Florida's uneven recovery from Hurricane Irma

Dec 21, 2017
Low-income communities face a long road ahead while in more affluent areas, homeowners can rely on insurance payouts to rebuild.

Puerto Ricans arrive in Florida to find affordable housing is scarce

Nov 28, 2017
More than 170,000 people have evacuated Puerto Rico for Florida and their immediate need, affordable housing, is hard to come by.
Jonathan Gonzalez waits with his children outside the Hurricane Maria Relief Center in Orlando, Florida.
Renata Sago/Marketplace

White House requests $44 billion in disaster aid from Congress. Now the negotiations begin

Nov 20, 2017
Texas, Florida, and especially Puerto Rico say they need tens of billions of more in funding to help recovery efforts. But how do economic cost estimates from a disaster get turned into legislation?
U.S. Army soldiers pass out food, provided by FEMA, to residents in a neighborhood without grid electricity or running water on October 17, 2017 in San Isidro, Puerto Rico.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

FEMA’S head details the agency’s hurricane recovery efforts before lawmakers today

Oct 31, 2017
Puerto Rico’s controversial contract and massive recovery will come under scrutiny

Climate change risk could lower a city’s credit rating

Oct 26, 2017
Credit agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s recently put out reports laying out this scenario: federal disaster spending drying up while damages from increasing disasters continue to rise. If cities, counties or states are left more on their own to fund rebuilding after natural disasters like hurricanes, they could have a lot of trouble managing […]

Median home prices are up in areas with the biggest risk of natural disaster

Sep 21, 2017
But people may be taking some risks more seriously.
Claude Scee salvages what he can from his father-in-laws home that was destroyed by hurricane Irma on September 17, 2017 in Summerland Key, Florida. 
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

What budget cuts would mean for predicting storms like Irma

Sep 8, 2017
High-resolution satellite images are critical tools for meteorologists, but proposed cuts to the weather service could put them at risk.
Hurricane Irma approaches Anguilla on Sept. 6 in this GOES-16 satellite image.
NOAA

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Citrus growers cower as Irma advances on Florida coast

Sep 7, 2017
With Hurricane Irma on the way, farmers from Florida on up the coast to the Carolinas are on alert. More cotton crops are threatened, and the price of orange juice futures is already up. Click the audio player above to hear the full story.

Property insurers report the worst first-quarter profits in more than 20 years

May 2, 2017
When you buy insurance for your car or your house, you and your insurance company hope you’ll never have to use it. Well, not so much in 2017. Property insurers are reporting the worst first-quarter profits in more than 20 years.  You can blame hailstorms, ice storms, tornadoes—the kind of severe weather that contributes to […]

Climate change puts weather on fashion students' radar

Feb 13, 2017
A warm December or chilly June can mean millions of dollars in lost sales of seasonal merchandise.
ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP/Getty Images