The Trump administration is escalating its campaign against international students at U.S. colleges and universities, announcing that it will begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, in addition to freezing visa processing for all foreign-born students as it prepares to require additional social media vetting for every applicant. “It’s really just difficult for me to think of any conceivable theory on which this is going to help the United States,” says Jameel Jaffer, noting that international students pay a disproportionate share of tuition costs on U.S. campuses. Jaffer is the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which has previously sued the government over its social media vetting policy for visa applications. The policy, which began as a pilot program during the Obama administration, “is ineffective at identifying national security threats, but it is very effective at chilling free speech,” says Jaffer.

Jaffer also comments on the high-profile immigration detention of former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and Harvard graduate researcher Kseniia Petrova, as well as a case brought by the Knight Institute challenging the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus pro-Palestine protest.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“It’s a sort of powerlessness, that it doesn’t feel like there’s anything that I can do about it,” said Myers-Benner. “Like, can you count on these systems or not?” 

Myers-Benner owns a family-run six acre farm in Keezletown, Virginia. Last spring, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded him a little more than $18,000 to support the farm’s work breeding winter peas that could increase soil’s ability to trap carbon. The grant is through the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, or SARE, which has supported farmer-led research initiatives nationwide for decades. The money represented an opportunity to expand work he and his family have been bootstrapping for years, growing crops that help feed lower-income, rural communities like his while preserving the planet.

Then, in late January, the Trump administration began freezing funds for programs across a broad swath of the government. Shortly after, his SARE representative at the University of Georgia fell silent. That’s when he started to worry: Without the grant, which reimburses expenses already incurred, he would need to line up part-time work to pay the bills. “There’s just a deflated feeling of ‘Okay. We were just about getting this rolling,’” he said. “And then … one change at the top has the potential to just completely wipe that out. And so we’ll have to pick up and hard-scrabble our way through it.” 

Myers-Benner finally got an answer on Monday, though one riddled in ambiguity. “You may continue your research or you are welcome to put your research on hold given the uncertainty of the situation, and once we learn more we can communicate that to you,” he was told by email, which he shared with Grist. “If this situation delays your research and outreach per your grant timeline we can offer a no-cost extension if you still have monies left in your budget. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you decide to hold your project let us know so we can note that in your files. That’s about the best information we can provide at this time while we wait to receive further guidance from USDA.”

The USDA administers SARE through four regional offices hosted in universities. Daramonifah Cooper, a spokesperson for Southern SARE at the University of Georgia, which oversees Myers-Benner’s grant, told Grist it is holding all calls for proposals until it hears from its federal funding source. When asked, Cooper could not clarify the funding status for grants already awarded.

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Since late January, the USDA has frozen, rescinded, or cancelled funding supporting everything from donations to food banks to climate-smart agricultural practices. The move aligns with the administration’s goal of rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and climate benchmarks. These steps prompted the termination of thousands of federal employees before courts intervened, pressuring the USDA to reinstate many of them, albeit temporarily, and federal judges have repeatedly ordered the administration to release gridlocked funds. Such abrupt and sweeping moves by the agency, and wider administration, have thrown the world of publicly-funded agricultural research into a tailspin. 

A USDA employee, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation, said “basically all” of the agency’s programs that fund agricultural research, including SARE grants, have been put on standstill due to the freeze. This person called the environment within the agency “a shitshow” and said, “It’s all really unknown right now. Even internally.” 

“We know that, yeah, things have been paused. Some political appointee at some level is reviewing our calls for proposals” this person added. “We know that DOGE is in the system, reviewing, doing searches of our databases, but we don’t know like … are they going to massively cut things right now? Things are on hold. But is the shoe gonna drop, and is lots of stuff getting canceled?” 

“Trump doesn’t really care about farmers or delivering services or efficiency or cost-savings. This is all politics. And we’re caught in the middle of it.”

At least 19 university labs have ceased agricultural research work because the Department of Government Efficiency dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development in February, a move one federal judge said may be unconstitutional. These decisions by the administration have impacted research programs nationwide. 

