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If Jeff Flake has taken up your cause, your cause is in danger

This weekend, someone — specifically, George Stephanopoulos — saw fit to ask Arizona Senator Jeff Flake what he thought of the Republican party’s position on climate change. Senator Flake, an active member of the party controlling our nation’s legislative branch (as well as its executive and judicial branches), said that he thinks the government should do more to combat warming.

You can always count on Flake to say something vaguely ethical and then do whatever will most directly undermine it. Most recently, you may remember him for giving an impassioned soundbite in support of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assault, … and then immediately voting to confirm Kavanaugh to the court. You may also recall him speaking out against the Republican tax reform effort last December … and then immediately voting to make it law.

Conflict-resolution theory, according to Kim Kardashian West’s makeup artist, dictates that when you are disappointed in someone’s behavior, you should mention some of their good qualities so that it’s clear you are viewing them in a balanced way. Here we go: Jeff Flake has very nice teeth. On Sunday, Flake showed off his excellent chompers while giving the following vacuous reaction to the recent, upsetting U.N. climate change report to Stephanopoulos on ABC’s The Week:

“There’s been more recognition [of the need for climate action] among Republicans, but the administration hasn’t taken the view of some of us that this is something we really need to deal with along with the rest of the world and address this. It’s going to be challenging — obviously, that report that came out was pretty dire. But I think there’s things we can do and should do, and Republicans need to be at the forefront if we want to keep our place and keep our seats.”

It is true that Republican officials have not been particularly proactive on the matter of climate change, to say the least. Just this weekend, in the aftermath of the “dire” IPCC report, President Trump’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow stopped just short of calling the assessment a “scare tactic.” And Flake’s colleague Marco Rubio, who represents Florida, where Hurricane Michael made its devastating landfall this past week, said he did not want to “destroy our economy” to combat climate change.

As a U.S. senator in a majority party, Jeff Flake is one of the one hundredth of one percent of humans in the world who can have a real, direct, tangible influence on slowing climate change. While he’s not seeking re-election this year, here is what he’s done with that position of power: He voted to confirm Rex Tillerson, Rick Perry, and Ryan Zinke to Trump’s cabinet. He voted against restricting methane pollution, incentivizing energy-efficient homes through the mortgage market, and banning fossil fuel drilling in the Arctic Refuge. He has a 8 percent pro-environmental voting record, according to the League of Conservation Voters.

Now that he’s made public comments about the need to take on climate change, I look forward to Jeff Flake’s upcoming vote to build more coal plants on top of whales.

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If Jeff Flake has taken up your cause, your cause is in danger

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Hurricane Michael could help climate denier Rick Scott in the Florida Senate race

As 155 mile-per-hour winds stripped roofs off buildings, and seawater surged through broken windows in the Florida panhandle, political insiders were already speculating about how Hurricane Michael might roil the November elections.

“Amazing to think with razor thin margins in FL statewide elections an October hurricane could swing it all …” Republican strategist Anthony Pedicini wrote on Twitter.

This isn’t the first catastrophe to upset Florida’s midterms. In the race for U.S. Senate, incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson, the Democrat, and sitting Republican Governor Rick Scott, have been firing attack ads accusing the other of causing disgusting algal blooms. (Who’s right?  Read this).

Climate change can influence both hurricanes and algal blooms. Algae thrives in warm water, so hotter weather can mean bigger blooms. And while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that warming won’t cause more tropical storms, it does project that they’ll be more intense.

So with the environment already taking a leading role in electoral politics, could Hurricane Michael provide the updraft Florida climate hawks need to soar to victory?

Floridians are right in line with the rest of the country when it comes to climate change, with 70 percent agreeing that it’s a thing, according to the most recent survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. But Michael made landfall in deep-red MAGA country.

If anything, the hurricane is likely to give voters the warm fuzzies for Scott (who censored the words “climate change” government officials weren’t even allowed to say the words, which made for some funny press conferences), because it give him the chance to go out and do leaderly stuff like activating the National Guard. His campaign had just started running an ad called “Leadership,” portraying him as the guy who got Florida through previous hurricanes. Polls show that Scott got more popular after those storms.

Nelson and the Democrats are fighting back with ads pointing out that, with Scott at the helm, 11 seniors died from heat exposure, and there were charges of profiteering on the cleanup.

All of which looks like normal mudslinging, not exactly a political playing field upended by climate disasters. At least not yet.

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Hurricane Michael could help climate denier Rick Scott in the Florida Senate race

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Floridians who missed voter registration deadline because of Hurricane Michael are out of luck

Hurricane Michael slammed into the Florida Panhandle Wednesday afternoon. The third strongest storm to ever hit the United States, it brought 155 mph winds, heavy rainfall, and towering storm surges. While Floridians in Michael’s path were searching for refuge from the storm’s imminent fury, thousands of would-be voters missed the state’s October 9 voter-registration deadline.

In response, a coalition of civil rights groups including the Advancement Project, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the American Civil Liberties Union has filed an injunction in federal court against the state. Florida officials refused to further extend the registration deadline, despite issuing mass evacuations and closing down offices in preparation for Hurricane Michael. There have also been mounting complaints about “a mess” in the online registration system — with glitches that could have disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters. The lawsuit calls for the voter-registration deadline to be extended by at least one week statewide.

“Our lawsuit is about protecting the right to vote for people impacted by Hurricane Michael in a moment where state officials have been unresponsive and unwilling to do the right things,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told Grist. “It is unreasonable to expect that anyone in Florida will have an opportunity to register and vote when you’re in the storm’s path.”

Considering Florida has a long-standing history of razor-close elections, as well as the high stakes of November’s upcoming election — where climate-related issues like toxic algae blooms and now Hurricane Michael are expected to take center stage — voters who were unable to register could have some political influence on the environmental burdens they and other Floridians face.

