After a $14-billion Upgrade, New Orleans' Levees Are Sinking

Thomas Frank, writing in Scientific America:

The agency’s projection that the system will “no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023” illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana.

A slow moving disaster in the making. Let’s hope the Army Corp. and the residents and decision-makers in all levels of government start addressing this now.

Here's How Paradise Ignored Warnings and Became a Deathtrap

More outstanding work by the Los Angeles Times, who has had some of the best Camp Fire reporting by any news organization. The LA Times Paige St. John, Joseph Serna, and Rong-Gong Lin II conclude

In truth, the destruction was utterly predictable, and the community's struggles to deal with the fire were the result of lessons forgotten and warnings ignored. The miracle of the tragedy, local officials now concede, is how many people escaped.

This is a brutally frank assessment of the socianatural origins of the Camp Fire, and how policy and human decisions factored into creating the highly vulnerable conditions. File this story in the “there is no such things as a natural disaster” bin.

Don't Blame Climate Change for the Hurricane Harvey Disaster, Blame Society

There is an old adage in disaster studies: "there is no such thing as a natural disaster." This article explains that idea clearly by arguing that nature and climate change are not driving causes of crises like Harvey, but instead the causes originate from social and political structures and human decisions. Kelman writes:

A disaster involving a hurricane cannot happen unless people, infrastructure and communities are vulnerable to it. People become vulnerable if they end up lacking knowledge, wisdom, capabilities, social connections, support or finances to deal with a standard environmental event such as a hurricane.

The socionatural disaster in Houston, as well as in New Orleans during Katrina, were largely caused by uncontrolled sub/urbanization, unregulated development of industry and housing, and as Michael Grunwald, writing in Poltico outlines, by Federal flood insurance policy. However, in Katrina we witnessed the failure of the structural, technological mitigation system and the failed political evacuation, rescue, and rebuilding, which all took its heavies toll on African Americans and the poorest residents of New Orleans and surrounding Parishes. We have yet to see the uneven toll that our social order has taken on the people of Southeast Texas. This will become more clear in the days, weeks, and months, and honestly years. 

The Media Loves Doomsday Stories About the West's Water Crisis

Brad Plummer interviews John Fleck on the politics and empirics of the Western water crisis. Rather than doom and gloom, Fleck argues that when you look behind the headlines you find communities, users, and governments working to solve the problems. Fleck argues:

And the reason is that all across the West, when people are confronted with the fact that there’s not enough water, they’ve been really successful at using less. So rather than the catastrophe I’d been led to expect, what I found instead was people working hard to figure out how to adapt.

Water crises and their variability, Fleck argues, are not natural but rather: 

the difference has a lot to do with the socioeconomics of land use planning and infrastructure in poor communities.

Check out Fleck's new book Water is For Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West. 

Flint, Michigan's water crisis: what the national media got wrong

Connor Coyne, writing for Vox.com, on the unfolding of the Flint poisoned water crisis:

In October 2015, the state finally confirmed the worst of our fears: There was lead in the water after all. The city switched back to Detroit water, but the damage had already been done. We, and our children, were being poisoned.

The whole article is worth a read. It's part first person narrative and part sociological overview of the crisis. 

Most Disaster Prone Places in the United States

Below are some great maps with types of crises. It appears simply geographical, but we must also remember the social factors that produce different and unequal experiences before, during, and after socio-natural crisis. The full article has a mouse over feature so you can look up each county of the United States for more fine grain detail.

Image via Washington Post

Image via Washington Post