DeSantis and other Florida Republicans face a climate change quandary

Ben Adler

·Senior Editor

Fri, September 30, 2022 

In 2018, when then-Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., was running for governor of Florida, he proudly distanced himself from the science of climate change. “I am not in the pews of the church of the global warming leftists,” he said while campaigning. “I am not a global warming person. I don’t want that label on me.”

But with warmer ocean temperatures increasing the power of hurricanes and higher sea levels exacerbating storm surges, DeSantis, like many other Florida residents, may no longer have the luxury of ignoring climate change. This week, portions of the state’s Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 hurricane that caused 10-foot storm surges, obliterated homes and businesses and left hundreds of residents stranded.

The Associated Press reported that “Ian’s rapid intensification occurred after it traveled over Caribbean waters that are about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) warmer than normal, largely because of climate change.” That warmer water creates “a lot more rocket fuel for the storm,” Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach told the AP.

Despite the firmly established science linking climate change to more powerful hurricanes, as well as sea level rise that helps worsen their impact, many Florida Republican politicians, including the governor and both of its U.S. senators, have resisted government action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing warmer temperatures. Yet even while they avoid any admission that burning fossil fuels is the underlying cause of climate change, they must also try to manage growing risks in the state that scientists have linked to the warming world.

Wind gusts blow across Sarasota Bay as Hurricane Ian churns to the south on Sept. 28 in Sarasota, Fla. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

DeSantis has embraced spending for the restoration of the Everglades wetlands and “resilience” for coastal cities, such as improved drainage and raising sea walls. In May last year, he said his state must “tackle the challenges posed by flooding, intensified storm events [and] sea level rise.” Without labeling the issue a climate change problem, the DeSantis administration estimates that sea level rise will put $26 billion in Florida residential property at risk of regular flooding by 2045.

The governor has steered clear of venturing an explanation as to why sea levels are rising and storms are intensifying, explaining that he fears that admitting that human activities cause climate change would accept the premise that people should change their ways to reduce its severity.

“What I’ve found is, people when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways,” DeSantis said at an event about sea level rise last year. “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.”

DeSantis’s record on climate change has been less hard-line than his pugilistic comments might suggest. He appointed the state’s first resilience officer, but after the appointee left the job a few months later, did not bother to find a replacement. He also created a position of chief science officer. Environmentalists were disappointed when he appointed Michael La Rosa, Florida chairman of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization known for advocating fossil fuel-friendly policies, to the Florida Public Service Commission, which oversees the state’s utilities.

DeSantis also supported buying 20,000 acres in the Everglades to prevent oil development, and the state is spending money on electric vehicle-charging stations. He even vetoed a utility-backed bill that would have hamstrung the rooftop solar market.

But Florida remains a laggard in utility-scale renewable energy, being among the minority of states with no legal requirement that its utilities increase the production of renewable energy. And this summer, DeSantis proposed prohibiting state pension funds from considering climate-change vulnerabilities and carbon emissions in its investments.

DeSantis’s office did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

After Hurricane Irma on Sept. 12, 2017, a canal in a trailer park in Marathon, Fla., in the Florida Keys is filled with debris and campers. (Marc Serota/Getty Images)

The impacts of climate change routinely pose challenges for coastal communities in Florida. Rising sea levels cause flooding on even sunny days in waterfront communities from St. Petersburg to Miami, and studies suggest the problem will get worse in the years to come.

In many recent years, the state has experienced stronger storms due to warmer water temperatures and more evaporation in the hotter air.

The state has also seen no shortage of devastating storms that coincide with the steep temperature increases witnessed over recent decades. Hurricane Irma hit Florida and its northern neighbors in 2017, causing 129 deaths and $54 billion in damages. The next year, Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida Panhandle as a Category 5 storm, killing 59 people in the U.S., where it racked up another $25.1 billion in damages. Numerous studies have shown that hurricanes have become stronger because of climate change, and many scientists say that effect was apparent in Irma and Michael.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a press conference at Anna Maria Oyster Bar Landside in Bradenton, Fla. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

DeSantis, of course, is not alone among Florida elected officials in wanting to steer clear of that discussion. In 2015, when Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., was governor of the state, the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting reported that Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection employees were “ordered not to use the term ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records.” The Scott administration denied that such a prohibition was ever issued.