According to a new analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists out earlier this month, the same communities that suffer from the burden of socioeconomic distress and environmental segregation — such as exposure to air toxins — also often face restrictive electoral laws. Researchers made the connection by examining Congressional election turnout and compared the effect of both socioeconomic, environment, as well as institutional factors on turnout.

“These cumulative inequalities add up and make it very difficult for those who are most in need of protecting their interests in their community from actually having a voice in the political process,” said Michael Latner, lead author of the analysis and a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow.

Researchers found that the lowest voter turnout happens in vulnerable communities and communities of color. “You get this cumulative effect such that you’ve got environmental injustice inequalities — that is, the burdens of environmental pollution and degradation — more concentrated among people of color and economically burdened communities,” Latner told Grist.

The areas affected by Hurricane Michael are some of Florida’s poorest. Gulf County and Franklin County have some of the highest poverty rates in the state at 23.5 percent and 23.1 percent, respectively. (Florida’s overall poverty rate stands at 14 percent, per the U.S. Census.) Calhoun County, just inland of where the storm made landfall, has a poverty rate of 21 percent. It’s also the county with the lowest median household income in the state — less than $32,000 per year.

“People who are economically depressed, in many ways, have less of a voice,” said Donita Judge, senior attorney and co-director of the Power and Democracy Program at the Advancement Project, one of the groups that brought suit against the state. “When some communities catch a cold, poor communities catch pneumonia. It’s always worse for them to overcome.”

This is not an isolated instance. Back in 2016, civil rights groups also sued the state after its refusal to extend the voter registration deadline during Hurricane Matthew. “Everybody has had a lot of time to register,” said Florida Governor Rick Scott at the time. Scott is currently on the ballot for one of the state’s two seats in the Senate.

But Scott’s response ignores the fact that, historically, there are spikes in voter registration rates right as a deadline approaches. In 2016, after a court ordered an additional one-week extension of the statewide deadline to accommodate those affected by Matthew, more than 100,000 additional Floridians registered.

Of course, Florida is not the only state facing allegations of voter suppression. Texas, which has some of the worst voter registration and voter participation rates, rejected 2,400 online voter registrations before the October 9 deadline. In Georgia, 53,000 voter registrations — of which nearly 70 percent belonged to African-Americans — are in limbo after the state’s Republican candidate for governor, who is also its current secretary of state, began overseeing an “exact match” registration verification process.

On Sunday, Florida’s Secretary of State Ken Detzner authorized election supervisors in select counties to accept paper registration applications whenever their offices reopen. But considering that prolonged recovery efforts follow soon after devastating hurricanes, civil rights groups feel this “limited, confusing, and inconsistent” solution was insufficient.

As human-induced climate change continues unchecked, disasters the likes of Michael are becoming the norm. “From Hurricane Katrina to Hurricane Michael, these past few years make clear that climate change is having an impact on our country,” Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said. “Election officials should do a better job at having emergency plans in place that safeguard the rights of voters.”

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Floridians who missed voter registration deadline because of Hurricane Michael are out of luck

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Hurricane Michael is a monster storm and an unnatural disaster

Hurricane Michael made landfall early Wednesday afternoon near Mexico Beach, Florida, as a high-end Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds of 155 mph, just 2 mph below Category 5 strength.

The hurricane will likely devastate Florida’s Panhandle communities. It is, simply, a history-changing storm. According to the National Hurricane Center, “most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.”

As Michael approached land, meteorologists struggled to find words to describe it. On Twitter, the National Weather Service said, in all caps, “THIS IS A WORST CASE SCENARIO.” The hurricane’s winds and waves were so strong, their rumblings were detected on seismometers — equipment designed to measure earthquakes. Michael is expected to produce storm surge — typically the deadliest part of any hurricane — of up to 14 feet, smashing local records.

No storm remotely this strong has ever hit this part of Florida. The previously strongest hurricane to hit the Florida Panhandle had winds of 125 mph, 30 mph weaker than Michael’s. The local National Weather Service office in Tallahassee issued a chilling warning that Michael was “not comparable to anything we have seen before.”

Only the 1935 “Labor Day” hurricane, which hit the Florida Keys, and 1969’s Hurricane Camille, which struck Mississippi, were more intense at landfall in all of U.S. history. Michael is the fourth Category 4 hurricane to hit the U.S. in just 15 months, joining last year’s trio of Harvey, Irma, and Maria — an unprecedented string of catastrophic hurricane disasters.

In the hours before landfall, Michael rapidly intensified, strengthening from a Category 1 to a strong Category 4 in less than 36 hours — consistent with recent research on climate change’s impact on storms. Michael did this after passing over unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, which likely helped to increase the storm’s moisture content and provide fuel for more intense thunderstorms, a deeper central pressure, and stronger winds. Sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico have risen by about a foot over the past 100 years, so there’s a direct link between Michael’s coastal flooding and long-term climate change.

Recovery from Michael is likely to be a painfully slow process. The Panhandle is the most impoverished region of Florida, and this kind of a storm would be difficult to overcome even for wealthy communities. Calhoun County, just inland of where Michael made landfall, is the lowest-income county in the state, with a median household income of less than $32,000 per year. As we saw during last month’s Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas, it’s likely that thousands of people couldn’t even afford to evacuate.

Even if Michael wasn’t making landfall in a particularly vulnerable section of U.S. coastline, it would be an unrecoverable storm for many families. Our inaction on climate change made Michael into an unnatural disaster.

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Hurricane Michael is a monster storm and an unnatural disaster

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Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke didn’t debate climate change. Will it come up next time?

Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke faced off on Friday, September 21, in the most high-profile Senate debate of the election season so far. As you might expect, it did not include a single mention of climate change.

Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, and O’Rourke, the Democratic congressman who’s challenging him, have starkly different views on the issue, but voters are not hearing enough about those views. Climate change poses huge threats in Texas, including extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and coastal flooding. The Houston area is still recovering from last year’s record-breaking Hurricane Harvey, which multiple scientific studies found was made worse by climate change. Long known as an oil and gas powerhouse, Texas now has a big stake in the clean energy economy, leading the nation in wind power and coming in fifth in solar power.

But the debate’s moderators — NBC 5 political reporter Julie Fine and Dallas Morning News political writer Gromer Jeffers — didn’t ask any questions about climate change or related energy issues. That was a squandered opportunity.

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“I’m disappointed,” Texas resident Sarah Beasley told ThinkProgress, explaining that she had wanted to hear from the candidates on global warming. Nearly 4 in 10 registered voters surveyed earlier this year said a candidate’s position on global warming would be very important when they decide who to vote for in 2018 congressional elections.

Unfortunately, the Cruz-O’Rourke debate was not an outlier. Of 12 debates in competitive Senate and gubernatorial races that Media Matters has analyzed so far this election season, only one included a question about climate change. That’s actually worse than what we saw in the 2016 election season, when Media Matters found that less than a quarter of the debates we analyzed in competitive Senate and governor races featured a climate question.

The Minnesota governor’s race provided the sole debate we’ve analyzed so far this year that did address climate change. The moderator, Minnesota Public Radio political editor Mike Mulcahy, asked both candidates — Republican Jeff Johnson and Democrat Tim Walz — for their views on climate change.

The resulting exchange, which went on for more than five minutes, was both substantive and informative. Johnson said that “there is quite a disparate opinion on how much” humans contribute to climate change. (If he was talking about the opinion of climate scientists, that’s not true.) He also argued that policies to fight climate change could “cost people a lot of money and hurt people” and might not “make any difference.”

In contrast, Walz said, “We can make a difference. We have to make a difference.” He pointed out that shifting to clean energy can lead to a stronger economy and job growth. The debate made the candidates’ differing views on climate change crystal clear.

Attention, debate moderators: We need more exchanges like that. Ask candidates to make clear whether they consider climate change to be a serious problem, and what they propose to do about it. Better yet: Ask how they will respond to climate change’s local, state, and regional impacts, which differ around the country.

Dozens more debates will happen over the next six weeks in the lead-up to Election Day, giving the journalists and others who will act as moderators plenty of opportunities to ask candidates about climate change — arguably the most pressing issue of our time. Media Matters will be updating a scorecard with details about upcoming debates and contact info for moderators, and after debates happen, we’ll report on whether moderators brought climate change up.

Voters deserve to hear candidates publicly state their views, and the rest of the electorate does too. If there’s a debate coming up in your state, let the moderators know that you expect climate change to be on the agenda. In Texas, there are two more chances to get it right: Cruz and O’Rourke will meet again at debates on September 30 and October 16. Houston’s ABC13 is asking citizens to submit questions for the next debate. Have any suggestions?

Lisa Hymas is director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters for America. She was previously a senior editor at Grist.

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Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke didn’t debate climate change. Will it come up next time?

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‘It’s hyped up’: Climate deniers in the path of Hurricane Florence

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Scientists warn that human-induced climate change is responsible for an increase in the number and severity of storms — such as Hurricane Florence, which has engulfed the Carolinas in the last week.

But many who weathered the tempest, deep in Trump country, don’t believe global warming fueled it and don’t think humans are the problem — or the solution.

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As the world’s oceans warm at a faster rate, hurricanes become more likely, and there has been an increase in storms since the start of the 20th century. Experts warn more numerous and even more ferocious hurricanes are on the way, and the U.S. government is not addressing the central issue even as America’s coasts get battered and inland areas inundated.

But based on the evidence in North Carolina on Wednesday, the random man and woman in the street is still not convinced about the science — even those who have faced two major storms in two years.

“We live on the coast. It’s cyclical,” said Bob Slattery.

“We may get two or three in a year, then go four or five years with nothing,” he added.

Slattery, 74, and his wife Gerda, 73, were sitting in the pretty downtown area of Fayetteville on Wednesday. The couple live six miles southwest of Fayetteville and weren’t hit too badly by the storm, but much of the city was, as the Cape Fear river reached record flood levels, spilling over its banks into neighborhoods and roads.

While miles of North Carolina is inundated, downtown Fayetteville had been fortunate enough to avoid flooding this week, although locals said a wine bar roof had partly caved in.

“There’s a group of people that want to control things, and they’re using climate change to control things, and they want to put a tax on things,” Bob said.

There is scant evidence for a shady group using the concept of climate change to control and tax society — but it appears there is wider support for the theory in these parts.

“That’s our opinion,” Gerda said.

“And many other people I speak to think that, too,” Bob said.

Florence hit North Carolina just two years after Hurricane Matthew blew through the state. Matthew set a slew of unwanted flooding records in October 2016 and at the time was described as a “once in a 500 year event.” But just 23 months later, Florence has shattered that prediction, surpassing Matthew’s flooding totals and in many places having a worse impact.

Despite the proximity of the storms, and expert views, some believe the science is overblown and it’s no more than natural global rhythms.

“It comes down to cyclical climate change,” said Matthew Coe. “I don’t think we play as big a factor in climate change as people say we do — when you think of the fact that the sea level rises naturally anyways.”

Coe 37, originally from Florida, is studying for an associate’s degree, alongside working at a downtown Fayetteville cafe. He lost power for three days after Florence roared in.

“Mother Nature is its own entity,” he said. “Whatever happens, it’ll fix itself eventually.” He pointed out that there had been fluctuations in the Earth’s temperature before, and predicted there could be another “ice age” which would correct the current trajectory of the climate.

“I think everything is hyped up a bit,” he said. In his opinion, there are “scientists on both sides” of the climate change argument.

