15 Miami-Dade Public School Staff Members Die Of COVID In Just 10 Days
Mary Papenfuss
A 30-year teaching veteran was one of 15 Miami-Dade County public school staff members who died of COVID-19 in just 10 days as Florida continues to reel amid the continuing, overwhelming toll of an unfettered pandemic.
“It’s a tremendous loss,” said a school official, referring to the death of longtime teacher Abe Coleman, 55, earlier this week.
“The number of lives that he impacted are countless. So many young men had the benefit of him intervening in their lives and pointing them in the right direction,” Marcus Bright, who works with a local education program 5000 Role Models of Excellence, told NBC-6 TV.
Coleman taught at Holmes Elementary School in Miami’s Liberty City area, which is a primarily Black neighborhood with 42% of the population living below the poverty line.
Local education officials haven’t released the identities of the other teachers or staff members.
“The loss of any of our employees is one that is always profoundly felt as every member of this organization is considered a part of Miami-Dade County Public Schools family,” the district said in a statement. “We extend our hearts and prayers to the loved ones of those whose lives have recently been lost.”
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has dismissed the importance of COVID-19 vaccinations and signed an executive order banning mask mandates at schools, issued no comment on the astounding death rate in the county schools system.
The state Health Department was sued earlier this week by the Florida Center for Government Accountability and Democratic state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith for not providing detailed, daily statistics about Florida’s surging COVID-19 cases in violation of the state’s open-records laws.
The suit argues that the DeSantis administration is deliberately manipulating COVID-19 data to make it appear the problem was not as dire as it actually is.
“The DeSantis administration has consistently refused to release COVID-related public records, which not only hurts our efforts to contain this deadly virus, it is also unlawful,” Smith said in a statement after the suit was filed.
“That’s why we’re suing them — to obtain the public records our constituents are entitled to under the Florida Constitution and to force the state to resume daily COVID dashboard reporting and avoid future litigation on this matter.”
After this desert city faced dry taps, California rushed through emergency water funding
Ralph Vartabedian
City water operator Taylor Miller stands at well 15, the main water supply in the Mojave desert town of Needles, in June. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
For months, the city of Needles has endured not just scorching hot weather but the possibility that its single water well could fail, a potentially life-threatening risk for this Mojave desert community of 5,000 residents.
Yet over recent weeks, word arrived that state officials — flush with billions of dollars in surplus tax revenue — intend to hand over $2 million to pay for a new well that could be operational later this year. City officials are now breathing easier, even as they prepare for high temperatures this Labor Day weekend of 111 degrees.
Needles is one of the hottest cities in the nation and one of the poorest in California. It has faced what City Manager Rick Daniels calls a “life and death” situation after state officials notified the city that three of its four wells failed to meet state water quality standards.
The city is so short of cash that it didn’t have money for a new well and was instead relying on its single good well that barely met demand. The well failed in late August, after an electronic control panel was fried in a power outage, and the city nearly ran out of water. The city has only 24 to 36 hours of water in storage tanks. City water technicians worked around the clock and restored the pump as reserves were nearly exhausted.
After The Times wrote about the city’s risky situation in July, Sen. Diane Feinstein, along with state legislators, began to put some political heat on the California State Water Resources Control Board to speed up conditional approval for emergency funding the city had sought.
“We got our grant, it is glorious,” Daniels said.
Until Feinstein and others weighed in, the state board was asking that the city modify an environmental report for the new well before they would process the grant, Daniels said. At best the city thought the grant might not come for at least a year, playing blackjack with the residents’ safety.
“We are just a microcosm of the state,” Daniels said. “There has to be hundreds of small rural towns across the state that are in or will be in our situation. Small towns can’t afford staffs of engineers, grant writers and lawyers to deal with these regulations.”
The drought has exacerbated the water supply problems of many communities, putting the lowest-income cities at a disadvantage.
Jay Lund, co-director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, said the state has about 9,000 regulated public water utilities and many of them are facing serious problems. It is a tough task to ensure there are no cities or towns that have failing water systems.
“You never will,” he said. “There are so many of them and you can afford to fix only a few of them at a time. Even if you try your best, you will miss some problem. There aren’t enough resources to fix everybody’s problem, especially when you get into a drought.”
Lund estimates that as many as 100 public water systems face the threats that Needles faces. “California is a big state and there are a lot of problems,” he said.
Needles received help in navigating the state’s thicket of regulations from a nonprofit coalition of labor unions and contractors, known as Rebuild SoCal Partnership. It attempts to help smaller cities deal with the state’s complex laws governing infrastructure issues.
“Things are falling apart in the state,” said Dave Sorem, an engineer on the group’s board and a vice president of a Baldwin Park construction firm, who went out to Needles to advise them on the problem. “A lot of agencies don’t have a clue about what is happening in small cities.”
Indeed, Daniels, the city manager, said none of the state water officials who were dealing with the city’s requests have ever been to Needles. The county seat is more than 200 miles away and the state senator lives in the Central Valley. Daniels said the situation reminds him of the Jimmy Buffet line, “Don’t try to describe the ocean if you’ve never seen it.”
Indeed, the city is hotter than many renowned municipal ovens, like Phoenix, Las Vegas and Houston. The daily high temperature in August never went below 100 degrees and topped out at 122 on Aug. 4.
The Colorado River flows through town and the city has rights to 1,272 acre feet of water each year. It has historically operated four wells, but starting last fall the water board notified the city that three of the wells were contaminated with naturally occurring minerals, manganese and iron, that exceeded state standards. Then it ordered a corrective action plan in May, which the city said it could not afford.
Manganese is regulated as a secondary contaminant, based on its aesthetics. It causes stains and a bitter taste to water. But toxicologists believe manganese causes neurological disorders, particularly in children, and say it will eventually be regulated as a health hazard.
The new well will be 150 feet to 300 feet deep, located upriver in an area where some private wells have low levels of manganese, Daniels said. It will be connected by a new 16-inch main, running 2,700 feet to the city’s water system. The city hopes to have the well online within three to four months.
When the new well is running, the city will have a 48-hour reserve capacity, still well under the seven-day reserve recommended for large municipal systems in Southern California. Ultimately, the city would like to build another water tank to supplement the three it currently uses, Daniels said.
