Recovery is a work in progress on the Texas coastline

PORT ARANSAS, TEX. — Islander souvenir shop has a new roof, inner walls replaced and a load of stuffed dolphins, key chains and shot glasses fresh off the truck. But when it reopened on the first Saturday of spring break, seven months after Hurricane Harvey’s landfall nearby, half the store was still cordoned off and empty.

Pam Luebke works to clean the floors at Island Sports,
a tourist shop in Port Aransas. The tourist shop recently
 opened after completing repairs from Hurricane Harvey.

Workers planned to get back on their hands and knees to scrape mud off more of the concrete floor in the coming weeks, but Islander was one of the lucky businesses. More than half are still closed. Windows blown out. Debris piled out front. “No trespassing” signs posted.

Port Aransas, a beach town on a barrier island near the middle of the Texas coast, is almost entirely dependent on tourism. This month accounts for 20 percent of the $400 million it brings in every year from visitors. Half of the city’s income comes in between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Read The Washington Post story by Mary Beth Gahan - “Recovery is a work in progress on the Texas coastline.”

See everything bad about climate change in a swingle Californian town

MONTECITO IS COMING back to life this morning. The 9,000 person town to the east of Santa Barbara has been empty since Tuesday, when mandatory evacuations forced residents out of their homes for the fifth time in four months.

Rain continues to fall on the flood-damaged area in
Montecito, CA where many residents have evacuated.

This week it was a channel of tropical moisture called the Pineapple Express, dumping bands of intense rain and triggering flash floods throughout Southern California. In January it was a once-in-a-200-year storm that dropped half an inch of water in five minutes, unleashing massive mudslides that ripped houses from their foundations and killed 27. In December it was the deadly Thomas Fire that incinerated 280,000 acres—the largest wildfire in California history.

To some, Montecito might just seem like a town hit by a string of superlatively bad luck. But to people crunching the numbers it looks less like an outlier and more like an inevitability of climate change. If you want to see what California looks like in the future, you don’t need a crystal ball. You just need to hop on the 101 and drive until you hit Montecito.

Read Megan Molteni”s Wired story - “See everything bad about climate change in a swingle Californian town.”