Scott’s public statements, however, often cast doubt on climate science. “Clearly, our environment changes all the time, and whether that’s cycles we’re going through or whether that’s man-made, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which one it is,” Scott said after Hurricane Irma.

As a senator, Scott has more recently shifted to acknowledging climate change’s existence, but opposing actions to address it. “The weather is always changing,” Scott said in the 11-point “Plan for America,” a political roadmap he released this year in his capacity as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We take climate change seriously but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks outside the White House at a news conference on Sept. 15. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., acknowledges that the Earth is warming, but he has claimed that “many scientists would debate what percentage is attributable to man versus normal fluctuations.”

Leading climate scientists, however, note that there is a remarkable unanimity in their community regarding the long-held findings that greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation are the leading causes of global warming. In fact, 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers find that climate change is primarily caused by humans, according to a 2021 survey of 88,125 climate studies.

Rubio has joined the Senate Climate Solutions Caucus and endorsed bills to deal with some of the effects of climate change, such as measures to restore both the Everglades and coastal reefs. But he opposes actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and supports increased production of fossil fuels, whose combustion has caused the problem in the first place.

“Americans, particularly Floridians, are right to be concerned about the changing climate,” he wrote in a 2019 USA Today op-ed. “But they are also right to be concerned about a regressive overreaction.” He added that “the good news is [climate change] problems are manageable.”

Rubio and Scott both have lifetime voting scorecards from the League of Conservation Voters, an American environmental advocacy group, of 7%.

Florida Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio speak to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House on Jan. 22, 2019. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Florida Republicans were not always so leery of environmental protection. Republican Gov. Jeb Bush established a conservation program to set aside $100 million in state funding for environmental protection projects, which continued under his GOP successor Charlie Crist. Scott cut it to less than $28 million. Crist is now a Democratic member of Congress who is running against DeSantis for governor.

Former President Donald Trump, another Florida resident, has also made known his feelings about climate change, calling it a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government designed to weaken the U.S. economy.

The political polarization exacerbated under Trump has pushed Florida Republicans even further toward an anti-environmental position, as the state’s economy comes under increasing assault by the effects of climate change.

Climate scientists say, though, that climate science denial won’t be a tenable position in the long run, as the threat to Florida is existential. Peter Gleick, a climate scientist who has received the MacArthur Fellowship referred to as the “genius grant,” puts it this way: “A future Hurricane Ian, with the three feet of sea-level rise that is coming, will irreparably wipe out Central and Southern Florida.”

EVACUATION SHOULD BE A PUBLIC SERVICE

Facing a Dire Storm Forecast in Florida, Officials Delayed Evacuation

NOT JUST A PSA

Frances Robles
Sat, October 1, 2022 

Tristan Stout surveys damage to his father's boat after it was thrown across the street as Hurricane Ian swept over San Carlos Island in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022. (Jason Andrew/The New York Times)

FORT MYERS, Fla. — As Hurricane Ian charged toward the western coast of Florida this week, the warnings from forecasters were growing more urgent. Life-threatening storm surge threatened to deluge the region from Tampa all the way to Fort Myers.

But while officials along much of that coastline responded with orders to evacuate Monday, emergency managers in Lee County held off, pondering during the day whether to tell people to flee, but then deciding to see how the forecast evolved overnight.

The delay, an apparent violation of the meticulous evacuation strategy the county had crafted for just such an emergency, may have contributed to catastrophic consequences that are still coming into focus as the death toll continues to climb.

Dozens have died overall in the state, officials said, as Ian, downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, moved through North Carolina and Virginia on Saturday, at one point leaving nearly 400,000 electricity customers in those states without power.

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About 35 of Florida’s storm-related deaths have been identified in Lee County, the highest toll anywhere in the state, as survivors describe the sudden surge of water — predicted as a possibility by the National Hurricane Service in the days before the storm hit — that sent some of them scrambling for safety in attics and on rooftops.