There is actually a 97 percent expert consensus among climate scientists that humans are responsible for global warming, although Coe and the Slatterys are far from alone in their beliefs: A 2016 Pew Research Center study found that 51 percent of Americans do not believe global climate change is due to human activity. Donald Trump is among the 51 percent — or at least was in 2015. That year he wrote in his book Crippled America that climate change was not human-caused, although he did not explain the reasoning behind his belief. During the 2016 presidential election, he called it a Chinese hoax. On Wednesday he was in North Carolina and South Carolina, promising “100 percent support” to displaced residents and those with flooded neighborhoods and power outages, but not mentioning measures to deal with climate change, different impacts on rich and poor, or coastal over-development.

Further along Hay Street, the thoroughfare through downtown Fayetteville, the retired air force member Andre Altman was sitting in the Huske Hardware House bar.

“Ask Mother Nature,” said Altman, 57. He echoed Coe’s belief that Earth’s capricious matriarch could be responsible for climate change and the ensuing increase in the number and force of storms.

“Really the Earth goes through cycles. So it’s just we’re on that particular cycle where we’re grabbing more storms,” Altman said. “Back in the industrial age we were burning coal and it didn’t get hotter then.”

Despite his belief that climate change was mostly a natural phenomenon, Altman accepted some of the science that said humans were also to blame. He recycles, he said, but believes his own actions are likely to have little impact.

“I try to worry about what I can affect. If I could actually do something about it, I would,” Altman said.

“But I’m not in politics.”

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‘It’s hyped up’: Climate deniers in the path of Hurricane Florence

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Coal ash and hog manure could flood vulnerable communities in Hurricane Florence’s path

North Carolina is home to 31 coal ash pits where Duke Energy stores an estimated 111 million tons of toxic waste produced by coal-fired power plants. The state is also home to thousands of manure pits, known euphemistically as “lagoons,” which hold approximately 10 billion pounds of wet waste generated each year by swine, poultry, and cattle operations.

A handful of news outlets are reporting about the danger of coal ash and hog manure spilling into North Carolina’s waterways in the wake of Hurricane Florence. Bloomberg covered the serious environmental and public health risks and the Associated Press warned of a potential “noxious witches’ brew of waste.”

There’s precedent for these concerns. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd, which struck North Carolina as a Category 2 storm, washed 120 million gallons of hog waste into rivers, Rolling Stone later reported. As AP noted this week, that was just one part of the mess caused by Floyd:

The bloated carcasses of hundreds of thousands of hogs, chickens and other drowned livestock bobbed in a nose-stinging soup of fecal matter, pesticides, fertilizer and gasoline so toxic that fish flopped helplessly on the surface to escape it. Rescue workers smeared Vick’s Vapo-Rub under their noses to try to numb their senses against the stench.

The media has been amping up its coverage of potential Hurricane Florence damage. But so far they’re missing an important part of the story — that African-Americans and other communities of color could be hit particularly hard by the resulting pollution. They’re also failing to note how the Trump administration has been loosening regulations and oversight in ways that could make coal ash and hog-waste spills more likely.

There’s an environmental justice component to this story

After Floyd, North Carolina taxpayers bought out and closed down 43 hog factory farms located in floodplains in order to prevent a repeat disaster. But when Hurricane Matthew hit the Carolinas as a Category 1 storm in 2016, at least 14 manure lagoons still flooded.

Even if they’re not widespread, hog-waste spills can still be devastating to those who live nearby — and many of the unfortunate neighbors are low-income people of color.

Two epidemiology researchers at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill published a paper in 2014 with a very straightforward title: “Industrial Hog Operations in North Carolina Disproportionately Impact African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians.” They wrote, “Overflow of waste pits during heavy rain events results in massive spills of animal waste into neighboring communities and waterways.”

A Hurricane Floyd-flooded hog waste lagoon.JOHN ALTHOUSE / AFP / Getty Images

Tom Philpott explained more about that research in Mother Jones in 2017:

As the late University of North Carolina researcher Steve Wing has demonstrated, [North Carolina’s industrial hog] operations are tightly clustered in a few counties on the coastal plain—the very part of the state that housed the most enslaved people prior to the Civil War. In the decades since, the region has retained the state’s densest population of rural African-American residents.

Even when hurricanes aren’t on the horizon, activists are pushing to clean up industrial hog operations. “From acrid odors to polluted waterways, factory farms in North Carolina are directly harming some of our state’s most vulnerable populations, particularly low-income communities and communities of color,” Naeema Muhammad of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network said last year.

Poor and rural communities of color are heavily affected by coal ash dumps as well. The New York Times reported last month on an environmental-justice campaign against coal ash pollution in North Carolina. Lisa Evans, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice, told the Times, “Coal ash ponds are in rural areas, particularly in the Southeast. Those communities have less power and less of a voice.”

The Trump administration recently loosened coal ash rules

The first major rule finalized by Andrew Wheeler, acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency, loosened Obama-era requirements for coal ash disposal. The change, which will save industry millions of dollars a year, could lead to more dangerous pollution. The Washington Post reported about this in July:

Avner Vengosh, a Duke University expert on the environmental impacts of coal ash, said that scaling back monitoring requirements, in particular, could leave communities vulnerable to potential pollution.

“We have very clear evidence that coal ash ponds are leaking into groundwater sources,” Vengosh said. “The question is, has it reached areas where people use it for drinking water? We just don’t know. That’s the problem.”

The Trump administration is also going easy on factory farms like the industrial hog operations in North Carolina. Civil Eats reported in February that there’s “been a decline in the number of inspections and enforcement actions by the [EPA] against concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) since the final years of the Obama administration.” Last year, more than 30 advocacy groups filed a legal petition calling on Trump’s EPA to tighten rules to protect communities from factory farms.