Among the heavy water users in the city are 14 marijuana growing facilities, which also contribute a fair amount to city finances through cultivation taxes and a 10% local excise tax on production. The city puts tax receipts back into upgrading the water system, Daniels said. For example, Needles is trying to replace aged and leak-prone pipes made of cast iron, asbestos cement and copper. Last year, the system sprung 200 leaks and in one case dumped a half-million gallons of water onto I-40, forcing a partial shutdown.
Needles Mayor Jeff Williams said the few local residents who know about the situation have been understanding. “Luckily, we didn’t have to distribute bottled water,” he said.
Report: Nearly a third of Americans endured a weather disaster this summer
Erin Doherty
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster since June, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal disaster declarations.
Why it matters: The data underscores the extent to which climate change and a warming planet are increasingly impacting Americans’ lives on a daily basis, the Post notes.
Driving the news: At least 388 people have died from hurricanes, floods, heat waves and wildfires since June in the U.S., per media reports and government records obtained by the Post.
Additionally, 64% of people live in areas that experienced a prolonged heat wave, which are not officially considered disasters but can be life-threatening.
Over the course of the summer, extreme heat waves scorched the Pacific Northwest, wildfires raged across the West and flash floods from storms killed dozens of people in the Northeast, among other weather events.
Between the lines: The Post based its analysis on FEMA-declared severe storms, fires, hurricanes, storms and floods.
The big picture: Atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher in 2019 than at any time in at least 2 million years, and the past 50 years saw the fastest temperature increases in at least 2,000 years, according to an assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published last month.
Weather and climate events are becoming increasingly common and severe and rising sea levels are flooding coastal areas with regularity, Axios’ Andrew Freedman reports.
The world must approximately halve emissions by the end of the decade to have a chance of avoiding the worst effects of warming, the Post writes.
What they’re saying: “What we are doing with global warming is making ourselves play a game that is rigged more and more against us because of our own actions,” Claudia Tebaldi, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and a lead author of the IPCC’s climate report, told the Post.
“If we want to limit these probabilities, if we want to limit the damages, then we should start to do something for real about mitigating,” Tebaldi said. “And we need to start now.”
The ill effects of climate change on many of the great wine regions in the United States and Europe have only just begun to be felt.
Wildfires have torn through vineyards in Napa Valley in California and elsewhere in Oregon, and even vineyards that were spared have had to contend with smoke damaging their grapes. In France, years alternating between unusual heat and damaging frosts have changed how much and what types of wine are being made. In the normally cooler regions that grow the grapes to make Champagne, the annual harvest yield has swung wildly from half the normal amount to double. (The region is allowed to store wine from a boom year to blend with wine from a low year.)
But the rising temperatures have had other, unforeseen effects. Parts of the United Kingdom, a country not at all known for wine production, are now making sparkling wine — as they did back in Roman times.
For wine connoisseurs, that means changes in the types of wines they have long loved and where those wines are produced. The average consumer may not notice, but the seemingly stable world of wine has become anything but.
“We’re seeing a broader selection of very interesting wines because of this warming,” said Dave Parker, founder and chief executive of the Benchmark Wine Group, a large retailer of vintage wines. “We’re seeing regions that historically were not that highly thought of now producing some excellent wines. The U.K., Oregon, New Zealand or Austria may have been marginal before, but they’re producing great wines now. It’s kind of an exciting time if you’re a wine lover.”
The rising temperatures have certainly hurt some winemakers, but in some wine-growing areas, the heat has been a boon for vineyards and the drinkers who covet their wine. Parker said growing conditions for sought-after vintages in Bordeaux used to come less frequently and sometimes only once every decade: 1945, 1947, 1961, 1982, 1996 and 2000. They were all very ripe vintages because of the heat. But in the last decade, with temperatures rising in Bordeaux, wines from 2012, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019 are all sought after — and highly priced.
And then there are the wines from previously overlooked regions.
“What I’d say is, currently, there hasn’t been a better time for wine collectors,” said Axel Heinz, the estate director of Ornellaia and Masseto, two of Italy’s premier wines. “The vintages and wine have become so much better. And for us, the changes over the past 20 years have put a focus on many growing regions that collectors weren’t interested in before, like Italian and Spanish wine.”
(Still, he said, his vineyards are not immune to the negative effects of climate change, with increased risk of spring frosts and hail.)
Yet for all the romance attached to making wine, it is essentially farming. So while winemakers have been reaping the benefits of higher temperatures, the grape growers have had to adapt in ways that are going to affect prices as well as the types of grapes. (And of course, vineyards are sometimes integrated, so the grape growers and the winemakers are all part of the same operation.)
Like other wineries, Jackson Family Wines, one of the largest wine producers in the United States, has already begun to take steps to deal with climate change.
“If we plant a vineyard today, we’re asking, what will the vineyard look like in 2042, not 2022,” said Rick Tigner, the company’s chief executive. “We might have a bigger canopy to provide the grapes shade, or different varietals. All of those things cost money. Farming for the future is going to be more expensive in the short term, but those vines could last 30 years, not 20 years.”
The company has installed solar panels throughout its vineyards, but the energy need during the 12 weeks of harvest is so intense that it cannot put in enough panels to meet those peak needs. Separately, the vineyard is also looking at reducing the weight of its glass bottles. While glass stores wine well and is recyclable, it requires a huge amount of energy to produce (since sand is being melted in furnaces to make glass).
Far Niente, which owns several brands including Nickel & Nickel and Dolce, opted to float almost half of its solar panels in an irrigation pond to save vineyard space. In doing so, the winery has covered all of its energy costs and is confident that as long as its aquifer holds up, it can manage the increased heat, said Greg Allen, president and winemaker for Dolce.
While wildfires are a significant concern for wineries, so is water usage. Hamel Family Wines, in the Sonoma Valley, turned to dry farming as a way to eliminate the need for extensive irrigation. John Hamel, winemaker and managing director of wine growing, said the process involves cutting slits in the dry earth, allowing rain that does fall to be absorbed and held in the ground longer. It also makes the vines more resilient to temperature swings, he said.
For Hamel’s 124 acres, dry farming saves 2-4 million gallons of water annually. But there is a trade-off: The yield is lower, with only 2.5 tons of grapes per acre as opposed to 5-6 tons per acre with irrigation.
“The vines get used to this drought and are able to grow in this condition,” he said.
