California firefighters ‘stretched to limit’ as devastating blazes become the norm

California firefighters ‘stretched to limit’ as devastating blazes become the norm

<span>Photograph: Noah Berger/AP</span>
Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

 

Before the ravenous Caldor fire laid siege to South Lake Tahoe, California’s top firefighting priority lay just to the north, where the Dixie fire scorched more land than any other single fire in state history. Together, the two behemoths have already blackened more than 1m acres (4,000 sq km) along the Sierra Nevada range. And fire season in the American west is just heating up.

The climate crisis has helped create extreme fire emergencies, with huge, rapid-moving blazes tearing through a hot, parched landscape at lightning speed. Fires have hopped granite summits firefighters had hoped would slow their spread. Blazes have displayed erratic burn behavior, making their movements hard to predict.

The extreme conditions raise fresh questions about the ability of the country’s firefighting forces to control an emergency that has grown exponentially bigger year after year.

Roughly 27,000 firefighters have been deployed across the west this summer, according to officials. Local crews have received support from federal agencies, firefighters from other states, soldiers and national guardsmen.

There is no official or expert estimate for how many firefighters are needed, but it is clear their numbers have fallen short. More than 8,200 first responders battled to stop California’s Dixie and Caldor fires. They were armed with dozens of helicopters, hundreds of dozers and a multitude of equipment. While there have been wins and important progress made, neither fire has been contained.

Once-in-a-career blazes become routine

For the first time in its history, California’s fire agency, Cal Fire, in the 2020-2021 fiscal year was on track to spend more than $3bn fighting wildfires, according to a report from the California legislative analyst’s office released last autumn.

Since 2012, fire suppression costs in the state have risen sharply each year. With more resources needed to battle the blazes, there have been fewer available for preventing them. Firefighters are seeing the effects of a system under pressure on the ground.

Over the last six years, the work of fire crews has changed drastically as the frequency, quantity, and size of the fires have gotten worse, according to Tony Martinez, a Cal Fire captain who has worked with the agency for 28 years.

Once-in-a-career blazes of years past had become the norm, Martinez said.

In the past months, fire crews have been repeatedly reassigned, moving from one fire to the next as new ignitions take place. Difficult decisions have had to be made. Protecting human life is always the top priority followed by saving structures, and sometimes that has meant ceding acreage in mountains and forests.

Firefighters Stephanie Lockhart and Dustin Peters of North Tahoe Fire break up smoldering areas after the Caldor fire moved through the area, in South Lake Tahoe, California, on Wednesday.
Firefighters Stephanie Lockhart and Dustin Peters of North Tahoe Fire break up smoldering areas after the Caldor fire moved through the area, in South Lake Tahoe, California, on Wednesday. Photograph: Fred Greaves/Reuters

 

“Firefighting resources are scarce,” said Isaac Sanchez, a battalion chief of communications with Cal Fire. “But we still have a responsibility to attack the new fire or respond to the new 911 phone call.”

During last year’s record-breaking fire season, when more than 4.2m acres across California burned, Cal Fire reported that the scarcity of fire crews was one of the greatest challenges faced by incident commanders. “The lack of crews became a significant operational liability,” officials wrote in a siege report on the harrowing year. “The mutual aid system in California was stretched to its limits as fires burned up and down the state.

“The destruction of watersheds, communities, lives and livelihoods was profound,” the report continued. “In the short term, air quality across much of the state was abysmal. In some areas, the sun was blotted out by smoke, making mid-summer temperatures feel akin to the dead of winter.”

Related: ‘We do it together’: how a Lake Tahoe community prepared to flee the Caldor fire

Burns this year are outpacing last year’s devastating season. In addition to 15 large blazes in California, firefighters are battling 86 others across the US.

A strain on firefighters’ health

The state of California has increased funding and expanded its hiring in recent years. Cal Fire added close to 3,000 temporary firefighters to its ranks last year and in March this year the governor approved $80.74m to add 1,399 mostly seasonal firefighter positions using emergency fund authorization. The state’s budget this year also includes $1bn to be spent over several years for wildfire prevention.

In addition, local firefighting crews have been reinforced by teams from out of state, the national guard and other state and local agencies. But firefighters still feel strained.

Martinez thinks Cal Fire is still understaffed. “The result of that falls on the shoulders of the firefighters on the ground.”

Sanchez said he thought current crew levels in California could manage the firefight ahead, and that crews and officials had prepared for the scale of the challenge. “But there are times when no matter what you do, depending on the conditions out there, fires are going to establish themselves and grow into the disasters we see now,” he said.

He added: “If I had it my way, of course I would have 10 times as many resources as we do now. But these are the number of resources,” Sanchez said. “They are finite.”

Sanchez said that the fatigue and emotional struggles among fire crews were real. He said he felt the same way. “The overall strain on wellbeing and energy levels is cumulative,” Sanchez continued. “It adds up and is certainly affecting folks as we speak.”

Contributing to the crunch is the Covid crisis. A 16-member Cal Fire strike team fighting the Caldor Fire had to be sidelined for two weeks, after the virus started spreading through its ranks.

Staff shortages on the federal level, too, are adding strain. US Forest Service (USFS) records showed that only half of fire engines were fully staffed at the start of the season. Martinez said the federal shortage put further strain on resources within California agencies. “We were warned before fire season started that the Forest Service has major shortages and people are quitting at higher rates than us,” he said.

A firefighter battles the Dixie fire as it jumps Highway 395 in Lassen County, California, last month.
A firefighter battles the Dixie fire as it jumps Highway 395 in Lassen County, California, last month. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

 

“They told us that we are going to have more of a commitment because of their lack of resources,” he added. “It compounds.”

Internal USFS documents, reported on by the Pew Charitable Trusts non-profit newsroom Stateline, noted that a third of agency engines were understaffed. Staff positions went unfilled as low pay and low morale pushed more federal firefighters into other lines of work, the news report concluded. “The agency sought to fill 781 vacant permanent positions in California during spring hiring this year, according to the data. But it ended the hiring period with 725 vacancies. That’s a net gain of just 56 employees,” Stateline reported in July.

“During years of extreme drought and prolonged fire activity across the country, resources are stretched to their limits,” Babete Anderson, national press officer for the USFS, told the Guardian in a statement. “The firefighter staffing shortage is mainly caused by limited candidate pools and competition with state and private fire organizations in California that pay two to three times the base pay of federal firefighters.” The federal government, she added, had recently taken steps to support wildland firefighters while improving recruitment and retention efforts.

The federal government has made moves to increase firefighter pay, a step advocacy groups have called a good start. Last month, the USFS announced pay increases were coming and that firefighters wouldn’t make less than $15 an hour from 30 June to 31 December this year. The infrastructure package passed by Congress earlier this year also included $600m to raise wages by 50% and shift 1,000 seasonal positions to permanent.

According to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an organization of active and retired federal wildland firefighters, those pay increases aren’t sufficient. The increases falls “woefully short”, said Kelly Martin, the organization’s president, given “the extreme risk and consequences that firefighters face on the fireline”.

“Recruitment is very difficult because of the low wages and people can’t find housing,” Martin said. “We are seeing shortages – they just cannot fully staff to what is needed in a year like this.”

Organizations like Grassroots point out that the government still doesn’t recognize many federal workers battling wildfires as emergency responders; instead, it considers them forestry technicians, range technicians, miscellaneous administrators and resource specialists. The classification can mean those workers miss out on services and resources. The part-time nature of their employment also affects retirement and other benefits.

“We are at a turning point in the climate change battle and the demands on federal wildland firefighters at the frontline have become a year-round request,” the group wrote on its website. “The federal government has failed to keep pace with this changing dynamic and firefighters are left with increased mental illnesses, increased rates of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and pay that falls below minimum wages in many parts of the country.”

While staff shortages have made fighting fires harder, Martin emphasized that real investment was needed on the prevention side. Extreme fires will continue outpacing efforts to fight them, if more isn’t done to cull the dense, dry vegetation that fuels them.

