In early March, a small group of Democratic senators from the Rust Belt sent President Joe Biden an urgent letter. They began by extolling the benefits of two of the Biden administration’s biggest achievements, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, calling them “historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure” that will ring in a brighter future for American manufacturing. But there was something, they cautioned, that threatened to hamper this progress: the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned regulations for integrated iron and steel mills, proposed last July and nearing a court-ordered deadline.

“We are concerned that the EPA’s proposed integrated steel rules will do what foreign competitors have thus far been unable to do: deter and diminish continued American investment in improving our steel industry,” wrote the five senators, among them Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. They claimed the regulations would cost companies billions, enough to force widespread layoffs, despite the EPA’s estimate of $7.1 million in costs for the two companies, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, that own all 10 of the country’s steel mills.

Shortly after the senators sent off the letter, the EPA unveiled its final rule, the first time the agency has ever attempted to cut emissions from leaks and equipment malfunctions at steel mills. The EPA expects the new regulations will cut particle pollution by 473 tons every year. But the final rule is weaker than the one it proposed in 2023. Whereas the agency had originally planned to slash steel mills’ toxic emissions by 79 tons per year, a 15 percent decrease overall, the final version is expected to cut emissions by 64 tons each year. The EPA also dropped a proposed limit on the thickness of the smoke emanating from mills’ doors and roof vents. 

Jim Pew, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who has litigated multiple lawsuits against the agency for its failure to curb steel mill pollution, told Grist that the regulations will have “real benefits” for the people living in the shadows of the country’s most polluting steel mills, but lamented the safeguards that were removed. 

“It’s a small step in the right direction,” he said, noting that the EPA had furnished the final rule with a standard to regulate a type of incinerator used by some highly polluting mills. “The steel companies mounted a real disinformation campaign about the cost of the rule that I think put pressure on EPA to take out some provisions that would have been beneficial.”

The new rule gives the country’s steel companies two years to update their facilities with the requisite emission reduction equipment and workplace standards. In an email, an EPA spokesperson said the agency had “carefully considered the stakeholder feedback and made data-driven modifications in the final rule that provide needed flexibility, while also providing health protections for surrounding communities.”

The senators’ letter represents a rare occasion of congressional involvement in the EPA’s rulemaking process, a yearslong endeavor that requires extensive data collection and engineering expertise. The agency’s air pollution regulations, while undergirded by science and riddled with industrial jargon, have major consequences for communities that host the country’s industrial infrastructure, determining the quantities of toxic chemicals that companies can emit — and that residents can inhale.  

Steel production is a highly polluting enterprise involving heating coal above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a product known as coke, which is then combined with iron ore in a blast furnace and melted down into liquid steel. The broiling heat releases a slew of toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic, as well as fine particulate matter that can accumulate in the lungs after prolonged exposure. Numerous studies have linked pollution from steel mills to impaired heart and lung function.

Ninety percent of the steel industry’s emissions originate from four mills that dot the rim of Lake Michigan near the border between Illinois and Indiana. Once bustling hubs for manufacturing, towns like Gary, Indiana, sank into decline over the latter half of the 20th century when manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. Today, the steel mills that emit black smoke into the air of the area’s overwhelmingly low-income and Black communities are holdouts from this era, symbols of a prosperous past that politicians on both sides of the aisle seem eager to protect. 

The first effort by members of Congress to convince the EPA to change its course came last December. A group of eight senators, including Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota as well as Republicans Mike Braun and Todd Young of Indiana, sent a letter to the EPA’s administrator, Michael Regan, arguing that the agency’s proposed regulations would harm national security by making the domestic steel industry — the “world’s cleanest major producer of steel” — uncompetitive.

“We support reducing harmful air pollution,” they wrote. “We also support rules that are durable, realistic,” and based on the view that the federal government should “improve public health while protecting good-paying jobs and supporting industries essential to our national and economic security. These rules fail to meet those standards.” The senators did not specify which provisions in the proposed rule would have these effects. The letter in March from Manchin and the other Democrats brought even stronger warnings. “If these rules are promulgated as proposed, Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel may be left with no choice but to prematurely shutter mills, resulting in job losses and irreparable harm to their local communities,” the senators argued.

