Grist

This year’s Fourth of July was the first time that the town of Comfort, Texas, used the sirens intended to warn its roughly 2,000 residents of imminent flooding. Founded by German abolitionists in 1854, Comfort sits along the Guadalupe River in an area known as “Flash Flood Alley.” It installed its siren-based warning system last year, a move that neighboring Kerr County, where well over 100 people died in this month’s floods, opted against.

One Comfort resident told Grist that when she heard the sirens, she had no way of knowing just how much urgency was called for.

“In my mind, I’m going, ‘Okay we’ve got a couple hours before it gets up to the house, because it’s a 50-foot drop from our house to the creek,” she said. Her husband started walking down to check on the water level, but quickly ran back inside. “You’ve got five minutes,” he told her. “Grab everything you need.’”

Ultimately, she and her husband were lucky — they were able to shelter with a neighbor whose house is on higher ground — but their close call captures a dilemma that’s taking on new urgency as flash floods claim lives from Texas to North Carolina: Even the most comprehensive disaster warnings are only as helpful as the responses of those who receive them.

“If you’ve never seen water rise in front of you in minutes, it’s hard to conceive of how quickly that can happen — and how quickly your life and property can be at risk,” said Rachel Hogan Carr, executive director of The Nurture Nature Center, a nonprofit focused on flood risk communication.

“There’s barriers to warning delivery from things like internet connectivity, people not having cell phones, or being asleep when a warning comes in,” added Hogan Carr, who is also a co-chair of Integrated Prediction of Precipitation and Hydrology for Early Actions or, InPRA, a working group within NOAA that researches early warning systems. “Communities need to anticipate these barriers, and set up local systems in order to amplify the distribution of warnings when they come in.”

In the aftermath of the July 4 deluge, questions about the efficacy of local warning systems have swirled, particularly in Kerr County, which saw the most devastating flooding. Although the county had the ability to use FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, to push out aggressive, vibrating alarms to residents’ mobile phones — similar to those that sound when an AMBER alert is issued to inform residents of a given area about a missing child — that system wasn’t used until days after the flood, as more rain headed towards the area.

That said, cell phone customers in the at-risk service area were sent a variety of warnings — including a flash flood warning from the National Weather Service — but their effects appear to have been limited. Many received no alert, or only received an alert after the flood had overtaken them. Even if the county had sent additional warnings, many residents likely would have missed them if their phones were off or out of reach for the night.

Plus, a warning from local officials may have carried more weight than the alerts from the National Weather Service, Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who studies emergency management, told the Washington Post. People tend to be more receptive to warnings that are tailored specifically to them, added Hogan Carr.

“We saw this in Superstorm Sandy,” she explained. “Even though the entire New Jersey shoreline there was at risk, if it didn’t say somebody’s specific small town name, they often decided it [didn’t apply] to them.”

On the night of the flooding, Kerr County resident Martha Murayama says she was woken up by an audible alert on her phone. But she turned it off without reading the warning, assuming that it was an AMBER Alert. Murayama lives in the gated subdivision of Bumble Bee Hills, which sit directly across from the Guadalupe between Kerrville and Ingram, Texas. By then, the flood was already well underway. Not long after she got back to bed, Murayama received a panicked call from her neighbor, saying that someone was banging on the door. It was a family who lived directly across from the river, trying to warn people as they moved to higher ground. Murayama was worried — her neighbor, Joe, suffers from Parkinson’s and was not in good health. When Murayama’s husband went outside to investigate, he was quickly swept away by flood waters, although he was ultimately able to make his way back to the house.

Just up the hill, Ramiro Rodriguez was awoken by the same family seeking shelter. Like Murayama, he too thought immediately of Joe, and made his way down to the house through flood waters to help Joe and his wife up the hill. As they managed to pop the garage door open, Rodriguez spotted a tow strap, which he used to haul the couple to his house. “I tied up Joe to my hips,” he said. “And right about that time, you can hear the flash flood warning.”

But just as quickly as the water arrived, it receded. Since July 4, Murayama says, she’s gotten new flood alerts constantly.

Flash floods are among the deadliest natural disasters and the most difficult to accurately predict. Less than 1 percent of waterways across the United States have stream gauges that monitor rising water in real time; the National Weather Service often relies on computer modeling to assess flood risk in smaller creeks and streams. (Kerr County only has six river gauges, which makes predicting floods more difficult). But nearby development can quickly render these models outdated. For example, a stream bordered by concrete will flood much faster and cause much more damage in the surrounding community than one that runs alongside a park, which has natural features that can absorb water.

Even when floods can be anticipated, communicating their severity to the public is a tall order. Because flash floods are very localized, even neighborhood-level warnings may seem like false alarms to some residents, leading to what the journalist Zoë Schlanger has dubbed “alert fatigue.”

