Americans are looking for a place in the sun – Alessio Marchionna

A severe water crisis has been underway for more than a month in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, which began after heavy rains flooded the Pearl River, blocking the city’s main water management facility. The inhabitants, who are about 150 thousand, cannot drink the water that comes to their home and have been invited by the authorities to boil it before using it. On 29 August Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba declared a water emergency; the next day Tate Reeves, the governor of Mississippi, declared a state of state emergency and asked for the intervention of the national guard to distribute water bottles to the population; and finally President Joe Biden declared a federal state of emergency.

A triple emergency to respond to a situation that is actually anything but exceptional. Jackson’s water system has been in crisis for years. In February 2021, a violent storm took the system out of action for a month. Even when water gets to the taps, residents often have to boil it and pay very high bills for water that is not always safe to drink. The Washington Post told the story of Roshonda Snell, a 32-year-old woman who works in a hotel. Snell and her family never drank tap water. They spend a good part of a subsidy they get from the government to buy bottled one.

Snell’s family is African American, like 82 percent of Jackson’s population. The city also has one of the highest poverty levels in the country, with 25 percent of its inhabitants in poverty. This explains why many US newspapers are describing the Jackson crisis as a kind of perfect storm that merges many of the problems in the United States today: racial discrimination, poverty, infrastructure vulnerability, and the climate crisis. A Bloomberg article that we publish this week on Internazionale (free for Americana readers) tells it well.

Towards danger
Jackson’s water crisis calls into question perhaps the most important issue of the coming decades, in the United States as well as in Europe: adaptation to the consequences of the climate crisis. An important part of the problem, as weather conditions worsen, concerns places where people decide to live. From this point of view, the United States is not well positioned. An article by Vox explains that in recent years, Americans have continued to move to the areas of the country most at risk from extreme weather events and have instead moved away from the safer ones.

“According to an analysis published in early August by the Economic innovation group, ten of the fifteen counties that registered the highest number of arrivals in 2021 were in the southwest, areas suffering from chronic water shortages. Since 2012, another 2.8 million people have moved to counties that have spent most of the last decade in severe or exceptional drought conditions ”. At the top of the chart is Maricopa County, Arizona. There is Phoenix, a metropolis built in the desert where the sun shines more than in any other major city on the planet and which has an average of 110 days a year with maximum temperatures of at least 37.7 degrees. In Phoenix, the average temperature has risen 2.5 degrees from the middle of the last century. In 2021, 338 people died from the heat in Maricopa County.

Despite this, the county’s population has increased 14 percent over the past decade to nearly 4.5 million people. Something similar happens in Florida and South Carolina, where the dangers of storms and floods are added to the heat, and in Colorado and Idaho, two states at high risk of fires. Overall, the fifty U.S. counties with most homes at risk of climate and extreme weather conditions experienced net positive migration (i.e. more people arriving than leaving) on ​​average between 2016 and 2020. In contrast, the fifty counties with most of the homes with the lowest climatic risk and extreme weather conditions recorded negative net migration in the same years.

Do not think that Americans are indifferent to global warming and its consequences. Simply, when deciding where to live they are more interested in the economic conditions and the cost of living of potential destinations. “The southwestern states and Texas are not only hot, dry and vulnerable to climate change, they also tend to be much cheaper than coastal cities.” Not only that: they are usually the places with the highest economic growth, so theoretically they can offer more jobs and greater possibilities for social mobility, with lower costs for housing than the cities on the coast. “In order to take advantage of these advantages, Americans are willing to accept the risks caused by the worsening of heat waves and other extreme weather phenomena.”

It is a problem that cannot be faced only from the point of view of individual choices. Housing policies will have to be completely rethought, explains the article: “If we do not want a future in which more and more people suffer the consequences of the climate crisis, we will have to make it less expensive to live in places not subject to heat waves, droughts or fires. “.

Disaster consultants
Extreme weather events, increasingly frequent and intense due to global warming, are transforming Americans’ lives in many ways. In November 2021, I told about the growth of the disaster-stricken reconstruction industry, which rests mainly on the shoulders of underpaid workers: mainly immigrants (many of them undocumented) who move from one place to another all year round. of the country, offering its manpower in places that have just been hit by natural disasters. Days ago The Verge reported on another industry that is thriving due to the increase in catastrophes, that of private consultants who help local governments to apply for and obtain the federal government’s reconstruction funds.

Cities and states turn to these consultants because the bureaucratic procedure they must complete to obtain aid is particularly complex, and even a small error in the forms can lead Fema, the agency that distributes the resources, to deny funding. Most local administrations do not have departments capable of managing the bureaucratic aspect of emergencies (as well as of course the emergencies themselves). In addition, the rules are constantly changing, especially during the presidential elections when a new administration takes office in the White House. Over the past two years, the pandemic has added an additional layer of complexity. And in general the rules of Fema tend to become more and more stringent, to avoid fraud and ensure that public money is used correctly.

The article tells the story of Mexico City, a Florida town overlooking the Gulf of Mexico that was destroyed by Hurricane Michael in 2018. Almost all the buildings were razed to the ground (including the police station and the fire station), the electricity grid was down, as were the sewers and water pipes. Not knowing where to start with the reconstruction, Mayor Al Cathey turned to Alyssa Carrier, a disaster response expert who began her career working for Fema and then moved to the private sector, founding AC disaster consulting. . Mexico City is still waiting to receive most of the money it should be entitled to and reconstruction is slow.

The rapid growth of the consulting industry creates easily imaginable problems. Unsurprisingly, the rush for public funds has led to a proliferation of companies offering this type of service, including many that are not really able to help local governments. Secondly, the intermediation of consulting firms entails additional costs for communities already in great financial difficulty and consequently for Fema and for the state.