The impact of the different sustainability measures on the wines themselves is still unclear. The average wine drinker is likely not to notice the difference, said Christian Miller, research director for the Wine Market Council, a wine market research firm.
“Consumer perceptions of wine and styles lag the actual conditions,” he said. “It takes a while to undo the perception at a winery or at a regional level. You also have normal variance in weather, and wineries can take corrective action to maintain the taste profile.”
The one wild card is fire. A fire can shift the perception of an entire vintage, even when some vineyards in a region escape unharmed. “Avoid that vintage for Napa Valley because of smoke taint could be a blanket assumption that isn’t true for all vineyards,” Miller said. Given the higher temperatures, some growers are harvesting grapes weeks earlier than they used to so they could have the harvest safely fermenting in sealed tanks.
The fires also threaten to upend the economic model of many boutique vineyards, which charge more for their wines. A high percentage of their sales, sometimes close to 70% or more, comes from people buying bottles at the vineyard and signing up for wine clubs that automatically ship them wine several times a year.
But as certain wine regions struggle to grow the varietals they have always grown, their customers could find themselves unable to drink the types of wines they have always loved.
A fire came within 100 feet of Medlock Ames, a vineyard in Healdsburg, California, in 2017. Two years later, a wildfire ripped through the vineyard. After surveying the damage, Ames Morison, Medlock’s winemaker, said he decided to plant different types of grapes. Malbec, the hearty Argentine grape, replaced the lighter white sauvignon blanc grape.
“It’s sad,” Morison said. “I’ll miss those wines. But sauvignon blanc grows better in cooler climates than we have.”
Similarly, Larkmead, in the Napa Valley, which grows Cabernet Sauvignon but also produces three blends, has created a research vineyard with nine types of grapes. The merlot it uses for its blends has become harder to grow.
“Our merlot blend is loved by everyone, but we’re having a conversation about discontinuing,” said Avery Heelan, winemaker at Larkmead. “We won’t have enough merlot to make that wine in the future. It’s 60% merlot now, but we’re going to have to shape-shift.”
Some of the grapes it is growing have historically thrived along the hotter Mediterranean growing regions in Spain and Italy. It is also using Shiraz, the Australian grape. “The Australians have a leg up on us on understanding fire and smoke,” she said. “Without manipulating our style or quality, there is not a lot we can do. It’s Mother Nature.”
Initiatives to adapt to climate change and to produce wine more sustainably are being driven by vineyards, for sure, but they are really being pushed by the big wine buyers, including sommeliers in restaurants, wine distributors and retailers who can see how climate is changing wine. Consumers, Miller said, are playing less of a role since most drinkers are not going to know the difference, and the collectors who do are a small part of overall wine drinkers.
“The trade is more aware, and is trying to react to climate change, than the wine consumers themselves,” he said, noting that sustainably produced wines cost $1-$4 more a bottle. “The impact of climate change is a moving average over a number of years,” he added, “and that’s why it’s going to have a slower impact on consumer behavior.”
How to make air conditioning less of an environmental nightmare
Amanda Schupak
Photograph: AKP Photos/Alamy
At first glance, the 32 panels on top of a grocery store in Stockton, Calfornia look like solar panels. But this installation is designed not to harness the sun, but to defy it. Coated with a film technology that reflects radiation from the sun, the panels – and whatever lies beneath them – can drop to 15F (8C) below the ambient temperature, even in the middle of the day, with no electricity required.
It is “a fundamentally different way of achieving cooling and harnessing an untapped renewable resource”, said George Keiser, chief operating officer of SkyCool, the company behind the panels. “We’re using the sky as this enormous heat sink,” said Keiser, sending excess heat from the surface of the Earth, through the atmosphere and into outer space.
At the grocery store, the panels are used to cool water running behind them, which is then piped into the condensers that run the store’s refrigerators. That lowers the temperature of the refrigerants inside, increasing efficiency and reducing yearly energy consumption by 15%.
SkyCool’s technology has also been installed on bus shelters in Tempe, Arizona, to keep commuters cool as they wait.
“The long-term goal is to see if we can come up with ways to use either the films or the panels to replace an air conditioner,” said Eli Goldstein, the startup’s co-founder and chief executive.
Air conditioning is the most obvious immediate response to the dangerous warming of the planet. It’s also making it worse.
Air conditioners use more electricity than any other appliance in the home. They consume 10% of global electricity (together with electric fans) and leak potent planet-warming gases into the atmosphere. On the hottest day of the year in some parts of the US and the Middle East, 70% of peak residential electricity demand is for cooling spaces.
As global temperatures rise and heatwaves become more common and more deadly, the demand for air conditioners is increasing, especially in emerging economies such as India, China and Indonesia.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that global demand for space cooling will more than triple by 2050. The growing cooling demand is “one of the most critical energy issues of our time”, according to the IEA’s 2018 report, which concludes that to keep people cool without spiraling energy demand, the answer “first and foremost” is to improve the efficiency of air conditioners.
But that’s not all it will take. To temper the effects of dangerous heat without heating up the world even more will require a spectrum of solutions, from more efficient ACs to shadier streets, to new technologies that fundamentally change the way we stay cool.
Solving the air conditioner conundrum
Most ACs are relatively cheap and extremely inefficient. The energy performance standards the machines are required to meet don’t come close to maximizing their potential, said Iain Campbell, senior fellow at the sustainability nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, and 95% don’t exceed the bare minimum.
Another big problem with air conditioners is that they leak hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants (HFCs), powerful planet-warming gases and a major contributor to global heating, into the atmosphere. The most commonly used – R-410A – is more than 2,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
As the machines work, the refrigerant travels in tubes between areas of low and high pressure, turning into a gas as it absorbs heat from inside and releases the heat outside as it condenses back into a liquid. In its gas form, HFCs can seep out through joints in the piping (a typical residential unit might lose 10% of its refrigerant each year) or can be released entirely if an air conditioner is thrown away without being properly drained.
In 2018, the Rocky Mountain Institute launched the Global Cooling prize, offering a $1m prize for new residential cooling technology that is five times more efficient and less polluting than today’s standard machines, costs no more than twice as much for consumers and can be installed in existing homes.
The two winning prototypes, announced in April and produced by two of the world’s largest cooling manufacturers – Daikin and Gree – work fundamentally the same way as today’s air conditioners, but are engineered with better sensing and controls and are configured to use more environmentally friendly refrigerants than those found in standard residential AC units. They have also added features, such as engineering to remove excess moisture from the air to make it easier to cool (it takes more energy to heat humid air).