North Carolina Republicans aren’t helping things either — they’ve gone easy on coal plants and hog operations. And in 2012, the GOP-controlled state legislature actually passed a law banning state officials from considering the latest sea-level rise science when doing coastal planning. ABC reported on the development at the time:

The law was drafted in response to an estimate by the state’s Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) that the sea level will rise by 39 inches in the next century, prompting fears of costlier home insurance and accusations of anti-development alarmism among residents and developers in the state’s coastal Outer Banks region. …

The bill’s passage in June triggered nationwide scorn by those who argued that the state was deliberately blinding itself to the effects of climate change. In a segment on the “Colbert Report,” comedian Stephen Colbert mocked North Carolina lawmakers’ efforts as an attempt to outlaw science.

“If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved,” he joked.

As Hurricane Florence bears down on North Carolina, journalists should make sure that their stories include the people who will be hurt the most by waste spills and other impacts, as well as the businesses and lawmakers who have been making such environmental disasters much more likely to occur.

Lisa Hymas is director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters for America. She was previously a senior editor at Grist.

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Coal ash and hog manure could flood vulnerable communities in Hurricane Florence’s path

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A mental health crisis continues to unfold in Puerto Rico

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For the first 36 hours after Hurricane Maria, 5-year-old Keydiel and his mother Shaina were trapped by the toppled trees that blocked the doors to their home in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico.

Eventually, neighbors cleared the sturdy tamarind trees, cutting by hand because there was no electricity. The mother and son emerged to find an island devoured by 155 mph winds and harsh rains.

Their immediate concerns were physical — finding food and water — but bubbling below were anxieties and trauma that would endure for months.

“It was difficult to find himself [Keydiel] in a situation where he didn’t have a way out. It was difficult for me,” Shaina told the Guardian through an interpreter, while sitting at a table outside her son’s classroom. “As a mom, I was very stressed out and I got anxious because I wasn’t able to solve things so quickly. I felt impotent.”

Keydiel’s school sits just below hillside forests that are finally a dense, dark green after Maria twisted them into a tangling mess of trees stripped of leaves and bark. This sign of recovery — one Puerto Ricans craved after their green island turned brown in the storm — is betrayed by house-sized patches of mud from landslides and the remains of pulverized structures.

Down in the valley, where crisp, salt-flecked coastal air drifts in from the Caribbean Sea just over the hills, Keydiel’s school had survived the storm. It was closed for months but eventually provided refuge for children desperate for everything to be like it was before.

Ten months after Maria, Shaina and other Puerto Ricans face a mental health crisis that stems from something frighteningly simple: One powerful hurricane robbed millions of Americans of reliable access to drinkable water, food, medical care, electricity, phones, and internet.

These basic necessities are still luxuries in the hardest-hit parts of the island and took longer than expected to return to the rest of the island, but nowhere is life the same. This disruption to daily life has exacerbated feelings of despair, anxiety, and hopelessness.

Gary Shaye, Save the Children’s interim director in Puerto Rico who also responded to the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal, said this daily impact distinguishes Maria from other natural disasters because it is a “living emergency.”

“The only other thing like this would be some conflict situations,” Shaye said, alluding to the agency’s work in the Middle East with Syrians “when you see people in a camp and they have a cellphone and every day they don’t know what’s happening to their house, their family, who died — and they live with it every day. Whereas other types of emergencies don’t wipe out an entire island.”

Walking around ‘zombie-eyed’

Mental healthcare was an issue in Puerto Rico well before Maria made landfall on Sept. 20, 2017.

The island’s decade-long recession provoked high unemployment rates and migration that separated families, a distressing mix for Puerto Ricans — especially those underserved by the island’s strained healthcare system.

All these issues were exacerbated by Maria, which robbed every person on the island of their daily routine for weeks, if not months.

Pharmacy closures deprived people of access to prescription antidepressants and antipsychotics. Veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Korea reported that the sounds of the storm and scenes of destruction triggered post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms that had been managed.

From November 2017 through January 2018, the island’s suicide hotline, Línea PAS, saw a 246 percent increase in calls from people who said they had attempted suicide compared with the same time a year earlier. There was also an 83 percent jump in people who said they had thought about attempting suicide.

The hurricane left a landscape of flattened homes, broken glass, downed trees, snapped cables languishing in water, and streams of people in shock searching for food, water, or loved ones. Those who were there in the weeks after the storm recall seeing people walking around “zombie-eyed.”

RICARDO ARDUENGO / AFP / Getty Images

The unsafe conditions kept children across the island largely indoors, where they couldn’t do activities that needed light or electricity. Because so many people had moved in with extended families for the hurricane, children removed from their neighborhoods were surrounded by strangers. Streets clogged with debris and crushed glass posed a long-term hazard.

Schools were closed for months, and even when they reopened, classes didn’t immediately begin and not every teacher had returned.

It was a recipe for trauma that can have long-lasting effects, according to Barbara Ammirati, Save the Children’s deputy director of Puerto Rico programs. She has led the implementation of psychosocial programs for children in U.S. disaster zones since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Shaina said Keydiel “went a little bit into a crisis” after the hurricane. He had no one to play with until late November, when school returned. Back in class, he was abnormally aggressive.

Shaina, meanwhile, hesitated every morning at 7:30 a.m. when she dropped him off at school, worried about how his food would be prepared because two months after the hurricane, drinkable water was still scarce. Rumors that rats drinking from a local river had later died petrified those who had been cooking and cleaning in the stream.

Hypervigilance is normal for parents after a natural disaster because of the parents’ own stress, explained Ammirati.

By late June, Keydiel and Shaina had shown signs of improvement, something Shaina credits to Save the Children, which deployed child protection programs to 32 municipalities, including Yabucoa.

Keydiel participated in programs that seek to mitigate trauma by improving children’s coping abilities and bringing out their inner resilience. The nonprofit also hosts workshops to train and support caregivers, who are often just as severely affected by the disaster as children.

‘She’d cry every morning, she’d cry every night’

Yabucoa was the site of the hurricane’s first landfall, where at least 1,500 homes were damaged and 60 percent still lacked electricity in May.