Lee County, which includes the hard-hit seaside community of Fort Myers Beach, as well as the towns of Fort Myers, Sanibel and Cape Coral, did not issue a mandatory evacuation order for the areas likely to be hardest hit until Tuesday morning, a day after several neighboring counties had ordered their most vulnerable residents to flee.

By then, some residents recalled that they had little time to evacuate. Dana Ferguson, 33, a medical assistant in Fort Myers, said she had been at work when the first text message appeared on her phone Tuesday morning. By the time she arrived home, it was too late to find anywhere to go, so she hunkered down with her husband and three children to wait as a wall of water began surging through areas of Fort Myers, including some that were well away from the coastline.

“I felt there wasn’t enough time,” she said.

Ferguson said she and her family fled to the second floor, lugging a generator and dry food, as the water rose through their living room. The 6-year-old was in tears.

Kevin Ruane, a Lee County commissioner and a former mayor of Sanibel, said the county had postponed ordering an extensive evacuation because the earlier hurricane modeling had shown the storm heading farther north.

“I think we responded as quickly as we humanly could have,” he said.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and his state emergency management director also said the earlier forecasts had predicted the brunt of the storm’s fury would strike farther north.

“There is a difference between a storm that’s going to hit north Florida that will have peripheral effects on your region, versus one that’s making a direct impact,” DeSantis said at a news conference Friday in Lee County. “And so what I saw in southwest Florida is, as the data changed, they sprung into action.”

But while the track of Hurricane Ian did shift closer to Lee County in the days before it made landfall, the surge risks the county faced — even with the more northerly track — were becoming apparent as early as Sunday night.

At that point, the National Hurricane Center produced modeling showing a chance of a storm surge covering much of Cape Coral and Fort Myers. Parts of Fort Myers Beach, even in that case, had a 40% chance of a 6-foot-high storm surge, according to the surge forecasts.

Lee County’s emergency planning documents had set out a time-is-of-the-essence strategy, noting that the region’s large population and limited road system make it difficult to evacuate the county swiftly. Over years of work, the county has created a phased approach that expands the scope of evacuations in proportion to the certainty of risk. “Severe events may require decisions with little solid information,” the documents say.

The county’s plan proposes an initial evacuation if there is even a 10% chance that a storm surge will go 6 feet above ground level; based on a sliding scale, the plan also calls for an evacuation if there is a 60% chance of a 3-foot storm surge.

Along with the forecasts Sunday night, updated forecasts Monday warned that many areas of Cape Coral and Fort Myers had between a 10% and a 40% chance of a storm surge above 6 feet, with some areas possibly seeing a surge of more than 9 feet.

Over those Monday hours, neighboring Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties issued evacuation orders, while Sarasota County announced that it expected evacuation orders to be in effect for the following morning. In Lee County, however, officials said they were waiting to make a more up-to-date assessment the following morning.

“Once we have a better grasp on all of that dynamic, we will have a better understanding about what areas we may call for evacuation, and, at the same time, a determination of what shelters will be open,” the Lee County manager, Roger Desjarlais, said Monday afternoon.

But forecasters with the National Hurricane Center were growing more explicit in their warnings for the region. In a 5 p.m. update Monday, they wrote that the highest risk for “life-threatening storm surge” was in the area from Fort Myers to Tampa Bay.

“Residents in these areas should listen to advice given by local officials,” the hurricane center wrote. New modeling showed that some areas along Fort Myers Beach were more likely than not to see a 6-foot surge.

Ruane, the county commissioner, said that one challenge the county faced was that the local schools had been designed to be shelters and that the school board had made the decision to keep them open Monday.

By 7 a.m. Tuesday, Desjarlais announced a partial evacuation order but emphasized that “the areas being evacuated are small” compared with a previous hurricane evacuation.

The county held off on further evacuations, despite a forecast that showed potential surge into areas not covered by the order. Officials expanded their evacuation order later in the morning.

