Her daughter was working that March night at Chuck’s Dairy Bar, a staple of the small, south Delta town. Along with some customers, Jackson’s daughter, Natasha, nestled into one of the coolers in the restaurant. 

Hours later, once the storm blew by, Jackson headed to find her daughter, navigating through debris. She found Natasha shaking, in tears. While the tornado tore the rest of Chuck’s into shreds, the cooler and those inside it were safe. 

“I thank God that I called her and told her to get down,” Jackson told Mississippi Today. 

The tornado killed 14 people in Sharkey County, and left Rolling Fork with little resemblance of its prior self. While the Jacksons didn’t lose anyone or anything that night, the reason they were in Rolling Fork in the first place is because, three months prior, they lost everything. 

The first tornado the Jacksons survived wiped away their homes last December, tearing up a trailer park where they lived in Anguilla. Victoria, her sister, aunt, cousin and everyone in their families lost their homes, among five total that were destroyed. About 20 members of the family had to relocate a few miles down Highway 61 to a motel in Rolling Fork. Many of them, including Victoria, are still there. 

As is often the case for rural disaster survivors, the damages they endured were too small to trigger crucial federal aid. Victoria didn’t have home insurance and lost her job after the storm. Now, nearly six months later, her family hasn’t seen a cent of government disaster aid, and are instead counting on donations to put them in a real home again.  

When people think about disaster recovery, they often think of “FEMA” – the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the national hub of government disaster aid. In reality, though, a vast majority of the country’s disasters don’t receive any FEMA money. They’re what experts call “undeclared” events.

“If you were to aggregate all the losses tied to undeclared disasters, they actually are more costly than typically declared disasters,” said Gavin Smith, a professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at North Carolina State University who has helped lead recovery efforts in multiple states.

In Mississippi, nearly a thousand homes have been damaged in undeclared disasters in just the last two years, state records show. 

FEMA aid, which comes when the president signs a disaster declaration, is reserved for the larger disasters that leave states needing additional resources. But when a disaster doesn’t meet that threshold, most states, including Mississippi, can’t replicate the kinds of services FEMA can offer. 

The programs states receive after a federal declaration include: paying for public infrastructure repairs, putting people in temporary housing, sending direct payments to survivors, expanding safety net programs like food stamps and uninsurance benefits, among others.

Since more often than not, FEMA money is unavailable, many disaster survivors rely on their home insurance to pay for repairs. 

But low-income, uninsured families like the Jacksons have to instead depend on the slow, complex network of volunteers and charities. Nonprofits and national religious groups help struggling communities recover all over the country, collecting donations to help rebuild homes, and providing otherwise costly labor for free. But that process takes time.  

“If they’re back and recovered within six months, that is like warp speed for these organizations,” said Michelle Annette Meyer, the director of the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. “At best, they’re looking at a year-long process to get the donations in, confirm the paperwork, get the volunteers and get the materials donated.” 

For Sharkey County, where Anguilla and Rolling Fork are, the nonprofit Delta Force handles disaster recovery, finding new homes for survivors after undeclared events. Delta Force’s chairman, Martha Bray, wouldn’t comment on specific cases for privacy reasons, only saying that they’re waiting for enough donations to come in to buy new mobile homes for the Jacksons. 

“It’s going to be a long process, that’s all we hear,” Victoria Jackson said. 

Last December, just before Christmas and after the tornado destroyed her home, Jackson lost her retail job at a local shop. She said her boss didn’t let her come back despite giving her time off after the storm, and then listed her as having quit, which blocked her from unemployment benefits. 

Now, she’s sharing a two-bed room with her husband and six kids at the Rolling Fork Motel. 

Jackson said she received $2,500 in initial donations from local churches and charities. But expenses like food, gas, laundry, and taking care of her children quickly dried that money up. Since her daughter Natasha lost her job at Chuck’s Dairy Bar, the family’s relying on her husband’s truck-driving job to keep them afloat.

“I wrote all of them a letter,” Pearson said. “However, to no avail. We did not get anything.”

