flood

POLITICS & SOCIETY Rachel Hadas, Rutgers University - Newark Patience is wearing thin. Not only are we all bone-weary of the pandemic; rising hopes have made the current precarious state of confusion and fear, vigorous variants and stubborn vaccine rejection all the more frustrating. We thought we were almost out of the woods, but there’s no clear end in sight to this forest. And there’s no shortage of other bad and worsening news too, notably the dramatic daily evidence of the catastrophic results of climate change. How do we weather this welter of bad news? How do we adapt? The same ways human beings always have adapted – grudgingly or stoically, fearfully or fatalistically or frantically. We’re in a prolonged period of maddeningly, scarily bad news – and if we follow the 24-h...

When hurricanes and other extreme storms unleash downpours like Tropical Storm Beta has been doing in the South, the floodwater doesn’t always stay within the government’s flood risk zones. New research suggests that nearly twice as many properties are at risk from a 100-year flood today than the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood maps indicate. Unfortunately, many of the people living in those properties have no idea that their homes are at risk until the floodwaters rise. I am a sociologist who works on disaster vulnerability. In a new study, I looked at the makeup of communities in Houston that aren’t in the 100-year flood zone, but that still flood. What I found tells a story of racial disparities in the city. Research in other cities has shown similar flooding problems in ...

Tag: flood

A Poet And Classics Scholar On ‘Working With Hope’ And Facing The Flood Of Bad News

Homes are flooding outside FEMA’s 100-year flood zones, and racial inequality is showing through