At least 19 students said they had considered suicide, according to Yabucoa city council. In May, a man climbed an electricity tower there and threatened to throw himself off in protest at the lack of power. And a preliminary study of 34 families in Yabucoa showed 74 percent of participants would like to receive psychological services.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded $6.7 million to Puerto Rico for its emergency mental health services assistance and training program, which it usually provides for one to two months, but was in place in Puerto Rico until March. FEMA also provided more than $12.6 million for a similar mental health program to run until December that includes services for people who need long-term counseling, children and the elderly.

The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration also loosened restrictions on existing block grants, offered technical assistance, and provided materials including 300 disaster kits and 5,000 suicide prevention wallet cards.

But places like Yabucoa are also getting significant support from the island’s mental health professionals and international nonprofits, including Save the Children, who pay regular visits to the area.

A woman in Yabucoa after Hurricane Maria. HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP / Getty Images

It was a Save the Children course where Alejandra, a cheery 9-year-old, said she and her classmates discussed what they were afraid of and how to help each other if they were mad or upset. “We were all sad it was ending because it was a lot of fun,” she said through an interpreter in an interview at her school.

Alejandra was chatty, and danced around her school’s outdoor hallways after the interview. The warm, thick air warned of an incoming tropical rainstorm that would cause electric outages throughout the afternoon — the new normal across Puerto Rico.

Her parents, Yeliza and Juan, said her bubbly attitude was a dramatic turn from how she was in the winter, when the family fled Puerto Rico for Florida.

More than two months after the hurricane, they did not have electricity and drinkable water was difficult to come by. Alejandra had been a dedicated student who took pride in her good grades, but school was closed through late November.

Juan said in a state of “complete desperation” they left for Florida.

They returned to Puerto Rico less than three weeks later because Alejandra was struggling at her school, which had other newly transported Puerto Rican students but no teachers who could speak Spanish. Alejandra said she didn’t feel safe at school and was very sad because she spent most of her time indoors with her older cousin.

“She’d cry every morning, she’d cry every night,” Yeliza said. “She didn’t want to go to school.”

Juan had found work and the family was living with relatives, but they still couldn’t get used to the new place, so they came back. “Now we’re here, battling it out,” Juan said.

Power returned to their home in April, though Alejandra pointed out that the electricity still goes out “now and then.” Her mother added: “But at least we can watch TV every day,” prompting claps from her young daughter.

Providers need psychological support, too

Ammirati said the existing network of mental health professionals in Puerto Rico was strong, but because the scope of devastation was so enormous, those providers needed psychological support too, like on an airplane when passengers are instructed to put an oxygen mask on themselves before helping children.

At one school in Yabucoa, a Save the Children caregivers workshop for teachers had the entire staff in tears. A course instructor, Tina Tirado, said teachers there told her they despaired at the lack of electricity, were distressed about not having their normal lives back and had a lack of hope about the future.

To address this issue, the island’s existing network of mental health professionals and educators made alliances with local universities, clinicians across the globe, NGOs, and city governments.

New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene sent clinicians to train nearly 1,000 people, mostly school staff, in psychological first aid. The department’s deputy commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, who is of Puerto Rican descent, said city workers heard “bone-chilling stories about people losing family members to suicide.”

“Teachers having to act on behalf of students to prevent parents from killing themselves in front of their kids,” Barbot said. “Just really traumatic events that even hearing them recounted by individuals months later, you can see how emotionally affected they are by the ongoing devastation of Hurricane Maria.

“This situation has brought into stark relief for me, that in this modern age, in the United States, we have to talk about the basicness of electricity and clean water and essential public health needs of a community,” Barbot said. “I never thought six months after a disaster, I would still have to focus on that.”

A sense of community remains strong

Despite this, Barbot and other mental health professional see signs of hope.

“Part of what we learned in addition to the hunger that there was for the basic skills was also about the resiliency of the human spirit,” Barbot said. “Even though they had gone through this tremendous devastation, they still had a sense of community and connectedness and commitment to their jobs as educators, to their calling as protectors of children to kind of show up for them and create a semblance of normalcy.”

This was on display at a school in Yabucoa for children between 18 months and 14 years. While showing off student-grown watermelon, pepper, and tomato plants and newly cleaned classrooms, Principal Maraida spoke about the army of parents who had helped her rebuild the campus, which was closed to its 150 students for 103 days.

She ignored tables and chairs in a classroom for toddlers and instead told her story while sitting on the classroom floor, which she said “is where everything begins.”

One of the school’s parent helpers, Melissa, had moved her husband, daughter, and niece into her parent’s house ahead of the hurricane because their property was sturdier. It was clearly the right decision, as pictures of her own home after the hurricane show a building that looks like it was picked up and smashed into the hill it was built on. She later found the family’s mattresses down the hill from their home.

Along with losing everything she owns, Melissa’s house had only got electricity back in late June — 290 days after it first went out.

But Maraida said Melissa had done everything possible to help the school, even after giving birth to her now 3-month-old baby. “She’ll slaughter pigs if you want her to,” Maraida said.

Melissa explained that the school was important for her daughter, Sonielys, who requires special education courses. Sonielys, 10, also went through Save the Children programs and was calm when power went out in a classroom during an interview.

She made an eerie, undulating “wooooh” noise to describe what the hurricane sounded like and showed no signs of fear as she recalled nonstop rain and not being allowed to go to school for weeks. “I learned that we’re all the same but some things are different,” Sonielys said through an interpreter.

Maraida was proud as she spoke of the work Melissa and other enthusiastic parents accomplished, but when asked about mental health issues in the community, she crumbled.

“We all have that friction sometimes, because the situation is not simple, it is a little bit complicated,” she said, crying. “I myself have a lot of trouble because I’m in charge. Because I am the leader, when I see that things don’t function I want them to function. I try to think positive but it’s a little bit hard.”