The winners say they will bring their designs to market by 2025. But until policymakers in the US and abroad raise the floor on efficiency standards for AC units, said Campbell, there’s no clear way for consumers to discern the difference between these new machines and those that are less efficient and have a far greater climate impact.
Mechanical engineer Vince Romanin realized that few consumers research air conditioner efficiencies or specific refrigerants before buying, which is why he markets his AC technology on user experience, rather than environmental credentials.
“There are about 50 million people in the US with a window AC, and almost all of them hate them,” said Romanin, CEO of Gradient. Configured to straddle the window sill, with the noisy bits outside and the tech housed below the window, Gradient’s machine is not “loud and ugly”, said Romanin, and it doesn’t block your view.
Gradient uses a lower-emissions refrigerant packed in factory-sealed, leak-proof tubing. Coming to market next year, it’s two appliances in one: the heat pump system that replaces hot air with cool in the summer works in reverse to make it a space heater in the winter.
Campbell is excited about the potential of new materials to push cooling technology even further. Cooling prize finalist Transaera is developing a “novel sponge-like” material that could improve air conditioners’ efficiency by passively sucking moisture out of the air. But until governments impose standards that rate ACs on how efficiently they reduce humidity, Campbell said, manufacturers lack incentive to include the tech in their products.
Irish clean tech company Exergyn is among those developing systems that replace harmful, leaky refrigerants with solid materials that contract and relax as they absorb and release heat. Solid state refrigerants have “significant promise”, Campbell said, but they need more testing to prove they can last as long.
Design for heat
Better air conditioners alone can’t solve the growing heat crisis, but they’re an important part of the puzzle, said Campbell, especially for the growing urban populations around the world.
There are many other things you’d ideally do first, he said. That includes designing buildings that use less energy, have better ventilation and are better insulated from heat.
“If you want to cool people, you have to provide shade, period,” said V Kelly Turner, assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Whether that’s in the form of trees or canopies, people’s bodies need to be protected from the direct heat of the sun.
There’s also the indirect effect of the sun heating physical surfaces, such as streets and buildings. In cities, where the urban heat island effect can raise the temperature by as much as 20F (12C), the simple act of painting roofs white can reflect enough sunlight to reduce the heat by a few degrees.
A dozen US cities require or encourage light-colored roofs on new construction, and in August dark roofs were banned in the south-west suburbs of Sydney, Australia, where new rules mandate that every backyard must have a tree.
It’s necessary to tackle the fundamental problems that make cities hotter, said Turner. But “we will need some air conditioning because [without it], you can’t get your core temperature cool enough if you’re exposed to really extreme heat”. That’s especially important, she stressed, for vulnerable people, including outdoor agricultural and construction laborers, children, elderly people and low-income renters, who need not only access to cooling centers on the hottest days, but air conditioning in their homes. (Most places in the US, she said, have laws limiting how cold an apartment can be, but none that prevent landlords from letting homes get dangerously hot.)
People at a cooling center at Kellogg middle school in Portland, Oregon.Photograph: Michael Hanson/AFP/Getty Images
The Cooling prize targets air conditioning – that last, necessary element. “If your living space is a very small apartment in a mid-rise tower and you have six members of the family living there and the temperature in the summer is peaking out at about 120F, 130F, you’re not gonna say: ‘Well I need to insulate my apartment, or I need to put some shading in,’” said Campbell. “You’re thinking, ‘I need a damn conditioner so we can all sleep at night.’”
People are going to keep buying air conditioners, he said, so we need to offer them better, safer, cleaner devices – and policymakers must impose regulations that take less efficient options off the table: “We can do better than this. And we’re doing a disservice to our citizenry when we let them buy something that is so expensive to operate, and so polluting that cooling is actually adding to the warming of the planet.”
Owners of flooded cars are likely to find their insurance doesn’t cover the damage
Paul A. Eisenstein
Residents across the country are still mopping up from the remnants of Hurricane Ida, which hit the Gulf Coast before sweeping up into the Northeast, leaving parts of New York City and its suburbs under water this past week.
Dozens were killed, many after being trapped in their cars by flood waters. News and social media from across the New York-New Jersey region show cars that were abandoned along major highways as well as neighborhood streets.
The flooding from Ida caps a summer season that has left many parts of the country waterlogged. That, in turn, has created major headaches for car owners — and car buyers. Thousands of vehicles have been seriously damaged or completely ruined. But many owners soon could find that, despite carrying insurance, they are out of luck when it comes to recouping their losses.
In the months to come, meanwhile, some of those flood-damaged vehicles may show back up on the used vehicle market through an appropriately named scam known as “title washing.” Someone buying one of those vehicles could be in for a number of headaches.
When a vehicle is submerged, it is subject to developing all sorts of issues, starting with mold. Body panels and other components can rust. Water can damage engines. And then there are all the electronic circuits that control everything from power windows to a car’s safety and infotainment systems. They can suffer intermittent or complete failures.
“A car that’s been in a flood, with the engine emerged for any length of time, will never be the same,” said Carl Sullivan, a veteran inspector for California-based AiM Mobile Inspections.
Drying out a car as quickly as possible, especially if it’s been submerged in salt water, is critical, Sullivan and other experts stress. They also warn drivers not to immediately try to start up a vehicle after a flood, especially one where water might have gotten into the engine. That could lead to a catastrophic failure known as hydrolock. Instead, find a repair shop trained in dealing with water damage and have the vehicle towed in.
Motorists should take detailed pictures that can help support an insurance claim. Unfortunately, many owners discover too late that their coverage doesn’t include flooding.
“If you want to be covered for flood damage of your car you’re going to need comprehensive coverage which takes in acts of god such as hail damage or flood damage,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, an analyst with website MoneyGeek.
If your vehicle is new and still covered by a loan or lease, Fitzpatrick noted, you likely carry comprehensive insurance, as it’s normally required as a part of your agreement. But older vehicles that have been paid off, he added, often have just the more minimal insurance coverage most states require. In that case, repairs — or even the replacement of the entire vehicle — may have to come out of pocket.
For those looking forward, industry data show comprehensive coverage typically adds between $400 and $500 annually to your insurance bill, though a variety of factors can influence the figure, including where you live, the cost of the vehicle and your driving record.