By the middle of the afternoon, Lee County officials were more urgent in their recommendation: “The time to evacuate is now, and the window is closing,” they wrote in a message on Facebook.

Katherine Morong, 32, said she had been prepared earlier in the week to hunker down and ride out the storm based on the guidance from local officials. The sudden evacuation order Tuesday morning left her scrambling, she said, as she set out in her car in the rain.

“The county could have been more proactive and could have given us more time to evacuate,” she said. On the road toward the east side of the state, she said, she was driving through torrents of rain, with tornadoes nearby.

Joe Brosseau, 65, said he did not receive any evacuation notice. As the storm surge began pouring in Wednesday morning, he said, he considered evacuating but realized it was too late.

He climbed up a ladder with his 70-year-old wife and dog to reach a crawl space in his garage. He brought tools in case he needed to break through the roof to escape.

“It was terrifying,” Brosseau said. “It was the absolute scariest thing. Trying to get that dog and my wife up a ladder to the crawl space. And then to spend six hours there.”

Some residents said they had seen the forecasts but decided to remain at home anyway — veterans of many past storms with dire predictions that had not come to pass.

“People were made aware, they were told about the dangers and some people just made the decision that they did not want to leave,” DeSantis said Friday.

Joe Santini, a retired physician assistant, said he would not have fled his home even if there had been an evacuation order issued well before the storm. He said that he had lived in the Fort Myers area most of his life, and that he would not know where else to go.

“I’ve stuck around for every other one,” he said.

The water rushed into his home around dusk Wednesday night, and Friday, there was still a high-water mark about a foot above the floor — leaving Santini a little stunned. “I don’t think it’s ever surged as high as it did,” he said.

Lee County is now an epicenter of devastation, with mass destruction at Fort Myers Beach, the partial collapse of the Sanibel Causeway and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. With water mains broken, the county utilities agency has advised residents to boil their water.

President Joe Biden said Friday that the destruction from the storm was likely to be among the worst in U.S. history.

“It’s going to take months, years to rebuild,” he said.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

SWAMPLAND
Ian is long gone but water keeps rising in central Florida


Paddling Home Canoes and kayaks sit tied up to a sign on a flooded street in Seminole County, Fla., on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2022. Residents in central Florida donned fishing waders, boots and bug spray and canoed or kayaked to their homes on streets where floodwaters continued rising Sunday despite it being four days since Hurricane Ian tore through the state. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider)More

MIKE SCHNEIDER
Sun, October 2, 2022 at 12:48 PM·2 min read

GENEVA, Fla. (AP) — Residents in central Florida donned fishing waders, boots and bug spray and canoed or kayaked to their homes on streets where floodwaters continued rising Sunday despite it being four days since Hurricane Ian tore through the state.

The waters flooded homes and streets that had been passable just a day or two earlier.

Ben Bertat found 4 inches (10 centimeters) of water in his house by Lake Harney off North Jungle Street in a rural part of Seminole County, north of Orlando, after kayaking to it Sunday morning. Only a day earlier, there had been no water.

“I think it’s going to get worse because all of this water has to get to the lake” said Bertat, pointing to the water flooding the road. “With ground saturation, all this swamp is full and it just can’t take any more water. It doesn’t look like it’s getting any lower.”

Gabriel Madlang kayaked through 3 feet (1 meter) of water on his street, delivering sandbags to stave off water that was 2 inches (5 centimeters) from entering his home.

“My home is close to underwater,” Madlang said Sunday morning before paddling to his house. “Right now, I’m just going to sandbag as much as I can and hope and pray.”

Two hours later, his house still was not flooded, and he was retrieving more sandbags to cover the back side of the house.

"We will see what happens," he said.

Madlang's street was in a flood zone and most of the residents with mortgages on the street of about 30 houses had flood insurance, but several of the residents who had lived there for decades didn't, Madling said.

Seminole County officials warned residents this weekend that flooding could continue for several days, particularly in areas near the St. Johns River and its tributaries, and said 1,200 residents have been affected by the flooding or other damage from Ian.

“Even as the rain has stopped, we still have the opportunity for more flooding," Alan Harris, director of Seminole’s office for emergency management, said at a news briefing.

