For days, parts of Texas have been slammed by massive rain and flooding caused by Harvey, a hurricane-turned-tropical storm that made landfall Friday.
Officials say at least eight people have died, with tens of thousands evacuated. Streets and rivers along Texas’ Gulf Coast and farther inland are flooded and dangerous.
The National Weather Service says Houston has gotten as much as 30 inches of rain, and the unpredictable storm has the potential to drop another 20 inches of rain, or more, on the beleaguered city over the next week…
…“We’ve seen in the U.S. a huge number of people hit by hurricanes remain on unemployment insurance the decade after the hurricane hit,” said Amir Jina, an environmental and development economist who’s an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. “People who are already vulnerable at the time – maybe someone who’s on the fence about dropping out of school, someone who has a child who’s ill who needs to stop working for week and so they don’t pay for their medicine that week – those are small things which can have negative consequences in the long run.”
“Reconstruction might look less like people rebuilding homes that were destroyed and more like clearing out businesses to make sure the person working as a cashier at the corner store can get back to their job as quickly as possible,” Jina said, reconstruction that can help recover from natural disasters that act as a “a short sharp shock can percolate through the rest of people’s lives…”
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