Vehicle owners aren’t the only ones who need to worry about flood-damaged vehicles, however. And that warning is especially important at a time when inventories of new and used cars are in especially short supply.
Legally, any vehicle damaged or declared totaled due to flooding should have that clearly marked on its title. Most of them will either be scrapped and recycled or they may be broken down for parts. In some cases, owners may try to dry out a vehicle and then sell it, without alerting the buyer that it had been in a flood, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau.
There are also plenty of scam artists, the NICB notes, who make a living out of acquiring flooded vehicles at bargain prices. The cars are cleaned up, then taken out of state where the VIN (the unique Vehicle Identification Number) is switched and the car is retitled with no indication it has been damaged.
Purchase one of these vehicles and you might not immediately notice any problems but, over time, the smell of mold could become apparent, corrosion might develop, or lights and electrical circuits could start giving you trouble.
“Water-damaged vehicles can be transported anywhere for resale, and often continue to appear in the marketplace for many months following major floods,” AAA spokesperson Ellen Edmonds said in a statement.
The travel and road service recommends motorists acquire a vehicle history from companies like CarFax before purchasing a used car, truck or crossover. It should reveal if the vehicle has been flood damaged. Many buyers also take a vehicle to a mechanic to be checked out.
Because of ongoing shortages of semiconductor chips, new vehicle production has plunged and dealers are short of inventory this year. That’s sending many customers over to the used car market which, in turn, has driven up prices for previously owned vehicles to record levels. For some scam artists — as well as owners who don’t have insurance on their vehicles — the temptation to resell flood-damaged cars could prove more tempting than ever this year.
Overlapping Disasters Expose Harsh Climate Reality: The U.S. Is Not Ready
Christopher Flavelle, Anne Barnard, Brad Plumer and
Michael Kimmelman
An MTA bus stuck in a flooded underpass on Queens Blvd. in New York, in the early morning hours of Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. (Dakota Santiago/The New York Times)
NEW YORK — In Louisiana and Mississippi, nearly 1 million people lack electricity and drinking water after a hurricane obliterated power lines. In California, wildfire menaces Lake Tahoe, forcing tens of thousands to flee. In Tennessee, flash floods killed at least 20; hundreds more perished in a heat wave in the Northwest. And in New York City, 7 inches of rain fell in just hours Wednesday, drowning people in their basements.
Disasters cascading across the country this summer have exposed a harsh reality: The United States is not ready for the extreme weather that is now becoming frequent as a result of a warming planet.
“These events tell us we’re not prepared,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw planning for climate risks on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “We have built our cities, our communities, to a climate that no longer exists.”
In remarks Thursday, President Joe Biden acknowledged the challenge ahead.
“And to the country, the past few days of Hurricane Ida and the wildfires in the West and the unprecedented flash floods in New York and New Jersey is yet another reminder that these extreme storms and the climate crisis are here,” said Biden, who noted that a $1 trillion infrastructure bill pending in Congress includes some money to gird communities against disasters. “We need to do — be better prepared. We need to act.”
The country faces two separate but interlaced problems, according to climate and resilience experts.
First, governments have not spent enough time and money to brace for climate shocks that have long been predicted: everything from maintaining and fortifying electrical lines and stormwater systems to clearing forests of undergrowth in order to reduce the ferocity of wildfires.
“We’re feeling all the effects of that deferred maintenance,” said Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
But there’s a second, more sobering lesson: There are limits to how much the country, and the world, can adapt. And if nations don’t do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change, they may soon run up against the outer edges of resilience.
“If we already can’t cope with where we are, then there’s little hope that it’s going to improve in a warming climate,” Dahl said.
The country’s vulnerability in the face of extreme weather was punctuated by the downpour that flooded the country’s largest city. New York City has invested billions of dollars in storm protection since Hurricane Sandy in 2012 — investments that seemed to do little to blunt the impact of the deluge.
Rain poured down in furious torrents, turning the subway system into a kind of flume ride. Central Park recorded 7.19 inches of rain, nearly double the previous record set in 1927 for the same date, according to the National Weather Service, which issued the city’s first-ever flash flood emergency alert.
Before the storm, city and state officials activated preparation plans — clearing drains, erecting flood barriers in the subway and other sensitive areas, and warning the public. But the rainfall dumped more water, and faster, than what the city had factored into its new stormwater maps as an “extreme” flood event.
The pattern of damage reflects the relationship between climate exposure and racial inequality: Impacts were more apparent in low-income communities of color, which, because of historic inequalities, are more prone to flooding, receive less maintenance from city services, and frequently experience lax housing code enforcement.
Most of those killed in New York City drowned when floodwaters rushed into their basement apartments. Many such apartments do not meet safety requirements but have proliferated as affordable housing for the working poor and immigrants living in the city illegally, who may fear complaining to authorities about safety violations.
In one case, Tara Ramskriet, 43, and her son Nick, 22, drowned when water filled their basement apartment in the Hollis section of Queens so quickly that family members could not pull them out against the flow, and a wall collapsed, trapping them inside.
Neighbors were outraged, saying it took fatalities to bring city inspectors to the scene.
“This happens all the time,” said Jennifer Mooklal, 33, who lives across the street from the Ramskriets. “Even if it’s just rain, our basement gets flooded. We’ve been dealing with this problem for years and have been asking the city, but no one is listening to us.”
Damage from extreme weather, and threats to human life, will only increase as the planet warms. For every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming, the atmosphere holds about 7% more moisture, scientists have found. That means much heavier rainfall when storms do occur.
Across the continental United States, the heaviest downpours have become more frequent and severe, according to the federal government’s National Climate Assessment. The Northeast has seen 50% more rainfall during the heaviest storms compared with the first half of the 20th century.
New York City is particularly vulnerable to flooding. Three-fourths of the city is covered by impervious surfaces like asphalt, which means runoff is channeled into streets and sewers rather than being absorbed by the ground.
And the city’s century-old subway system was not designed for a warming climate. Even on dry days, a network of pumps pours out 14 million gallons of water from its tunnels and stations. Heavy rains can overwhelm the system, as they did on Wednesday.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has invested $2.6 billion in resiliency projects since Hurricane Sandy inundated the city’s subways in 2012, including fortifying 3,500 subway vents, staircases and elevator shafts against flooding. Still, this week’s flash floods showed that the system remains vulnerable.