That’s why early community education is such an integral part of a functioning warning system, according to Hogan Carr. “If you get a flash flood warning and you never see it, you got lucky,” she said.

Many people do not understand the speed with which floods move, which can lead to them driving through areas that are about to be submerged, for example. Warnings such as the ones sent in Texas, encouraging residents to “move to higher ground,” don’t necessarily convey urgency, according to Ashley Coles, an associate professor of environmental geography at Texas Christian University who studies flash flooding.

“I spoke to somebody regarding the flooding in Texas. They said, ‘You know, if I had gotten that message I would’ve gotten together a go bag and then gone to bed.’ So they would have been ready to evacuate if needed, but it came so fast that they would have been swept away,” said Coles. “It makes it very difficult even for people who are trying to be cautious.”

The National Weather Service has defended its response to the floods, pointing out that it issued warnings at 1:14 am, two hours before the flood waters reached inhabited riverside areas like Camp Mystic. But the warnings, though they cautioned that “life-threatening” flooding was possible, did not order evacuations.

As climate change makes flash floods and other extreme weather events more common and deadly, researchers across the country are struggling with how to effectively communicate risk to the public, without losing their trust through over-warning.

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support, wrapped around the issuance of a formal flood warning,” said Hogan Carr, explaining that ideally, the local weather service would have a forecaster whose job was dedicated to doing community outreach, explaining local risks, where forecasts come from, and where residents can get reliable information in an emergency. “It’s an investment of time and resources proactively, that could pay off tremendously during these large-scale events,” she added.

In the meantime, Kerr County residents are hoping for a siren system, like the one used in neighboring Comfort.

“I slept through [the phone alert],” said Rodriguez. “If it wasn’t for those people knocking on the door, I would have slept right through it.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why flash flood warnings will continue to go unheeded on Jul 16, 2025.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

The Miccosukee Tribe in Florida joined environmental groups on Tuesday to sue the federal and state agencies that constructed an immigrant detention center known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” and located in the Everglades National Park.

In a motion to join a lawsuit, as one of the first tribes to potentially sue against the detention center, the case argues that the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Miami-Dade County, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management did not seek an environmental review.

The filing alleges the center’s proximity to Miccosukee villages, ceremonial sites, and access to traditional hunting grounds, and “raises significant raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts.”

“We are going to make sure that we fight this facility on whatever front is available to us,” said William “Popeye” James Osecola, who is the secretary of the Miccosukee tribal council. He hopes the lawsuit will “signify that the tribe will continue fighting to do what it’s always done, which is protect the land and save the land that saved us.”

According to Osecola, since the facility’s operation began, tribal members have been restricted from gathering plants and roots for uses such as medicine. “Obviously, that’s not an option for us right now,” he said. “At the moment, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen gates like that there, so it’s very jarring for us.”

Nearby the facility, 15 active tribal villages reside inside Big Cypress National Preserve, located within the Everglades.

During the 19th century, the Seminole Wars, which the Seminole Nation and Miccosukee Nation view as one continuous conflict against the U.S., many members fled into the wetlands and used their natural environment as refuge.

Protestors stand outside a makeshift detention center for immigrants known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” as government vehicles drive by, in the Florida Everglades. Betty Osceola

In a press conference at the detention center last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said there would be  “zero impact” on the wetland’s environment. The site is located on an abandoned airstrip, once a controversial project that aimed to be the world’s largest airport. Observers outside the facility said they could see lights on at all hours, attracting mosquito swarms. Recent satellite images also reveal that a freshly paved road has been laid down.

Last year, the tribe and the National Park Service signed a co-stewardship agreement for Everglades National Park. The partnership aimed to collaborate on protecting tribal practices, restoration efforts for the land’s vegetation, and protection.

In these cypress swamps and toothy sawgrass marshes, wildlife alongside alligators includes bats, turtles, and panthers. Because species such as the panther are critically endangered, Osecola implied that the continuous traffic at Alligator Alcatraz will “see more deaths with the wildlife”. “It’s taken decades just to get Everglades restoration going like it is now,” he said.

While the Department of Homeland Security distanced itself after promoting the facility for weeks, claiming Florida controls the facility under state hands, critics are not convinced. Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that filed alongside Friends of the Everglades in the case last month, noted that “setting aside the funding for detaining immigrants is essentially a federal function. This is a federal project, regardless of what they say in their court filings.”

Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a legal notice with an intent to sue that the construction also violates the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, raising concerns such as light pollution and the use of insecticide to mitigate mosquitoes on-site that could affect the area’s wildlife and surrounding water.

Each day since its opening, protestors and groups have noticed trucks coming in carrying diesel, generators, and caged vehicles holding detainees. There are currently 3000 beds inside the facility and at least 400 security personnel on-site.