Tara Casel has never seen flooding on her street near Lake Harney like she did Sunday morning, despite living through multiple hurricanes. She and her husband used a canoe to get to their house and feared it would have water.

“We were here last night and it was pretty bad,” she said. “But this morning looks worse.”

Rescue Crews in Florida Find Fully Submerged House With Human Remains Inside


Dan Ladden-Hall, Justin Rohrlich, Michael Daly
Fri, September 30, 2022

Joe Raedle/Getty

Rescue crews going house to house in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Ian have encountered harrowing scenes, including scores of stranded people and at least one house that was completely submerged with human remains inside.

Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s emergency management director, said during a Friday morning press briefing that authorities are reviewing 21 fatalities to see if they’re related to the catastrophic hurricane. The death toll is expected to rise as many parts of Lee County—including the barrier islands of Sanibel and Captiva—remain inaccessible by road, slowing the rescue process.

Guthrie said that crews spotted an undisclosed number of drowning victims at a house in an undisclosed part of Lee County.


“Let me paint the picture for you. The water was up over the rooftop but we had a Coast Guard rescue swimmer swim down into it and he could identify what appeared to be human remains,” he said. “We do not know exactly how many... until the water recedes and we have the special equipment to get in there.”

On Friday afternoon, the confirmed death toll stood at 25, according to CNN.

Hurricane Ian ravaged parts of Fort Myers Beach.
Joe Raedle/Getty

Gov. Ron DeSantis said officials “fully expect to have mortality from this hurricane.” He said late Thursday that at least 700 rescues had been completed, though it remained unclear how many more people are still trapped. After surveying some coastal towns from the air on Thursday, DeSantis called the damage “indescribable.”

One of those deaths occurred in the town of New Smyrna Beach in Volusia County, where 67-year-old Jerry Argo and his wife found themselves trapped inside their home Thursday night as the unrelenting storm surged. While the couple waited to be rescued, Argo slipped inside the house, hitting his head on the floor, his step-grandson Samuel Mackey told The Daily Beast on Friday.

Unable to get up again, Argo died as the floodwaters rose over him, according to authorities. His wife, Alice, and the pair’s two dogs, survived and are now staying in a temporary shelter.

In Fort Myers, a 4-month-old baby went into cardiac arrest after rolling over into a position that restricted his airway. However, the child’s mom, certified lifeguard Mariah Lane, began performing CPR and managed to revive her son, who is named Ace, before paramedics arrived moments later.

“His mother... was out [of the room] cooking,” the baby’s grandfather, Richard Miller, told The Daily Beast. “And every five minutes or so, she goes and checks on him. And this time, he had rolled over. And she picked him up, and his face was all blue.”

Meanwhile, the family’s neighbors have banded together to help one another recover and rebuild.

“If one doesn’t have, the other one gives,” Miller said. “We’ve helped several neighbors help put up shutters, and helped take them down. If somebody doesn’t have a generator, there’s a cord going across the street from another house.”

Ian left widespread flooding, catastrophic infrastructure damage, and ongoing power outages after it made landfall in Florida on Wednesday afternoon as one of the most powerful storms in American history.

After making landfall as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds on Thursday, Ian steadily lost power before regaining strength over the Atlantic.

The storm made a second landfall near Georgetown, South Carolina, just before 2:30 p.m. Friday afternoon as a Category 1 storm with 85 mph winds.

He Rescued His Neighbor—Then Had a Yacht Crash Onto His Doorstep

On Friday morning, the National Weather Service said a danger from life-threatening storm surge will be in effect along the coasts of northeast Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Hurricane-force winds are also expected to batter the coasts of South Carolina and southeastern North Carolina.

Although officials have issued warnings to residents in all of the states in Ian’s projected paths, fears are particularly strong for those in low-lying Charleston, South Carolina, where nine out of 10 residential properties are thought to be vulnerable to storm surge flooding.

Biblical downpours that accompanied Ian are already threatening to push river flooding to record levels in Central Florida in the coming days, the National Hurricane Center said. As many as half the roads in some areas of the state were made impassable by floods.

