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Job and funding cuts to federal emergency programs have the nation’s tsunami response experts, shall we say, concerned.
There is never a good time for an earthquake. But as President Donald Trump and his government efficiency guru, Elon Musk, take a buzzsaw to the federal bureaucracy, they risk discovering whether there is such a thing as an especially bad time.
The 700-mile Cascadia Subduction Zone runs off the Pacific coast from southern British Columbia to northern California, and has been stuck for approximately the past three centuries. When the oceanic Juan de Fuca plate finally slips free to slide beneath the North American plate, it will cause what is ominously referred to as the Big One: a megathrust earthquake expected to be “one of the worst natural disasters” in the continent’s history. Scientists put the odds of it happening in the next 50 years at around 37%, with an upper threshold of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake or possibly even higher. As the Pacific Northwest’s former FEMA director once famously (albeit somewhat hyperbolically) told The New Yorker, when the Big One hits, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
Of particular concern for the low-lying Washington and Oregon coasts is that the earthquake could cause a tsunami, which in places could reach more than 100 feet high. While the United States Geological Survey monitors earthquake activity in the U.S., tsunamis are the domain of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is undergoing heavy staffing cuts courtesy of the Trump administration. The U.S. tsunami program — which includes staff at the National Weather Service and the two U.S. Tsunami Warning Centers in Alaska and Hawaii — comprises only about 50 people. So far, at least three scientists from the Warning Centers have been terminated, along with the director of the tsunami program, with more layoffs expected in the coming days.
“Tsunami is about the worst thing that can happen to a coastline,” Carrie Garrison-Laney, a tsunami hazards specialist at the University of Washington’s Sea Grant program who liaises with NOAA partners, told me. She added, “I’m concerned about the impact on public safety.”
Indeed, the layoffs add another layer of strain on a system that is already in transition. The National Tsunami Warning Center, in Palmer, Alaska, is set up to issue warnings to the entire West Coast, while the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, covers the Hawaiian Islands, the Pacific territories of Guam and American Samoa, and the Caribbean. Though the warning centers are intended to serve as backups for each other in the case of a technical glitch or disaster that knocks one of them out, they use two different, incompatible software models from the 1990s. “The current systems in place are not good,” one Washington State-based emergency manager told me.
About a year and a half ago, the Tsunami Warning Center began a $2 million unification project to update the technologies and merge the platforms onto a shared system. That project is not expected to be completed until later this year, and many in the tsunami and emergency management worlds are concerned that it could get mothballed as the Trump administration continues to deplete NOAA staff and funding. “The loss of technical personnel may delay that work,” a representative from Oregon’s Department of Emergency Management confirmed to me in a statement.
That might not be an issue for coordinating an emergency response in the short term, but the longer it’s put off the greater the risk to people living in tsunami zones. “If we’re not on the cutting edge of understanding and being able to warn people about a tsunami as it’s happening, then the greater likelihood we have of something going wrong,” Daniel Eungard, a tsunami hazards geologist at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, told me. “Then you’re looking at more casualties or more damage.”
Even worse, NOAA’s Tsunami programs were already severely understaffed before the layoffs began. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, in particular, has struggled to attract people who are willing to live on a government salary in one of the most expensive parts of the country.
Earthquakes are no-notice events, meaning they can hit with no more than a few seconds of warning. Tsunamis, as a result, don’t follow a nine-to-five schedule; the centers need to be staffed around the clock every day of the year. The Tsunami Warning Center teams were already working overtime before the added strain of Trump’s staffing cuts. Add more layoffs on top of that, and an already-small staff in charge of sending life-saving alerts faces a real risk of burnout. Oregon’s OEM also stressed that in no-notice events, quick and accurate information is imperative. Whether the NOAA layoffs will impact the quality of the warning centers’ service isn’t yet clear. (In a statement provided to Oregon’s OEM and Heatmap, the National Weather Service said that it doesn’t discuss internal personnel and management matters, but that “NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public.”)
Though planning, alerts, emergency responses, and public messaging — including evacuation maps, sirens, and signage — for tsunami disasters are primarily done at the level of states and territories, they’re almost entirely funded through the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program. Even before Trump took office, states had unsuccessfully fought back against cuts to the program — ironically, to pay for the software integration project — which reduced grants for some states and territories by up to 50%.
The tsunami experts I spoke with were uniformly alarmed by the short-sightedness of the funding cuts, a situation they don’t expect to improve under the Trump administration. “We’ve been very fortunate that we’ve had very few events of significant size and damage here, and hopefully that will stay that way,” Eungard, the tsunami hazards geologist, said. “But the likelihood is that as time continues, one such event will happen.”
NOAA, of course, isn’t the only agency in turbulence right now. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which would be tapped to respond to a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami on the West Coast, is in similar disarray. “Nobody should feel particularly assured that FEMA is coming to their assistance in your time of need," Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently told NPR. One emergency management official agreed to speak with me only off the record; when I asked whether they felt like FEMA could be counted on in the case of a near-future disaster, they scoffed. (For the time being, the USGS seems to have survived some of the probationary cuts, though its funding is also on the chopping block.)
The situation at NOAA should be a major concern for everyone who lives in a coastal region, whether it’s American Samoa, Alaska, or the Oregon Coast. An earthquake is a no-notice event for a reason; it doesn’t wait on politics, personnel, or outdated technologies to be updated, and it can strike at any time.
But for as long as the Big One holds off, Garrison-Laney, the specialist at Sea Grant, said her NOAA colleagues are in her thoughts. “It’s a group of people who work really hard and do really great work,” she told me. “There’s nothing wasteful about the work that they’re doing.”
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.