After state legislators were blocked from entering the Alligator Alcatraz’s premises, Governor DeSantis invited legislators and the state’s members of Congress to tour the facility over the weekend. According to Osecola, the Governor of Florida did not extend that invitation to tribes.

Some Republican members claimed that the detention center was clean and safe. Others, such as Democratic State Representative Anna Eskamani, reported that, “The environmental impact of this facility cannot be overstated — there is new asphalt, thousands of gallons of water used every day and gas tanks powering generators. No alligators seen, but plenty of mosquitoes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A tribe in Florida joins the fight against the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigrant detention center on Jul 15, 2025.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

Since 2019, the 191 countries that are party to an international agreement called the Basel Convention have agreed to classify mixed plastic trash as “hazardous waste.” This designation essentially bans the export of unsorted plastic waste from rich countries to poor countries and requires it to be disclosed in shipments between poor countries. But the rule has a big loophole.

Every year, an unknown but potentially large amount of plastic waste continues to be traded in the form of “refuse-derived fuel,” or RDF, ground-up packaging and industrial plastic waste that gets mixed with scrap wood and paper in order to be burned for energy. Environmental groups say these exports perpetuate “waste colonialism” and jeopardize public health, since burning plastic emits hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

Many advocates would like to see the RDF loophole closed as a first step toward discouraging the development of new RDF facilities worldwide. They were disappointed that, at this spring’s biannual meeting of the Basel Convention — the 1989 treaty that regulates the transboundary movement of hazardous waste — RDF went largely unaddressed. “It’s just frustrating to witness all these crazy, profit-protecting negotiators,” said Yuyun Ismawati, co-founder of the Indonesian anti-pollution nonprofit Nexus3. “If we are going to deal with plastic waste through RDF, then … everybody must be willing to learn more about what’s in it.”

RDF is a catch-all term for several different products, sometimes made with special equipment at material recovery facilities — the centers that, in the U.S., receive and sort mixed household waste for further processing. ASTM International, an American standard-setting organization, lists several types of RDF depending on what it’s made of and what it’s formed into — coarse particles no larger than a fingernail, for example, or larger briquettes. Some RDF is made by shredding waste into a loose “fluff.”

Although RDF contains roughly 50 percent paper, cardboard, wood, and other plant material, the rest is plastic, including human-made textiles and synthetic rubber. It’s this plastic content that makes RDF so combustible — after all, plastics are just reconstituted fossil fuels. According to technical guidelines from the Basel Convention secretariat, RDF contains about two-thirds the energy of coal by weight.

One of the main users of RDF is the cement industry, which can burn it alongside traditional fossil fuels to power its energy-intensive kilns. Álvaro Lorenz, global sustainability director for the multinational cement company Votorantim Cimentos, said RDF has gained popularity as cities, states and provinces, and countries struggle to deal with the 353 million metric tons of plastic waste produced each year — 91 percent of which is never recycled. Some of these jurisdictions have implemented policies discouraging trash from being sent to landfills. Instead, it gets sent to cement kilns like his. “Governments are promoting actions to reduce the amount of materials being sent to landfills, and we are one solution,” he said.

Workers sort plastic waste for recycling in Samut Prakan, Thailand, in 2023. Matt Hunt / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Lorenz said RDF makes his company more sustainable by contributing to a “circular economy.” In theory, using RDF instead of coal or natural gas reduces emissions and advances companies’ environmental targets. According to David Araujo, North America engineered fuels program manager for the waste management and utility company Veolia, RDF produced by his company’s factory in Louisiana, Missouri, allows cement company clients in the Midwest to avoid 1.06 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions with every ton of RDF burned. The ash produced from burning RDF can also be used as a raw material in cement production, he added, displacing virgin material use.

RDF is also attractive because it is less price-volatile than the fossil fuels that cement production would otherwise depend on. In one analysis of Indonesian RDF production from last year, researchers found that each metric ton of RDF can save cement kiln operators about $77 in fuel and electricity costs.

Lorenz said that the high temperatures inside cement kilns “completely burn 100 percent” of any hazardous chemicals that may be contained in RDF’s plastic fraction. But this is contested by environmental advocates who worry about insufficiently regulated toxic air emissions similar to those produced by traditional waste incinerators — especially in poor countries with less robust environmental regulations and enforcement capacity. Dioxins, for example, are released by both cement kilns and other waste incinerators, and are linked to immune and nervous system impairment. Burning plastic can also release heavy metals that are associated with respiratory and neurological disorders. A 2019 systematic review of the health impacts of waste incineration found that people living and working near waste incinerators had higher levels of dioxins, lead, and arsenic in their bodies, and that they often had a higher risk of some types of cancer such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Read NextThe misleading accounting behind your ‘recycled’ plasticJoseph Winters

“Before they convert it into fuel, the chemicals are still locked inside the [plastic] packaging,” said Ismawati. “But once you burn it, … you spray out everything.” She said some of her friends living near an RDF facility in Indonesia have gotten cancer, and at least one has died from it.