Parts of Sanibel Causeway were washed away along with sections of the bridge, cutting off Sanibel Island.
Joe Raedle/Getty

Collapses of several sections of the only bridge between the mainland and Sanibel Island—a vacation hotspot off the coast of Fort Myers—left the island inaccessible by road. At least two fatalities on the island were confirmed late Thursday.

Over two million customers were still without power on Friday morning, according to tracking site PowerOutage.us.

After a state of emergency was declared in South Carolina, the state’s emergency management division issued urgent advice on Friday before Ian’s arrival. Residents in affected areas were instructed to avoid walking in moving water or driving through flooded areas. “If there’s any possibility of a flash flood, move to higher ground,” the organization tweeted. “Do not wait to be told to move.”

—with additional reporting by Michael Daly

THIRD WORLD U$A
Poor Florida neighborhood battered by flood tries to recover




 Harlem Heights Residents of apartments in Harlem Heights, Fla., clean out clothes and other possessions from their apartments swamped by flood waters from Hurricane Ian, Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022.

REBECCA SANTANA
Sun, October 2, 2022 

HARLEM HEIGHTS, Fla. (AP) — The Gladiolus Food Pantry usually hands out supplies on Wednesdays to about 240 families, so when Hurricane Ian swept through that day and canceled their distribution, it was left full of flats of canned black beans, bags of rice, meats, bread and produce — food that helps families struggling with rising rents and inflation make ends meet.

By the weekend, much of that food was in the garbage, the floors were still wet and muddy from the floodwaters that had filled the room, and the pantry's founder and director, Miriam Ortiz, was worried about what would become of her neighborhood as she worked to get the pantry she started nine years ago up and running again.

“Right now I don’t know what we’re going to do because we’re going to need food, we’re going to need water, we're going to need everything," she said. “We got flooded and the water came through all the building.”

Ortiz said the food pantry's green building is the heart of the Harlem Heights neighborhood, a small, mostly Hispanic community of nearly 2,000 people near Fort Myers that was hammered by the Category 4 hurricane. A sign scrawled on a piece of roofing that had torn loose advertised free food, diapers, wipes, body wash and toothpaste.

The wind, rain and storm surge that accompany hurricanes affect everyone in their path. But those combined effects are often more of a disaster for poor people living day to day, like many in Harlem Heights, where the median income is a little under $26,000, according to U.S. Census data.

Many are hourly workers with little savings for things such as evacuation hotel stays or money to tide them over until their places of employment reopen. In a tourism heavy economy like South Florida's, the wait for hotels to reopen and visitors — along with the jobs they bring — to return can be long and agonizing.

Ortiz said many of the clients she was seeing every week before the hurricane were already hurting from the skyrocketing cost of food and housing. Rising rents had forced many young adults that had been living on their own to move back in with parents and grandparents, she said.

Over the weekend, cars and trucks whizzed down the neighborhood's main road, which was dry and had been swept free of tree limbs and palm fronds. That wasn't the case on many side streets, many of which were still submerged in water as residents hauled waterlogged furniture to the curb.

At Maria Galindo's apartment, the water had risen to about hip height and the wind had ripped off part of her roof while she and her 9-year-old daughter, Gloria, were terrified inside. Her daughter said that during the storm, she kept thinking she wanted to return to her native Guatemala.

“We did not know where to go, where to grab onto, whether here or there because of the rain, the wind, the water. ... It was very difficult," said Maria Galindo, speaking in Spanish.

They and their neighbors were trying to salvage what they could and to push the water from their waterlogged apartments. Wet clothes hung from a clothes line outside, while inside a thin seam of light coming between the wall and ceiling showed where the roof had been lifted.

Galindo works as a housekeeper at a local hotel, but it's closed until further notice. She's worried for her family and her daughter and wondering how she'll make ends meet.

“We are without a roof overhead. We need food. We need money to buy things," she said. "We need help.”

Back at the food pantry, people had been delivering donations of food, cleaning supplies and clothing throughout the day Saturday, and a volunteer had set up a tent and was cooking food for people.

