From Tornadoes In Joplin And Tuscaloosa To Flooding From Hurricane Irene And Tropical Storm Lee, United States Hit Hard

With the recent rains from both Hurricane Irene in August and Tropical Storm Lee earlier this month, places such as Paterson, Middlesex, and Manville, New Jersey have become the latest casualties in what has been a year dominated by natural disasters. All kinds of devastation has been wrought on many parts of the United States in 2011.

At the beginning of the year, there were the snowstorms that hammered the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic as well as the Midwest. Then, there was flooding along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers that hit places such as Louisiana hard even though the state was experiencing a drought. Speaking of dry spells, Texas has over 80 percent of its state covered in unprecedented drought. Georgia has been very dry as well.

During the spring, the United States had a couple of its worst tornado outbreaks ever. Two rounds of tornadoes roared through Alabama on April 15th and April 27th. The first of those outbreaks progressed into North Carolina, and produced nearly 100 tornadoes in the Tar Heel state. The second round of twisters devastated the town of Tuscaloosa as well as a number of other communities in Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia.

In May, the tornadoes struck in the Great Plains, and one EF5 twister devastated a large area of the city of Joplin in Western Missouri. Later on during the summer, there was the first major earthquake in Colorado in 40 years, and a strong earthquake that shook the East Coast of the United States from Virginia to Vermont. Both of those quakes occurred on the same day, and less than a week before Hurricane Irene came up the East Coast of the United States.

All of these disasters have had a major economic impact on the country. At a time when the United States doesn’t need it, this latest series of disasters have inflicted billions of dollars in damage to many different parts of the country. Consequently, FEMA is running out of money and resources, and that has created a political football that puts the threat of government shutdown at the end of the month. A vote was taken in the House of Representatives on Thursday to keep government services running at the end of the month, but it was rejected.

The stumbling block has been trading off giving government aid for those that have been hit hard by recent disasters such as Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee for offsets on other government spending. So far in 2011, there have been nine billion dollar disasters, and we haven’t even included Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. Through May, there had already been over $30 billion dollars in damages from disasters in the United States, which was five times the average amount up to that point in the year.

With already two government showdowns over the budget and the debt ceiling in February and August, and a government caught in a ideological tug of war between forces from diametrically opposite directions, the situation doesn’t look good for people living in harm’s way whether they want to or not.