“What we really have to think about is how we embrace and manage fire,” she said. “We have a dual need. We have to protect life and property but we have another need to put more good fire on the landscape and that’s where we are really short with resources, both from a fiscal and human capital standpoint.”

Reports of environmental problems caused by Hurricane Ida begin to trickle in

The Times-Picayune – NOLA

Reports of environmental problems caused by Hurricane Ida begin to trickle in

Department of Environmental Quality to inspect industrial sites over next few weeks

Mark Schleifstein, Staff Writer        August 31, 2021

Information about potential environmental threats caused by Hurricane Ida have been slow in coming, but initial reports to the Coast Guard’s National Response Center and the state Department of Environmental Quality confirm there were releases of crude oil, fuel oils and a variety of chemicals in numerous locations in southeastern Louisiana on the day before and the day of the storm.

The information that’s available is not complete or comprehensive, consisting of initial call-in or emailed reports by company officials or others to the two agencies. They include releases of different chemicals by refineries and chemical plants when flares were extinguished by Ida’s winds, as well as the possible release of sewage and wastewater in numerous locations in Jefferson Parish when power was lost, knocking out 95% of the parish pump stations that move waste through underground pipes.

The state environmental agency has already begun more detailed inspections of all facilities within Ida’s path to identify concerns, with that information likely to be made public over the next few weeks.

On Tuesday, the National Response Center had reports on 11 incidents that occurred in Louisiana on Saturday, the day before Ida hit, through the end of Sunday.

The state Department of Environmental Quality listed 35 incidents that had been reported to them on Sunday and Monday, some of which were also reported to the Coast Guard.

The Saturday incidents reported by the Coast Guard:

  • The release of an unknown amount of hydrogen at the Shell Norco facility during a unit’s shutdown in advance of Ida.
  • An unknown amount of ammonia was released from a process safety valve at Cornerstone Chemical in Waggaman. The valve was restored to stop the leak.

On Sunday, the Coast Guard reported several incidents involving ships:

  • A vessel slipped from its moorings at Golden Meadow and was adrift with a tug boat connected to it. Neither were leaking oil.
  • A stray vessel struck another vessel in its berth at Danos Shipyard in Morgan City, and a sheen was noticed in the water nearby.
  • In Port Fourchon, where Ida made landfall at 11:55 a.m., a floating dry dock at Bollinger Fourchon broke free and breached the hull of another vessel, possibly breaching a tank aboard the vessel and resulting in the discharge of some fuel oil. The breach occurred above the water line of the hit vessel.

It also reported a number of releases at refineries, petrochemical plants and pipelines:

  • ETC Texas Pipelines reported the release of two barrels of condensate onto the ground near the intersection of La. 151 and Virgil Road in Minden, La., the result of a corroded pipe.
  • Koch Nitrogen in Hahnville reported the release of 58 pounds of ammonia through a flare during a power outage caused by Ida. The release was halted, and plant officials said they were working to restore power at the plant. No information about the amount of nitrogen released was available
  • CF Industries in Donaldsonville reported that the pilots on the flares of two storage tanks were extinguished, while control valves were partially open, allowing the release of ammonia. “Conditions from Hurricane Ida are ongoing and a crew is unable to secure the release,” the company reported. The amount of ammonia released was unknown.
  • Phillips 66 Pipeline LLC reported two leaks on two separate pipelines, RV 26 and RV 32, due to conditions during Ida, resulting in the release of propylene and isobutane into the atmosphere. “It is unknown if there is waterway impact at this time,” the company reported. The releases were near Paradis and Louisiana 3127 in St. Charles Parish.
  • Mosaic Fertilizer reported ammonia vapor released inside its St. James facility after a flare blew out during Ida.
  • Shintech Louisiana, in Plaquemine, reported the release of an unknown amount of ethylene dichloride from a storage tank into the air “due to power consistency/Hurricane Ida.”

The DEQ list includes the Phillips 66 Pipeline, Mosaic and Shintech reports, and many other reports of incidents at refineries, chemical plants, pipelines, vessels and other government and business sites, including one made by the Entergy Waterford 3 nuclear power plant. The information reported by DEQ was less detailed than that made public by the Coast Guard.

  • Jefferson Parish Sewer Department reported wastewater and rainwater were released due to loss of power that caused 95% of the lift stations that move waste through pipes to fail. The releases were in various locations throughout the parish.
  • Waterford 3 in Hahnville reported an unusual event due to the loss of power running to the station from offsite. There was no release of radiation or other materials resulting from that power loss.
  • Chalmette Refining reported the release of sulphur dioxide from a flare due to loss of power.
  • The Dow-Union Carbide plant in Hahnville reported flaring of products and byproducts due to loss of power.
  • ExxonMobil in Baton Rouge reported releases of nitrogen oxide, nitrate, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide due to an upset caused by Ida.
  • Hudson Marine/Orion Reederei reported that a vessel ran aground at Magnolia Landing in St. James Parish. No release was reported.
  • Energy Transfer Partners/Lone Star NGL in Geismar reported a loss of power that caused its flare to produce black smoke. What was actually released was unknown
  • Marquette Transportation on the Mississippi River near LaPlace reported fuel coming from the cargo vessel Golden L.
  • Kirby Inland Marine on the river in St. Charles Parish, reported the release of pygas in a discharge from a tank of the barge M/V Kirby 28046.
  • Cornerstone Chemical reported the release of sulphur dioxide and sulphur trioxide. “Molten sulfur tank may have been struck by lightning or other ignition source,” the report said.
  • Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery in Belle Chasse reported a release of mainly stormwater after the refinery was flooded when a levee was overtopped. Officials hope to open floodgates to reduce water within the leveed area to lessen the flooding impact.
  • The Valero St. Charles refinery in Norco reported damage to a gasoline tank and a release of gasoline.
  • Entergy’s Little Gypsy Plant in Montz reported an unknown amount of asbestos blown off the ground.
  • ECM Maritime/Hokoku Marine reported that one of its vessels in the Mississippi River ran aground in St. Charles Parish, and there was potential for release of fuel oil.
  • Marathon Pipeline’s St. James Tank Farm reported crude oil discharged onto an aboveground storage tank and then onto the ground and into surface water.
  • Hudson Marine reported that tugs broke free from the Bonnet Carre Anchorage at Norco and struck a vessel. There is the potential for a release.
  • Tennessee Gas Pipeline reported that a nipple on a pipeline near Golden Meadow was damaged, releasing natural gas.
  • Gallagher Marine/Safety Sailing Ship Management reported that the bulk cargo ship L/T Ocean Star was aground in the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish and there was potential for the release of oil.
  • The Coast Guard reported that there was an unidentified barge sunk in the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish, posing the threat of a release of an unknown amount of oil.
  • Clean Gulf reported oil sheen in the Gulf of Mexico a few miles off Port Fourchon from an unknown source.
  • Shell Pipeline reported damage to piping at a pipeline booster facility near Golden Meadow that was leaking crude oil.

15 million Covid vaccine doses thrown away in the U.S. since March, new data shows

NBC News

15 million Covid vaccine doses thrown away in the U.S. since March, new data shows

As countries across the world clamor for vaccine doses, U.S. pharmacy chains and state health departments have thrown millions away.
By Joshua Eaton and Joe Murphy          September 1, 2021
Image: Moderna Vaccine

The number of discarded doses is still a small fraction of the total doses administered in the U.S. Apu Gomes / AFP via Getty Images file

Pharmacies and state governments in the United States have thrown away at least 15.1 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines since March 1, according to government data obtained by NBC News — a far larger number than previously known and still probably an undercount.

Four national pharmacy chains reported more than 1 million wasted doses each, according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in response to a public records request. Walgreens reported the most waste of any pharmacy, state or other vaccine provider, with nearly 2.6 million wasted doses. CVS reported 2.3 million wasted doses, while Walmart reported 1.6 million and Rite Aid reported 1.1 million.

