politics, says that union membership is what has enabled workers from continent to continent to stand up and walk out, but she fights for non-unionized workers, too.
“If you are part of a union,” she said, “you will get those breaks. Those breaks are in your contract. But for those workers that don’t have unions, we will continue to find ways to protect them.”
It’s dark as usual at night in the Gaza Strip, as routine power cuts plunge Palestinian homes into darkness. But what has been different during the past few weeks is an unprecedentedly stifling summer heatwave. With no electricity, people are getting pushed to their limit. Dina Ahmad, 33, holds her newborn baby. They both look sticky and sweaty. She puts her son’s head in her hand…
July is expected to be the hottest month experienced on earth in 120,000 years – a temperature not felt by human civilization since the end of the ice age.
In a joint report published Thursday by the World Meteorological Organization, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, and Leipzig University, the temperature for the first three weeks of July averaged 62.51 Fahrenheit, breaking the previous record of 61.93 Fahrenheit set in 2019.
In parts of the United States, temperatures have risen above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In Arizona, people have experienced life-threatening burns from falls on hot pavement, in California, inmates swelter as cooling systems fail, and in the Florida Keys, ocean temperatures rose above 100 Fahrenheit this week, the average temperature of a hot tub.
The report adds that the heat in July has already been so extreme that it’s caused fires around the world including in Italy, Greece and Spain killing 40 people and spreading through 13 countries, while in Canada, the worst fire season in 34 years has led to the destruction of nearly 39-thousand square miles.
An analysis published Monday by the World Weather Attribution group, an international science and research team, found that recent heat waves in North America and Europe were nearly impossible without climate change. Researchers also found that this month’s heat wave in China was 50 times more likely to occur in our current warmer world. All three heat waves were hotter than they would have been without the boost from global warming.
The World Meteorological Organization predicts a 98 percent chance that one of the next five years will be 1.5 Celsius hotter than average in the 19th century—1.5 Celsius is the agreed upon temperature rise limit that world leaders promised to avoid by the end of the century in the Paris Climate Agreement.
“Short of a mini-Ice age over the next days,” said U.N.Secretary-general António Guterres. “July 2023 will shatter records.”
The dream that haunts Christine White is always the same, and though it comes less frequently, it isn’t any less terrifying.
The black water comes rushing at the witching hour, barrelling toward her front door in Lost Creek, Kentucky. She’s outside, getting her grandson’s toys out of the yard. It hits her in the neck and knocks her off her feet before racing down a street that has become a vengeful river. She and her husband run to a hillside and scramble upward, grabbing hold of tree roots and branches. She finds her neighbors huddled at the top of the hill. As dawn comes, everything is unrecognizable, the land shifted, houses torn from foundations. They begin to walk through the trees, over the strip mine, out of the forest, in their pajamas and underwear with whatever they were able to carry when they fled.
Then she wakes up.
That night used to replay every time White went to sleep. She started taking antidepressants six months ago, something she felt ashamed of at first but doesn’t anymore. They’ve helped a little, but the dream still haunts her, lightning-seared and vivid.
It’s been one year since catastrophic floods devastated eastern Kentucky, taking White’s home and 9,000 or so others with it. Her current abode — a camper on a cousin’s land — has become, if not home, no longer strange. But it’s the closest thing to home she’ll get till her new house, in another county, is finished. Lost Creek, though, is all but gone forever. What houses remain are empty husks. Some are nothing more than foundations overgrown with grass.
White is never going back. “All the land is gone,” she said.
Christine White poses for a photo in Eastern Kentucky, one year after floods destroyed her home. Grist / Katie Myers
In the early hours of July 28, 2022, creeks and rivers across 13 counties in eastern Kentucky overran their banks, filled by a month’s worth of rain that fell in a matter of days The water crested 14 feet above flood stage in some places, shattering records. All told, 44 people died and some 22,000 people saw their homes damaged —staggering figures in a region where some counties have fewer than 20,000 residents. Officially, the inundation destroyed nearly 600 homes and severely damaged 6,000 more. A lot of folks say that tally is low, based on the number of residents who sought help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As of March about 8,000 applications for housing assistance had been approved. That’s half the number the agency received.