One reason is that city and federal officials focused on protecting against the kind of coastal storm surge that Sandy wrought, according to Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design, a nonprofit group that works on climate resilience.
But in the case of Hurricane Ida, the main threat was rainwater flowing downhill, not storm surge pushing in from the coast. So much water fell that it overwhelmed storm drains, overflowed riverbanks and poured into basements, from the hilly parts of Manhattan’s Washington Heights to the inland flats of Jamaica in Queens.
The investments that protect against storm surge differ from those that guard against extreme rain, Chester said.
Coping with severe rainfall means more places to absorb and hold water, whether with so-called green solutions like parks, or traditional structures like underground retention tanks. And it means increasing the capacity of the sewer system to handle a greater volume of water.
Because New York has mostly been spared the type of severe rainfall that occurred Wednesday, officials have made it less of a priority.
Other countries have heeded the warnings of climate scientists and acted.
In the Netherlands, where much of the country lies below sea level, the government strengthened flood design standards and in 2007 created a program called Room for the River, which in essence authorized the wholesale redesign and rebuilding of dozens of vulnerable watersheds around cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The goal was to prepare for the sort of one-in-10,000-year floods that Dutch scientists were warning might become more frequent.
In that country, government water boards have the ultimate authority over land use. If they determine an area is needed for flood protection, its residents must move.
Specific taxes are dedicated to water management. There is no National Flood Insurance Program for residents in flood zones in the Netherlands because, the Dutch argue, the government’s job is to protect people from floods, not help homeowners rebuild in areas vulnerable to damage.
Among other things, Room for the River created dozens of new parks, enhancing underserved neighborhoods, resettling populations living in flood zones into new homes out of harm’s way, and girding the nation’s economy in the process.
In the United States, efforts to protect U.S. cities from damage by severe storms and rising seas have been plodding. There are many reasons, including government reluctance to impose on private property, a legacy of racial and economic injustice, and a system of governance and regulation that often moves far slower than the hastening pace of climate change.
Jainey Bavishi, director of New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, said the city has spent more than $20 billion on resilience since Sandy, and that work also includes some protections against extreme rainfall in addition to storm surge.
The city is about to break ground on a stormwater retention system in Queens. And various other programs have been created to soak up more rainfall: incentives to cover roofs and traffic medians with grass, rain gardens and other more permeable surfaces to slow down and absorb rainwater.
The city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which handles drainage and sewage, has been quietly working on upgrades for the system, improving and widening the catchment basins under storm grates, designing new systems to separate stormwater runoff from sewage, and even rushing out before storms to unclog drains.
But stormwater upgrades for the entire city amount to a massive, multiyear and multibillion-dollar project. It hasn’t attracted federal attention and support, particularly under former President Donald Trump when climate change preparation was not a priority. So far, officials have upgraded the stormwater capacity of just a fraction of the city.
The rules that govern federal disaster money have also complicated the city’s efforts to deal with extreme rain. Of the $20 billion that New York City has spent on resilience since Sandy, $15 billion came from the federal government, and much of that money had to be linked to Sandy, which meant focusing on storm surge and sea-level rise, Bavishi said.
“We know that intense precipitation is a risk,” she said. “Last night’s storm underscored that cities need access to proactive federal funding to get this work done.”
Even with the right projects designed and funding in hand, climate change is outpacing the speed at which American communities can fortify themselves.
“It’s happening faster than we’ve anticipated,” said Dahl of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who is 43. “I didn’t expect all of this to happen at this point in my lifetime.”
Drought forces North American ranchers to sell off their future
Rod Nickel and Tom Polansek
Cattle graze on a pasture affected by the recent drought on a farm near Fairy Hill, Saskatchewan.
WINNIPEG, Manitoba/CHICAGO (Reuters) – When Canadian rancher Dianne Riding strides across her brown pasture, sidestepping cracks and popping grasshoppers, she has less company than usual.
Record-setting heat and sparse rain left Riding with too little grass or hay to feed her cattle near Lake Francis, Manitoba. She sold 51 head at auction in July, about 40% of her herd. The sales included 20 heifers, young cows that have not given birth, that were potential breeding stock.
“That’s your future. As my herd goes down, so does my income,” Riding said. “It’s gut-wrenching.”
Such liquidations of breeding stock are expected to limit cattle production in the coming years, tightening North America’s beef supply and driving up consumer prices, according to two dozen ranchers and cattle experts.
The drought spanning much of western North America – from western Canada to California and Mexico – has cooked pastures and hay crops that fatten cattle. The ranchers’ plight is one impact of many from the punishing drought, which has also damaged wheat across North Dakota and cherries in Washington state, weakened bee colonies, and forced California to shut a major hydroelectric plant. In British Columbia, an entire town burned, while California is expected to see a record number of acres go up in flames this year.
Climate scientists say global warming makes extreme heat and drought occur more frequently, but some ranchers interviewed by Reuters dispute the link to climate change. They view the current drought as an unremarkable shift in the weather from which the industry will recover.
Riding said she is tired of scientists blaming agriculture, among other industries, for climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
“I know climate change is our latest buzzword, but I think this is a cycle,” said Riding, 60, whose farm northwest of Winnipeg sits in one of hardest-hit drought areas. “Sometimes the cycles are longer than normal.”
Gloria Montaño Greene, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official who works to reduce risks to farming, said the connection between the West Coast drought and climate change is clear. “There is an increase in heat. We’re seeing various wildfires,” she said. “We’re seeing climate change.”
Adding to ranchers’ problems, prices of feed alternatives such as corn, soy and wheat are the highest in years. There is so little feed available that Manitoba farmers have bought 280 tons of hay from as far away as Prince Edward Island, some 3,400 kms (2,000 miles) to the east.
In a normal year, 10% to 12% of breeding stock in western Canada, the country’s top beef-producing region, are culled due to age or other routine reasons, and farmers replace most of it, said Brian Perillat, senior analyst at CanFax.
This year, ranchers are likely to cull 20% to 30%, reducing the size of herds, according to industry group Alberta Beef Producers. That would be an unprecedented reduction of the breeding stock, based on records going back to 1970, Perillat said.
In the United States, the world’s third-biggest beef exporter, analysts expect a smaller impact because the herd is more spread out. Still, a third of U.S. cattle are in drought areas, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and producers are making the painful decision to send animals to slaughter early.