The data released by the CDC is self-reported by pharmacies, states and other vaccine providers. It is not comprehensive — missing some states and federal providers — and it does not include the reason doses had to be thrown away. In one example of missing data, the CDC lists just 12 wasted doses for Michigan since March, but Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services said on Wednesday that the state has thrown away 257,673 doses since December.

The number of discarded doses is still a small fraction of the total doses administered in the U.S.

In general, there are a number of reasons why vaccination sites may have to mark doses as wasted, from a cracked vial or an error diluting the vaccine to a freezer malfunction to more doses in a vial than people who want them. A wastage report can also happen when a vial contains fewer doses than it should.

The data on wasted doses comes as the more contagious delta variant spreads rapidly across the United States, adding fresh urgency to the effort to vaccinate as many people as possible and spurring a plan to begin offering booster shots to those already vaccinated — even as many nations around the world have vaccinated few, if any, of their residents.

“It’s really tragic that we have a situation where vaccines are being wasted while lots of African countries have not had even 5 percent of their populations vaccinated,” said Sharifah Sekalala, an associate professor of global health law at England’s University of Warwick, who studies inequalities in infectious diseases.

“A lot of the global south is unvaccinated. The African continent is still below 10 percent, and that’s just a huge inequality and it’s really problematic.”

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said in an email that the share of Covid vaccines wasted “remains extremely low, which is evidence of the strong partnership among the federal government, jurisdictions, and vaccine providers to get as many people vaccinated as possible while reducing vaccine wastage across the system.”

Nordland added, “As access to Covid-19 vaccine has increased, it is important for providers to not miss any opportunity to vaccinate every eligible person who presents at vaccine clinics, even if it may increase the likelihood of leaving unused doses in a vial.”

A CVS spokesman made a similar point, writing in an email: “While we regret having to dispose of any vaccine, we’re extremely proud of our store employees who’ve helped administer more than 30 million doses. When given the option of potentially saving a life or slightly improving our reported waste figures, we’ll always choose the former.”

Walgreens, Walmart and Rite Aid did not immediately respond to requests for comment. “Our goal has always been ensuring every dose of vaccine is used,” Walgreens spokesperson Kris Lathan told Kaiser Health News in May.

The number of doses that went to waste is a small fraction of the more than 438 million doses that were distributed in the country as of Tuesday and the 111.7 million additional doses the U.S. had given to other countries as of Aug. 3.

Demand for vaccines in the U.S. rose in August as cases and hospitalizations surged due to the delta variant. Still, the U.S. wasted at least 3.8 million doses in August alone, the data shows.

States, pharmacies and other vaccine providers also reported at least 4.4 million wasted doses to the CDC in June and 4.7 million in July — more than in March, April and May combined.

No state health department came close to the number of doses wasted by pharmacy chains, but four reported over 200,000 wasted doses each. Texas led in reports of vaccine waste by states, with 517,746 wasted doses, North Carolina reported 285,126, Pennsylvania reported 244,214 and Oklahoma reported 226,163. (This list does not include Michigan, which did not have full information listed in the CDC’s data release.)

Lara Anton, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said the state “instructed vaccine providers to prioritize vaccinating people when they came in to get vaccinated rather than waiting until they found enough people to use every dose in the vial before opening it,” which can lead to wasted doses. Power outages at two vaccine storage facilities in Texas affected more than 47,000 doses in May, KXAN Austin reported at the time. Vaccine storage has moved to facilities with better temperature monitoring since that incident, a Texas Health Department spokesperson said at the time.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health released a statement saying, “While we do everything possible to avoid waste, and while we don’t want to waste on purpose, we also don’t want to miss any vaccination opportunities.”

Representatives for the North Carolina and Oklahoma health departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Officials in Oklahoma previously blamed vaccine waste on the need to get vaccines into arms, even if that means throwing away unused doses.

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration authorized booster shots for people who are immunocompromised because their bodies may not respond to the initial vaccine regimen. The Biden administration has also announced a plan, pending FDA and CDC signoff, to offer booster shots to all Americans eight months after their last dose in response to evidence of waning immunity.

Those moves prompted debate about whether it was moral to offer Americans extra protection when so many people around the world haven’t received even a single Covid vaccine shot.

But the new data showed that the U.S. has wasted far more vaccine doses than many poorer countries have for their entire population. For example, the country of Georgia, a coronavirus hot spot, has administered just 1.1 million vaccine doses for its population of 4.9 million. Nepal, which has been ravaged by the delta variant, has administered just 9.7 million doses for its population of 30.4 million.

“It’s an equity issue,” said Tim Doran, professor of health policy at the United Kingdom’s University of York. “You’ve got a very wealthy country with good access to vaccines essentially throwing vaccine away, and a lot of vaccine away, and you’ve got other countries and other communities within those countries who would really require it, who were having to wait and aren’t getting access to vaccine and that’s making them susceptible whilst they are awaiting vaccination.”

Sekalala, the global health law professor, said the U.S. wasting so many doses was “inevitable under the model” in which wealthy countries bought large quantities of vaccines for themselves, only thinking about donating them to poorer countries later.

“It’s a failure of the current system where rich countries buy their individual batches of vaccines, and then have to think about what’s going to happen if they don’t use them,” she said. “This led to an over-purchase, with people buying up supplies that they didn’t need or weren’t able to use.”

One contributing factor to vaccine waste is the way the vaccines are packaged. Most vaccines for other illnesses come in single-dose vials. But, depending on the equipment used to draw a dose, Moderna’s Covid vaccine has up to 15 doses in a vial, while Pfizer’s has up to six and Johnson & Johnson’s has up to five.

Once a vial is punctured — for example, if a customer requests a vaccination at a retail pharmacy — the clock starts ticking. A vial of Moderna’s vaccine has to be discarded 12 hours after it’s punctured, while Pfizer’s and Johnson & Johnson’s have to be discarded after six hours.

The high number of doses in each vial and the relatively short timeframe for using a vial once it’s been punctured likely contributed to unused doses going to waste.

Several vaccine providers reported the waste of thousands of doses to the CDC in a single report. But overall, the newly released data shows that vaccine waste was a slow, steady trickle rather than a flood — the most common report in the data was just four doses wasted at a time.

The data released Tuesday is more detailed and complete than data the CDC released in April, when a Kaiser Health News investigation found that the country wasted nearly 200,000 Covid vaccine doses from December through March.

separate investigation by The New York Times found about 1 million wasted doses across 10 states from December through July.

The more detailed data suggests that the CDC now has a better picture of how much is being wasted and where than it did earlier in the vaccination program. Still, seven states are missing from the newly released data entirely: Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maine, Nevada, Ohio and Oregon.

Also missing from the CDC’s data are doses wasted by federal agencies that are administering the vaccines, including the Department of Defense, the Bureau of Prisons, the Veterans Health Administration and the Indian Health Service.

More vaccine waste data is held in Tiberius, a system run by the Department of Health and Human Services, but officials have yet to release it. The data released Tuesday came from the CDC’s Vaccine Tracking System, or VTrckS, which pulls data from state and local immunization registries.

Climate Change Is Bankrupting America’s Small Towns

Climate Change Is Bankrupting America’s Small Towns

The abandoned downtown of Fair Bluff, N.C., five years since flooding from Hurricane Matthew devastated the small town, on June 18, 2021. (Mike Belleme/The New York Times)
The abandoned downtown of Fair Bluff, N.C., five years since flooding from Hurricane Matthew devastated the small town, on June 18, 2021. (Mike Belleme/The New York Times)

 

FAIR BLUFF, N.C. — It has been almost five years since Hurricane Matthew flooded the small town of Fair Bluff, on the coastal plain of North Carolina. But somehow, the damage keeps getting worse.

The storm submerged Main Street in 4 feet of water, destroyed the town hall and the police and fire departments, and flooded almost one-quarter of Fair Bluff’s homes. After two weeks underwater, the roads buckled. The school and grocery store shut, then did not reopen. When Hurricane Florence submerged the same ground two years later, in 2018, there was little left to destroy.