The need for help, specifically housing assistance, was, and remains, acute. Most people here live on less than $30,000 a year, and at the time of the disaster, no more than 5 percent had flood insurance. Multitudes of nonprofits, church and community organizations, businesses, and government agencies have spent months pitching in as best they can. Yet there is a feeling among the survivors that no one’s at the rudder, and it’s everyone for themselves.
President Biden issued a federal disaster declaration the day after the flood, and his administration has disbursed nearly $300 million in aid so far. The state pitched in, too, housing 360 families in trailers parked alongside those from FEMA. Many of those have moved on to more permanent housing, but up to 1,800 are still awaiting a solution.
Some in the floodplains are taking buyouts — selling their homes to the federal government, which will essentially make the land a permanent greenspace. It’s a form of managed retreat, a ceding of the terrain to a changing climate. Some local officials openly worry that the approach doesn’t solve the biggest problem everyone faces: figuring out where on Earth people are going to live now. Eastern Kentucky was grappling with a critical shortage of housing even before the flood, and much of the land available for construction lies in flood-prone river bottoms. That has people looking toward the mountaintops leveled by strip mining.
A vacant building in Whitesbury, Kentucky, one year after floods devastated the Eastern part of the state.
Grist / Katie Myers
Kate Clemons, who runs a nonprofit meal service called Roscoe’s Daughter, sees this crisis every day. As the water receded, she started serving hot meals in the town of Hindman a few nights each week, on her own dime. She figured it would be a months’ work. She’s still feeding as many as 700 hungry people every week. Recently, an apartment building in Hazard burned down, displacing nearly 40 people. Some of them were flood survivors. They’ve joined the others she’s taken to helping find homes.
“There’s no housing available for them,” she said.
Clemons often brings food to Sasha Gibson, who after the flood moved with her boyfriend and nine children into two campers at Mine Made Adventure Park in Knott County. At first, she felt optimistic. “I was hoping that this would open up a new door to something better,” she said, after asking her children to go to the other trailer so she could sit for the interview in her cramped quarters. “Like this is supposed to be a new chapter in our lives.”
But the park, built on what was once a strip mine, became purgatory instead.
Sasha Gibson, left, moved with her boyfriend and nine children into two campers at Mine Made Adventure Park in Knott County. Parker Hobson
Gibson, who lived on family land before the rains came, wants to leave. It’s just that the way out isn’t apparent yet. Many rentals won’t take so big a family. It doesn’t help that many of their identity documents were lost to the flood, making the search that much harder. She got some help from FEMA, but said the money went too quickly.
A caseworker helps navigate a labyrinth of agencies designed to help Kentucky flood victims, and they’ve put in applications at a grab bag of charities building housing. One has told Gibson her case looks promising, but she’s still waiting to hear a final word. Other applications are so long and such a crapshoot — one ran 40 pages, for a loan she’d struggle to pay back — that she’s too tired to put them together.
“It’s a big what-if game,” she said. “They’re not reaching out to you. You’re expected to call them.”
Meanwhile, ATV riders sometimes ride through to the park, kicking up dust and leaving a mess in the restrooms. Gibson tries not to resent them. It’s not their fault she’s stuck.
“While it’s great and, like, they’re having a good time, it’s not a great time for us because we feel like we’re stuck here and we’re, like, an inconvenience and we’re in the way,” she said. “We don’t want to bother anybody.”
As extreme weather intensifies due to climate change, stories like Gibson’s will play out in more and more communities. Though eastern Kentucky hadn’t flooded like this since 1957, parts of the state could face 100-year floods every 25 years or so. About half of all homes in the region hit hardest by last year’s floods — Knott, Letcher, Perry, and Breathitt counties — are at risk for extreme flooding.
Some residents worry that the legacies of surface mining – lost topsoil and tree cover, a ruined water table, and waste retention dams like the one that may have failed near Lost Creek, drowning it – will make communities more vulnerable to floods, compounding the effects of generational poverty and aging rural infrastructure. Housing needs to be built, and some say it needs to go up on the only high, flat land available — that is, the very same strip mines that contributed mightily to this whole problem in the first place.
