{"id":11737,"date":"2020-06-12T19:16:17","date_gmt":"2020-06-12T19:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/?p=11737"},"modified":"2020-06-12T19:16:18","modified_gmt":"2020-06-12T19:16:18","slug":"reducing-economic-risk-as-hurricane-season-arrives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/?p=11737","title":{"rendered":"Reducing economic risk as hurricane season arrives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Hurricane Harvey, a devastating Category 4 hurricane, made landfall on Texas and Louisiana in August 2017, causing catastrophic flooding and many deaths.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Photo: wikipedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By ROZ BROWN<\/strong>
Texas News Service<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PASO, Texas \u2014 Today marks the start of hurricane season, and even as storm trackers keep their eye on a possible development that could impact Southeast Texas, experts say it\u2019s time to put more focus on flood mitigation projects and resilient infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forbes Tompkins, manager of Flood-Prepared Communities at The Pew Charitable Trusts, said communities need more financial resources and guidance from the federal government to make investments long-lasting, and they might want to take notes on some of Texas\u2019s recent actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBy providing more resources for disaster mitigation at the state level, as well as starting to take a look at the problem at a watershed level \u2013 so not pitting a community against another community for resources or siloing a lot of these community plans,\u201d Tompkins said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Texas, the peak hurricane threat exists from August through September, but they can and have struck the Texas coast during every month of the hurricane season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tompkins said the need for Texas to prioritize resilient infrastructure and mitigation is underscored by the multiple rounds of damaging storms that have hit the state in recent years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople tend to just remember Hurricane Harvey, which was one of the most damaging storms in U.S. history,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd even before Hurricane Harvey, in 2016 and in 2015, the state, from non-hurricane storms, experienced more than 500-year flooding events.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pandemic-related economic effects experienced by Main Street mirror what small businesses have gone through after natural disasters, according to former Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Craig Fugate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe goal that we have is, how do we build more resilient communities so small businesses aren\u2019t having to face the difficult decisions of how to recover from disasters but are able to do business, provide jobs, pay taxes as part of the local economy,\u201d Fugate said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts 2020 could be an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season, with 13-19 named systems possible. Of those, 6-10 could become hurricanes, according to NOAA\u2019s May 21 forecast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Support for this reporting was provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By ROZ BROWNTexas News Service PASO, Texas \u2014 Today marks the start of hurricane season, and even as storm trackers keep their eye on a possible development that could impact Southeast Texas, experts say it\u2019s time to put more focus on flood mitigation projects and resilient infrastructure. Forbes Tompkins, manager of Flood-Prepared Communities at The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":11722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11738,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11737\/revisions\/11738"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}