Lorenz and Araujo both said their companies are subject to, and comply with, applicable environmental regulations in the countries where they operate.

Lee Bell, a science and policy adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network — a network of environmental and public health experts and nonprofits — also criticized the idea that burning RDF causes fewer greenhouse gas emissions than burning traditional fossil fuels. He said this notion fails to consider the “petrochemical origin” of plastic waste: Plastics cause greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life cycle, and, as a strategy for dealing with plastic waste, research suggests that incineration releases more climate pollution than other waste management strategies. In a landfill, where plastic lasts hundreds of years with little degradation, the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law has estimated greenhouse gas emissions at about 132 pounds per metric ton. That rises to about 1,980 pounds of emissions per metric ton when plastic is incinerated.

Bell said he’s concerned about the apparent growth of the RDF industry worldwide, though there is little reliable data about how much of the stuff is produced and traded between countries each year. Part of the problem is the “harmonized system” of export codes administrated by the World Customs Organization, which represents more than 170 customs bodies around the world. The organization doesn’t have a specific code for RDF and instead lumps it with any of several other categories  — ”household waste,” for example — when it’s traded internationally. Only the U.K. seems to provide transparent reporting of its RDF exports. In the first three months of 2025 it reported sending about 440,000 metric tons abroad, most of which was received by Scandinavian countries.

Nearly all of the world’s largest cement companies already use RDF in at least some of their facilities. According to one market research firm, the market for RDF was worth about $5 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to grow to $10.2 billion by 2032. Other firms have forecast a bright outlook for the RDF industry in the Middle East and Africa, and one analysis from last year said that Asia is “realizing tremendous potential as a growth market for RDF” as governments seek new ways to manage their waste. Within the past year, new plans to use RDF in cement kilns have been announced in Peshawar, Pakistan; Hoa Binh, Vietnam; Adana, Turkey; and across Nigeria, just to name a few places.

A cement factory in Port Canaveral, Florida. Peter Titmuss / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Araujo, with Veolia, said his company’s RDF program “has grown exponentially” over the past several years, “and we recently invested millions of dollars to upgrade equipment to keep pace with demand.” A separate spokesperson said Veolia does not send RDF across international borders, and a spokesperson for Votorantim Cimentos said the company always sources RDF locally.

Dorothy Otieno, a program officer at the Nairobi-based Centre for Environment Justice and Development, said investment in RDF infrastructure could create a perverse incentive for the world to create more plastic — and for developing countries to import it — just to ensure that facility operators earn a return on their investment. “Will this create an avenue for the importation of RDFs and other fossil fuel-based plastics?” she asked. “These are the kinds of questions that we are going to need to ask ourselves.”

At this year’s Basel Convention conference in May and June, the International Pollutants Elimination Network called for negotiators to put RDF into the same regulatory bucket as other forms of mixed plastic — potentially by classifying it as hazardous waste. Doing so would prohibit rich countries from exporting RDF to poor ones, and make its trade between developing countries contingent on the receiving country giving “prior informed consent.”

Negotiators fell short of that vision. Instead, they requested that stakeholders — such as RDF companies and environmental groups — submit plastic waste-related comments to the secretariat of the Basel Convention, for discussion at a working group meeting next year. Bell described this as “kicking the cans down the road.”

“This is disappointing,” he added. “We appear to be on the brink of an explosion in the trade of RDF.”

The next Basel Convention meeting isn’t until 2027. But in the meantime, countries are free to create their own legislation restricting the export of RDF. Australia did this in 2022 when, following pressure from environmental groups, it amended its rules for plastic waste exports. The country now requires companies to obtain a hazardous waste permit in order to send a type of RDF called “process engineered fuel” abroad. Although RDF exports to rich countries like Japan continue, the new requirements effectively ended the legal export of RDF from Australia to poorer countries in Southeast Asia.

Ultimately, Ismawati said countries need to focus on reducing plastic production to levels that can be managed domestically — without any type of incineration. “Every country needs to treat waste in their own country,” Ismawati said. “Do not export it under the label of a ‘circular economy.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This fuel is 50% plastic — and it’s slipping through a loophole in international waste law on Jul 15, 2025.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

Early in the morning on July 4th, as torrential rains battered Central Texas, the dangers of flash floods became imminent. In Kerr County, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet within 45 minutes, leading to the deaths of 106 people. As the catastrophic deluge swept throughout the region, the death toll climbed to at least 132.