In its final rule, the EPA estimated that the total costs to the steel industry would total $7.1 million, an amount that would cover the installation of air monitors to measure chromium pollution around the perimeter of facilities and the implementation of new workplace practices to reduce leaks from previously unregulated emission sources. But in a press release supporting the senators’ claim of costs running into the billions, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves argued that the rule would “put at risk good-paying, middle-class union jobs in the steel industry.” In 2023, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs reported sales of $18 billion and $21 billion, respectively.

Pew, the Earthjustice attorney, said concerns that the new rules will wreak havoc across the industry are unfounded. “The cost claims were so shocking to us, because EPA routinely overstates the cost of its rules,” Pew said, citing a study in 2020 from the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. “They’re saying that not only did EPA understate the cost of these rules, but that it understated them by orders of magnitude.”

After taking note of the senators’ efforts to gut the steel mill regulations, Bruce Buckheit, the former director of the EPA’s air enforcement division, decided to send Regan a letter on behalf of Earthjustice in February. He dissected the contents of the new rule, arguing that its impacts would be “straightforward” and meet the minimum pollution reductions required by the federal Clean Air Act. “I’ve seen nothing in the rulemaking record for these proposals that supports the cost claims in the senators’ letter,” he wrote. The total capital expenditures, he concluded, would be minuscule compared with U.S. Steel’s and Cleveland-Cliffs’ revenues.

“I believe it is important to push back against such overblown industry claims, lest that narrative drive public opinion and agency policy,” Buckheit wrote.

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA wanted to clean up steel mills. Then a group of Rust Belt senators got involved. on Apr 2, 2024.

Now 30, Big Wind spent most of their 20s fighting extraction projects. They were at Standing Rock, then, immediately after, traveled east to fight the construction of the Tennessee Gas pipeline. A Northern Arapaho tribal member from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Big Wind learned important financial lessons during those actions: Working collectively in resistance camps means resources are pooled and shared. That’s because climate work, at least at the individual level, doesn’t pay much.

“You’re not really using money inside a camp, even though it’s helping get resources to function,” said Big Wind. “There’s so much possibility, because nobody had to worry about their basic necessities,” they said. 

Outside of the camps is where people like Big Wind have to worry. 

A member of the 30×30 White House Advisory Committee, and a long-time climate activist, Big Wind spoke in Dubai at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December and, from a young age, has crowdfunded conservation initiatives on the Wind River Reservation. 

“I’m not getting paid to go to these things,” said Big Wind, “by these institutions, by the feds, or by the international community.” Big Wind’s day job with the Wyoming Outdoor Council helps pay for some of these trips, and they continue to rely on crowdfunding to support travel. 

The unpaid labor that Big Wind provides to fight climate change is at the heart of a new paper published in Cambridge University Press called “Wages for Earthwork” — “earthwork” being the term to describe labor that takes care of the planet and provides benefits to all. That work should be compensated, argues essay author David Temin, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

“If we’re going to think about a just transition to a world without fossil fuels, we need to put a lot of this invisible labor at the center,” Temin said. “A lot of this is obvious to Indigenous communities. Everyone is implicitly benefiting from this.”

The argument may seem quite basic, but the exploitation of unpaid earthwork has far reaching economic dimensions. Take unpaid housework or childcare: labor that maintains society and allows for the economy to continue operating but that is invisible in everything from labor markets to gross domestic products. Because productivity in most economies is a matter of goods and services, unpaid labor — like eldercare or earthwork — lies outside the market.

“The parallel is absolutely apt,” said Erin Hatton, a professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in gender and labor markets. “Because of our capitalist system, labor outside the home has a measure of respect.” 

Earthwork, Hatton says, broadens that definition of home by taking care of the Earth as one would tend to a household where everyone lives. “It’s a home more broadly constructed,” she said.

Whereas unpaid housework and childcare have historically fallen to women, unpaid earthwork typically falls to Indigenous peoples, who are expected to steward land and share traditional ecological knowledge for free, says Micheal Mikulewicz, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “The argument is they should be grateful that we are actually asking and trying to help, which doesn’t help them put food on the table,” Mikulewicz said. 