What started as a physical crisis has become an existential one. The town’s only factory, which made vinyl products, closed a few months after Matthew. The population of around 1,000 fell by about half. The federal government tried to help, buying the homes of people who wanted to leave, but those buyouts meant even less property tax, tightening the fiscal noose.

Al Leonard, the town planner, who is responsible for its recovery, said his own job may have to be eliminated, and maybe the police department, too.

Climate shocks are pushing small rural communities like Fair Bluff, many of which were already struggling economically, to the brink of insolvency. Rather than bouncing back, places hit repeatedly by hurricanes, floods and wildfires are unraveling; residents and employers leave, the tax base shrinks, and it becomes even harder to fund basic services.

That downward spiral now threatens low-income communities in the path this week of Hurricane Ida and those hit by the recent flooding in Tennessee — hamlets regularly pummeled by storms that are growing more frequent and destructive because of climate change.

Their gradual collapse means more than just the loss of identity, history and community. The damage can haunt those who leave, since they often cannot sell their old homes at a price that allows them to buy something comparable in a safer place. And it threatens to disrupt neighboring towns and cities as the new arrivals push up demand for housing.

The federal government has struggled to respond, often taking years to provide disaster funds. And those programs sometimes work at cross purposes, paying some people to rebuild while paying their neighbors to leave.

What Comes After the Storm

Fair Bluff is small-town idyllic, nestled among fields of corn and tobacco near the South Carolina border, shielded from the Lumber River by a narrow bank of tupelo gum, river birch and bald cypress trees. But its main road offers a sobering glimpse of what climate change could mean for communities that cannot defend themselves.

On a recent afternoon, the sidewalks were empty and the storefronts abandoned, their interiors smashed up and littered with trash, doors ajar. The roof of one building had collapsed, a battered American flag stuck in the debris; inside other buildings were ransacked shelves, plastic containers full of Christmas decorations, an upside-down tricycle. Speakers on a Methodist church played recorded hymns for no one.

Some stores were strewn with cleaning supplies and half-full garbage bags, as if shopkeepers had first tried to fix the flood damage before giving up.

“If you look at what the folks here called downtown, really the only business that came back was the U.S. Post Office,” said Leonard, who splits his time between Fair Bluff and four other towns, none of which can afford a full-time employee on their own.

It is no coincidence that small towns in eastern North Carolina are among the first in the country to face an existential threat from climate change. Many were already struggling from the decline of the tobacco and textile industries, and the area’s flat terrain makes it especially vulnerable to flooding from powerful hurricanes that are coming more often. Between 1954 and 2016, North Carolina was hit by 19 hurricanes severe enough to produce a federal disaster declaration, about one every three years. By contrast, four hurricanes have cleared that bar since 2018.

Leonard described Fair Bluff’s hopeful plan: Buy the ruined stores downtown, tear them down, clean up the land and turn it into a park that can flood safely. Build a new downtown a few blocks east on land is less likely to flood. Rebuild, revive and regain what has been lost.

But the town cannot afford any of it.

“We were a small town before the hurricanes; we’re much smaller after the hurricanes,” Leonard said. The median household income is $20,000 a year; many residents are retired, and just one-third have jobs. “Fair Bluff’s recovery will go as far as someone else’s money will take us.”

‘Ain’t Gonna Be That Many People on This Street’

That strategy has half-worked. The town won grants to rebuild in bits and pieces, repairing some roads and the drinking water system. Last spring, the Economic Development Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, announced $4.8 million to build a small business center. A company that makes pipes has said it would open a factory in Fair Bluff.

But clearing the old downtown could cost $10 million — money Fair Bluff does not have, Leonard said. And while the EDA is funding a new commercial building, other federal agencies are paying for residents to leave — residents who might have been customers for those new shops.

After Hurricane Matthew, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying to buy 34 houses in the town to demolish them — a process that can take years. Only 14 have been purchased so far; the rest should be sold sometime in the next year. FEMA’s rules require that no new homes be constructed on that property, taking it off the real estate tax rolls.

Buyouts protect people by getting them out of homes likely to flood, said David Maurstad, head of insurance and mitigation at FEMA. But he acknowledged it makes it harder for towns to stay economically viable. “That’s a real challenge for communities,” he said.

State officials offered to buy another 35 houses in Fair Bluff, this time with money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. To persuade the town, the officials brought a map with a shaded area, showing the homes they said could not reasonably be protected against future floods.

Those homeowners, the state argued, should have the chance to leave.

The shaded area covered nine blocks in the middle of town. It would have carved a hole in Fair Bluff, which is only 3 square miles, setting aside land that could never be rebuilt upon. The town refused.

More buyouts would make it even harder for the town to survive financially, Leonard said. “Those folks have decided to stay in Fair Bluff,” he said. “Who are we to say, ‘We want you to leave?’”

But in interviews, some residents said that if another storm struck, they would not come back.

A few blocks south of Main Street, Barbara Vereen lives in a modest white house. After Hurricane Matthew, Vereen, 64, moved in with relatives while her flooded house was repaired. Then came Hurricane Florence, displacing her another six months.

From a chair on her front porch, she pointed to the neighboring houses, most of them waiting to be torn down. “Ain’t gonna be that many people on this street,” she said. If another flood comes, Vereen said, she will join her neighbors and leave.

The mayor of Fair Bluff is Billy Hammond, who works as an undertaker at the local funeral home. He said he thinks the town can regain some population within the next decade — if another storm does not hit.

“If we would have another flood and lose 200 people,” he said, “we would be in dire need.”

Build Back or Pay People to Leave?

Adapting to climate change in the United States arguably comes down to a brutal decision: when to build back and when to help move people away from threats that are only getting worse.

The first option is becoming more expensive and less effective as disasters mount. The second option is usually too painful to even consider.

In 2016, the Obama administration set up a working group among agencies that handle disaster policy and recovery, including FEMA, HUD and the Army Corps of Engineers, asking them to devise a coordinated approach for what experts call managed retreat: relocating entire communities from areas that cannot be protected.

But that work stopped under former President Donald Trump and has not resumed.

Instead, agencies continue to pursue their own programs, even if they conflict with each other.

Halfway between Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Atlantic coast is Princeville, the first town in America chartered by freed slaves. Princeville was built at a spot where the Tar River veers through a 90-degree bend, creating a natural choke point when hurricanes flush the river with rain.

In 1967, the Army Corps of Engineers built a levee in Princeville; three decades later, flooding from Hurricane Floyd overwhelmed that levee, damaging or destroying the town’s 1,000 homes. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew flooded Princeville again.

As residents left and tax revenue shrank, so did the town’s role in daily life. The county took over policing as well as water and sewer services and tax collection. A contractor handles trash pickup.

Bobbie Jones, the mayor of Princeville, said he wanted to bring residents and businesses back so the town could provide those services again.

“When we are doing things for ourselves, we take more pride in it,” Jones said. “The oldest town chartered by Blacks in America — we want to make sure that everything that all other towns have, that we have the same services for ourselves.”

After Floyd, FEMA offered to buy every home; town officials refused. After Matthew, Congress tried a new approach, directing the Corps to build a $40 million system of levees and other flood protections.

But as the Corps plans the new levee, FEMA and HUD have begun providing people with money to leave. Since Matthew, FEMA is paying for the state to buy and tear down 22 homes. HUD is paying to buy another 27, and more could follow.

Laura Hogshead leads the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which manages disaster money the state gets from HUD. She said that buying out homes in Princeville, at the same time as another agency builds a new levee to protect those homes, may require reconsideration.

“If we are seeing significant numbers of people who want to stay in Princeville, then I want them to be protected,” Hogshead said. “If everyone’s going to move, then that’s a different conversation.”

‘If Another Flood Happens, It’s Definitely Gone’

Fifty miles south of Princeville is a warning about what happens when people leave and do not return.

All that is left of the town of Seven Springs is a few dozen buildings on the south bank of the Neuse River, land that rises gently to a highway a few hundred feet away. The effect is like a bathtub — which is what the town became when Hurricane Floyd sent the Neuse over its banks in 1999. Hurricane Matthew flooded the town again in 2016. Hurricane Florence repeated the damage in 2018.