High ground, especially former strip mines, in the region tends to be off limits. A study completed in the 1970s showed that most of what is available belongs to land companies, coal companies, and other private interests. About 1.5 million acres is believed to have been mined. Many of those sites are too remote to be of much use for housing, though, and those that are closer to town typically have seen commercial development. As the flood recovery has dragged on, though, some of these entities have decided to donate some of what they hold so that there might be more residential construction. Other parcels have been donated by landowning families with cozy relationships to the coal industry, though that hasn’t always gone smoothly.
Chris Doll is vice president of the Housing Development Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to building single-family homes for low-income families. It was beating the drum of eastern Kentucky’s crisis long before the flood. The situation is even more dire now. Without an influx of new construction, he argues, the local economy will spiral even further.
On an overcast and gentle day in June, Doll walked around a former strip mine turned planned development in Knott County called Chestnut Ridge. It sits near a four-lane highway and close to other communities, with ready access to water lines. The Alliance is working with other nonprofits to build around 50 houses here, along with, it hopes, 50 to 150 more on each of two similar sites in neighboring counties. A $13 million state flood relief fund has committed $1 million to the projects.
Chris Doll stands in a field in Eastern Kentucky.
Grist / Katie Myers
The road leading to what could, in just a few years, be a bustling neighborhood opened up into a bafflingly flat landscape, almost like a wooded savanna. It was wide open to the sunshine, unlike the deep hollers and coves that characterize this part of eastern Kentucky. To an untrained eye, it appeared to be a healthy ecosystem. Look closer, though, and one sees the mix of vegetation coal companies use to restore the land: invasive autumn olive, scrubby pine trees, and tall grasses, planted mostly for erosion control.
Still, it’s ideal land for housing, and most folks around here won’t mind the landscaping. Doll said the number of people who need help is overwhelming, and his team can’t help everybody. But they hope to build as many houses as they can.
“There are so many people that have so many needs that I am of the mindset that I will help the person in front of me,” Doll said. “And now we can turn them into homeowners. If that’s what they want.”
On a hillside overlooking another mine site, Doll and I walked up to the ridge to see if we could get a better view of the terrain. It is covered in a thicket of brush, too dense to see beyond. The path wound toward a small clearing, where worn headstones and stone angels sit undisturbed. Family cemeteries are protected from strip mining, and this one was clearly still cared for; the bouquets at the angels’ feet were fresh. The lifecycle of coal had come and made its mark and gone.
Chestnut ridge is a former strip mine turned planned development in Knott County, Kentucky. Grist / Katie Myers
“You can see where they cut out,” Doll said. “They just entirely destroyed that mountain. It’s such a wild thing to think that strip mine land is going to be part of the solution.”
Doll thinks of it as a post-apocalyptic landscape, or maybe mid-apocalyptic, ripe for renewal, but still carrying the weight of its past. The land was gifted by people whose money was made from coal, after all.
“And, you know, it’s great that they’re giving land back,” he said. “I would prefer if it was still mountains, but if it was mountains, we couldn’t build houses on it. So yeah, it’s ridiculously complex.” He shrugged. “Bigger heads than mine.”
He squelched across the mud and back to the car. In the summer heat, two turkeys retreated into the shade of a scrubby pine grove, their tracks etched in the mud alongside hoofprints, probably from deer and elk. The place was alive, if not exactly the way it was before.
The former strip mine developments are financed in part by the Team Kentucky flood relief fund created by the governor’s office. Beyond the four projects already in motion, eastern Kentucky housing nonprofits like the Housing Development Alliance are working with landowners, local officials and the governor to secure more land in hopes of building hundreds more homes.
“Working together – and living for one another – we’ve weathered this devastating storm,” Governor Andy Beshear said last week during a press conference outlining progress made since the flood. “Now, a year later, we see the promise of a brighter future, one with safer homes and communities as well as new investments and opportunities.”
That said, nothing is fully promised just yet, and the process could take years. The homes will be owner-occupied and residents will carry a mortgage, but housing advocates hope to lower as many barriers to ownership as possible and help families with grants and loans. Applications for the developments are expected to open within a couple of months. The plans, thus far, call for an “Appalachian look and feel” that combines an old-style coal camp town and a suburban subdivision to create single-family homes clustered in wooded hollers. Though some might argue that density should be the priority, local housing nonprofits want developments that feel like home to people used to having a bit of land for themselves.