The federal government does provide applications to grants pointed at tribal nations and organizations. This year, the Biden administration awarded $120 million dollars to 146 Indigenous-led projects for everything from climate-adaptation planning to community-led relocation and habitat restoration. But that doesn’t account for all the labor that has been done without federal funding. Also, grant-funding tends to privilege organizations with the means to pay grant writers, which can leave smaller organizations at a disadvantage. 

“We don’t really talk about the amount of work and labor that will be necessary to adapt to climate change,” said Mikulewicz. “Actually making changes in our economy, in our society, in the way our economic system works, or even the way we grow food for that matter. The phases of adaptation are really, really diverse.”

Mikulewicz adds that there are no easy answers to solving these imbalances, but that compensating Indigenous climate labor is a step in the right direction and could open the possibility of broader, more fruitful alliances between environmentalists and labor. 

According to Temin, the paper’s author, solutions could range from hourly wages to pressuring non-Indigenous conservation organizations to pick up the tab, but he recognizes that answers are typically dependent on situations with no one-size-fits-all approach to compensation. The funds to help from large conservation organizations are not making it into the hands of local Indigenous communities. 

However, Temin said the best way for Indigenous peoples to start seeing real forms of compensation is for governments to strengthen tribal sovereignty and return traditional lands to Indigenous stewardship.

“The most important component is securing land tenure rights and supporting local communities’ efforts to protect themselves and their territories against environmentally damaging extractive development projects and conservation projects that kick them off their own land,” he said.

Big Wind, on the Wind River Reservation, agrees. “I don’t think money is going to solve it. But I also feel like we do have a responsibility to ensure that we are taking care of the people who are working for all of us.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous peoples’ climate labor benefits everyone. Should it be paid? on Apr 2, 2024.

When you recycle a six-pack of aluminum cans, you save the amount of energy equal…

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is launching an emergency response in Lower Florida Keys waters after reports emerged of smalltooth sawfish displaying abnormal behaviors such as spinning and whirling.

In addition to the abnormal behavior reported by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), as of March 24 there were more than 28 deaths of smalltooth sawfish, a press release from NOAA said.

An investigation effort led by the commission — including the collection and analysis of samples — was underway.

“If the opportunity presents itself, this would be the first attempt ever to rescue and rehabilitate smalltooth sawfish from the wild,” said Adam Brame, coordinator of NOAA Fisheries sawfish recovery, as The Guardian reported. “We’re hopeful for positive outcomes from these rescue attempts, and grateful to our partners for their support as we work to protect this endangered species. It’s important to note that active rescue and rehabilitation are not always effective in saving stranded animals. However, it can still give us critical information to learn about the nature of the distress.”

According to FWC, the ongoing compilation of fish necropsy data so far showed no signs of bacterial infection or communicable pathogens. Salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH and temperature were also ruled out as the cause of fish deaths or abnormal behavior.

Smalltooth sawfish live primarily in shallow coastal waters, with one in five species living in tropical estuaries or seas, NOAA Fisheries said.

The critically endangered fish experienced dramatic population decline during the latter part of the 20th century, primarily due to habitat loss caused by coastal development, as well as accidental capture by fisheries.

Once found in waters off the coasts of North Carolina and Texas, smalltooth sawfish are now mostly limited to Florida. In 2003, they became the first ever marine fish to be protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.

“Given the limited population size of smalltooth sawfish, the mortality of at least two dozen sawfish could have an impact on the recovery of this species,” Brame said in the NOAA press release. 

Brame stated that a higher number of total mortalities was suspected, however. As of March 24, more than 100 sawfish — large juveniles and adults from seven to 14 feet long — had been impacted by the event.

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NOAA planned to rescue the endangered sawfish and bring them to quarantine facilities for observation, with the goal of rehabilitating and releasing them. Agencies offering to house and rehabilitate the fish included Mote Marine Laboratory, Dynastic Marine Associates, Inc. and Ripley’s Aquariums.

“Our goal is to release all rescued sawfish back to the wild once rehabilitated,” Brame said in the press release.

NOAA said it would work with animal care teams, including scientists and veterinarians who would develop specified care guidelines.