Floyd cut the population of Seven Springs by about half; Matthew cut it again. Of the 30 or so houses left between the river and the highway, maybe a dozen are still occupied, said Stephen Potter, the mayor. The population, which peaked at 207 in 1960, had dwindled to 55 by last year.

The main street consists largely of abandoned businesses: the old Southern Bank branch, a general store, a restaurant. The town cannot condemn partially collapsed buildings because it cannot afford to tear them down and clear the debris, Potter said.

The town budget has fallen to $50,000 a year; to make ends meet, it has been dipping into reserves. Potter’s strategy is to turn one of the town’s empty lots into a campsite big enough for two recreational vehicles, which visitors to a nearby state park could use when that park’s main RV site fills up.

“Now, what happens when we have another catastrophic flood? I don’t know,” Potter said. “I really don’t want to be the mayor that presides over the death of Seven Springs.”

Still, the town keeps shrinking. Hogshead approached Seven Springs with a map showing which houses could not be protected and so were eligible for buyouts. It included almost all the land between the river and the highway. So far, 12 homeowners have signed up.

“I remember the town when it was thriving,” said Alan Cash, a 46-year-old electrician who works in Raleigh, an hour and a half away. “It’s very sad to see what it’s become.”

Cash said he had declined a buyout because it would not be enough money for a similar house elsewhere, adding that most of his neighbors who did accept them wound up in mobile home parks along the highway. “It is really a step down,” he said.

He described how the series of floods had shrunken Seven Springs: With each flood, more people leave. The tax base shrinks. Those who stay lose the will to improve their properties, knowing that they will likely flood again.

“I don’t know that it’s really going to take the next flood to kill it,” Cash said of Seven Springs. “But if another flood happens, it’s definitely gone.”

Lake Tahoe wildfire seemed controllable, then it wasn’t

Lake Tahoe wildfire seemed controllable, then it wasn’t

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Just last week, managers overseeing the fight against the massive wildfire scorching California’s Lake Tahoe region thought they could have it contained by the start of this week.

Instead, the Caldor Fire crested the Sierra Nevada on Monday, forcing the unprecedented evacuation of all 22,000 residents of South Lake Tahoe and tens of thousands of tourists who would otherwise be winding down their summers by the alpine lake straddling the California-Nevada state line.

That drastic move might never have been needed if authorities could have thrown more firefighters at the blaze when it was small. That didn’t happen because the Dixie Fire was simultaneously raging across the mountain range 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the north, on the way to becoming the second-largest wildfire in California history.

“I do think the Dixie and the way that it’s burned and its magnitude did impact the early response to the Caldor,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of wildland fire science at the University of California, Berkeley. “It really drew resources down so much that the Caldor got very few for the first couple days.”

By the time Caldor approached Lake Tahoe two weeks later, there were 4,000 fire personnel, dozens of water-dropping aircraft and hundreds of fire engines and bulldozers.

But all that manpower and equipment were overmatched by tinder dry conditions, whipping downslope winds and an overgrown forest ripe to burn, a half-dozen fire experts said. And with resources already stretched across the West and internationally, they said the long-term situation will only worsen as exhausted firefighters battle bigger blazes that start earlier and last longer.

“Mother Nature is calling the cards on our hubris that we can conquer and control wildfires during these extreme conditions,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who now heads Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, which advocates for working with wildfires instead of reflexively putting them out.

The Caldor Fire ignited from an unknown cause on Aug. 14 in the steep wooded foothills east of California’s capital city of Sacramento. In the first few days, about 240 firefighters were dispatched, compared to the 6,550 firefighters battling the Dixie Fire at the time.

It wasn’t until four days later that Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter said fire managers diverted 30 fire engines from the Dixie Fire to the Caldor Fire. Overnight, the number of engines and firefighters nearly tripled. But by then the fire had already burned through Grizzly Flats, destroying dozens of homes in the town of about 1,200 people.

“We are moving resources around as needed, sharing among the incidents,” Porter told reporters on Aug. 18. But he acknowledged that “we are having a very difficult time” because resources were so stretched across the West.

Officials couldn’t say how many firefighters would have been ideal and when, but Cal Fire was candid that there initially was a shortage, said Ken Pimlott, who retired as the agency’s director in 2018 and lives a few miles from the fire’s origin.

“Early on, this was not the highest priority because there were other threats on other fires that were higher,” Pimlott said.

As the fire marched toward Lake Tahoe and its crystal clear waters that attract visitors from around the world, it destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures and left a firefighter with serious burns.

Still, officials predicted as recently as last weekend that they could hold the fire outside the Lake Tahoe Basin. They feverishly expanded fire lines to take advantage of the barren granite that caps the mountain chain which has formed an impenetrable barrier to flames in the past. This time, their optimism merely lulled residents into a false sense of security, leaving many scrambling to pack their lives in bags when evacuation orders came Monday.

Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project said fire managers were foolish to think they could stop the flames based on the expected winds.

“It is 100% predictable that under those conditions the fire will continue to move in that direction. So it’s hard for me to imagine why anyone would conclude otherwise,” said Hanson, a frequent critic of forest management efforts.

Firefighters had thought they made good progress during favorable conditions going into the weekend, said Jason Hunter, a spokesman for Caldor Fire managers. But then came the changing weather pattern with “incredibly gusty winds” that pushed burning embers over the crest.

“The weather, is what it boils down to, is what changed,” Hunter said. Containment projections are a “constantly moving target” based on evolving conditions, he said. The Caldor Fire’s containment projection has since been pushed back to Sept. 13.

Experts agreed conditions are grim because drought has been worsened by consecutive climate change-driven heat waves that sap humidity before dry winds whip flames and ferry embers sometimes a mile or more ahead of the main blaze.

“These embers are leapfrogging over fire lines and rivers, ridges and roads and other things that typically stop wildfire spread, and so you have these fires kind of hopscotching across the landscape,” Ingalsbee said.

Firefighters were outflanked by a shift in localized winds that funneled flames into the Tahoe basin, said John Battles, a University of California, Berkeley professor of forest ecology.

Fire managers have become adept at projecting the weather and how fuels will burn, but still lack the ability to predict localized winds at fires — some caused by the fires themselves — with 10 different computer models offering as many conflicting outcomes, he said.

“They’re trying to predict winds at a mountain pass. That is the most complex topography we have,” Battles said. “That’s why you have this feeling like they didn’t know what they’re doing.”

He added: “When you’re fighting a fire the size of the Caldor, you make your best guess.”

The Caldor Fire is just the second in modern history to have traversed the Sierra. The first was the Dixie Fire that started in mid-July near the town of Paradise and has grown to 1,300 square miles (3,367 square kilometers), more than four times as large as Caldor.

Such monster fires typically come later in the year when conditions are their driest but also when cooler days, rising humidity and ultimately rain and snow have aided the firefight, said Char Miller, a professor at Pomona College who has written extensively about wildfires.

But California has received far less precipitation than normal the last two years and there’s no guarantee more will arrive this fall to aid firefighters. “This may burn through October,” Miller said.

Yet the fire experts said the biggest challenge is neither drought nor climate change, but the overgrown forests that could actually benefit from fire — so long as it is set or allowed to burn at a low intensity during the spring or fall before it can explode out of control.

Firefighters still quickly contain about 95% of fires, but it’s the ones that escape that do the major damage, Pimlott said. Once fires spread, firefighters may need to start prioritizing communities that can be protected while letting the flames burn around them, he said.

“It’s a hard pill to swallow for all of us in the firefighting community, because we want to put these fires to bed,” he said. “We just may not be able to do that on every one of these fires, because of the conditions we’re facing.”

Inside a Florida Hospital Full of Dying, Unvaxxed Thirtysomethings

Inside a Florida Hospital Full of Dying, Unvaxxed Thirtysomethings

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photos Getty
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photos Getty

 

MIAMI—After ending a 12-hour shift on Sunday, an intensive-care unit nurse at Baptist Hospital was ready to put August behind her.