The Housing Development Alliance has built houses on mined land before, and some of them are among those given to 12 flood survivors thus far. Alongside other entities, it has also spent the year mucking, gutting, and repairing salvageable homes, often upgrading them with flood-safe building protocols. Even that comparatively small number was made possible through support from a hodgepodge of local and regional nonprofits, and the labor of the Alliance’s carpenters has been supplanted with volunteer help.
Though the Knott County Sportsplex, a recreation center built on the mineland next to Chestnut Ridge, appears to be sinking and cracking a bit, Doll said houses are too light to cause that kind of trouble. Nonetheless, geotechnical engineers from the University of Kentucky, he said, are studying the land to make sure there won’t be any unpleasant surprises. The plan is for the neighborhoods to be mapped out onto the landscape with roads and sewer lines and streetlights, all of which require the involvement of myriad county departments and private companies; then the Alliance and its partners will come in and do what they do best, ideally as further disaster funding comes down the line.
Still, all involved say that there’s no way they can build enough houses to fill the need.
A flood-damaged building sits vacant in Lost Creek, Kentucky.
Grist / Katie Myers
More federal funding will arrive soon through the U.S. Housing and Urban Development disaster relief block grant program. It allocated $300 million to the region, and organizations like the Kentucky River Area Development District are gathering the information needed to prove to the feds the scale of the region’s need. Some housing advocates are critical of this process, though.
Noah Patton, a senior policy analyst with the Low-Income Housing Coalition, said HUD grants are too unpredictable to forge long-term plans. “One reason it’s exceptionally complicated is because it is not permanently authorized,” he said. A president can declare a disaster and direct the agency to release funds, but Congress must approve the disbursement. Although it all went smoothly in Kentucky’s case, the unpredictability means there are no standing rules on how to allocate and spend funding.
“Oftentimes, you’re kind of starting from scratch every time there’s a disaster,” Patton said.
Local development districts, such as the Kentucky River Area Development District, are holding meetings around the affected counties, urging people to fill out surveys so it can collect the data needed to apply for funding from the federal program. And HUD is overhauling its efforts to address criticism of unequal distribution of funds. Still, the people who might benefit from these block grants may not see the homes they’ll underwrite go up for a few more years, Patton said.
On the state level, housing advocates have been pushing the legislature for more money to flow toward permanent housing. Many also say the combined state, FEMA and HUD assistance isn’t nearly enough. One analysis by Eric Dixon of the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank, pegged the cost of a complete recovery at around $453 million for a “rebuild where we were” approach and more than $957 million to incorporate climate-resilient building techniques and, where necessary, move people to higher ground.
Sasha Gibson has heard rumors of the new developments. She’s somewhat interested insofar as they can get her out of limbo. Until she sees these houses going up, though, they’ll be just another vague promise in a year of vague promises that have gotten her nowhere but a dusty ATV park. It’s been, to put it bluntly, a terrible year, and the moments where the family’s had hope have only made the letdowns feel worse.
“I have no hope to rely on other people,” she said. “I don’t want to give somebody else that much power over me. Because then you’ll just wind up disappointed and sad. And it’s even sadder when you have all of these little eyes looking at you.”
As Gibson waits, others long ago decided to remain where they were and rebuild either because they could or because there wasn’t another choice.
Tony Potter, who’s lived on family land in the city of Fleming-Neon since birth, has spent the past year in what amounts to a tool shed. It’s cramped and doesn’t even have a sink, but the land under it belongs to him, not a landlord or bank. It’s a piece of the world that he owns, and because a monthly disability check is his only income, he doesn’t have much else and probably couldn’t afford a mortgage or rent. Asked if he’d consider moving, he scoffed.
“You put yourself in my shoes,” he said.
Tony Potter, who’s lived on family land in the city of Fleming-Neon since birth, says he won’t consider leaving. Grist / Katie Myers
He can’t believe FEMA would offer to buy someone’s land, or that anyone would take the government up on the offer. “I mean, my God, why in the hell you wanna buy the property and then tell them they can’t live on it?” he said. “What kind of fool would sell their property? Why would you want to sell something and then go rent something?”
