Giving Compass' Take:
- Adam Mahoney reports on Winter Storm Fern and the subsequent power outages devastating rural Black communities, particularly those in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
- What are the root causes of Winter Storm Fern hitting these communities before they had even fully recovered from previous climate-related disasters? How can philanthropy support equitable disaster recovery?
- Search for a nonprofit focused on disaster relief and recovery.
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Winter Storm Fern came, and just as Monica Coleman predicted, it hit places least equipped to handle it.
On Monday morning, she was one of roughly 1 million Americans without power because of Winter Storm Fern. Officials in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where she lives, are warning residents that they could be without power for multiple days.
“We are stuck here,” Coleman wrote to Capital B in a text Monday. Her county was one of the hardest hit by the storm that turned highways into ice rinks, snapped trees onto power lines and homes, and cut electricity from Texas to Kentucky.
For her, the impact of the storm is about the country’s inability to care for the most vulnerable long before disaster ever strikes.
“We know that climate change is real, and people in the South, especially communities of color and rural communities, are first and worst impacted,” she said Friday before Winter Storm Fern hit. “Every time something happens, it feels like we’re never prepared, and it just doesn’t make sense to me.”
She pointed to the devastating impact of an ice storm that hit Mississippi in 1994 that led to nine deaths.
“We are now still doing the same things that we did when I was 9 years old, to just try to make sure we can make it,” she said. “Everybody’s left fending for themselves instead of the community and state actually having a plan.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said the state’s situation “is probably going to get worse before it gets better,” in reference to Winter Storm Fern.
As temperatures plunged into the teens and single digits across half the country, at least a dozen people have died in storm-related crashes and cold exposure. As of Monday morning, 56% of the contiguous U.S. was covered in snow and ice, the second-highest rate in two decades.
The worst power outages due to Winter Storm Fern were concentrated in Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, where ice-coated lines and fallen trees severed service for more than 300,000 customers in Tennessee and over 140,000 each in Mississippi and Louisiana at the height of the storm. In Mississippi alone, as much as 12% of all customers lost power Sunday, with the hardest-hit pockets in the northern part of the state.
Read the full article about Winter Storm Fern hitting rural Black communities by Adam Mahoney at Capital B News.