fema

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was sorely unprepared to handle Hurricane Maria and the subsequent crisis in Puerto Rico, the agency admitted in an internal performance assessment memo released last week. FEMA’s after-action report details how the agency’s warehouse on the island was nearly empty due to relief efforts from Hurricane Irma when Maria made […]

Last year, one of the hottest years in modern history, was also the costliest year ever for weather disasters, setting the U.S. back a record-setting $306 billion in spending aid and relief cost. But it appears the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency that responds to hurricanes, flooding and wildfires, is ignoring a critical […]

UPDATE: Since the release of NPR report and a flood of angry reactions from politicians, FEMA said it never intended to stop giving aid to Puerto Rico and will continue to hand out supplies for as long as necessary. William Booher, an agency spokesman, told the New York Times that Wednesday was not the actual […]

By Evelyn Milagros Rodriguez, University of Puerto Rico—Humacao I’ve always been fascinated by storms, particularly Puerto Rico‘s own history of them. I think it’s because I was born in September 1960 during Hurricane Donna. In its wake, that storm left more than 100 dead in Humacao, the city where I am now a special collections […]

By Cathy Mazak I’m so happy to be able to communicate with you again. As many of you know, I live in western Puerto Rico. In this post I want to tell you a little about my family’s experience with Maria, and how you can help Puerto Rico. On Thursday Sept. 21, when the sun […]

On Wednesday, roughly two weeks after Hurricane Maria struck, just 50 percent of Puerto Rico had access to drinking water and only 5.4 percent had electricity. That information was clearly displayed on Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) website on disaster relief efforts in the U.S. territory. But the next day, as first noticed by the […]

By Erin Auel and Alison Cassady One of the most visible and immediate ways climate change has affected—and will continue to affect—Americans is through extreme weather exacerbated by rising global temperatures. Aerial image of flooding in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Between 2005 and 2015, the annual average temperature in the U.S. exceeded […]