County officials, Pearson said, told her the damages didn’t meet the threshold for federal assistance. 

“I keep hearing we didn’t meet the threshold,” she said. “Well I asked somebody, ‘Will you tell me what the threshold is?’ No one could tell me what the threshold is.”  

For Individual Assistance, the FEMA program that includes housing and other direct support for survivors, there is no set threshold, officials told Mississippi Today.

“It is kind of subjective,” FEMA spokesperson Mike Wade said. 

FEMA weighs several factors, such as the degree of damages and the amount of uninsured losses, when deciding if a declaration is justified. The agency categorizes damages into several categories, ranging from “affected” to “destroyed.”  

But to local and state officials, FEMA’s criteria is unclear. 

In the summer of 2021, for instance, heavy rain flooded 284 homes in the Delta. While local officials pleaded for federal support, the state informed them that not enough of the homes received “major damage,” which FEMA defines as needing “extensive repairs.”

Last March, 33 tornadoes touched down in Mississippi, destroying 42 homes across a dozen counties. The state applied for a federal declaration, but was denied.  

While there’s no set threshold, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency estimated that at least 50 homes need major damage to earn a federal declaration.   

But the damages from undeclared disasters in just the last couple years dwarf that number. 

Since 2021, 982 homes in the state received some damage from an undeclared natural disaster, according to records from MEMA; 81 of those homes were completely destroyed, and another 203 received major damage.

“When you look at only one of (the undeclared disasters), the damage may be relatively small,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute whose research focuses on rural recovery efforts. “But when you add all those up across the state, it actually cumulatively could be much more important than some of those big events that do get that support.” 

Anguilla has just 250 households, according to the Census. Sharkey County Supervisor Jesse Mason, who represents Anguilla, wondered how such a small place could reach the amount of damages that FEMA looks for. 

“I don’t know what the magic number is,” Mason said. “I guess maybe it had to tear the whole town up.” 

“The more rural you are and the more scattered your population and assets are, sometimes those kind of events are the ones that slip under the radar compared to the events where there’s media, for example, to immediately cover it, or there’s political pressure to immediately make declarations,” Rumbach said.

Mississippi has a program that sends money to counties after undeclared disasters. The Disaster Assistance Repair Program, or DARP, works with local nonprofits, and sends up to $250,000 for materials to rebuild homes. Meyer, the Texas A&M professor, said that’s more than what most states do after undeclared events. 

Since 2018, DARP has helped rebuild 850 homes in 22 counties. But Sharkey County hasn’t applied for DARP funds to help the Anguilla survivors, and officials couldn't be reached to explain why.  

Every county in the state has emergency management officials. But in Sharkey County, there are only two such employees, and both work part-time. Counties with lower tax bases and less capacity to do damage assessments struggle to make the case for disaster declarations, Rumbach said. 

One of those two employees, Natalie Perkins, also runs the local weekly newspaper. After the Rolling Fork disaster, which President Joe Biden approved for federal aid, Perkins saw firsthand the difference a declaration makes. 

“When you have a declared disaster, everyone comes out of the woodwork to help,” she said. “But when you have an undeclared (event), you don’t get the attention, you don’t get the donations, you don’t get the federal and state funding that you do in a declared disaster. That’s just the bottom line.”

Pearson sat down with Mississippi Today to talk about the December tornado, the one that displaced the Jacksons. She emphasized that she didn’t want to take away attention from what happened in Rolling Fork. But she couldn’t hold back frustration over the lack of help Victoria Jackson and her family received. 

“These people just three months ago lost their homes,” the mayor said. “I can’t equate Rolling Fork with Anguilla. But come on now, people are people, humans are humans. The (Jacksons) left Anguilla and came to Rolling Fork. Now a tornado hit Rolling Fork. These people don’t have anything, and you’re telling them they can’t qualify (for FEMA aid)?”

