emergency response

At the end of June, when parts of Iowa were underwater, I wrote that the United States needed to develop a rainy day fund and do more to routinize emergency response and reconstruction. In that piece I mentioned that, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration: "The U.S. has sustained 78 weather-related disasters over the past 28 years in which overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. The total normalized losses for the 78 events exceed $600 billion."              

Now, we are all horrified by the impact of Hurricane Ike on the Gulf Coast and on Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. The financial impact of this latest disaster is still being calculated, and even though the impact was not as great as it could have been or as devastating as some predicted, the financial cost will be huge.  read more »