Kansas State University shut down two labs that were developing drought-resilient varieties of wheat and sorghum crops and pest-resistant plants. Johns Hopkins, the largest university recipient of federal research funding, cut roughly 2,200 jobs. USDA staffing cuts forced a federal project in Maryland investigating unprecedented managed honeybee losses to ask others to carry on its work. Seed and crop research being conducted across the nation’s network of gene banks have also been hobbled by layoffs and grant application suspensions, and grape breeding programs and work on crops affected by wildfire smoke in California have reported disruptions. The administration then announced an abrupt withdrawal of millions in federal funds for multiple universities, triggering a new round of layoffs, lab closures, and project suspensions across the country.

The federal government provides roughly 64 percent of the country’s public agricultural research and development funding. “With federal funding, especially research dollars, being on the chopping board for the current administration, the consequences of that, coupled with layoffs … means that at a time when we need innovation the most to deal with climate change, to make our food systems more resilient, that capacity is going to be lost,” said soil scientist Omanjana Goswami of the nonprofit the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

There will likely be economic fallout, too. A study published March 11 finds that the compounding effects of climate change and lagging investment in research and development has U.S. agriculture facing its first productivity slowdown in decades. 

The researchers modelled the eroding effects of climate change on American agriculture and the decades-long stagnation of spending for publicly funded research and development, using the estimates to quantify the research investment necessary to avoid agricultural productivity declining through 2050. To offset an imminent climate-induced productivity slowdown, federal agricultural research spending, which includes expenditures from every USDA agency except the U.S. Forest Service, and state agricultural experiment stations and schools, must replicate the unprecedented boom in public spending that followed both world wars. The government currently allocates approximately $5 billion annually to ag research and development, a figure that grew less than 1 percent annually from 1970 to 2000 before leveling off. Adding at least $2.2 billion per year to that tally would offset the climate-induced slowdown, the paper found.

If the current investment trend doesn’t change, the costly impacts of warming, including higher inputs, reduced yields, and supply chain shocks, will result in lower productivity, leading to more government bailouts and increased U.S. reliance on other countries for food, said Cornell University climate and agricultural economist Ariel Ortiz-Bobea. Without action, agricultural productivity is estimated to drop up to 12 percent with each passing year by 2050. This will cost the U.S. economy billions annually. American farms contributed roughly $222.3 billion to the economy in 2023 alone. 

“This is like a double whammy. They’re both human-caused, inflicted wounds. One because we’re failing to invest in R&D, the other because we’re emitting so much that it is actually slowing down productivity itself. So it’s like it’s being compressed from both sides,” said Ortiz-Bobea, who led the new study. 

Experts worry that the Trump administration is heading in the wrong direction with its layoffs, funding freezes, and efforts to roll back scientific initiatives. House Republicans, for example, have been pushing to cut some $230 billion in agriculture spending over 10 years. Millions of dollars in reductions to the USDA’s research, inspection, and natural resources arms were included in the funding stopgap bill Trump signed March 15. 

Most of the foundational agricultural research that happens in the United States is through some kind of USDA funding mechanism. The USDA is made up of multiple agencies and offices with their own research pipelines that support universities, nonprofits, businesses, farmers, ranchers, and foresters, among others. SARE grants are one of the ways the wider agency has funneled money into agricultural research conducted on farms nationwide, awarding nearly $406 million across 8,791 initiatives from its inception.

Jon Kasza runs an organic vegetable farm in New York’s Hudson Valley and relies on SARE funds to conduct his agricultural research. He doesn’t understand why the agency is still freezing that funding, given all of the administration’s promises to put farmers first. “I can’t say enough about how fragile it all looks to me,” said Kasza. He’s thinking about the excessively volatile bouts of rain that battered his fields in summer of 2023, followed by a smattering of dry periods last year that dried his soil so much he couldn’t plant his cover crops on-time in the fall. That’s where research grants like SARE, which he said allow farmers to bypass the typically “sluggish” timelines of conventional scientific trials to develop things like drought-resistant crop varieties, are critical. 

In November, he submitted his first SARE grant proposal of nearly $30,000 to grow multiple varieties of rice on hillsides in raised beds with biodegradable plastic mulch to conserve water and expand where the crop can be produced. Earlier this year, he was notified by a regional representative that the grant had been approved. “We’re moving forward as if some of the funding is going to be there, but we know that that’s uncertain,” said Kasza, who called the messaging surrounding the freeze a “rollercoaster” of confusion. A local land conservation group has promised to step in to save about 20 percent of the project if federal funding falls through. Still, that is “not nearly enough” to complete the work, he said.