The nurse, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she did not have permission from the hospital to speak to reporters, said the past month was the worst of the pandemic so far—echoing the horrific hard numbers in the state.

“It’s horrible,” the nurse told The Daily Beast. “I’ve never bagged so many thirtysomething-year-olds, leaving behind young kids, pregnant wives.”

“The screams when we tell them their loved ones didn’t make it,” the nurse added. “We’re exhausted.”

Across much of America, frontline hospital workers are going through similar stress and fatigue as they grapple with a devastating coronavirus surge primarily fueled by the Delta variant and vaccine hesitancy. But in Florida, experts and medical workers say, a uniquely stubborn and denialist Gov. Ron DeSantis has helped transform hot vaxx summer into a summer from hell.

With skyrocketing numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths this summer, any optimism that the Sunshine State was rounding the corner on the pandemic has been laid to waste. And September may not offer any respite.

<div class="inline-image__caption"><p>Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has hardened his resolve against mask and vaccine mandates even as his state's ICUs fill up.</p></div> <div class="inline-image__credit">Joe Raedle/Getty</div>Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has hardened his resolve against mask and vaccine mandates even as his state’s ICUs fill up. Joe Raedle/Getty

According to a Miami Herald analysis of recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Florida added at least 894 deaths on a single day to its August tally as reported to the agency this past week. According to The New York Times’ COVID-19 tracker, an average of 262 Floridians a day drew their last breaths during the seven days ending Aug. 31, representing about a sixth of the nationwide total. Over the past week, COVID-19 hospitalizations mercifully trended downward, except for Aug. 30, when there was an uptick by 10 patients, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Interviews with employees and internal emails obtained by The Daily Beast show how Baptist, like other hospitals, struggled to keep up with a torrent of new COVID-19 patients, a majority unvaccinated and under 65—and sometimes much younger. Instead of breathing a sigh of relief after a year and a half of nightmarish case loads, the hospital’s halls transformed into spectacles of pandemic skepticism and death.

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Spokespersons for Baptist Health South Florida, the nonprofit company that owns Baptist Hospital, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In an Aug. 20 email to all employees, Baptist Hospital CEO Patricia Rosello told her workforce that the previous evening, three people in their thirties died from COVID-19.

“We realized this week that not everyone who works here realizes how different this surge has been,” Rosello wrote. “We want you to share this data and information with your friends and family as we all have to do our part in sharing the TRUTH. Many of your colleagues are having to face the multiple deaths of young people. We have pregnant patients with COVID in our ICU and that is something we did not experience before.”

Rosello warned that the start of the new school year and the Labor Day holiday would likely send more people to the emergency room seeking treatment for COVID-19. “Unfortunately, we will see our numbers rise, so we have to continue to be strong and resilient.”

Her email contained the hospital’s coronavirus update, which stated that Baptist had experienced a 700 percent increase in the number of patients not breathing and flat-lining throughout its COVID-19 units from June until Aug. 20.

“We’ve had code blues going off all the time,” the nurse working at the hospital told The Daily Beast, referring to an emergency code hospital staff respond to when a patient is in cardiac arrest or having respiratory issues. “It’s very scary.”

The same day, a separate email sent out to all Baptist hospital nurses informed them that the oxygen supply had reached critical levels.

“Everyone, please be extra aware that our oxygen supply is at critically low levels due to the high number of patients on high flow oxygen,” the email stated. “When you are rounding in your areas and in patient rooms, please ensure that the oxygen on the wall is OFF when not in use.”

The email also noted that the number of COVID-19 patients actively in the hospital had eclipsed 300—and that the number of patients requiring constant observation had risen to record levels.

A video clip uploaded to the hospital’s Facebook account that day showed a masked ICU nurse named Alexis choking through tears as she talked about treating an unvaccinated pregnant young woman and other patients in their adult prime. “COVID this time around is no joke,” she said. “It is beyond scary to see someone my age in here with breathing tubes and lines [inserted] everywhere you can think of. The fact that some of these people cannot hold their loved one’s hand is very heartbreaking.”

Amid the COVID-19 chaos, Gov. DeSantis has hardened his resolve against mask mandates in schools and to prevent businesses—such as cruise lines—from requiring employees and customers to provide proof of vaccination. On Monday, the state Department of Health even dangled $5,000 fines against businesses that require proof of vaccination.

The DeSantis administration is also facing new criticism for how it is tabulating the pandemic death toll.

The Herald reported Tuesday that the Florida Department of Health changed its reporting format for death data to the CDC as cases mushroomed worse than ever last month. The tweak in the reporting system caused the health department’s Monday update to show just 46 new deaths per day over the previous seven days. If the state had used the previous metric, it would show the number of average daily deaths was 262.

Meanwhile, DeSantis is in full combat mode, sparring with national media outlets and President Joe Biden’s administration while playing to his Republican base.

Last week, during an appearance on Fox News, DeSantis hyped his administration’s barnstorming push to provide free Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatments to people sick with COVID-19 at pop-up medical sites around Florida. The governor also made sure to take shots at the current occupant in the White House.

“You know, he said he was going to end COVID,” DeSantis crowed. “He hasn’t done that. We are the first state to start the treatment centers for monoclonal antibodies. We’re having great success with that.”

DeSantis intimated that Biden’s administration should follow Florida’s lead in making monoclonal antibody treatments easily available across the U.S: “At the end of the day, he is trying to find a way to distract from the failures of his presidency.”

Marissa Levine, an infectious-disease professor at the University of South Florida, said DeSantis’ approach failed to meet the needs imposed by a rapidly-changing reality.

“The pandemic is an evolving situation involving a series of outbreaks in different places at different points in time,” Levine said. “You have to continue learning and adapting as you go. You can’t create a line-in-the-sand policy to respond to a constantly evolving situation.”

She added, “I don’t think that approach is the right approach in successfully dealing with a pandemic.”

Christina Pushaw, a DeSantis spokeswoman, told The Daily Beast the latest criticisms of her boss were unfair. She insisted the governor’s office, along with the Florida Department of Health, have consistently advocated for vaccines, and now monoclonal antibody treatments, as the best tools to fight COVID-19, based on science.

“Gov. DeSantis has done more than 50 events in 27 counties promoting the vaccines,” Pushaw said Tuesday. “At every Regeneron press conference, including three he did yesterday, he talks for a few minutes about the vaccines.”

Whether it’s fear of the Delta variant or DeSantis reminding people to get their shots at his Regeneron events, vaccination rates are up this past month, Pushaw said. She also said Floridians who were getting free Regeneron treatments have also led to recent decreases in COVID-19 hospitalizations.

Even with Florida reporting an average of over 200 COVID-19 deaths each day during the last week of August—the highest in the nation, according to the Washington Post—Pushsaw said the state was faring much better than the rest of the country. That is, she argued, if you take into account the overall number of deaths since the pandemic began.

She pointed to the CDC’s rankings of age adjusted deaths by state, which shows Florida ranks 17th in the nation.

“The bottom line is that Gov. DeSantis is giving Floridians the facts about vaccines and the monoclonal antibody treatments,” Pushaw said. “Gov. DeSantis is saving lives by expanding access to free monoclonal antibody treatment. He feels that all Americans who could benefit from this treatment should have access to sites like the ones in Florida.”

Even if Pushaw can point to the governor’s Regeneron tour as having had a positive impact in helping alleviate strained hospitals, the situation inside Baptist’s intensive care unit remains dire.

According to the hospital’s Aug. 27 and Aug. 30 COVID-19 census updates, the number of patients went down from 248 to 222 between those dates—but the intensive care unit was still slammed. Both updates noted that the number of patients requiring “high acuity” care had not decreased at the same rate as people who come in and are discharged.

“High acuity means patients who have been intubated or need constant high-flow oxygen,” the ICU nurse told The Daily Beast. “Those beds are still full.”

The Aug. 27 update also said that a 50-year-old and three patients in their 30s died the previous day, and that 61 percent of the patients requiring constant observation were between the ages of 18 and 65. Staff were again instructed to keep tabs on oxygen levels.