One of those who dropped by to deliver supplies was a frustrated Lisa Bertaux, who came with her friend. She ticked off the items that people needed: toothbrushes, deodorant, cleaning supplies, paper towels, children's clothes and wipes. And the list went on.

“There is so much need here. ... There’s very little food coming in so far. There’s a great need," she said. “It’s time for us to rebuild our community.”

One of those coming by to pick up supplies was Keyondra Smith, who lives down the street in an apartment complex with her three kids. She had parked her car in a different area so that when the floodwaters came sweeping through, she didn't lose it. Her neighbors weren't so lucky, as cars floated through the parking lot during the worst of the flooding and the people who lived on the first floor — she's on the second — were completely flooded out.

Smith had been driving by the food pantry when she noticed it had supplies so she stopped to pick up some toilet paper, water and hot plates of food. Before that, her family had been eating raviolis out of a can, Vienna sausages and snacks from a local convenience store.

“We don’t have any water. My food is spoiling in the refrigerator," she said. Though she can drive to the few stores that are open, she said they are only taking cash and many of the ATMs aren't working. “I have three kids so I have to get some supplies to feed them.”

Tesla's robot strategy is inextricably tied to its Autopilot strategy, for better or for worse



Darrell Etherington
Fri, September 30, 2022 

Tesla unveiled its first prototype of its Optimus humanoid robot on Friday — an actual robot this time, by the strictest definition, instead of a flesh- and-blood human clad in a weird suit. The robot performed some basic functions, including walking a little bit and then raising its hands — all for the first time without supports or a crane, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The company may be taking its first early steps into humanoid robotics, but it has a lot riding on the business. Musk has said that the Optimus bot will eventually be more valuable "than the car business, worth more than FSD (Tesla's add-on "Full Self-Driving" feature, which is not self-driving.)

What was apparent at the event Friday night is that Tesla is making the economically wise but strategically questionable decision to yoke together the destinies of both Optimus and its Autopilot (and by extension, FSD) ambitions.

Tesla suggested that the reason it's been able to move so quickly in the robotics world is that it has already laid a lot of the groundwork in its work attempting to develop automated driving for vehicles.

"Think about it. We're just moving from wheels to our legs," explained one of the company's engineers. "So some of the components are pretty similar [ … ] It's exactly the same occupancy network. Now we'll talk a little bit more details later with Autopilot team [ … ] The only thing that changed really is the training data."

It was a recurring theme throughout the presentation with various presenters from Tesla (the company trotted out many as is maybe to be expected for an event billed primarily as a recruiting exercise) bringing up how closely tied the two realms of research and development actually are.

In truth, what Tesla showed with its robot on stage at the event was a very brief demo that barely matched and definitely didn't exceed a large number of humanoid robot demonstrations from other companies over the years, including most famously Boston Dynamics. And the linkage between FSD and Optimus is a tenuous one, at best.

The domain expertise, while reduced to a simple translation by Tesla's presentation, is actually quite a complex one. Bipedal robots navigating pedestrian routes is a very different beast from autonomous vehicle routes, and oversimplifying the connection does a disservice to the immense existing body of research and development work on the subject.

Tesla's presenters consistently transitioned relatively seamlessly between Optimus and its vehicles' autonomous navigation capabilities. One of the key presenters for Optimus was Milan Kovac, the company's director of Autopilot Software Engineering, who handed off to fellow Autopilot director Ashok Elluswamy to dive further into Tesla vehicular Autopilot concerns.

It's very clear that Tesla believes this is a linked challenge that will result in efficiencies the market will appreciate as it pursues both problems. The reality is that there remains a lot of convincing to do to actually articulate that the linkages are more than surface deep.

Not to mention, Autopilot (and more specifically, FSD) faces its own challenges in terms of public and regulatory skepticism and scrutiny. A robot you live with daily in close proximity doesn't need that kind of potential risk.

Tesla may have turned its man-in-a-suit into a real robot with actual actuators and processors, but it still has a ways to go to make good on the promise that it's a viable product with a sub-$20,000 price tag any of us will ever be able to purchase.