“It’s already hard enough just to have an agricultural business, but then to have climate change as a factor on top of that, and then have this administration who’s wreaking havoc?” he said. “Cutting research, particularly our farmer-driven research, off at the knees, just seems like such a silly and short-sighted thing to do.”

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On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, another SARE grant recipient has also been stuck in limbo. Rancher Don Heacock spent decades working as an aquatic biologist for the Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources before retiring and launching his nearly 40-acre farm in the late 1980s. Ever since, he’s raised a herd of water buffalo, grown crops like taro, and cultivated ponds of tilapia. He does it all with local food systems, soil health, and water conservation at the forefront, maximizing crop diversity, maintaining living roots in the ground year round, and integrating livestock farming. 

Up until now, Heacock had heard nothing about his pending SARE grant, a $59,000 funding proposal submitted last year to expand his farm’s agrotourism education, buffalo raising, and soil conservation work. Then, suddenly, late last week, he was told the proposal was denied. He believes that rejection is linked to the federal funding freeze.

After reaching out to SARE representatives for all four regions and the national arm of the program, Grist has learned that the USDA-NIFA has frozen funding for all pending grant applications this fiscal year, which began in October. When asked, a national spokesperson confirmed those funds were still “under review” while regional representatives told Grist that all new calls for proposals have been paused as a result. None of the representatives specified a timeline for when those funds were disbursed nor whether already-awarded grant funding will be released. 

For farmers like Heacock, the stakes of the administration grounding agricultural research initiatives like his is far bigger than the work happening on one lone project or farm. “Trump has got it all wrong. Climate is a real issue and it’s hitting us right in the face,” he said. “If we don’t become sustainable real quick, we’re dead in the water.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Farmers are reeling from Trump’s attacks on agricultural research on Mar 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

The Marshall Islands marked 71 years since the most powerful nuclear weapons tests ever conducted were unleashed over the weekend.

The Micronesian nation experienced 67 known atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, resulting in an ongoing legacy of death, illness, and contamination.

The country’s President Hilda Heine says her people continue to face the impacts of US nuclear weapons testing seven decades after the last bomb was detonated.

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The Pacific Islands have a complex history of nuclear weapons testing, but the impacts are very much a present-day challenge, Heine said at the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Tonga last year.

She said that the consequences of nuclear weapons testing “in our own home” are “expensive” and “cross-cutting”.

“When I was just a young girl, our islands were turned into a big laboratory to test the capabilities of weapons of mass destruction, biological warfare agents, and unexploded ordinance,” she said.

“The impacts are not just historical facts, but contemporary challenges,” she added, noting that “the health consequences for the Marshallese people are severe and persistent through generations.”

“We are now working to reshape the narrative from that of being victims to one of active agencies in helping to shape our own future and that of the world around us,” she told Pacific leaders, where the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres was a special guest.

She said the displacement of communities from ancestral lands has resulted in grave cultural impacts, hindering traditional knowledge from being passed down to younger generations.

“As well as certain traditional practices, customs, ceremonies and even a navigational school once defining our very identity and become a distant memory, memorialised through chance and storytelling,” President Heine said.

“The environmental legacy is contamination and destruction: craters, radiation, toxic remnants, and a dome containing radioactive waste with a half-life of 24,000 years have rendered significant areas uninhabitable.

“Key ecosystems, once full of life and providing sustenance to our people, are now compromised.”

Heine said cancer and thyroid diseases were among a list of presumed radiation-induced medical conditions that were particularly prevalent in the Marshallese community.

Displacement, loss of land, and psychological trauma were also contributing factors to high rates of non-communicable diseases, she said.

“Despite these immense challenges, the Marshallese people have shown remarkable resilience and strength. Our journey has been one of survival, advocacy, and an unyielding pursuit of justice.

“We have fought tirelessly to have our voices heard on the international stage, seeking recognition.”

In 2017, the Marshall Islands government created the National Nuclear Commission to coordinate efforts to address testing impacts.

“We are a unique and important moral compass in the global movement for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation,” Heine said.

The US Deputy Secretary of State in the Biden-Harris administration Kurt Cambell said that Washington, over decades, had committed billions of dollars to the damage and the rebuilding of the Marshall Islands.

“I think we understand that that history carries a heavy burden, and we are doing what we can to support the people in the [Compact of Free Association] states, including the Marshall Islands,” he said.