Later that day, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The law gutted public food and healthcare safety nets, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, while also codifying massive tax breaks for wealthier individuals and major corporations. The devastation in Texas, then, became the first major disaster to expose the grave effects of Trump’s extensive disinvestment from disaster resilience programs — and his administration’s newest food and hunger policies.

Charitable groups such as food banks and pantries typically serve as frontline distributors of food and water in a time of a crisis, working in tandem with other responding national and global relief organizations and government agencies. Now, though, because of the policy and funding decisions enacted by the Trump administration over the last six months, the primary food banks that are responding to the needs of residents throughout central Texas have less food to distribute.

Near the beginning of Trump’s second term, the Department of Agriculture stopped the flow of some of the money that pays for deliveries of products like meats, eggs, and vegetables known as “bonus commodities” through The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, to charitable organizations like food banks. TEFAP is one of the primary ways that state and federal governments have ensured food reaches communities in need in the aftermath of climate-fueled disasters like a hurricane or heatwave.

In March, the USDA also moved to end future rounds of funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. These two programs, which are also designed to support emergency food providers such as food banks, were slated to distribute more than a billion dollars this fiscal year to states, tribes, and territories.

In April, the funding cuts drove the Central Texas Food Bank to cancel 39 loads of food — the equivalent of 716,000 meals — scheduled to be delivered through September, said Beth Corbett, the organization’s vice president of government affairs and advocacy. The state of Texas lost more than $107 million for programs that allowed food banks and schools to buy food locally because of the administration’s funding cuts, the Austin Monitor and KUT reported. The San Antonio Food Bank also endured similar losses to its inventory.

San Antonio Food Bank’s president and CEO Eric Cooper told Grist he is consumed by concern that they may not be able to meet the emergency food demand prompted by the flooding tragedy in central Texas.

“Prior to this disaster, we just don’t have the volume of food in our warehouse that we need to have,” said Cooper, noting that they are “struggling to keep up” with the demand intensified by the deluge. “We have had to try to pivot a little bit to ration some of what we do have across the population we serve so that we can stretch [our supply],” he added. “USDA cuts have made it harder to keep up. The flood will make it even more difficult. Pending SNAP cuts feel like it will be impossible.”

Read NextDisaster 101: Your guide to extreme weather preparation, relief, and recoveryLyndsey Gilpin

Over a week after the floods, more than 160 people remain unaccounted for, and on Sunday another round of heavy rains halted some rescue efforts. The food bank, which has pantries and distribution sites throughout 29 Texan counties, is now acting as the central community-based anti-hunger hub serving some of the hardest hit swaths of Hill Country. Throughout the last week, the bank distributed more than 160,000 pounds of food relief to households in affected counties — an amalgamation of heated and ready to eat meals, groceries, pallets of water, and snacks, that equates roughly $300,000 in value and provides up to 120,000 meals. In the period of recovery to come, they expect to distribute another 40,000 pounds or so worth of food every day, an amount which feeds anywhere between 300 and 500 families.

That volume, according to Cooper, is far more than the bank normally distributes. They are already seeing a 10 percent increase in demand — a rapid uptick in the span of a little over a week. “We’re doing what we can to make sure that people don’t go hungry, but it has been tough,” he said. The biggest problem they are running up against, he noted, is how federal funding cuts have obstructed their ability to fully respond.

“I feel like the parent whose child asked what’s for dinner tonight, and not knowing, not able to totally confirm, that I’ve got it.”

With more than 5 million residents facing food insecurity, 17.6 percent of the state’s total population, Texas leads the rest of the nation in hunger rates. The region struck by floods is no exception. Among the six Hill Country counties most severely affected by the floods is Tom Green County, home to 120,000 or so residents. Preliminary estimates by Feeding America show that, based on location trends and new individuals registering for San Antonio Food Bank distributions, about 1,872 people in the area are now at further risk of hunger because of the expected economic impacts of the floods. About 20,080 residents living in Tom Green already confront food insecurity — nearly 17 percent of the population.

Signs outside of the Hunt Baptist Church advertise free water, food, and supplies to anyone in need. Jim Vondruska / Getty Images

But most of the destruction wrought by the floods was seen across neighboring Kerr County, where about 9,310 people already grapple with food insecurity, according to the latest public Feeding America data. With a total population of little more than 53,000 people, the towns found in this rural belt of south-central Texas include places like Hunt, an unincorporated community on the Guadalupe River, with a permanent population that sits at around 1,300. Roughly 876 residents in Hunt — more than half — now face a deeper food insecurity risk because of the floods, according to the Feeding America data shared with Grist.

Hunger typically intensifies in disaster zones because of the lasting economic repercussions of an extreme weather event. Poverty rates — and issues with food access — surge in areas significantly impacted by floods and storms because many Americans are less able to afford the mounting costs needed to best prepare for a disaster or recover from the damages they wreak.

