The climate crisis is fueling a steady growth in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather, and Massachusetts cities and towns face an increasingly common conundrum trying to respond to those emergencies.
Many of the disasters that have hit the Bay State in the past decade, like major flooding, cause more potent effects than local officials can handle on their own but fall short of the scale required to earn a federal disaster declaration, according to the head of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.
Over the past decade, the state emergency operations center has been activated for disaster response at a “largely consistent” rate, while the regional emergency operations center activations have increased 91%, MEMA Director Dawn Brantley told lawmakers Thursday.
Read the rest of the story at NBC Boston, here.