She described working as a contractor, lobbying the island and federal governments for help, while also caring for her daughter as a single mom, and for her father, who is in chemotherapy for cancer. She said: “I am staying here and I’m giving it to the end.”

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A mental health crisis continues to unfold in Puerto Rico

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Caribbean leaders beg Trump to act on climate change

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Caribbean states and territories have rounded on the Trump administration for dismantling the United States’ response to climate change, warning that greenhouse gas emissions must be sharply cut to avoid hurricanes and sea-level rise threatening the future of their island idylls.

The onset of this year’s hurricane season has seen leaders in the region tell the Guardian that President Trump needs to grasp the existential threat they face. Rising temperatures and increased precipitation caused by climate change is strengthening hurricanes, researchers have found, even as the overall number of storms remains steady.

“In 2017 we saw some of the most devastating and destructive hurricanes we’ve seen in our history,” said Selwin Hart, Barbados’ ambassador to the United States. “This needs to be recognized.

“This isn’t some scientific debate, it’s a reality with loss of life implications. We need the U.S. to be back at the table and engage. It’s imperative. We wouldn’t have a Paris climate agreement without the U.S. and we need them back now.”

Hurricane Irma strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane before slamming into the Caribbean and the United States in September, causing more than 130 deaths in places such as Barbuda, Saint Martin, Barbados, and the United States. This storm was swiftly followed by Hurricane Maria, which obliterated much of Dominica and caused a widespread, ongoing disaster in Puerto Rico, leaving thousands dead.

“Even before the passage of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, we could already see the effects of coastal erosion, and even the loss of some islands,” said Ricardo Rosselló, governor of Puerto Rico. The U.S. territory is part of an alliance with several states, including New York and California, that have committed to addressing climate change absent the federal government. “Puerto Rico remains in a more vulnerable situation than other states. It is expected that some of the initial effects of climate change will be seen in Puerto Rico,” said Rosselló, who called Trump’s climate policies “a mistake.”

During the 2015 Paris climate talks, Caribbean nations were among the loose coalition of low-lying countries that successfully pushed the international community to aim to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7F) beyond pre-industrial levels.

This aspiration, which would provide many island states the hope of remaining viable in the face of sea-level rise, drought, and powerful storms, is currently far from likely, with a recent U.N. report warning the picture would be “even bleaker” if the Trump administration follows through with its vow to remove the United States from the Paris deal.

The withdrawal from Paris would take three years, but in the meantime the Trump administration is working to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era strategy to cut carbon dioxide, delay new vehicle emissions standards, open up new land and ocean to oil and gas drilling, and even put in place a set of subsidies that would prop up the ailing coal industry.

“The U.S. is a major player in the world and it needs to lead — we depend on it to be a moral voice on issues where people are vulnerable,” said Darren Henfield, foreign minister of the Bahamas. “We really hope the U.S. readjusts its position. It seems there will be doubters until we start completely losing islands.”

Henfield said Bahamians have become “dramatically aware” of climate change following a series of hurricanes that have hit or brushed the archipelago in recent years. The country has attempted to accelerate its transition to renewable energy although it faces the conundrum of relying economically upon tourists, borne on huge cruise ships that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide.

“We are being forced to put up sea walls to push back the rising tides,” Henfield said. “We are very exposed and we could see the swallowing of the Bahamas by sea-level rise. We don’t have much room for people, there’s nowhere for people to move. Climate change will exacerbate the issue of refugees.

“I don’t know what influences the mind of President Trump but the world will be negatively impacted by not dealing with climate change. We always talk to our neighbors in the North and part of our foreign policy is to sensitize them and the international community to the threat we face.”

But while Caribbean states plead for climate assistance, particularly from the United States, they are also looking at how to adapt to a new environment. The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, a coalition of island countries that spread in an arc south of the British Virgin Islands, has turned its attention to looming challenges such as food security, coastal village relocation, and new building designs in order to deal with rising temperatures and seas.

“Dominica was a real wake-up call for us, it virtually got washed away,” said Didacus Jules, director general of the OECS. “We know the impacts are going to be increasingly catastrophic and we need to plan for that. We need to do things completely differently in order to protect life and limb.”

Didacus said he was alarmed by the U.S. reversal on climate change. “We are very disturbed by what is going on, it’s a matter we’ll deal with aggressively in terms of diplomacy,” he said. “We will work with other island nations to make ourselves heard.”

However, many in the Caribbean fear the window of time to avert the worst is rapidly closing. Roosevelt Skerrit, prime minister of Dominica, addressed the U.N. last September in strikingly bleak terms, describing himself as coming “straight from the front line of the war on climate change.”

“Heat is the fuel that takes ordinary storms — storms we could normally master in our sleep — and supercharges them into a devastating force,” Skerrit said. “Now, thousands of storms form on a breeze in the mid-Atlantic and line up to pound us with maximum force and fury. We as a country and as a region did not start this war against nature. We did not provoke it. The war has come to us.”

Skerrit said the hurricane left Dominica with flattened homes, smashed water pipes, hospitals without power, wrecked schools, and ruined crops. “The desolation is beyond imagination,” he said. “The stars have fallen. Eden is broken. We are shouldering the consequences of the actions of others.

“There is little time left for action. While the big countries talk, the small island nations suffer. We need action and we need it now.”

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Caribbean leaders beg Trump to act on climate change

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Hurricane Maria evacuees worry about jobs, housing, and if they’ll ever go home

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, 1,700 evacuees from Puerto Rico have received housing assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This past week, those Puerto Ricans faced being displaced again as a deadline approached that would have forced them to move out of hotel rooms, mostly in Florida, that were being paid for by the U.S. government.

Temporary Shelter Assistance (TSA) for those affected by Maria was scheduled to end on June 30. But advocates rallied for an extension, as well as a plan to provide more long-term housing to those who were forced to flee Puerto Rico.