At the motel, the Jacksons accused the owner of poor treatment, saying he recently raised their weekly rent to $400, and charges extra to wash their sheets. When reached for comment, the motel staff said the owner was out of the country and couldn’t comment. Meanwhile, the Jacksons don’t know how much longer they’ll be able to afford the room. 

That Wednesday, while federal officials were in Anguilla, Victoria tried to apply for FEMA aid. They called back later, she said, telling her she’d been denied. While the agency won’t comment on specific cases, FEMA confirmed that aid wasn’t available for people in her situation. 

“We just need the help that they’re giving other people,” Jackson said, wondering why she and her family had been left out. “Anguilla is Sharkey County, Rolling Fork is Sharkey County, so all this should be combined together, right? Help for everybody, right?”

The post When disasters are deemed too small, rural Mississippi struggles to recover appeared first on Mississippi Today.

With President Joe Biden’s signature fresh on legislation that would expedite the completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, pipeline officials aim to have it up and running by year’s end, while the project’s opponents are considering their options.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which Biden signed Saturday, suspends the U.S. debt ceiling for nearly two years. It also includes a provision specific to the Mountain Valley Pipeline: It authorizes all remaining permits and other approvals necessary for the natural gas pipeline’s construction and operation, and it shields the project from further legal challenges by removing the jurisdiction of courts to review such approvals.

Initially planned for completion in 2018, construction on the 303-mile pipeline through Virginia and West Virginia has effectively been halted since 2021 by federal and state permitting delays and by legal battles brought by landowners, environmentalists and others who have challenged the pipeline’s acquisition of private property through eminent domain and its impact on forests, streams, wetlands and endangered species, among other legal grounds.

“The MVP project has gone through more environmental review and scrutiny than any natural gas pipeline project in U.S. history, having been issued the same state and federal authorizations two and three times, only to have those authorizations be routinely challenged and vacated in court,” Thomas Karam, chairman and CEO of Equitrans Midstream, the pipeline’s operator, said in a news release after Biden signed the bill.

The $6.6 billion, 42-inch pipeline is set to start in northwestern West Virginia and proceed into Virginia, where it will pass through Giles, Craig, Montgomery, Roanoke and Franklin counties before connecting to a compressor station in Pittsylvania County. Pipeline officials say the project is more than 90% complete, though opponents dispute that claim.

Pipeline supporters say the project is an important source of secure, domestic, lower-carbon energy that meets a demand for natural gas. U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, who was the primary driver of the pipeline provision’s inclusion in the debt-limit deal, called it a “critical energy security project” and said it “opens up markets for our natural resources, giving us untold new revenue sources and developing industries that our grandchildren and future generations will benefit from.”

Opponents say the project is unnecessary and harmful to the environment, both in terms of future greenhouse-gas emissions and the impact of its construction — and some say they aren’t ready to give up the fight.

“Even if some of these permits are issued and initially shielded from judicial review, that’s not necessarily the end of the line,” said Jason Rylander, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, which advocates for species protection and other environmental causes. “The pipeline still has to cross some of the most difficult terrain along the route, through the Jefferson National Forest and other areas, and there will be opportunities to hold them accountable for the damage they are continuing to do.”

Beyond watching the pipeline’s progress to see what comes next, it’s unclear what specific further options might be available to pipeline opponents.

After Thursday’s Senate vote, the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights — or POWHR — coalition released a statement from Denali Nalamalapu, its communications director, saying, “Our global movement to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline is stronger than ever.

“While we are outraged and devastated in this unprecedented moment, we will never stop fighting this unfinished, unnecessary, and unwanted project. Our hearts are broken but our bonds are strong,” the statement said.

Asked about specific next steps, Nalamalapu replied in an email: “We don’t have clear answers at the moment but we likely will in the coming days/weeks.

“Right now we are focusing on mobilizing in front of the White House on June 8th to respond to this unprecedented decision and hold Biden accountable to his broken climate promises,” Nalamalapu wrote, referring to a protest, sponsored by People vs. Fossil Fuels, scheduled in front of the White House from 2 to 4 p.m. Thursday.