Latvian PM's New Unity party 

ahead in vote, exit poll shows

Fri, September 30, 2022 

By Andrius Sytas

RIGA (Reuters) -The centre-right New Unity party of Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins was set to win Saturday's national election, an exit poll showed, after a campaign dominated by security concerns following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

If confirmed, the result should mean Latvia remains a leading voice alongside its Baltic neighbours Lithuania and Estonia in pushing the European Union for a decisive stance against Russia.

But it could widen a rift between the country's Latvian majority and its Russian-speaking minority over their place in society, amid widespread national anger over Moscow's actions in Ukraine.

The first Latvian head of government to serve through a full four-year term, Karins, a 57-year-old dual U.S. and Latvian citizen, has benefited from his Moscow policy, which included restricting the entry of Russian citizens travelling from Russia and Belarus.

"We have known Russia’s politics for years, we had been trying to warn our neighbours for years before the war started," Karins told reporters after exit polls were published.

"We will continue to invest in our own defence ... to ensure that Latvia and the Baltic region remains as secure in the future as it is today."

An LETA/LSM exit poll showed New Unity at 22.5%, twice the number of votes as nearest competitor, the United List of smaller parties.

The Greens and Farmers Union, a coalition of conservative groups closely knit around Aivars Lembergs, the long-term mayor of Ventspils who was put on a U.S. sanctions list for alleged corruption in 2019, was in third place with 10.9%.

Exit polls showed falling support for parties popular with Latvia's Russian-speaking minority, which makes up about a quarter of the country's population of 1.9 million.

The left-leaning Harmony party saw its support decline to single digits, with observers saying this was driven in part by ethnic Latvian voters turning away. Some Russian speakers were also disappointed by the party leadership criticizing the Kremlin over Ukraine.

(Reporting by Andrius Sytas and Janis Laizans; Editing by Justyna Pawlak and David Holmes)

FAA says Boeing has not

completed work needed for 

737 MAX 7 approval

FILE PHOTO: The first Boeing 737 MAX 7 is unveiled in Renton43

By David Shepardson

(Reuters) -The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told Boeing it has not completed key work needed in order to certify the 737 MAX 7 by December, according to a letter from the FAA seen by Reuters.

Lirio Liu, the FAA's executive director of aviation safety, told Boeing in the Sept. 19 letter that the agency had concerns about the planemaker's submissions and sought discussion "about realistic timeframes for receiving the remaining documents."

The FAA told Boeing to turn in all remaining System Safety Assessments (SSAs) by mid-September "if the company intends to meet its project plan of completing certification work (and receiving FAA approval for this airplane) by December."

Liu said as of Sept. 15, "just under 10% of the SSAs have been accepted by the FAA and another 70% of these documents are in various stages of review and revision."

Boeing faces a December deadline to win approval from the FAA of the 737 MAX 7 and 10 variants, or it must meet new modern cockpit-alerting requirements that could significantly delay approvals.

Congress could opt to waive the requirements that were adopted as part of a certification reform bill passed after two fatal 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people and led to the best-selling plane's 20-month grounding.

The FAA added in the that "most concerning, however, is that Boeing has yet to provide an initial submittal for six of the

outstanding SSAs."

It said it expects "many of these documents will take significant time to review due to their complexity and bearing on the overall safety of the new aircraft."

"Work must be completed deliberately and in such a way that an arbitrary calendar date does not become the driving factor," Liu wrote.

Boeing said it is "discussing with policymakers the time needed to complete these certifications, following established processes."

"We are not seeking to rush this process, and believe safety is best served by allowing the 737-7 and 737-10 certification effort the time needed to complete this important work without introducing different systems," Boeing said.

"Consistent operational experience across an airplane family is an industry best practice," Boeing said.

On Sept. 15, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun predicted the company would win approval for the smaller 737 MAX 7 this year.

Calhoun said if needed, Boeing would seek "some kind of extension" and make a case based on the "safety argument to win."

The Seattle Times reported the FAA letter earlier.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Kim Coghill, Robert Birsel)

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