In the last week, the USDA has issued flood-related waivers for households already enrolled in SNAP but not yet announced broader food assistance through programs like D-SNAP, or the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In flood-ravaged places like Hunt, humanitarian organizations are stepping in to provide assistance where the government isn’t.

The World Central Kitchen set up its main distribution site in Hunt. Their on-the-ground team of ten has handed out over 12,100 meals throughout Hill Country and has begun coordinating with local food banks to assess their longer-term resource needs.

“There is an influx of aid here because of this national tragedy,” said Samantha Elfmont, who leads emergency global food relief operations for World Central Kitchen. “We’re in that period now of ‘How do we support the community much longer than the month of July?’”

The latest round of torrential rainfall has complicated those efforts: Over the weekend, the Hunt site was flooded, so they are now also working to evacuate the team and food truck.

Getting a hot meal to those reeling from the floods is important for not just physical recovery from a disaster, but also for the emotional recovery process, said Elfmont. “People often think of health and shelter,” she said, but “emergency feeding helps people get through the trauma.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas food banks are rationing meals for flood survivors because of Trump’s cuts on Jul 14, 2025.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

Beatriz Salazar was sifting through her usual pile of mail this spring when an envelope from the city of Chicago caught her eye. Inside, she found a letter warning her — in 10 different languages — that her drinking water was delivered to her tap through a toxic lead pipe.

With it, the city included tips to reduce exposure, links to city programs to help replace the pipe, and a full-page diagram showing how the lead can flake or dissolve into tap water from a service line or other plumbing infrastructure and cause serious health harm, including brain and kidney damage.

“Lead?” Salazar remembered thinking. “We’ve been drinking lead for how long?”

Salazar, a housing counselor, lifelong resident of the city’s Southeast Side and mother of two, immediately called friends and family. Her mother-in-law, who lives around the corner, had received the same letter. So, too, had one of her clients. But others, including her mother, 74-year-old Salome Fabela, fewer than 10 blocks away, hadn’t seen or heard anything about it.

Beatriz Salazar looks over information on lead contamination and the city’s replacement programs at her mother’s kitchen table. Keerti Gopal / Inside Climate News

A federal drinking water rule required Chicago officials to warn approximately 900,000 renters, homeowners, and landlords before November 16, 2024, that their drinking water is at risk of lead contamination. Their properties were built before 1986, when the city required the installation of lead service lines. Lead pipes were banned nationwide that year.

But as of early July, Chicago had only notified 7 percent of the people on its list that their water may be dangerously contaminated.

Fabela’s home, according to city records, is connected to a service line containing lead, so she should have received a letter. But she is among the vast majority of people who — eight months past the deadline — still have not been warned. The federal law requires water systems to warn residents on a yearly basis until all of its lead pipes are replaced.

Megan Vidis, spokesperson for the Department of Water Management, estimated that about 3,000 letters are mailed out every week, adding up to about $8,500 in monthly costs.

Related Stories

Chicago residents risk daily lead exposure from toxic pipes. Replacing them will take decades.

As states replace lead pipes, plastic alternatives could bring new risks

Advocates worry that the city’s delayed warnings could keep already vulnerable communities in the dark about the state of their drinking water and what they can do about it.  A study published last year found two-thirds of Chicago children under 6 years old live in homes with tap water containing detectable levels of lead.

Vidis said DWM has asked the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency for more time to make its notifications, but they haven’t received an extension thus far. She added that the state is aware of Chicago’s delay and estimated that the city would not complete its first round of mailed notifications until 2027, but that it will notify residents electronically by the end of this year.

IEPA said water systems that did not certify completion of the requirement by July 1 will receive a reporting violation that they will have to make public.

Lead pipes are a serious health hazard, and millions are still in use across the country in older homes and buildings. No other city in the nation is so reliant on the dangerous metal as Chicago, where around 412,000 out of about 490,000 service lines are at least partly made of lead, or may be contaminated with it. And the city doesn’t plan to finish replacing them for another five decades — 30 years later than required by the federal government.

Climate change could amplify the health risks of lead pipes because soaring temperatures can increase the amount of lead dissolving into and contaminating drinking water. Service lines, which bring water from the street into homes and buildings, are just one of many plumbing fixtures — along with faucets, valves and internal plumbing — that can add lead to drinking water.

All of that makes timely notifications even more important.

This is the first time water utilities have been required to notify the public they might be getting water through a lead pipe, according to Elin Betanzo, founder of Safe Water Engineering. Betanzo was instrumental in uncovering the water crisis in Flint, Michigan — which celebrated the replacement of a majority of its lead service lines earlier this month.

