Mary Bart

The Cost of Inaction: What the Texas Floods Reveal About Our Risk www.floods.org/news-views/f...

FEMA—and the Nation’s Disaster Safety Net—Gets Cut Adrift As the Trump administration targets the Federal Emergency Management Agency for “reforms,” states and communities lose the support they depend on to make it through climate-influenced disasters.

Today @nrdc.org filed comments with the administration, detailing how their actions have unraveled the nation's disaster safety net and set back climate resilience.

Their actions are degrading federal emergency management capacity, and state and local gov'ts.
www.nrdc.org/bio/rob-moor...

Exclusive: FEMA is “not ready” for hurricane season, internal agency review shows | CNN Politics Hurricane preparations at FEMA have slowed to a crawl. With hurricane season weeks away, a new assessment raises a number of red flags about how the agency would respond to a major disaster.

Hurricane preparations at FEMA have slowed to a crawl, and the disaster relief agency “is not ready” for the June 1 start to the season, according to an internal agency review obtained by CNN. www.cnn.com/2025/05/15/p...

Trump’s Cuts Are Making Natural Disasters Deadlier The administration is denying recovery funding and slashing money for preparedness. With hurricane season approaching, the results could be catastrophic.

“The federal disaster safety net is at risk of unraveling right now,” says @robnrdc.bsky.social. “If you’re a local government official, a governor, or somebody who’s lived through a disaster in the past, you should be worried ..." newrepublic.com/article/1945...

Nebraska communities still recovering from 2019 floods Six years after flooding devastated Nebraska and claimed four lives, communities are still recovering. And as that recovery continues, the federal government’s role is unclear.

This @nebpublicmedia.bsky.social story about Peru, Nebraska (pop 598) provides a good reminder about how long flood recovery takes, especially for small communities.
nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news...

Threat of FEMA Abolishment, Layoffs Lands Mississippi as American Rivers’ Top Endangered River for 2025 American Rivers is today, naming the Mississippi River as America’s Most Endangered River® of 2025. At a time when extreme weather is driving more frequent and devastating floods, hundreds of layoffs ...

Due to the rapid loss of capacity at FEMA, @americanrivers.bsky.social has named the Mississippi River as the nation's most endangered river. @floodcomms.bsky.social @nwfwater.bsky.social
www.americanrivers.org/media-item/t...

ASCE 24-24 Delivers Major Update to Flood Resistant Design Standards Flood Resistant Design and Construction, ASCE/SEI 24-24 is an update to widely used standards for structures in flood hazard areas. Here are the 4 big changes.

A new national standard could significantly change how communities mitigate flooding.

This article highlights what's new, what it means, and what ASFPM is doing to make it easier for communities to adopt the standards:

www.floods.org/news-views/f...

Exclusive: Trump administration drops work on stronger building codes for disasters To help homes survive more intense disasters, FEMA has been developing recommendations for stronger building codes. The Trump Administration has pulled them back.

As I told NPR, "Everything we build today needs to be built for the world we're going to inhabit decades from now. And we know what the failure to do that looks like because it's all around us."
www.npr.org/2025/02/20/n...

FEMA Quietly Eases Rules Meant to Protect Buildings in Flood Zones The agency issued an internal memo saying it would “pause” a regulation directing that schools, libraries and other public facilities damaged by disasters be rebuilt safely.

Making post-disaster rebuilding unsafe again.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/c...