The post NOAA Launches Emergency Rescue of Critically Endangered Sawfish in Florida Keys appeared first on EcoWatch.

A historic new law in Phoenix, Arizona, will provide thousands of outdoor workers in the hottest city in the country with protections from extreme heat.

In a unanimous vote, the Phoenix City Council passed an ordinance requiring that workers have easy access to rest, potable water and shade, as well as training to recognize signs of heat stress, a press release from the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) said. Vehicles with enclosed cabs must also have access to air conditioning.

“People who work outside and in hot indoor environments in Phoenix suffer unacceptably during our deadly summers, with too few protections,” said Katelyn Parady, a Phoenix-based expert on worker health and safety with National COSH, who assisted unions and local workers in advocating for the new extreme heat protection measures, in a press release from National COSH. “This ordinance is a critical first step toward getting workers lifesaving protections and holding employers accountable for safety during heat season. It’s also a model for how local governments can leverage their contracts to protect the workers who keep their communities running from climate change dangers.”

In 2023, there were a record 31 consecutive days of 110-plus degree heat in Phoenix. The city had 340 deaths related to the extreme heat, with 645 in Maricopa County, according to the county health department. Three-quarters of the heat-related fatalities happened outdoors.

In the United States, more than 40 percent of outdoor workers are Hispanic or Black, while making up approximately 32 percent of the population, reported The Guardian.

People of color and low-income workers are the most impacted by the hazards of extreme heat. According to Public Citizen, the risk of Latinx workers dying from heat stress is more than three times higher than that of their peers.

“This heat safety ordinance will change my life,” said Filiberto Lares, who has been delivering food to airplanes for Sky Chefs at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport for 11 years, as The Guardian reported.

The new ordinance will apply to outdoor laborers who work for city contractors and subcontractors of engineering, construction and airport projects, as well as other city services, the press release said.

“The heat at Sky Harbor Airport is dangerous and all of us who work there know it,” said passenger service agent Cecilia Ortiz, who filed a complaint against her employer last summer over the sweltering conditions, in the press release. “We’re glad the city of Phoenix is stepping up to require that airlines and their contractors give us basic heat protections outdoors and in the jet bridges. Now we need to keep pushing to make sure cabin cleaners, who work inside planes but often with the A/C off, are also protected. And we are going to hold our employers accountable. They must take this ordinance seriously, so we can stay safe at work.” 

In addition to the safety requirements required of contractors, they will also have to create and keep a heat safety plan.

“In the summers, when the temperatures reach extremes, the asphalt on the tarmac is even hotter,” said Lares, who is a UNITE HERE Local 11 member in Phoenix, in the press release. “It has felt as though people forget that many of us work in vehicles. Having air conditioning in work trucks, buses, and delivery vans matters just as much as in a building because those vehicles are our workplaces.”

Lori Bays, Phoenix’s deputy manager, said the new rule would apply to roughly 10,000 city contract workers, reported The Guardian.

“Phoenix is recognizing the need to take action to protect the most vulnerable,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a climate vulnerability researcher with the Union of Concerned Scientists, as The Guardian reported. “With an intense heat island effect, there’s very little vegetation and an unequal distribution of shading and trees that can help lower exposure to temperatures.”

As climate change continues to bring increasingly hotter summers to Phoenix, advocates of the ordinance say broader protections are necessary for all workers, not only those employed by the city’s contractors and subcontractors, the press release said.

“It’s good news that our city council is listening to workers who are in grave danger due to climate change,” Parady said in the press release. “But your body’s ability to cope with extreme heat does not depend on whether you work for a city contractor, directly for the city or for a private employer. We’re going to keep organizing until all workers have strong protection from heat – because everyone works under the same blazing sun.”

The post Phoenix Passes Historic Ordinance Giving Outdoor Workers Protection From Extreme Heat appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the U.S. on March 21 overturned previous orders by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that banned the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in product packaging by a plastics treatment company, Inhance Technologies.

In December 2023, the EPA issued two orders for Houston-based Inhance Technologies to stop manufacturing PFAS, including PFOA, in its plastics treatment processes. Exposure to PFOA may be linked to higher risks of certain types of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. 