Tom Cormons, executive director of the grassroots environmental protection group Appalachian Voices, said in a statement that “the fight is not over.”

“Defeating this unnecessary and ill-conceived project that has already degraded water quality across two states and would contribute significantly to the climate crisis if it is completed and brought into service is a top priority,” Cormons said.

Preserve Bent Mountain, which is a local chapter of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League and part of the POWHR coalition, released a statement saying, “It is not yet clear whether the stench of the MVP/debt limit deal will surpass legal scrutiny.”

“While repulsed at this Dirty Deal, we will go forward — as we have since the inception of this destructive boondoggle, with all regulatory and legal challenges available. We will not be governed by the gas industry,” the group said in a statement sent by member Roberta Bondurant, a Roanoke County resident.

One possible path forward for opponents could be contesting the pipeline provision itself.

“Clearly the bill, or what will soon be the law, forecloses most court actions on the pipeline. But the one thing that is left is a possible challenge to the law itself, presumably on constitutional grounds,” said David Sligh, conservation director of Wild Virginia, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. 

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, suggested the same during a conference call with reporters last week ahead of the Senate’s vote on the bill. Senators also voted 30-69 to defeat an amendment brought by Kaine that would have removed the Mountain Valley Pipeline provision from the debt-limit legislation. 

“I would think that frankly the only option under this bill is not to challenge any aspect of the pipeline but to challenge, did Congress have the legal ability to do what it just did?” Kaine said. “That would be the only remaining challenge.

“Now of course at the end of the day, once the pipeline’s underway, there may be provisions where people can say, ‘Wait a minute, you didn’t do the restoration on my land right,’” Kaine said. “We haven’t eliminated that down the road, if the pipeline violates state laws, because in both West Virginia and Virginia the construction of the pipeline has violated water quality standards and state agencies have been able to challenge them. They still have to comply with state laws.”

Kaine noted that the authors of the Mountain Valley Pipeline provision appear to have anticipated a potential legal challenge against the provision itself: The bill specifies that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit “shall have original and exclusive jurisdiction over any claim alleging the invalidity of this section or that an action is beyond the scope of authority conferred by this section.”

Sligh, of Wild Virginia, said environmental advocates will continue monitoring Mountain Valley Pipeline’s work on the ground, ensuring that any citizen complaints are funneled to the appropriate governmental agencies and following up to verify that regulatory rules are enforced.

“I have looked at thousands — thousands — of the inspection reports that the state of Virginia has done … and they have done a pretty good job of being out there and documenting some of the problems, a lot of the problems. But Virginia has not done what it needs to do to stop them once it finds them,” he said.

Beyond that monitoring work, Sligh said, “I think everybody is quickly trying to assess what else is possible.”

The post With path cleared for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, opponents weigh next steps appeared first on Cardinal News.

Biologists once found a crayfish with an entire garter snake and several fish inside a female bullfrog near Sheridan. That may sound like an impressive amount of food for a two-pound frog, but it’s actually pretty standard for the voracious amphibians. Wendy Estes-Zumpf, the state’s herpetological coordinator, once saw a picture of a bullfrog that choked to death trying to eat a duck. 

Bullfrogs consume nearly every living thing they find.  Their menu is limited only by the size of their mouths — as the aforementioned duck would suggest, sometimes not even that —  and they are wreaking havoc on the West’s native species. 

To make matters worse, once introduced to an area, bullfrogs can be nearly impossible to eradicate. Their potential to damage ecosystems is so great, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department passed a new regulation that took effect Jan. 1 prohibiting anyone from importing or possessing live bullfrogs. 

“A lot of the landowners in the Sheridan area said they had lots and lots of leopard frogs and now they have only bullfrogs,” said Estes-Zumpf. “There are frog species that are now endangered in other states and the primary cause are bullfrogs because the natives just cannot compete.”

Eaters and carriers

Like carp, feral pigs and crayfish, bullfrogs aren’t all bad. They play important roles in the areas where they’re from. In the eastern part of the U.S., bullfrogs are critical as predators and prey and distribute nutrients from wetlands into more terrestrial areas. 

