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Up First from NPR

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4.5 • 52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

The recent wildfires around Los Angeles are just the most recent example of how extreme weather driven by climate change is affecting housing across the country. Millions of homes are at risk of flooding, fire or drought. Increasingly, local municipalities are facing hard decisions about whether to tear homes down or ban new construction altogether.

Today on The Sunday Story, we share an episode that originally aired last year in which reporters Rebecca Hersher and Lauren Sommer visit three communities in the US trying to balance the need for housing with the threat of climate-driven disaster.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the headlines to bring you one big story.
0:09.7	First came the Santa Ana winds, then the massive wildfires. Next, the rain arrived to parts of Southern California, causing mudslides in some of the burned areas.
0:24.1	It's hard to comprehend the aftermath.
0:26.8	More than two dozen people died, and thousands of people have lost their homes, including
0:31.7	Jennifer Barghia Rana of Altadena, California.
0:35.5	Recently, she spoke to my colleague Elsa Chang. Us, like,ena, California. Recently, she spoke to my colleague, Elsa Chang.
0:39.1	Us, like tens of thousands of Angelinos at this moment,
0:44.0	are scrambling to find temporary housing,
0:47.3	but are we looking for short-term temporary,
0:50.6	long-term temporary?
0:52.7	How do we settle our family in a way that stops making this an emergency
0:58.0	for weeks and months moving ahead?
1:02.4	Bargy-A-Rena needs answers fast, but her questions also go to the heart of even bigger questions.
1:09.1	Are there places that are simply too dangerous, too risk-prone for people to live?
1:15.2	And who decides where those places are?
1:18.9	Today, we bring you a story we first aired last year.
1:23.5	In it, my colleagues Lauren Summer and Rebecca Herscher of NPR's Climate Desk,
1:28.6	travel to communities at risk of natural disasters and consider the hard choices they must make.
1:39.2	Rebecca, Lauren, welcome to the Sunday story.
1:42.1	Hey, it's great to be here.
1:43.3	Yeah, thanks.
1:46.5	Climate change is driving more extreme weather on all ends of the spectrum. It just seems like, you know, every other day
	...

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