The PFAS are a byproduct from the company’s flourination process, which is used to make plastics more durable and prevent degradation of the products inside the treated containers. The company treats containers designed for products like cleaners and pesticides.

Inhance Technologies sued the EPA one week after receiving the orders, and it stated that if it had to follow the orders and shut down its fluorination process, it would go bankrupt.

The federal appeals court overturned the orders, saying the EPA exceeded its authority by issuing the orders under Section 5 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The judges said that Section 5 of the TSCA allowed the EPA to regulate the use of “new” chemicals or chemicals used in “new” ways, and they said they agreed with the argument that EPA overstepped by issuing the orders under Section 5 instead of Section 6, which applies to regulation on all chemicals.

The judges said that Section 5 did not apply to Inhance Technologies’ fluorination process, which has been used for 40 years, Reuters reported.

“The court did not dispute EPA’s underlying decision that this is a danger to human health, what they did was say it’s not a new use, which I think is wrong… but this case isn’t over by any stretch,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official now with the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), as reported by The Guardian.

The EPA told The Guardian it will review the decision from the federal appeals court.

PEER and the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) shared in a press release that they will “pursue that case in addition to any other remedies that are available to abate this significant and unreasonable danger to public health, and will urge the government to do so as well.”

The post Federal Appeals Court Overturns EPA’s Ban of PFAS in Manufacturing of Plastic Containers appeared first on EcoWatch.

In the 20 months since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered billions in subsidies for clean energy projects and electric vehicles, President Joe Biden has sought to supplement those climate carrots with a few key sticks. The Environmental Protection Agency has in recent months raced to roll them out, in the form of key regulations that penalize carbon emissions from power plants, oil wells, and passenger cars, under an effort to finalize new rules before the election.

The administration on Friday finalized the last of those rules, a set of strict standards for carbon emissions from big rigs and other heavy-duty vehicles. This regulation has been among the most controversial Biden climate rules, in large part because it pushes up against the limits of available technology: Freight companies and trucking industry advocates have argued that the rule could force them to abandon diesel engines before electric drivetrains are ready to replace them in long-haul tractor-trailers. The EPA weakened the rule from an earlier version in response to those concerns, delaying the mandate for the largest trucks by a few years.

But the rule goes beyond long-haul trucking. It also applies to a wide range of other heavy-duty vehicles, including garbage trucks, box trucks, cement mixers, and school buses. These vehicles spew toxic air pollution just like 18-wheelers, but they travel far fewer miles and carry lighter loads, making them easier to replace with electric models.

“When you look at the share of vehicles, even in the tractor-trailer space, a huge chunk of those don’t travel more than 250 miles per day,” said Dave Cooke, a vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a climate advocacy organization. “There is a significant chunk of the sector that could be electrified now, because a large portion of it has these really distinct routes.” The rule will apply to about 11 million heavy-duty vehicles in the United States.

The trucking industry’s opposition to the rule has centered on what EV drivers often call range anxiety: Tractor-trailers have to haul heavy loads down interstate highways for hours at a time, and many existing batteries aren’t quite up to the task of replacing diesel engines over such long ranges. Furthermore, the few electric tractor-trailers on the market right now are several times more expensive than conventional models, and there are few places to charge them. The Biden administration has sought to remedy this infrastructure gap with a “zero-emission freight corridors strategy” that will channel chargers and grid investments toward interstates that carry an outsize share of long-haul freight.

But a large percentage of trucks and heavy-duty vehicles don’t make long trips and so don’t need to worry so much about range. Garbage trucks, city buses, and delivery vehicles, for example, travel just a few hundred miles each day at most, within the range of current battery technology, and they return to a depot or warehouse where they can charge overnight. 

Even the Clean Freight Coalition, which represents freight companies and truck dealers, has found that most of these vehicles could go electric using available technology. A recent report from the group found that electric models on the market right now could handle 93 percent of medium-duty trucking routes, with only the longest 7 percent requiring more juice than current batteries can offer. That’s compared to just half of all tractor-trailer routes, according to the report.

The electric transition among short-haul vehicles is already happening in many parts of the country. The Biden administration has doled out billions of dollars to cities like Baltimore to roll out electric school buses, and companies like Amazon have deployed a growing number of electric Rivian delivery trucks on package routes. 