“This is not a legacy that we seek to avoid. We have attempted to address it constructively with massive resources and a sustained commitment,” he told reporters in Nuku’alofa.

A shared nuclear legacy
The National Nuclear Commission chairperson Ariana Tibon-Kilma, a direct descendant of survivors of the nuclear weapons testing programme Project 4.1 — which was the top-secret medical lab study on the effects of radiation on human bodies — told RNZ Pacific that what occured in Marshall Islands should not happen to any country.

“This programme was conducted without consent from any of the Marshallese people,” she said.

“For a number of years, they were studied and monitored, and sometimes even flown out to the US and displayed as a showcase.

“The history and trauma associated with what happened to my family, as well as many other families in the Marshall Islands, was barely spoken of.

“What happened to the Marshallese people is something that we would not wish upon any other Pacific island country or any other person in humanity.”

She said the nuclear legacy was a shared one.

“We all share one Pacific Ocean and what happened to the Marshall Islands, I am, sure resonates throughout the Pacific,” Tibon-Kilma said.

Billions in compensation
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for the Pacific head, Heike Alefsen, told RNZ Pacific in Nuku’alofa that “we understand that there are communities that have been displaced for a long time to other islands”.

“I think compensation for survivors is key,” she said.

“It is part of a transitional justice approach. I can’t really speak to the breadth and the depth of the compensation that would need to be provided, but it is certainly an ongoing issue for discussion.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Junta restrictions on the transport of medicine in Myanmar’s war-torn regions of Rakhine, Chin and Sagaing in the north and west have led to shortages for displaced civilians dealing with outbreaks of disease, sources told RFA Burmese.

The restrictions are the latest attempt by the junta to keep medical supplies from reaching rebel groups it has been fighting since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup d’etat.

But rights organizations said the transport ban largely hurts civilians who have fled conflict and likened it to a “war crime.”

Across the country, the civil war has left more than 3.5 million people displaced within Myanmar as of Feb. 17, the United Nations said.

More than 10,000 internally displaced persons, or IDPs, are suffering from diarrhea and skin diseases in the southern part of Sagaing region’s Kalay township alone, a person who fled fighting in the area told RFA Burmese on Monday.

The person said that the conditions are largely due to contaminated water and people “urgently need medicine.”

“Due to their poor and unhygienic living conditions, IDPs are highly vulnerable to seasonal diseases,” said the source who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. “The junta is the root cause of these health crises, as they have blocked and seized essential medical supplies to the conflict torn areas.”

More than 200 displaced people were suffering from diarrhea in early February, resulting in three deaths, residents of Kalay told RFA. Travel to three affected villages has been restricted, they said.

No capacity to treat serious diseases

Displaced people from Chin state’s Paletwa township, who are taking shelter in refugee camps across the border in India’s Mizoram state are also facing hardships due to a lack of medicine, a refugee told RFA.

“Most IDP camps along the border lack access to healthcare and urgently need medicine,” said the refugee, who also declined to be named. “As the number of displaced people continues to rise daily, the demand for medical supplies has also increased. Paletwa township is facing a severe shortage of essential medicines.”

Although medical teams and residents are providing public health care services in some areas of Chin state, they “lack the capacity to treat chronic and infectious diseases effectively,” he said.

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The shortages have forced many residents of Chin to cross the border in search of hospitals in Mizoram, Salai Van Sui San, the deputy director of the Institute of Chin Affairs, told RFA.

“If a diarrhea outbreak occurs, it will quickly spread throughout an IDP camp,” he said. “With no access to medical treatment in these areas, residents rely on NGOs for healthcare services.”

Chronically ill ‘are dying’

The junta has also completely blocked the transportation of medicine in Rakhine state, residents said Monday, noting that patients returning to the state capital Sittwe after receiving treatment in Myanmar’s largest city Yangon are “only allowed to bring medicine prescribed by their doctor.”

“Due to restrictions on medical transportation, people with chronic illnesses are dying,” said Win Naing, a resident of Rakhine’s Maungdaw township. “Some medicines are imported into Rakhine state via routes from India and Bangladesh, but those in urgent need still face severe difficulties.”

(Citizen Photo)

A 10-tablet pack of paracetamol, used to treat fever and mild to moderate pain, now costs up to 5,000 kyats (US$2.40) in Rakhine state, he said — a 10-fold increase from before the coup.