New Mexico rancher Pat Boone, 67, slashed his herd of mother cows by half, to about 200 head, over the past year.
“Our land is hurt, and it’s hurt badly,” said Boone, who lives in Elida, a town of about 200 people in eastern New Mexico. “We’re not going to be in any hurry to restock.”
FEWER COWS, HIGHER BEEF PRICES
Sending female cows to slaughter in 2021, instead of keeping them for breeding, will reduce market-ready cattle inventories in 2023, economists say. The animals have long gestation periods and take time to fatten after birth.
“When we liquidate cow herds, these supply impacts last years,” said Mike von Massow, associate professor of food, agricultural and resource economics at University of Guelph, Ontario. “You have this hangover.”
Tyson Foods, the biggest U.S. meat company by sales, said in a recent earnings call it expects operating margins for its booming beef business to decline next year amid herd liquidation, though results should still be strong.
Riding says she will need four years to rebuild her herd. If the drought abates, she might retain or buy heifers next year, but the animals don’t produce their first calf until they turn two years old.
Consumers will also feel the pinch, analysts said. The USDA in August trimmed its estimates for U.S. beef production this year and next as ranchers are raising animals to lighter weights.
After a 2014 drought, beef prices in Canada rose about 25% over the following year, and stayed elevated for at least two years, von Massow said, citing Statistics Canada data. Beef prices are likely to increase as early as this fall, reflecting the higher prices to feed cattle, he said.
In Mexico, the northern state of Chihuahua has gone from around 1.2 million breeding cows in 2019, to about 700,000 because of drought, said Fernando Cadena, head of Mexican ranching company Carnes Ribe based in Ciudad de Chihuahua, just south of Texas.
Cadena said other major northern Mexican ranching states like Sonora, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Durango, saw similar rates of drought-induced slaughter, in addition to cows that died on parched land due to lack of food or water.
The hardest hit ranchers in northern Mexico will likely need two to four years to recover herd levels, he said.
Fewer cows in Mexico could impact the U.S. beef supply, as more than a million cows are imported across the southern border each year.
“We’ll just have to wait for the pasture land to recover,” Cadena said. “For months, it just didn’t rain. There wasn’t anywhere for the cows to graze.”
Feedlots, which buy cattle from ranchers and fatten them for slaughter, are also worried about their businesses. Greg Schmidt, who feeds 15,000 cattle near Barrhead, Alberta, expects to pay more for available cattle next year after herds are reduced.
“This is going to ripple through our industry for years,” said Schmidt, chair of the Alberta Cattle Feeders’ Association.
PONDS TURN TO CRACKED DIRT
Steve Arnold, a rancher in Pozo, California, said 12 of the last 15 years have brought less than half of normal rainfall to his area about 200 miles northwest of Los Angeles. But Arnold, 67, said this drought is the worst he has seen. Grass never grew this year due to the lack of rainfall, Arnold said. He has reduced his herd about 30% to about 70 head.
“We’ve had dry stuff but not like this,” he said.
Ponds that used to provide drinking water for cattle are dried up in parts of California, said Tony Toso, 58, who raises cows and calves in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
“I’m seeing ponds that usually may get low, but not where they’re cracked dirt,” said Toso, president of the California Cattlemen’s Association. “There’s nothing in them.”
With grass in short supply, Toso expects prices for alfalfa hay to top $300 per ton, up from $200 to $220 per ton last year.
The rancher said he did not retain any calves to replace his herd of mother cows as he normally would because of the drought and outlook for limited feed. Instead, the animals all went to market to be slaughtered for beef.
“We’re just kind of hunkering down,” he said.
(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg and Tom Polansek in Chicago; additional reporting by David Alire Garcia in Mexico City; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Brian Thevenot)
Madison Cawthorn: behold the rotten fruit of extreme Republican gerrymandering
David Daley
Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The congressman from North Carolina brandished a gun as he addressed a Macon county Republican event last weekend. “We all need to be storing up some ammunition,” Madison Cawthorn warned the crowd, as he embraced the big lie about the 2020 presidential race and insisted that “we all know it was a stolen election”.
Then, chillingly, Cawthorn conjured a second civil war being fought over his fraudulent claims. “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place,” Cawthorn said, “and that’s bloodshed … As much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American.”
We awaken every day to pillars of liberal democracy torn down, wrecked norms and ruined institutions, fresh assaults on foundational freedoms from state legislatures and runaway courts, political leaders bathed in the hateful stew of rightwing media and racing to bend a knee before an authoritarian leader who himself bowed before dictators and cared so little for his voters that he offered them bleach during a pandemic.
The roots of this fearful moment run deep: a constitutional system unprepared for a political party willing to play constitutional hardball; a Democratic party that neglected local elections while Republicans invested in a decades-long effort to capture state legislatures and the courts; winner-takes-all districts that break toward extremes under severe polarization; a nation that has never been willing to embrace multiracial democracy.
But there’s a simpler reason that Cawthorn can spew such an abhorrent incitement to violence. His extremism was created intentionally by aggressive partisan gerrymandering. Cawthorn and many of the other demagogues and conspiracy theorists who have hijacked the Republican party owe their seats to the noncompetitive districts Republicans drew themselves a decade ago. Without gerrymandering, Cawthorn would just be another loudmouth Twitter troll pumped full of Newsmax nuttiness. With it, he’s issuing a call to arms as a prominent member of an elite Washington club of 435.
The road to political power for Cawthorn, who has been accused of multiple instances of inappropriate sexual behavior and even lying about the car wreck that left him paralyzed, began not long after the 2010 elections. He has denied those allegations. That year, Republicans spent more than $1m on a dark-money, negative-ad driven effort to win control of North Carolina’s house and senate just in time to dominate redistricting. When they won, a determined Republican party focused on drawing a congressional map that would turn this moderate state inside-out – producing 10 reliable Republican seats and just three Democratic districts.
The key to the entire map? Asheville, the largest city in western North Carolina, an enclave of vegan restaurants and independent bookstores surrounded by conservative mountain towns. With Asheville as its core, the 11th district had long been a swing seat, see-sawing between a Republican from 2000 through 2004 and a Democrat during 2006, 2008 and 2010 as this area, like so many others, rallied behind the Iraq war and then shifted Democratic as the war and economy soured. Republicans needed to win the 11th to assure a 10-3 map. So they drew the district line straight through Asheville, neatly attaching half of the city to a larger number of rural, conservative towns, and diluting the Democratic vote across two districts they could never hope to win.
