DAILY CHALLENGE THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2011
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Hurricane Irene could be among costliest storms Hurricane Irene likely will be among the costliest catastrophes in U.S. history, analysts say, adding that much of the damage may not be covered by insurance. Analysts said much of the damage was caused by flooding, which is excluded from many standard insurance policies, The New York Times reported yesterday. At least 43 deaths have been attributed to Irene, CNN reported. As of Tuesday, about 2.85 million customers were without power, the Department of Energy reported. Nearly 6.7 million customers initially were without power because of the storm. Flood advisories were posted for much of New Jersey, as well as portions of Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and North Carolina. Insurance industry officials peg Irene’s costs from $7 billion to $10 billion, largely because the hurricane cut through such a wide swath of the East Coast. Irene flooded cotton and tobacco crops in North Carolina, temporarily stopped shellfish harvesting in Chesapeake Bay, Va., closed sport-
ing and entertainment venues, zapped power, snarled transit for commuters and shooed tourists off Atlantic Ocean beaches just before summer’s last hurrah. Insurers typically covered about half of the total losses in past storms, but a Kinetic Analysis Corp. study indicates insurers may cover less than 40 percent of the costs associated with Hurricane Irene, the Times said. That is partly because flooding caused so much damage and it is unclear how many damaged homes have flood insurance coverage, and partly because deductibles have risen in coastal areas in recent years, requiring some homeowners to pick up at least $4,000 worth of damages before insurers cover the loss. Governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut sought expedited disaster declarations from the federal government Tuesday, which would open up avenues for more federal aid. The effects of Irene were felt in parts of New England, as flooding and widespread power failures continued to affect tens of thousands of people.
“I think this is going to end up being a bigger event than people think it is,” Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy said. “All of this is massive in scope. What the final dollar amount is, I don’t know.” In hard-hit southern Vermont, the National Guard airlifted food, water and other supplies Tuesday to hundreds of people stranded in 13 communities cut off by floods since Sunday, the Times said. “I think it’s probably a very scary thing to not know when you can get out of town and to have a water system that’s not working and a general store that has run out of bottled water,” Mark Bosma, a spokesman for the Vermont Office of Emergency Management, said. “People are extremely nervous about being isolated.” In northern New Jersey, the Passaic River, already high because of a rainy summer, roiled after Irene blew through, CNN reported. “Before Irene hit, the Passaic River was already running high from frequent precipitation this summer,” Wheeler Antabanez of Montclair, N.J., said. “When the hurricane blew through and
Panel releases 9/11 Commission report card WASHINGTON — The United States “is undoubtedly safer” since terrorists attacked the country 10 years ago, but serious flaws remain in security, a panel said. “Today, our country is undoubtedly safer and more secure than it was a decade ago. We have damaged our enemy, but the ideology of violent Islamist extremism is alive and attracting new adherents, including right here in our own country,” the Bipartisan Policy Center National Security Preparedness Group said in a release. The group released a report card on the unfinished recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission, formed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. “With important 9/11 Commission recommendations outlined in this report still unfulfilled, we fail to achieve the security we could or should have,” the report said.
The report did recognize work of the FBI and the CIA for working cooperatively, with the panel said resulted in the disruption of terrorist plots and the capture or killing of operatives. The bipartisan group, led by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, RInd., said the government officials failed in developing a biometric entry-exit screening system, standardized secure identification and reconciling civil liberties with executive powers. Despite 10 years of work on security detection, “the aviation screening system still falls short in critical ways with respect to detection,” the report said. The report took to task the president and Congress. For example, Congress and the president set up a commission-rec-
ommended Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to monitor actions across government, but the board. “has, in fact, been dormant for more than three years.” Despite lives being at stake, a recommendation to improve radio interoperability for first responders “has stalled because of a political fight over whether to allocate 10 MHz of radio … directly to public safety for a nationwide network,” the report said. “Our terrorist adversaries and the tactics and techniques they employ are evolving rapidly. We will see new attempts, and likely successful attacks,” the report said. “One of our major deficiencies before the 9/11 attacks was a failure by national security agencies to adapt quickly to new and different kinds of enemies. We must not make that mistake again.”
dumped all that water on north Jersey, the river began to rage.” Rescuers collected families and pets from their homes Tuesday, using rafts to transport them out of danger. “It’s been pretty much 24 hours a day,” said Sgt. Alex Popov of the Paterson Police Department.
President Obama to visit Paterson to survey Hurricane Irene damage By MATT FRIEDMAN PATERSON — President Obama is coming to New Jersey on Sunday, the White House announced yesterday. The president will be in Paterson, but further details of the visit have not yet been announced.
Number of ‘majority minority’ U.S. cities grows WASHINGTON — The ethnic map of U.S. cities has drastically changed in the last decade, which could affect how major metropolitan areas provide social, educational and health services, according to a study released by the Brookings Institution. Non-white people and Hispanics accounted for 98 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2010, Brookings found in its analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census. By 2010, minorities made up more than half the population in 22 of the 100 largest metro areas, it said. That compares with 14 areas in 2000 and five in 1990. “Overall, most of these ‘majority minority’ metro areas are located in California and Texas, where Hispanics dominate the minority population,” Brookings said.
The research group found that “diverse Hispanic and Asian communities who speak a variety of languages and represent different origins” are growing in many cities. “When juxtaposed against the needs of long-standing Black communities, especially in more segregated northern metropolitan areas, it is clear that ‘one size fits all’ approaches will no longer apply,” Brookings said. It also found that the Black population remains “the dominant minority in many metropolitan areas” and that during the past decade, the group has shifted into new cities and has had an “accelerating return to the South.” All of the 100 largest cities showed declines in the white population from 2000 to 2010 and areas that gained large numbers of whites during the first decade of the new century were
in the Mountain West and Southeast. Those cities also attracted minorities, and only nine cities gained more new white residents than minority ones from 2000 to 2010. They included Provo, Utah, and Boise, Idaho, in the West, and Nashville, Tennessee, in the South. When it comes to Hispanic and Asian populations, those groups tend to cluster in the same places. Nearly half of all Hispanics in the United States live in 10 cities. “The Asian population, while much smaller than the Hispanic population, grew just as rapidly in the 2000s,” Brookings said, noting that the numbers of Asian immigrants grew, especially those from India. “Yet, as a group, Asians are more concentrated in their major settlement areas than are Hispanics.”
The president’s visit comes after federal officials spent recent days touring states hit hard by Hurricane Irene. Yesterday, Gov. Chris Christie met with Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate. Christie and several New Jersey lawmakers have asked the president to expedite federal disaster aid, as New Jersey towns continue to suffer flooding from rainswelled rivers. The governor yesterday cut a stop in Paterson from his tour with Napolitano. Christie had scheduled to make a stop there along with a small group of press, but instead the caravan drove through the city without stopping.