Chicago has provided other resources to let residents know that houses built before 1986 are likely to have a lead service line, including an online lookup tool that shows the material sourcing water to a specific address. The city also encourages residents to test their water by calling 311 and signing up for a free lead test kit. But the program was unable to complete any tests in May while it was undergoing maintenance, and it’s currently backlogged. Some residents have been waiting months, or even years, to receive results.

Chicago residents: Take these steps to find out more about lead in your water

To request a free lead testing kit from the city of Chicago, enter your address here.

The city also has an address look-up tool that can help determine whether you have a lead pipe. (Scroll down and check the box agreeing to the site’s terms and conditions in order to go to the tool.)

If you have already tested and lead was found, you may qualify for pipe replacement. Find out more here. In the meantime, use a water filter and flush your water often. See if you qualify for a free water filter here.

Gina Ramirez, director of Midwest environmental health for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said her mother completed a lead test in 2022 and never received results, although her service line was replaced through a city program geared toward lower-income residents in 2023.

Of the 10 cities with the most lead service lines in the country, only Chicago has confirmed that it has not yet finished mailing all its notices. By the end of last November, about 200,000 notices had gone out in Cleveland and Detroit, more than 100,000 in Milwaukee, more than 85,000 in Denver and St. Louis, more than 75,000 in Indianapolis, nearly 70,000 in Buffalo, and more than 55,000 in Minneapolis, according to the cities’ respective water departments and utilities. New York City did not respond to multiple inquiries.

In Chicago, only about 62,000 of the 900,000 notices that were due in November had gone out by early July. In some cases, they pointed residents to broken links.

While Chicago is struggling to mail 3,000 notices a week, Milwaukee sent over 100,000 in a single day. And Detroit has already sent 124,000 this year after its 200,000 last year.

“People are not getting the information they need to protect themselves,” Betanzo said of Chicago’s pace. “It’s information they should have had a long time ago, and we’re continuing to delay that? That’s not OK.”

Beatriz Salazar looks over information on lead contamination and the city’s replacement programs at her mother’s kitchen table. Keerti Gopal / Inside Climate News

Chicago has a big job ahead, replacing hundreds of thousands of lines that are partially owned by private citizens, and it has to get permission from homeowners to replace their portion of the line. The city has said in its service line replacement plan that notifying homeowners of the problem and why it should matter to them is an important step in building buy-in for replacement.

Suzanne Novak, a senior attorney working on safe drinking water issues for the nonprofit Earthjustice, said she thinks Chicago’s delay means city officials aren’t taking their responsibilities to the public seriously.

“They are brazenly violating the law,” Novak said. “We not only need them to step up and catch up really quickly, but we also need the state of Illinois and EPA to use their powers to hold them accountable for this blatant lack of compliance with the law.”

The EPA also requires water systems to send out three types of notifications to residents: one if their service line is confirmed to be made of lead; another if it’s galvanized steel, which contains lead; and a third if the material of their service line is unknown. So far, Chicago has only started sending letters to homes with confirmed lead service lines.

Chicago officials say they are also prioritizing notifications by neighborhood and type of home. So far, the city has notified homes within 15 wards, mostly in lower-income areas on the city’s South, West, and Northwest sides. The city has begun by sending letters to single-family homes, which officials say are more likely to experience higher lead contamination due to less water usage and, subsequently, more water stagnation in the pipes.

But advocates and residents say the notification letters haven’t reached every affected home in these categories. Salazar and her mother both live in the 10th ward, one of the city’s priority areas, and Fabela lives in a single-family home.

Vidis, the spokesperson for the city’s Department of Water Management, said Fabela had not yet received a letter because city records showed she has a galvanized steel pipe. Vidis said Fabela’s notice would go out this year but did not specify when.

“I just think they should have done something to inform us faster,” Salazar said. “I think they’ve known this, and they’re just now informing us.”

Vanessa Bly, co-founder of Southeast Side neighborhood advocacy group Bridges//Puentes: Justice Collective of the Southeast, has been working since 2022 to raise awareness about the dangers of lead in drinking water. Last year, Bly began working with a Northwestern University laboratory that is developing rapid, at-home lead tests.

Bly has been troubleshooting the experimental test kits with homeowners like Salazar and Fabela on the Southeast Side. The predominantly Black and Latino community experiences disproportionate pollution and health harms linked to toxic exposures, including higher rates of chronic disease and lower life expectancy. Decades of disinvestment have also bred distrust with the city.

Coming soon: More reporting on Chicago’s lead service lines, plus an interactive map to explore which areas are most at risk. Sign up to be notified when these stories and tools are available.

Have you been affected by lead pipes or lead exposure in Chicago? Tell us what happened.

Over and over, Bly has found that many of her participants still haven’t received lead notifications from the city. She worries about residents drinking their tap water with no idea it could be unsafe.