“The statewide oxygen shortage continues to present challenges to hospitals throughout Florida, and the demand for oxygen will continue to increase, so conservation is crucial,” the update read.

According to the Aug. 30 summary, last month, Baptist had 90 patients die from COVID-19, the highest number of deaths at the hospital during any given month of the pandemic.

Last Friday, a second ICU nurse told The Daily Beast, the hospital only had 32 hours of oxygen left when she arrived for her shift.

“The oxygen truck came later that night,” she said. “Last weekend, the morgue was full and we had two freezer trailers outside. One filled up by midnight the same day.”

The nurse, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said 90 percent of the COVID-19 patients she treated were unvaccinated, and of the ones who died, 99 percent did not get vaccines.

“It’s a nightmare I wish we could wake up from,” the second nurse said.

Largest study of masks yet details their importance in fighting Covid-19

Largest study of masks yet details their importance in fighting Covid-19

 

A study involving more than 340,000 people in Bangladesh offers some of the strongest real-world evidence yet that mask use can help communities slow the spread of Covid-19.

The research, conducted across 600 villages in rural Bangladesh, is the largest randomized trial to demonstrate the effectiveness of surgical masks, in particular, to curb transmission of the coronavirus. Though previous, smaller studies in laboratories and hospitals have shown that masks can help prevent the spread of Covid, the new findings demonstrate that efficacy in the real world — and on an enormous scale.

“This is really solid data that combines the control of a lab study with real-life actions of people in the world to see if we can get people to wear masks, and if the masks work,” said Laura Kwong, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the co-authors of the study.

The preprint study was posted online Wednesday by the nonprofit organization Innovations for Poverty Action and is currently undergoing peer review. The research was led by Kwong, Jason Abaluck and Mushfiq Mobarak from Yale University, and Steve Luby and Ashley Styczynski from Stanford University.

Related video: Study confirms vaccine effectiveness

The study’s findings have important implications for countries that are relying on mitigation measures to slow the virus’s spread until vaccines are more readily available. But there are also applicable lessons for nations like the United States, where some communities are reimposing mask mandates to stem outbreaks of the delta variant.

“The policy question we were trying to answer was: If you can distribute masks and get people to wear them, do they work?” said study co-author Mushfiq Mobarak, a professor of economics at Yale.

For five months beginning last November, Mobarak and his colleagues tracked 342,126 adult Bangladeshis and randomly selected villages to roll out programs to promote their usage, which included distributing free masks to households, providing information about their importance and reinforcing their use in the community.

Among the roughly 178,000 individuals who were encouraged to wear them, the scientists found that mask-wearing increased by almost 30 percent and that the change in behavior persisted for 10 weeks or more. After the program was instituted, the researchers reported an 11.9 percent decrease in symptomatic Covid symptoms and a 9.3 percent reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence, which indicates that the virus was detected in blood tests.

While the effect may seem small, the results offer a glimpse of just how much masks matter, Mobarak said.

“A 30-percent increase in mask-wearing led to a 10 percent drop in Covid, so imagine if there was a 100-percent increase — if everybody wore a mask and we saw a 100-percent change,” he said.

The scientists said masks significantly reduced symptomatic infections among older adults, and found that surgical masks were more effective than cloth versions.

Kwong said those findings may be especially important for countries such as the U.S., where people spend much more time indoors compared to those in rural Bangladesh.

“Right now, places say to cover your face but they don’t say what type of face covering,” she said. “If schools and workplaces and other indoor public spaces are going to mandate masks, they should be working to mandate surgical masks.”

Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved with the study, called the research “thoughtfully put together” and “impressive on many different levels.”

He added that the project demonstrated that strategies can be effectively implemented in communities to change mask behavior. In the U.S., public health officials have struggled to promote their usage after masks were politicized early in the pandemic.

“Normative behavior is what needs to be targeted,” Sethi said. “It’s not just mask use that needs to be adopted, it’s also an understanding of why masks need to be used and reinforcement that the virus is serious.”

Kwong and her colleagues are now expanding their research to include other villages and cities in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The researchers also intend to track the effect of masks on asymptomatic transmission.

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases physician and associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, said the research helps reinforce what was known about the effectiveness of masks, but he stressed that people should see them as just one of multiple interventions needed to stop the spread of Covid.

“We need vaccinations, better ventilation in indoor settings, crowd control, physical distancing — all these different added layers of protection,” he said. “Masks certainly help, but we can’t mask our way out of the pandemic.”

If U.S. had fought COVID like Denmark did, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive | Opinion

If U.S. had fought COVID like Denmark did, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive | Opinion

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Virtually nobody here wears a face mask on the street or inside shops and restaurants — a huge surprise. It’s almost as if the COVID-19 pandemic were a distant memory.

As soon as I left the Copenhagen airport and took a taxi to the city, the driver — who was not wearing a mask — told me that I didn’t need to wear one in Denmark. “It hasn’t been required for several months,” he said. When we entered the city, I noticed that, indeed, almost no one was wearing a mask.

In Denmark, 72% of the people have been fully vaccinated, as opposed to 51% in the United States, 31% in Argentina and 25% in Mexico. And by almost every standard, Denmark has done much better than the United States and most other countries in fighting the pandemic.

The cumulative number of COVID-19 deaths per million people in Denmark is of 442, compared with 1,904 in the United States, according to Oxford University’s Ourworldindata.org website.

In conversations with Danes from all walks of life, virtually all of them told me the same thing: Denmark has succeeded in its battle against COVID-19 because most of the population followed the advice of government officials and experts from the start.

In early 2020, when the government ordered a stringent lockdown, everybody complied. When the government asked people to get vaccinated, almost everyone did. Government officials say that most of those who didn’t get vaccinated were young people, who thought that COVID-19 posed no threat to them. Now, the government is launching a vaccination campaign in schools and colleges, aiming at a full vaccination rate of 90% of the population.

To enter the country, you need to show a negative COVID-19 test taken in the past 72 hours. Every time I went to a restaurant, I had to show proof of vaccination. But the government announced on Aug. 27 that this and all other domestic restrictions will expire on Sept. 10, because the pandemic is “under control.”

“We believe in authorities, we believe in experts,” Bertel Haarder, a member of Parliament and former education and culture minister, told me in an interview. “When experts tell us that we should get vaccinated, then the Danes have a tendency to get vaccinated.”

Gert Tinggaard Svendsen, a professor of comparative politics at Aarhus University and author of a book on trust, agrees.

“Here, people trust the government,” Svensen told me. “When the government told Danes that vaccines were good for you, people trusted the government.”

Compare this to the United States where, possible cultural differences aside, we had a president — Donald Trump — who, unlike Danish leaders, minimized the pandemic from the very start. In February 2020, when Danish officials announced they were about to order a national lockdown, Trump was saying that “It’s going to be just fine,” and “I’m not concerned at all.”

Worse, Trump didn’t set an example by wearing a mask in public, often mocked those who did and, at one point suggested that people should inject themselves with a disinfectant to fight COVID-19.

From then on, things in America only got worse. The Republican Party — with a few honorable exceptions — has abandoned common sense by following in Trump’s footsteps, fighting mask mandates and failing to actively campaign for mass vaccinations, hoping to hurt President Biden’s initially successful offensive against the virus.

That’s insane. It’s costing thousands of American lives — many more than those lost in Afghanistan, or any other war.

Let’s follow Denmark’s example. I’m not suggesting to put all our trust in our politicians, because we’ve had a bad experience with that. But we should follow what the consensus of the scientific community says: Get vaccinated, wear a mask, and keep your distance!

Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show on Sundays at 8 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. 

Air pollution is slashing years off the lives of billions, report finds

The Guardian

Air pollution is slashing years off the lives of billions, report finds

Dirty air is a far greater killer than smoking, car crashes or HIV/Aids, with coal burning the leading cause

 

Smoggy conditions in New Delhi
Smoggy conditions in New Delhi. India is worst affected country, with the average citizen dying six years early. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.
Air pollution is cutting short the lives of billions of people by up to six years, according to a new report, making it a far greater killer than smoking, car crashes or HIV/Aids.