After levying a lawsuit against FEMA, the effort was successful in achieving a brief reprieve. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that evacuees could retain occupancy of their hotel rooms until July 23. While it’s a momentary relief, these displaced Puerto Ricans still face several hurdles in setting up a new life post-Maria.

Grist spoke with three TSA recipients who moved to the Orlando area after the hurricane. All of them expressed uncertainty about the futures of them and their families. And the new deadline now looms large as they work to find jobs, more permanent housing, or a way back to their island home. (The sources’ accounts have been edited for clarity and concision.)

Ariana Colon, 20

Colon was a nursing student when Hurricane Maria hit. She and her boyfriend have a one-year-old son and another baby on the way. They’re staying at a Holiday Inn in Kissimmee, Florida.

I moved in December. My boyfriend came in October to make sure he was going to have a job first before we actually came here. It’s been really hard because I’ve never been to Florida before, so it’s kind of like trying to learn how everything goes here.

When we were in Puerto Rico, the governor of Florida was saying that there would be a lot of assistance. But once we came here it was the opposite. We did get the assistance from the TSA program, but other than that, there was nothing. We had to do everything ourselves, even though we came with just a suitcase with some clothes with it. We didn’t come with money. It was more like we came here by force after everything that happened.

We didn’t lose our home, it was more everything that happened after the hurricane: no electricity, no water, no food. I spent a lot of days trying to find one can of formula for my baby. He was actually getting sick because of the smell of the generators. He got a lung infection.

In Puerto Rico, there was tropical weather. It was so hot inside that he couldn’t sleep, so I would have to sleep outside or sleep on roof so he could. It was more for my son that we decided to come because he was suffering a lot. He was five months old at the time, so he was really small.

At first I couldn’t work because I didn’t have daycare. Daycare is really expensive. So my boyfriend was working by himself, and I wasn’t receiving any benefits from the government, like food stamps or WIC (a food program, specifically aimed at women, infants, and children). I started receiving those later on, after maybe three months. Everything was coming out of our pockets, so we couldn’t save a lot in that time.

Then I was trying to get assistance from the state that helps you pay for daycare. I got it in April, and that’s when I started working in a fast food restaurant and trying to save more. But even with that, I spend like maybe half of what I make on daycare — and that only covers five hours Monday through Friday, so I can’t really have a full-time job.

It’s been really stressful, not knowing if you’re going to have a roof over your head or not, and having a baby makes it 10 times worse. I was freaking out about this — like, “Oh my god, I have to move everything again.” Because we have actually moved; we’ve been in four different hotels.

People say, “You’re staying in a hotel. It must be nice.” But it’s really not, staying in a hotel room for such a long time and having [hotel staff] coming in and out. You never know when someone’s going to open the door. Having everything stuck together in a small room is really uncomfortable. We can’t cook, because there’s no kitchen. You’re not comfortable at all. It is a roof and a bed, but it’s not how people think.

Pregnancy is really hard, and it obviously wasn’t planned so it’s kind of hard having to think about all this stress with the FEMA situation and then dealing with my baby. I feel like I have a lot of pressure on me. But I’m managing to fight through it.

Right now, we do have a plan. My boyfriend has a car in Puerto Rico that he’s trying to get here. With that car, he can do Uber. And we’re going to hope that doing that we can probably make more and get an apartment sooner.

So this [TSA extension] gave us a little more time. Instead of wasting money on a room that we’re going to be forced to rent — because obviously we can’t just stay in the street with my son — we can use that money to bring the car and start making more and see if that works out. I don’t think we have any more options.

Victor Oliveras, 26

Oliveras ran a small construction business in Las Marias, Puerto Rico, before Hurricane Maria destroyed his home. On June 30, the day TSA was originally scheduled to end, he moved out of a Super 8 motel and in with a Florida resident who had offered a room in his house to Victor and his girlfriend. He’s now working as a canvasser for the local nonprofit Organize Florida, where he’s helping to register Puerto Ricans to vote. (He spoke to Grist via a translator.)

Last month and this month, I had anxiety and depression. I went to bed every night without knowing what I can do. When you don’t have your own place, it’s horrible. It’s a nightmare.

I don’t want to stay in the hotel anymore. FEMA extended the program, but at any time you can end up on the street and be homeless. So I didn’t apply for the extension. I would rather stay in the bedroom that I rent because I feel safe. Now I don’t live with anxiety anymore because I have my own bedroom, I feel comfortable.

Here I’m alone. I’m with my girlfriend, but I don’t have family here. In Puerto Rico, I had my own company and built houses. I’m saving money to begin my small business in Puerto Rico again — and so I can stay with my family.

I want to move to Puerto Rico in December, but I need to find a house or an apartment there. The rent in Puerto Rico is cheaper than here by far, but I need money so I am working here to save up.

María Báez Claudio, 53

Claudia is a grandmother living with her five-year-old grandson, who has a disability that affects his motor skills, as well as his ability to talk. They are staying together at a Super 8 motel in Kissimmee, Florida. She applied for more permanent housing assistance through the Methodist Church, but is still on a waiting list. (She spoke to Grist via a translator.)

After the hurricane, with my grandson’s condition and few medical resources, I decided that the best thing to do was to come to Florida. Being alone and staying in a hotel with my grandson with a disability can be complicated. It’s a bit tough to go through sometimes. I’m grateful with him being able to go to therapy and go to school. I feel that he has gotten better because of those things. I’m thankful for that.

I’ve been anxious, worried, desperate, not knowing what’s going to happen [with TSA]. Today, I have a little bit of piece of mind, but overall it has been a hard experience. I’m hoping they can give me at least another month [beyond the July 23 deadline], because I have to figure things out.

I hope I have an apartment to live in and a job to sustain us and to be able to give my grandson stability and a good life. What keeps me going is the love that I have for my grandson — every time I look at him I find the strength to keep going.

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Hurricane Maria evacuees worry about jobs, housing, and if they’ll ever go home

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