Restricting medicine ‘is a war crime’

Salai Mang Hre Lian, the managing officer of the Chin Human Rights Organization, told RFA that the junta’s blocking of medical treatment amounts to a war crime.

“We’ve witnessed so many cases of denied medical treatment [since the coup], and we can say that the junta is bluntly violating our people’s right to life and committing war crimes,” he said.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta spokespersons Nyunt Win Aung for Sagaing region, Hla Thein for Rakhine state, and Aung Cho for Chin state for comment on the restrictions went unanswered Monday.

According to a Feb. 14 report by ReliefWeb, a group funded by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs that regularly publishes updates on humanitarian situations worldwide, nearly 140 health workers have been killed and approximately 840 arrested in Myanmar since the coup.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

The flooding that devastated western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene laid waste to communities all around the region, spitting up great torrents of mud and washing away homes, cars, and people. The landscape along the creeks and mountainsides has been forever changed. 

Beyond the fallen trees, sliding hillsides, and damaged buildings, Helene took out critical infrastructure, like internet and electricity, water, and sewer. Everyone would have liked more time to get things in order, but working families were desperate for childcare and the desire to resume classes was too great. “We had to get open,” Rambo said. “The kids needed some routine and structure and consistency, and families needed to go back to work.”

Although folks in Spruce Pine were told Thursday they could finally stop boiling water before using it, the school still can’t flush its toilets because the sewers remain a mess. In addition to two portable toilets (and special seats so the smaller children wouldn’t fall in), it has had to buy water by the barrel and spend $600 to install portable hand-washing sinks. The bills continue adding up: $360 per week for the johns and $350 every time they need emptying. Everyone has had to adjust to these changes and more, even as they’ve dealt with similar problems at home.

It’s been that way everywhere. The storm killed 103 people throughout western North Carolina and surrounding areas. Many more were injured. All told, the wind and the water damaged as many as 126,000 homes, and dozens of roads and bridges simply washed away.

Helene also decimated more than two dozen water utilities. For weeks after the storm, people had to boil anything that wasn’t poured from a bottle, and many of them drew from creeks and ponds just to flush their toilets. Folks in Asheville, where taps ran dry for three weeks, were told just this week that their water is safe to drink without boiling it first, but thousands of people served by 16 utilities still deal with sketchy water, low pressure, and other frustrations. In an effort to make their lives a little easier, officials dipped into a $273 million relief package to dot this end of North Carolina with 650 portable toilets and 15 “community care stations” with showers and washing machines.

Asheville was lucky enough to have upgraded its reservoir last year, something that prevented even worse flooding and allowed the region’s largest city and the communities that rely upon it for water to recover sooner than they otherwise might have. But for towns like Spruce Pine, the financial and engineering challenges of repairing their water systems are as formidable as the hurricane that broke them.

The water that flows into the North Fork Reservoir, which serves Asheville and the towns of Black Mountain and Swannanoa, always ran clear and clean from its headwaters high in Pisgah National Forest. But mud and debris have turned it murky brown and damaged much of the equipment needed to pump it. Crews have worked around the clock to set things right, reconnecting pipelines in record time and drawing muck from the lake.

Repairing municipal water systems leveled by a storm that washed away distribution lines, overwhelmed intakes, and inundated treatment plants is no easy feat. The challenge is acute in mountain communities, where geography is a hassle. Much of the infrastructure required to draw, treat, and distribute water often sits alongside reservoirs, placing them squarely in a floodplain when the torrent arrives and increasing the likelihood of damage. Reaching anything needing attention can take days or even weeks because the lines that carry water to customers meander through valleys, over ridgelines, and along roadways, many of which remain impassable. Spruce Pine Water & Sewer has restored service to 90 percent of its 2,000 or so customers, but can’t do much for the rest of them until the roads are fixed.

The sewer system remains a mess too. Town manager Darlene Butler has asked residents to conserve water as she works with county officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to erect a temporary treatment facility. The equipment is only now arriving and will, at best, be a Band-Aid for a multi-year fix. “We had a lot of damage there, so we’re trying to encourage people not to use a lot of water and put it into our sewer system,” she said.