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The nation’s most ambitious effort is afoot in California, which has been seeking federal permission to impose even stricter truck emissions standards than the EPA. It has been making an aggressive push to decarbonize short-haul trucking, otherwise known as drayage. Trucks unloading freight from the nation’s two biggest ports, in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, make thousands of trips through residential neighborhoods, and the state is pushing companies to go electric and improve air quality in those areas.

The Biden administration’s new rule sets a faster timeline for things like delivery vans and utility trucks than it does for tractor-trailers. The standards for those smaller vehicles start in the 2027 model year, but standards for “sleeper cab” long-haul rigs don’t take effect until 2030, a change that represents a big concession to concerns from the trucking industry. 

“We thank [EPA] for addressing industry concern about the challenges of the early years of the rule, and we remain committed to upholding the spirit of this regulation,” Sean Waters, an executive at the major trucking company Daimler, said in a statement following the rule’s announcement.

Like the EPA’s previous rule on passenger cars, the truck rule is “technology neutral,” meaning it doesn’t mandate an electric transition. Instead it sets goals for the carbon emissions of a truck manufacturer’s entire fleet, giving them the option to increase the fuel efficiency of their diesel engines or offer hybrid or electric models. The agency laid out a hypothetical scenario showing how a company could reach compliance in model year 2032 by rolling out a line of hybrid delivery vans and school buses. Two-thirds of its tractor-trailers would still run on diesel, with a smaller number of hydrogen fuel cell trucks thrown into the mix as well.

Cooke says the agency could have pushed companies harder to switch to zero-emission vehicles given that the technology for electrified short-haul trucks already exists. 

“This rule doesn’t put that guarantee in place, that we’re going to see zero-emission trucks in communities on the ground that are dealing with the trucking sector,” he said, adding that he had hoped for a “stronger signal” to companies and utilities to invest in electric trucks and transmission infrastructure to charge them.

Even so, the rule will still lead to significant air quality improvements, says Laura Kate Bender, who leads healthy air advocacy at the American Lung Association. That will be true even for cities without major trucking routes or large ports, she said: Large local vehicles like buses and garbage trucks are some of the most polluting on the average city street, and a strong push to replace them with electric models will ease the burden on frontline communities.

“There’s a lot of different types of trucks, beyond the big long-haul trucks that we think of on the highway, that are actually in folks’ neighborhoods,” said Bender. “We’re excited to see the cleanup that this leads to.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA’s push to clean up trucking goes way beyond 18-wheelers on Apr 1, 2024.

The loss of a beloved family member is one of the most challenging times humans…

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AnnDionne Selestin normally finished work as a housekeeper at The Westin in West Maui after 5 p.m., but August 8 was different. With a hurricane passing south of the island and the power out, most guests were riding things out in their rooms and didn’t want to be bothered. So Selestin, her husband, and three aunts who also worked at the hotel headed home early, driving through Lāhainā in the mid-afternoon as an inferno approached.

They spent two hours stuck in gridlocked traffic, watching branches fly through the sky and the orange glow of flames on the hillside inch closer and closer. As a black cloud descended on their line of cars and more people hurried out of their driveways into the caravan, fear evident in their faces, Selestin and her aunties prayed silently, in English and Pohnpeian, the native language of their home island in Micronesia, Pohnpei. 

Their prayers were answered that day: They survived the Lāhainā wildfire that killed more than 100 people in the coastal historic town, the deadliest blaze in modern U.S. history. 

Tourism skidded to a halt. Six months later, Selestin started working with wildfire survivors who were Indigenous Pacific migrants like herself: Families who migrated from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. That’s when she learned that despite treaties between their countries and the United States that allow her community to live and work here legally and indefinitely, a mistake in the drafting of a law 28 years ago prevented them — some of them homeless — from getting access to help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Now, Congress has passed a law restoring access to FEMA and other key federal programs to citizens of these countries living in the U.S. It ends nearly three decades during which people such as Selestin, an estimated tens of thousands, had been cut off from governmental safety-net programs. 