“They are just an amazing species,” said JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. Also often called pond frogs, bullfrogs are the largest true frog species in the U.S.

They have abundant predators like smallmouth bass and snapping turtles in their native habitats, and the waterways are much more complex. Ponds back East tend to vary in depth and vegetation and streams snake between other ponds offering other frog species, tadpoles and fish plenty of places to hide. 

Bullfrogs are also hardy, big and incredibly efficient travelers, able to cover tens or even up to 100 miles over dry land to reach new water. 

“They get big and have chunky chicken thigh legs,” Estes-Zumpf said. “They are probably the number one frog-leg frog,” and they taste like chicken.

As a result, they were introduced across the world, sometimes as a food source, and other times as stowaways in fish stocking efforts. More recently, well-meaning classroom teachers have dumped easy-to-raise bullfrogs into ponds and creeks after they’ve run their course as classroom pets. 

How, exactly, they entered the Sheridan region, no one knows for sure. 

Game and Fish first received reports of bullfrog sightings in 2018. The next year, biologists surveyed the area and found bullfrogs everywhere. 

Estes-Zumpf knows a landowner outside Sheridan introduced bullfrogs and fireflies to his property to remind him of home back East, but she’s guessing as widespread as they’ve become in the region, they were likely introduced elsewhere as well. 

Bullfrogs have occupied a few streams in far eastern Wyoming for decades. They’ve been there so long, in fact, biologists don’t know the impact they’ve had because no records exist of native species prior to their arrival. 

The problem in the Sheridan area is the bullfrog’s crusade to consume nearly every northern leopard frog and tadpole in sight. Northern leopard frogs are stable in portions of their range. They exist everywhere from Maine to Washington down to eastern Arizona, but were petitioned for Endangered Species Act listing in some portions of the West where their populations are struggling. 

Leopard frogs can coexist with bullfrogs in eastern water systems because they’ve found plenty of ways to hide and survive, but they’re not so well adapted out here, said Apodaca. 

Potentially more concerning, bullfrogs carry, but are immune to, the deadly chytrid fungus that is suffocating and killing native frogs and salamanders across North America.

“When it becomes a real concern for us in the conservation community is when [bullfrogs] throw ecosystems out of alignment and actively harm and damage native species,” Apodaca said.

Keeping them out

Once established, it’s exceptionally hard to eradicate bullfrogs, Estes-Zumpf said, though Wyoming’s harsh winters could help. 

One approach includes draining ponds, trapping adults and killing any tadpoles and eggs in the process. But the collateral damage of annihilating everything in the water limits its use and is not practical once bullfrogs spread to complex water systems with streams and connecting waterways. 

Biologists with more invasive-bullfrog-management experience elsewhere have found ways to minimize their damage. 

Officials in Boulder County, Colorado, for example, have been able to control bullfrogs in priority wetlands where northern leopard frogs breed. 

Efforts include targeting adult bullfrogs, Apocada said, as well as strategically removing eggs since bullfrogs reproduce later in the summer than northern leopard frogs. 

“To get rid of bullfrogs is a continuous battle because they’re on the landscape and will come back,” he added. 

That’s why Game and Fish decided to ban them from the state. The fewer bullfrogs here, the lower potential for release. Estes-Zumpf encourages anyone with a hankering for bullfrog legs to feel free to hunt them (though not at night with lights, because that’s illegal), remembering that they can’t be kept alive as pets or released back into the water again. 

With any luck, Estes-Zumpf said, the bullfrog invasion can be contained to the Sheridan region. 

Anyone who hears the telltale croak — it may sound similar to a cow mooing — or sees or captures a bullfrog should call their local Game and Fish office. The earlier bullfrogs can be caught and contained the better for the rest of Wyoming’s species, fish, frogs and ducks included, Estes-Zumpf said.

The post Bullfrogs are invading Sheridan, threatening native species appeared first on WyoFile.