A lot of these utilities struggled even before Helene. In many Appalachian towns, the companies that once paid to maintain water and sewer systems have shut down or moved on, and shrinking populations generate less revenue to keep things shiny and new. This is endemic throughout Appalachia. Residents in McDowell County, West Virginia — where one-third of families live in poverty — have for example given up on the often discolored water that flows from their taps and buy it by the case instead. Pipes in Martin County, Kentucky lose about 64 percent of what flows through them, a problem that started 24 years ago when a toxic coal slurry spill damaged them. The burden of these failures falls on customers who must adapt to the situation even as their rates climb. (Rates in Martin County, North Carolina, to offer one example, are among the nation’s highest.)

Yet other systems, particularly those in tourist towns, struggle to keep up with rapidly growing populations. The challenges are compounded by the difficulty of running new lines in the mountains and maintaining the complex pumps needed to maintain pressure over ridgelines. “This is a really, really great place to live,” said Clay Chandler, Asheville’s water resources information officer. “It’s beautiful. The people are amazing. But, man, it makes it hard to operate a water system.”

Spruce Pine’s system is so old that Butler has no idea when its pipes were laid, though she guesses it was 60 years ago. The pump station, recently upgraded with money from the American Rescue Plan, was built in 1967. It has seen overhauls as things broke, but rural utilities rarely make wholesale improvements because they are expensive and disruptive. “I think, like most small towns, we’ve struggled for the funds to be proactive instead of reactive,” Butler said.

Even as communities deal with the aftermath of so much deferred maintenance, others are facing the inescapable fact that rebuilding on a floodplain may no longer make sense. Spruce Pine is banking on hazard mitigation funding from FEMA and help from federal officials to move its wastewater treatment plant to higher ground.

The work needed to fully, and permanently, restore water and sewer service in these communities will by most estimates take two to four years and cost many millions of dollars. Meanwhile, crews continue playing whack-a-mole as aging lines break. Another one gave way in rural Yancey County last week, sending a geyser dozens of feet into the air. 

About 2,000 people live in Spruce Pine, a busy place with water-intensive businesses that have been impacted by the disruption. There’s the mine that produces some of the purest quartz in the world and sent heavy equipment to help restore service. There are the restaurants and kitschy attractions that drive a burgeoning tourism industry. And then there are the two state prisons, each of which holds about 800 people (who were relocated after spending a week in flooded cells) and, like prisons everywhere, burden the local water and sewer systems.

The ongoing crisis also has made providing basic services a challenge. Blue Ridge Regional Hospital, which serves three counties, has long had a standby power supply but scrambled to cope with losing water. Trucks haul in what’s needed, and enormous bladders collect what’s been used. “We had backup generators to supply the hospital in case of an emergency,” said Alex Glover, chair of the hospital’s board of directors. “But we never dreamed we would lose water and sewage capabilities, and we lost them all at once.”

With water in short supply, the volunteer fire department banned burning the yard waste, brush, and other debris people have been clearing for weeks. “If we had a big fire and we needed to take several thousand gallons or more out of the system, we don’t really know for sure how long that supply would hold up,” said firefighter Chris Westveer.

The department has experienced some close calls. Westveer recalled one frightening night when wiring in a damaged home sparked a fire. The road had been washed away, forcing crews to approach on an all-terrain vehicle. With no water on tap, they drew what they needed from a river and hoped the wind wouldn’t spread the flames beyond their ability to fight them.

Such strains on public services, already scarce throughout mountain communities, compound the stress felt by those who have gone nearly two months without reliable water. People in Banner Elk, a community of 1,000 or so that had to rebuild a road before it could repair water and sewer lines, couldn’t flush their toilets for a month. County officials worried that the raw sewage would flow into the Elk River. Meredith Olan, director of the Banner House history museum, has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do the dishes. “I’m very adept at carrying buckets now,” she said ruefully. Anyone wanting to take a shower had to rely upon the goodwill of friends with wells to draw from. But even that was no guarantee. Some were inundated with floodwaters and might have been contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens, and the electric pumps that pull water from the depths aren’t any good when the power is out. 

Even as these communities work nonstop to restore service, local and state officials are looking ahead to the next big storm. Members of the state Water Infrastructure Authority, a body tasked with financial planning for the state’s water and sewer utilities, gathered last month to ponder updates to North Carolina’s water infrastructure master plan. The document, created in 2017, explored ways of ensuring the financial stability of water utilities. Members of the panel, which includes several utility directors, a water engineer, and the head of the state Division of Water Infrastructure, acknowledged that local officials often have little idea how water and wastewater work and need help navigating the aftermath of a disaster and applying for grants to recover from it. 

