Incredible data here from REBUILD BY DESIGN From 2011-2024: 95.5% of U.S. residents live in disaster-declared counties All Senate and 99.5%* of all House of Representative Districts have had at least one federally-declared disaster due to an extreme weather event since 2011.

"At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms." And at other parks:

The L.A. mayor’s firing of her fire chief stirs heated controversy in a city still reeling from recent fires. Some top city officials feel blindsided. Firefighters union says they are fully behind their fmr chief w/ ⁦Reis Thebault⁩ ⁦Brianna Sacks⁩ washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02…

Wow. The Los Angeles Times reports Mayor Bass’ office has been editing out Q&A sessions from news conference videos posted to her FB page, cutting out parts where reporters press her about her handling of the fire. LAT asked Bass’ office why the videos are being edited, & got no response.

New Report: "FEMA Established a Process to Review Hermit’s Peak Assistance Claims but Did Not Meet Required Processing and Reporting Timeframes" oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/…

Just a reminder that the opinion section is walled-off from the newsroom and is home to about a tenth of the Post's journalists. I have had so many conversations with folks who canceled their subs, urging them to reconsider and stressing that ownership doesn't interfere in

Also ask how many of those fired employees had a “red card” qualifying them to assist in wildfire response. We surge wildfire response by calling up a militia of non-fire personnel who are qualified (red carded) to work on fires. How many wildfire minutemen did we just lose?

It appears that staff fired today include meteorologists, data scientists responsible for maintaining weather predictive models, and technicians responsible for maintaining the nation’s weather instrumentation network (among many others). 2/11

The now-confirmed and rumored additional cuts to come at NOAA/NWS are spectacularly short-sighted, and ultimately will deal a major self-inflicted wound to the public safety of Americans and the resiliency of the American economy to weather and climate-related disasters. 11/11

A tale of two executive orders, issued on 3/1/25 Newsom trying to get more wildfire safety work done this year, addressing a critical issue for CA: gov.ca.gov/wp-content/upl… Trump trying to get the cut out like it's 1950, after firing key personnel: whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…

‘Cash offers only’: After L.A. fires, scorched lots in both the Pacific Palisades and Altadena are selling fast. Brianna Sacks and Reis Thebault explain why, and what's at stake washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/0…

1/ A team of The Washington Post journalists spent nearly 2 months probing what went wrong in the response to the Eaton Fire. See it here washingtonpost.com/weather/intera… By Joyce Sohyun Lee Joshua Partlow John Muyskens Samuel Oakford Sarah Kaplan Brianna Sacks Aaron Davis and Imogen Piper

This, by Brianna Sacks, is just aching. And replicated so many thousands of times across Los Angeles County. washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…

"My dad said little. At one point, he put his glove-covered hands on the cracked remnants of his office wall and bowed his head. 'My whole life went up in smoke,' he said." Really moving essay about covering the #LAFires by Brianna Sacks washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…

Brianna Sacks on a reality so many will face: "Each major, once unfathomable disaster has been laying out the truth in clear, plain terms: In this era of climate change, there are fewer and fewer safe places. Great loss, for many of us, is inevitable." washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…

The last thing this community needs… New Start in Lahaina, Hawaii on the island of Maui. There are evacuations currently for the Kaanapali area of Lahaina. Resources responding.

Emergency management is often what keeps people alive during disasters, yet it's chronically underresourced. LA County, the most populous in the US, barely has any money for its office of EM, docs show. That played out in a big way during the #LAfires. wapo.st/4m3tueh

In the middle of hurricane season, the Department of Homeland Security involuntarily reassigned more than 100 FEMA employees to help with mass deportation work wapo.st/40PWNIH