US confronts floods, heatwaves, smoky skies all at once amid Trump aid cuts

Across the US this week, different disasters – from Canadian wildfire smoke darkening the skies in the Midwest and northeast to extreme heat along the east coast to catastrophic flooding in Texas – are disrupting daily life and putting people’s health at risk.When multiple weather catastrophes play out like this at the same time, or in quick succession, experts refer to them as compound events. As Climate Change makes compound events more likely, experts warned that grappling with them is further complicated by the Trump administration’s cuts to disaster work.The American disaster complex has long been struggling to cope with the increasing number of costly crises, but recent cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have made the situation worse, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, Columbia University’s faculty director of the National Centre for Disaster Preparedness. “We are not as well prepared as we were a few years ago,” he said.