Overlapping disasters (nema URL, z newsletteru NY times)
If you’re looking for something to read during this summer of coronavirus and you tend toward the macabre, here’s a suggestion: Sign up for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s daily operations briefing, released via email around 9:30 Eastern time most mornings, and count the number of ongoing disasters.
Wednesday morning’s edition included Hurricane Isaias, which had just plowed up the East Coast, knocking out power for millions of households across a dozen states; wildfires in California and Nevada; the risk of “severe thunderstorms” in the Central Plains; parts of Texas still waiting for damage assessments from Hurricane Hanna last weekend; and, of course, Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, which has killed 155,204 Americans, according to the agency’s latest count.
As Henry Fountain and I wrote this week,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/climate/hurricane-isaias-apple-fire-climate.html this is what living with climate change will look like: Not just an epic, Katrina- or Sandy-scale catastrophe every few years (though probably that, too), but a relentless grind of overlapping disasters, major and minor. The number of disasters that FEMA is handling is about twice what it was three years ago, before Hurricane Harvey struck Texas, and that doesn’t include its pandemic response. Disaster preparation and recovery have blurred into a single frenzied motion, never ending but also never quite succeeding.