The community of legal migrants from Pacific island nations is known as the Compact of Free Association, or COFA, citizens. That COFA citizens weren’t eligible for any aid is attributed to an inadvertent mistake in drafting the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The new law that corrects this error was included in the federal spending bill approved last month. 

Members of this community who were denied crucial support in the wake of Lāhainā’s destruction are expected to be the first to benefit. 

“Just knowing that there’s people that actually care about the COFA citizens, it’s amazing,” said Selestin, the surprise evident in her voice. “We’re very grateful.”  

That fact people care surprises Selestin because for most of her life, she’s heard that people like her are not welcome in Hawaiʻi. Her parents moved to Maui from Pohnpei when she was 6, seeking a better life for her and her siblings. At first, that meant splitting up the family by leaving her older brothers with relatives on their home island more than 3,000 miles away. Her father got a job on a pineapple plantation, an experience that reflects the immigrant story so often celebrated in Hawaiʻi. 

But there was one key difference. Selestin is a citizen of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, one of three Pacific island nations that gained independence and a seat at the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s following a century of colonial rule. 

The United States gained control over the islands from Japan during World War II and supported their independence with the understanding that the U.S. military would still retain strategic power over their lands, airspace, and surrounding waters, a portion of the western Pacific region that rivals the size of the continental U.S. The international agreements securing these military rights — the Compacts of Free Association — have been increasingly recognized as critical to U.S. national security amid growing concerns about China.  

As part of the compacts, the U.S. to a large extent maintains an open border policy with the three nations: Their citizens can live and work in the U.S. and vice versa with no need for a visa. When the treaty with the Federated States of Micronesia was signed in 1986, people who moved to the U.S. were eligible for the same federal programs, such as federal disaster aid, that long-term permanent residents can access.

But just 10 years later, COFA citizens’ eligibility was stripped in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. It wasn’t just FEMA: The community lost access to Medicaid and food stamps. They could work in the U.S. legally for decades, but if they suddenly became disabled they could no longer collect Social Security disability insurance.

Many COFA migrants who moved to the U.S. for work and education never needed to rely on these safety nets. But others who were too sick to work, or struggling to raise families on low salaries and high rents, quickly realized that they had been paying taxes into a system that excluded them when they needed help most. 

The Lāhainā wildfire gave momentum to longstanding community advocacy to reverse this systematic exclusion and to ongoing efforts by Hawaiʻi congressional leaders, Senator Mazie Hirono and Representative Ed Case, to restore their eligibility. 

The bill was included in a broader measure to renew the treaties with the Federated States of Micronesia and Republic of the Marshall Islands. The law provides funding to the countries and also extends veterans’ health benefits to COFA citizens, who serve in the U.S. military at high rates and previously were denied care.

After the bill became law this month, FEMA announced it will reopen its cash assistance application window for COFA citizens affected by the Maui wildfires. Agency spokesman Todd Hoose said he’s not sure yet how many people it’ll help — he’s heard estimates as low as a few dozen people or as high as 200. The COFA community in Lāhainā was small, but growing; much bigger was the Filipino community, which included immigrants of mixed legal status. Undocumented people remain excluded from federal disaster cash assistance.

“We do not yet have the process, but we are encouraging folks to help us identify those who are potentially eligible,” Hoose said. 

Even though there’s still so much unknown, Selestin is excited. In the months since the wildfire, FEMA has spent tens of millions of dollars to help affected families stay housed. She knows people who have been sleeping in their cars and struggling to feed their kids. As a middle schooler on Maui, she felt ashamed to be Micronesian, but now at age 24, she’s proud of it, and wants to continue to help her people get back on their feet. 

Rising sea levels, worsening storms, and other climate change-related effects are expected to increase outmigration from the island nations, especially the low-lying atolls of the Marshall Islands, to more mountainous islands like Guam and Oʻahu and other parts of the U.S. The Maui wildfire will not be the last time that members of the Micronesian diaspora will be in need of federal disaster assistance. And next time, they’ll have the right to receive it right away. 

“That’s huge for us,” Selestin said. 

Correction: This story originally misspelled AnnDionne Selestin’s name.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous Pacific wildfire survivors on Maui can finally get FEMA help on Apr 1, 2024.