In a district like this, the Republican primary was now the only race that mattered; the Democratic incumbent saw the writing on the wall and promptly announced his retirement. A small-town businessman who had dabbled in meteorology, a local sandwich shop and real estate read the angry base of this new district perfectly. His name was Mark Meadows, and you can watch on YouTube the moment when he first tasted power. Meadows’s closest Republican competitor dissembled when a Tea Party audience asked about pursuing an investigation into Barack Obama’s citizenship. Meadows pounced with a quick, direct answer: “Yes.” As the crowd roared, Meadows gives a tiny smirk. “You know what?” he added. “We’ll send him back home to Kenya or wherever it is.”
When Meadows led an Obamacare rebellion that forced a government shutdown in October 2013, Karl Rove called the insurgent Republican members his redistricting strategy helped create a “suicide caucus”. The New Yorker took a look at the districts they represented, and discovered a kind of America in reverse – whiter, more rural, more conservative, at a time when demographic trends were headed the other direction. These districts became 2% whiter ahead of 2012. They were 75% white, on average, compared with 63% elsewhere. The Republican party engineered themselves a fantasia: Obama defeated Mitt Romney by four percentage points nationwide. But not in “suicide caucus” nation. There, Obama went down to a stunning 23-point defeat.
That’s what Cawthorn inherited when Meadows left Congress for a seat at Trump’s side as White House chief of staff: a district Republicans cannot lose, where red meat and outrage are all that matters, demographics and representativeness be damned. Cawthorn learned his lessons well. Generate outrage, generate attention, generate big dollars fundraising off the hate.
The census numbers released last month show a nation that continues on its path to diversity. But can a multiracial nation become a multiracial democracy? Not if we continue to redistrict in this toxic fashion. The connection between gerrymandering and polarization is a complicated one; they act as accelerants on each other. Yet there’s no denying this: Cawthorn and his ilk would not be in office without it. There is a huge difference between the kind of candidate who won this very seat a decade ago, and the two extremists who have held it for the last decade. And when we lose swing seats and bridge builders to those who urge Americans to stockpile weapons and ammunition, we have lost an important part of ourselves.
As the 2021 redistricting cycle gets underway, and the maps that will define our politics for the next 10 years are crafted in state capitals nationwide, Cawthorn’s dark vision hangs in the balance. If lawmakers continue to draw tilted maps that maximize the number of seats their party wins, at the cost of representative results in otherwise competitive states, they will continue to produce districts easily captured by ultra-radical zealots like Cawthorn. They will continue to incentivize elected officials to cater only to the militant base that drives party primaries. And we could break, once and for all, under the strain of this existential test.
David Daley is the author of the national bestseller Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy
GOP Senate campaign heats up after report tying Budd to bankruptcy that hurt farmers
Will Wright
The race for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina heated up in recent days after a Washington Post story detailed how farmers lost millions of dollars in the bankruptcy of a company led in part by the family of Rep. Ted Budd.
Budd, whose candidacy won former president Donald Trump’s endorsement in June, has faced sharp criticism from his competitors after the story published on Tuesday. Both former Gov. Pat McCrory and former Rep. Mark Walker, who are also vying for the nomination, jumped at the chance to accuse Budd of being a “D.C. insider” who swindled farmers.
AgriBioTech, based in Henderson, Nev., was a “full-service seed company” specializing in forage and turfgrass that also researched and developed seed varieties and processing plants, according to a company news release.
Budd was not an officer of the company, but was a shareholder. His father, Richard Budd, took over as chief executive in 1999 and served as chairman of the board, according to federal securities filings.
Budd was also one of 11 people who signed a loan to AgriBioTech to try and save the faltering company less than a year before the company declared bankruptcy, his campaign acknowledged. AgriBioTech repaid the loan with interest, but more than 1,200 farmers in 39 states went unpaid for more than $50 million of products.
Following AgriBioTech’s bankruptcy filing in 2000, a lawsuit filed in Nevada claimed that Richard Budd transferred millions of dollars out of the company to his family, including Ted Budd, before paying back farmers for their products. In a settlement reached in 2005, the Budds agreed to pay about $6 million to the farmers without admitting wrongdoing, according to a report by the Las Vegas Sun at the time.
“I wish my efforts to save ABT had been successful, but they were not,” Richard Budd said in a statement provided by his son’s campaign. “I did my best, but in this case, my best was not enough to save the company.”
In an interview this week with the Winston-Salem news channel WXII, Ted Budd said he “never had any involvement” with the company. His campaign spokesman, Jonathan Felts, said in a statement that farmers’ accusations of fraudulent transfers were “untrue allegations which is, sadly, a typical tactic in these sorts of lawsuits.”
“Ted’s got the Trump endorsement and has the momentum to win this race,” Felts said. “Some reporters suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome and will say or do anything if they think it might hurt President Trump’s political popularity.”
McCrory, Walker’s response
All three of the leading Republican candidates have tried to paint themselves as outsiders in Washington, and both Walker and McCrory are using the Post’s story as a way to kick the legs off Budd’s efforts.
“Do we really need another Washington politician like this representing North Carolina in the United States Senate?” McCrory wrote on Twitter.
Walker wrote on Facebook that the report was “unsettling but confirms the Budd record: follow big money and you always find Ted Budd.”
“Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story, but the opening chapter of Budd putting money over principle,” Walker added. “You cannot expect to serve North Carolina in the U.S. Senate with this lack of judgment and refusal to answer questions.”
State of the campaigns
The U.S. Senate race in North Carolina will play a pivotal role in determining which party will control the chamber after the 2022 midterm elections. The primary is scheduled for March 8.
So far, Budd has cashed in on his Trump endorsement by raising $700,000 in the second quarter. He also loaned his own campaign $250,000, and came into the race with an extra $1.1 million in cash from his House races. McCrory raised $1.24 million in the second quarter, and Walker has raised more than $1.25 million since he declared his candidacy in December.
It is unclear what impact Budd’s connection to AgriBioTech will have on the race.
Jordan Shaw, a campaign advisor to McCrory, wrote on Twitter that Budd is “going to need a better answer” than denying connection to the company.