James Hall, who also lives in Neon, lost everything but is staying put, in part because he doesn’t think it’ll happen again. The words “thousand-year flood” must mean something, he said. But that didn’t keep him from putting his new trailer a foot and a half higher just in case. He might bump that up to 3 feet when he has a minute. Through it all, he’s kept his dry sense of humor. “If the flood comes again,” he said, “I’m gonna get me a houseboat.”
That kind of outlook buoys Ricky Burke, the town’s mayor. He said the community’s used to flooding – the city sits in a floodplain at the intersection of the Wrights Fork and Yonta Fork creeks – but last year’s was by far the worst. Water and mud plowed through town with enough force to shatter windows. People went without water and electricity for months in some places. A few buildings, like the burger drive-in on the corner at the edge of town, have been repaired, but others remain gaunt and empty.
Still, Burke, a diesel mechanic who was elected in November, is confident the town will pick itself up. He’s heard talk that Neon might need to move some of its buildings, that a return to form simply isn’t viable. He’s dismissive of such a notion. What Neon needs, he believes, is a big party, and he’s planning to celebrate the community’s resilience with flowers, music, and a gathering on the anniversary of the flood.
“These people in Neon ain’t going nowhere,” he said.
A sign hangs above Neon’s main street.
Grist / Katie Myers
Some folks, through persistence, hard work, and a bit of luck, have moved into new homes.
Linda and Danny Smith got theirs from Christian Aid Ministries, a Mennonite disaster relief group, though construction started a couple months later than planned because it ended up taking awhile to figure out exactly where the floodplain was. It was built on their land at the end of a Knott County road called, whimsically, Star Wars Way. According to the Smiths, the group, which was from out of state, nearly ran out of time before having to return home and only just finished the job before leaving. They left so quickly that Danny Smith said he still needed to paint the doors. He isn’t complaining, though. Other homes were left half-done, their new owners left searching high and low for someone to finish the job.
Although grateful for the help that put a roof over his head, Smith got a little tired of dealing with all the people who came to heal his body, his spirit, and his mind even as he completed mounds of paperwork and made calls to anyone he thought might help. “One guy, he kept insisting that I needed to go talk to someone,” he recalled. “And I said ‘who?’”
Linda and Danny Smith stand in the kitchen of their new home. Parker Hobson
The man suggested that Danny talk to a therapist. He laughed at the recollection. It was a laugh heard often around here, the sound of a tired survivor who’s already assessed their own hierarchy of needs many times over. “I said, ‘You know, I don’t need nothing done with my mind. I need a home.”
Despite the frustration, the Smiths are piecing their lives back together, a little bit higher up off the ground than they were before. Christine White is praying for a similar outcome, and thinks she can finally see it on the horizon. The occasional nightmare aside, she’s felt pretty good these days.
FEMA gave her $1,900 awhile back to demolish her house and closed her case, leaving her high and dry. She called housing organization after housing organization until CORE, a national nonprofit that assists underserved communities, agreed to build a small home on a piece of land she owns in Floyd County. Construction began earlier this month. White, who spends her time volunteering at a local food bank, calls it a miracle. “You just gotta go where the Lord leads you,” she says. But it’s not built yet, so she’s trying not to count her chickens.
The climate crisis — driven by the burning of fossil fuels — has significantly increased the likelihood of the dangerous heat waves that baked three different continents this July. Without climate change, the heat wave that broke records in China would have been a one-in-250 year event and the temperatures measured in Mexico and the U.S. and in Southern Europe would have been “virtually impossible…
As a record-breaking heat wave continues in Arizona, reporters with The Intercept say they have observed U.S. Border Patrol holding about 50 migrants inside a chain-link pen in the Sonoran Desert, at the Ajo Border Patrol Station. This comes as the group Humane Borders reports the bodies of at least 13 people were found over the past month in the Sonoran Desert where many migrants cross.
The smoke caught most people by surprise. Communities in California and along the West Coast have been contending with intense fire seasons for years. But for many of us living in New York City, Washington D.C. and along the East Coast, the toxic haze from wildfires raging across Canada was a visceral reminder that climate change isn’t simply hovering on some future horizon. It’s here now…
