Accelerating Pace Of Natural Disasters (Floods & Hurricanes East, Heat/Fires West) Keep Stretching US Emergency Services

It’s been a brutal week in weather-related disasters across the US. Large parts of the south-east are still grappling with the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene, and another potentially catastrophic storm is barreling towards Florida. At the same time, much of the west has been sweltering amid scorching temperatures, which have elevated fire risks and fueled extreme fire behavior. Hurricanes and fires aren’t abnormal in early autumn. But the climate crisis has turned up the dial and created more opportunities for catastrophes to overlap, ultimately adding strain on relief resources, emergency response, and those who have been impacted by the dangerous and destructive events.

While federal officials have been clear that emergency response agencies have been able to lead on recovery efforts following Hurricane Helene, strongly disputing rampant misinformation about misuse or politicization of the funds in areas devastated by the storm, the competing disasters nonetheless have severely strained the agencies.

The homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, told reporters last week that Fema “does not have the funds to make it through the season”. Joe Biden echoed those concerns in a letter to Congress, calling on legislators to increase funding to ensure Fema won’t have to “forego longer-term recovery activities in favor of meeting urgent needs. “The Congress should provide FEMA additional resources to avoid forcing that kind of unnecessary trade-off and to give the communities we serve the certainty of knowing that help will be ongoing, both for the short- and long-term,” the US president wrote.

Meanwhile, dangerous fire conditions in the west prompted officials to bump the country’s response to preparedness level 5 (PL5) on Tuesday, the highest level. The early-October designation – the latest PL5 since the system began registering the levels in 1990 – shows that resources for fighting fire are growing scarce as conditions linger into autumn. It’s already been a busy season for firefighters, many who have logged up to 1,400 hours of overtime fighting blazes that have covered more than 7.6m acres in the US so far this year. Faced with dwindling budgets, the drawdown in seasonal crews, and deployment of more than a thousand wildfire personnel to aid in Helene recovery efforts, agencies are yet again scrambling.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/09/hurricanes-wildfires-climate-crisis