Experts on the subject said consolidating the region’s patchwork of small systems may be the key to rebuilding and maintaining them. Some are doing just that. Four counties in southwestern Virginia are working together to install dozens of miles of water lines. Such efforts are easier among towns that are close together, like Mars Hill and Weaverville. These small towns, which are rapidly becoming suburbs of Asheville, have linked their water systems so they can ensure there’s enough to supply new housing. That connection allowed Weaverville to quickly buy and move water when the flood knocked out its municipal system. A similar arrangement proposed for nearby Marshall would cost about $15 million.

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Teamwork can provide a backup supply of water, reduce maintenance costs, and allow small utilities to share these essential resources and collaborate on, rather than compete for, grant applications. Such efforts will grow increasingly important as development and a warming world further burden these systems. “I think the fiefdom of water supply has to change for everyone to thrive in an era of climate catastrophe,” said Will Harlan, the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity and a resident of Barnardsville, another community not far from Asheville.

Even if a physical collaboration isn’t possible, an organizational one might be. “If you’ve got three tiny towns and nobody can afford to hire a public works or public utilities director, the three of y’all go in together and hire a qualified utilities director,” one member of the master plan committee said during a public conference call. 

Barring any changes, the region is at risk of simply rebuilding what it has, only to watch it all wash away in the next big flood, said Francis de los Reyes. He is an engineering professor at North Carolina State University who focuses on sanitation systems. He’d like to see communities move their water infrastructure to higher ground, as Spruce Pine is doing, and relocate flood-prone neighborhoods, as is happening in eastern Kentucky. “Your choices are mitigation, adaptation, or staying in fight-or-flight,” de los Reyes said. 

But it takes more than a collaborative spirit and skilled leadership to repair a water system and harden it against future disasters. It requires communities to pool resources or seek federal support because they do not have the millions of dollars that work requires. Even before Helene struck, the bipartisan infrastructure law set aside $603 million to help North Carolina replace old pipes and other hardware. The fate of that money remains in question, however, because President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to undo much of the Biden administration’s climate work.

Back at Spruce Pine Montessori School, Jennifer Rambo is trying not to let uncertainty about the future get to her. It’s hard enough dealing with the present. Beyond the weeks without potable water, she is grappling with spotty internet access and electricity, and an inescapable sense of loss. In the days after Helene, she spent much of her time trying to determine if people were still alive. Her voice wavered as she said more or less the same words that so many in her community, and others like it, have echoed over the past two months: “Nobody was prepared.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural water utilities in North Carolina are still reeling from Helene on Nov 22, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

The first 2024 presidential debate between President Biden and former President Trump was held on Thursday night. It marked the first time a sitting president debated a former one. It also marked the two oldest candidates ever to run for president, with a combined age of 159. The 90-minute discussion hosted by CNN was more of an incoherent debacle than any substantive debate. Biden was halting and disjointed. He was hard to hear, muffled his lines and often appeared to lose his train of thought. Meanwhile, Trump repeatedly lied — his false claims not challenged by CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. “Joe Biden really failed to rise to this moment,” says Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation. “I expected nothing great, but it was so much worse.”

We also speak with Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the co-founder of RootsAction.org, which sponsors the “Step Aside Joe!” campaign. He says Biden’s performance in the debate showed “he is clearly impaired” and unable to defeat Trump, which is “a gift to the extreme right wing.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

With the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, we speak with Oxford University international relations professor Neta Crawford, who says the region is still reeling from the impact of the war. “The story continues. It’s not over,” she says. Crawford is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, where her latest report pegs the cost of U.S. wars in Iraq and Syria since 2002 at nearly $2.9 trillion. Since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 under the false pretext of preventing Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction, more than half a million people have been killed in Iraq and Syria. Millions more were displaced or died from indirect causes like disease. “It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t easy, and it certainly wasn’t cost-free,” says Crawford.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We speak with Marxist economist Richard Wolff about how experts forecast another economic recession in the United States, with inflation at a historic high and a federal minimum wage that hasn’t changed for 13 years. The Federal Reserve plan to combat rising inflation by raising interest rates delivers a “body blow to a working class” already suffering from decades of upward wealth redistribution and a pandemic, says Wolff, emeritus professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst and visiting professor at The New School. His latest book is “The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.