 

Coal burning is the principal culprit, the researchers said, and India is worst affected, with the average citizen dying six years early. China has slashed air pollution in the last seven years, but dirty air is still cutting 2.6 years from its people’s lifespan.

Fossil fuel burning is causing air pollution and the climate crisis, but nations have much greater power to cut dirty air within their own borders. The climate crisis is now also adding to air pollution by driving wildfires, completing a vicious circle, the scientists said.

The team said recent events had illustrated the different futures possible depending on whether governments act or not. Coronavirus lockdowns cut pollution, revealing the Himalayas to some Indian city dwellers, while wildfires in the western US caused serious pollution on the other side of the continent in New York City.

“Air pollution is the greatest external threat to human health on the planet, and that is not widely recognized, or not recognized with the force and vigor that one might expect,” said Prof Michael Greenstone at the University of Chicago. Greenstone and colleagues developed the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI), which converts air pollution levels into their impact on life expectancy.

The average global citizen loses 2.2 years of life with today’s levels of air pollution and, if nothing changes, that adds up to 17bn lost years, Greenstone said. “What else on the planet is causing people to lose 17bn years of life?”

“Furthermore, we’re not just letting it happen, we’re actually causing it,” he said. “The most striking thing is that there are big countries where, effectively, a combination of the government and [societal] norms are choosing to allow people to live really dramatically shorter and sicker lives.” He said switching to cleaner energy and enforcing air quality measures on existing power plants have cut pollution in many countries.

The report estimated the number of additional years of life people would gain if air pollution levels in their country were reduced to World Health Organization guidelines. In India, the figure is 5.9 years – in the north of the country 480 million people breathe pollution that is 10 times higher than anywhere else in the world, the scientists said. Cutting pollution would add 5.4 years in Bangladesh and Nepal, and 3.9 years in Pakistan.

In central and west Africa, the impacts of particulate pollution on life expectancy are comparable to HIV/Aids and malaria, but receive far less attention, the report said. For example, the average person in the Niger delta stands to lose nearly six years of life, with 3.4 years lost by the average Nigerian.

China began a “war against pollution” in 2013 and has reduced levels by 29%. This is adding an average of 1.5 years on to lives, assuming the cuts are sustained, the scientists said, and shows rapid action is possible.

“Coal is the source of the problem in most parts of the world,” said Greenstone. “If these [health] costs were embedded in prices, coal would be uncompetitive in almost all parts of the world.”

Fossil gas is significantly less polluting than coal and Japan said in June that it would offer $10bn in aid for energy decarbonisation projects in southeast Asia, including gas power stations. But gas burning still drives global heating and Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief, said on Sunday: “Let’s be clear, gas is not an alternative to coal and nor is it a transition fuel. Investments in new gas must stop immediately if carbon neutrality is to be reached by 2050.”

The AQLI report is based on research comparing the death rates of people living in more and less polluted places, with heart and lung problems being the largest source of early deaths. The analysis is based on small particle pollution, but is likely to include the effects of other air pollutants as these all tend to be high in the same locations. The estimates of air pollution around the world were derived from satellite data at 3.7-mile (6km) resolution.

  • The picture on this story was changed on 1 September 2021. The original showed water vapor emerging from cooling towers, which does not contribute to particulate pollution.
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Ida collapses Mississippi road; kills 2, injures at least 10

Ida collapses Mississippi road; kills 2, injures at least 10

 

Ten people were injured and two were killed when a highway collapsed in Mississippi

LUCEDALE, Miss. (AP) — Barbara Cochran said she was about to get ready for bed late Monday when she heard a loud crash outside her home in rural southeastern Mississippi. Hurricane Ida had been dumping torrential rain, her husband was already asleep and the home’s air conditioner was humming loudly.

The 83-year-old retired educator said she went onto the porch to see if a big oak tree had fallen, or if an 18-wheeler had slid off the highway down the hill from their home. She didn’t see car lights, so she didn’t think there was a wreck.

About 10 minutes after she went back inside, she heard a second loud crash. Moments later, Cochran heard a third crash. As she was about to call the sheriff’s department, she heard the wail of sirens.

And, she said: “I heard something that sounded like a woman screaming.”

Two people were killed and at least 10 others were injured late Monday when seven vehicles plunged, one after another, into a deep hole where a dark, rural highway collapsed as Hurricane Ida blew through Mississippi, authorities said Tuesday.

Heavy rainfall may have caused the collapse of two-lane Mississippi Highway 26 west of Lucedale, and the drivers may not have seen that the roadway in front of them had disappeared, Mississippi Highway Patrol Cpl. Cal Robertson said. The George County Sheriff’s Department received the first call at about 10:30 p.m.

Cochran told The Associated Press that she didn’t know about the highway collapse or the wrecks until after she woke from a fitful night’s sleep. She said she is praying for the families of those killed or hurt.

“This is such a catastrophe,” Cochran said Tuesday.

Robertson said some of the vehicles ended up stacked on top of each other as they crashed into the abyss, which opened up in a rural area without street lights. Ida dumped as much as 13 inches (33 centimeters) of rain as it blew through Mississippi, the National Weather Service said.

“You can imagine driving at night with heavy rain coming down,” Robertson said. “It’s just nothing but a wall of water, your headlights kind of reflecting back on you.”

State troopers, emergency workers and rescue teams responded to the crash site about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northeast of Biloxi, to find both the east and westbound lanes collapsed. Robertson said the hole removed about 50 to 60 feet (15 to 18 meters) of roadway, and is 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters) deep.

George County Sheriff Keith Havard told the Sun Herald that the sheriff’s department received a 911 call from a man whose car had plunged into the hole.

“He said he was driving and all of a sudden he wasn’t driving anymore,” Havard said. “He didn’t understand what had happened. I can’t imagine anyone would.”

The newspaper reported that 911 dispatchers heard other vehicles crash into the pit.

The vehicles were later lifted out by a crane, leaving some debris at the bottom of the hole. A drone video published by the Sun Herald showed how a raised berm beneath the road washed away, leaving a red-clay scar that runs for hundreds of feet, from a cemetery on one side into a wooded area on the other.

“It is a slide, which means the ground under the roadway and embankment was super-saturated and we can tell right now that’s what caused the slide,” Kelly Castleberry, district engineer for the Mississippi Department of Transportation, told the newspaper.

Jerry Lee, 49, of Lucedale, was pronounced dead at 1:20 a.m., and Kent Brown, 49, of Leakesville, was pronounced dead 10 minutes later, George County Coroner DeeAnn Murrah said.

George County High School said one of its students, a senior, was hospitalized with critical injuries after crashing into the hole. Local schools were closed Tuesday because the collapsed highway created problems for buses and other traffic.

Mississippi southern district Transportation Commissioner Tom King said he didn’t know anything unusual about the soil conditions where the highway caved in.

“We just got bombarded here in south Mississippi with rain,” King told the AP.

King said work crews were checking other highways in areas that received heavy rain from Ida.

Between 3,100 and 5,700 vehicles drive along the stretch of highway on an average day, according to Mississippi Department of Transportation data.

“It’s going to take us a while to redo it and make it right again and make it safe for folks to go over,” King said of the collapsed roadbed.

Mike Dillon is pastor of Crossroads United Pentecostal Church, which is near the crash site. He said he learned about the crashes after he woke up Tuesday and checked a community prayer page online. Like many local residents, he walked to the crash site and prayed.

“We’re a very close-knit community,” Dillon said, “and we’re going to get through this with the help of the Lord.”

Hurricane Ida blasted ashore Sunday as a Category 4 storm, one of the most powerful ever to hit the U.S. mainland. It knocked out power to much of southeastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi, blowing roofs off buildings and causing widespread flooding as it pushed a surge of ocean water that briefly reversed the flow of the Mississippi River.

This story has been corrected to show that Jerry Lee was 49, not 42.

Emily Wagster Pettus reported from Jackson, Mississippi.