FEMA and Funding Disaster Relief
This one will be short because I need to get back to work (I am so close to getting Marker Bed off for formatting, and then publishing, that any delay rankles).
Anyway, I just saw a news bulletin while eating some of Susie’s excellent bruschetta for lunch that said FEMA is out of money, even before the height of the hurricane season arrives. This is apparently the second year in a row they have spent all they had before the doodoo really hit the fan (or the coast, as the case may be), and I have no doubt that political pundits on the right will be quick to blame Biden (actually Harris) and the “Radical Left” for the shortfall (especially if one of the landfalls ends up nuking Mar-A-Lago).
The consensus of opinion from the Talking Heads is that you can — as is often the case — blame much of the escalating severe storm risk on climate change (click here for an index of climate change posts). This is a favorite go-to culprit which I fully agree needs to be in any conversation about the obviously increasing risk from hurricanes and tornadoes (not to mention heat waves, Arctic blasts, dry water taps, and dogs and cats living together).
But, it’s not just severe storms that can help contribute to the increasing national debt, and the bankruptcy of FEMA and the federal government. You can blame more hurricanes and tornadoes on climate change all you want — and yes, it’s true that each of them cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in emergency funds — but what about the next big earthquake? It will have absolutely nothing to do with climate change, but you’d better believe that FEMA will be involved in the recovery efforts. (Click here for an index of posts on earthquakes, or here to go straight to an Introduction to Earthquakes.)
Whether the inevitable quake(s) occur along the west coast (either the San Andreas system in California, or the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the Pacific Northwest), or the New Madrid fault that has the potential to take out much of the Eastern part of our country, the bill for something like this will not be in the hundreds of millions to billions, but the hundreds of billions to possibly even trillions.
I don’t know about you, but this makes me really nervous (and not just because my house is only seventy miles directly above the Cascadia). I’ve loved my country for a very long time, and it breaks my heart when I realize that the extreme polarization of the population will almost surely hinder (or at least complicate) relief efforts of the magnitude that will be required.
Oh yeah! Any significant earthquake will require a bit more than free paper towels. (Click here for a post about the Richter scale, and what qualifies as a “significant” quake.)
The good and the bad news are about the same: there’s not much we can do in advance of an earthquake to eliminate any potential risk (click here for a post on quake prediction and control). For most of us, all we can do is hang on tight when the music starts and hope for the best.