“Is it so hard to have a commercial campaign to talk about it?” Bly asked.

Some residents have long been suspicious about their water quality, even if they didn’t know it might contain lead. Salazar and her kids drink bottled water at home and keep a filter in the refrigerator, she said. Her mother, Fabela, has filtered her water for almost 25 years, first through a filter attached to her tap, and then through a handheld pitcher.

At her mother’s kitchen table, Salazar looked over the city’s options for lead service line replacement. She doesn’t qualify for Chicago’s equity program, which replaces lines for free for homeowners whose household income is below 80 percent of the area median income. The city is raising money to cover costs for more homeowners, but it hasn’t told Salazar when it might get to her line. And she doesn’t have $30,000 to pay for her own immediate replacement.

For now, she said, continuing to filter her water is probably the most realistic option. But she thinks the city should have told her and her family about the risk sooner.

“How long have they known?” Salazar asked. “And why did it take them so long to inform us?”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chicago was supposed to warn residents about toxic lead pipes last year. Most still have no idea. on Jul 14, 2025.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

For 25 years, a group of the country’s top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, on June 30, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on.

A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump’s second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is “by far the biggest loss we’ve seen,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future.While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they’re no longer as easy to access. And it’s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form.

So why did the reports survive Trump’s first term, but not his second? You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said — as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. “If you suppress information and data, then you don’t have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,” Gehrke said.

Read NextHow your showerhead and fridge got roped into the culture warsKate Yoder

This isn’t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. “I don’t know if we’re living in climate denial anymore,” said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at Columbia Climate School. “We have this new front of denial by erasure.”

By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing. In April, the administration pulled nearly $4 million in funding from a Princeton program to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere, claiming the work created “climate anxiety” among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its 45-year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters. Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaiʻi, which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the 1950s — the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate.

“This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,” Aronowsky said.

In a response to a request for comment, the EPA directed Grist to a webpage containing past greenhouse gas emissions reports, as well as a version of what was supposed to be this year’s report obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. However, the agency confirmed that the latest data has not been officially released. The White House declined to comment, and neither NASA nor NOAA responded in time for publication.

Last year, a leaked training video from Project 2025 — the policy roadmap organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — showed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.” The strategy appears to be designed to boost the fossil fuel industry at a time when clean energy has become competitive and the reality of climate change harder to dismiss, as floods, fires, and heat waves have become perceptibly worse. “We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in his inauguration speech in January.

Read NextIn Trump’s new purge of climate language, even ‘resilience’ isn’t safeKate Yoder

The administration hasn’t exactly been subtle about its endgame. Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, doesn’t deny the reality of climate change (he calls himself a “climate realist”), but he’s zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the “endangerment finding,” the bedrock of U.S. climate policy. It comes from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Air Act that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants since they endanger public health. If the administration can convince the courts that climate change isn’t a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation.

“If you’re removing information about climate change, its reality, and its impact on people, then I think it’s a lot easier to make the case that it’s not an environmental health issue,” Gehrke said.

There’s a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends: agnotology (from the Greek “agnosis,” or “not knowing”), the study of how knowledge is deliberately obscured. What Trump is doing to information about climate change fits squarely in that tradition, according to Aronowsky: “If you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there’s nothing to even debate, right?”

Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Over the decades, as the evidence became rock-solid, those who opposed reducing the use of fossil fuels gradually shifted from outright denying the facts to attacking solutions like wind and solar power. What the Trump administration is doing now marks a radical break from this long-term trend, said John Cook, a climate misinformation researcher at The University of Melbourne in Australia. “This is a 180, not just a turn, but diving into something we’ve never even seen before,” he said. On the other hand, Cook said, the administration is taking a classic climate denial tactic — painting scientists as “alarmists” or conspirators who can’t be trusted — and turning it into government policy.

Half a year in, the second Trump administration’s treatment of climate information hasn’t yet reached the “eradication” levels that Project 2025 aspired to, at least on government websites. The EPA’s climate change website, for instance, is still up and running, even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency’s home page. Most of the website deletions so far have served to isolate climate change as an issue, erasing its relationship to topics such as health and infrastructure, Gehrke said. Up until the National Climate Assessments disappeared, she would have said that “climate erasure” was an inappropriate characterization of what’s happening. “But now, I’m really not so sure,” she said.

Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks that the administration’s actions actually go beyond erasure. “They’re literally trying to change the basis on which a lot of policymaking is advanced — the science basis, the legal basis, and the economic basis,” she said. Her biggest concern isn’t just what facts have been removed, but what political propaganda might replace them. “That’s more dangerous, because it really leaves people in this twilight zone, where what’s real, and what’s important, and what is going to affect their daily lives is just being obfuscated.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the federal government is making climate data disappear on Jul 14, 2025.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed