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(SHILOH, Ala.) — At a recent church service in Cleveland, a group of visitors from a rural Alabama community nearly 900 miles away, including pastor and business owner Timothy Williams, joined congregants in singing the spiritual “I Don’t Mind Waiting.”

Williams has grown used to waiting.

After six years of frequent flooding, two presidential administrations and numerous reassurances from top officials, homeowners like Williams who live in the majority-Black Shiloh community say they are still waiting for state and federal agencies to make them whole.

Now, with the Biden administration ending Monday, they feel they are running out of time.

“The longer they put us on hold, things are getting worse and worse,” said Williams, who has been advocating for Shiloh since 2018, after community members say a project by the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) to widen an adjacent highway led to flooding on their properties.

When the state denied responsibility for the flooding, community leaders turned to the federal government for help. In September 2022, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration opened an investigation into their concerns.

The administration says it aims to complete investigations within six months, but after a year with no resolution, Shiloh residents focused their efforts on reaching the top transportation official in America: U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Shiloh residents became hopeful last spring when Buttigieg traveled to their community to see how runoff from the expanded highway drained onto their properties. He toured the historic community, listening to residents and telling them Washington would make things right.

The people of Shiloh say they were optimistic about what was to come, but when the federal investigation came to a close in October — more than two years after it began — the resulting Voluntary Resolution Agreement with ALDOT fell short of their expectations.

The deal required the state to mitigate future flooding in Shiloh, but it did not address existing property damage. It also did not assign blame for the flooding, raising questions as to whether any government entity is liable for compensating the residents for their losses.

“We are closely coordinating with the Federal Highway Administration on our efforts to follow through with the terms of the Voluntary Resolution Agreement,” ALDOT spokesperson Tony Harris told ABC News.

On the brink of yet another administration change, Williams wants Buttigieg to commit more resources to Shiloh in his final days in office.

“We want him to give us a binding written agreement that will cover the damages of the people’s homes and their properties and make the people whole,” Williams said. “That’s all we’re asking him to do and he can do that.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Transportation, however, said the secretary cannot meet this demand.

“Congress has not authorized any programs or funding for DOT that can provide emergency relief directly to communities experiencing hardship, so this whole-of-government approach is critical to help the Shiloh community access federal assistance that is not available through DOT alone,” the spokesperson told ABC News.

The flooding in Shiloh has consequences ranging from transportation to housing to environment, spanning the jurisdictions of a web of federal agencies. Some of these departments are involved in a task force led by the U.S. Transportation Department to identify resources available for Shiloh, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson told ABC News.

“EPA shared all funding opportunities and technical assistance available to the community,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that Shiloh community members applied for an EPA grant program in November.

Since the Voluntary Resolution Agreement did not assign liability for the flooding – the responsibility for finding government funds to fix the flood damage has largely fallen to the Shiloh community members. They now say they’ve been wading through red tape while their homes fill with water.

With the clock ticking toward another Trump administration, Shiloh community leaders are worried they’ll be left behind. They aren’t waiting for federal agencies to come to them anymore.

In December, Williams and his daughters traveled from Alabama to Ohio, where Buttigieg was scheduled to speak before the City Club of Cleveland.

In his address, Buttigieg discussed the accomplishments of his administration, including tackling infrastructure inequities in vulnerable communities.

“Many communities had transportation projects done to them rather than with them, often because they lacked the wealth or political power to resist or reshape them,” Buttigieg said.

Listening closely alongside the Williams family were some of their supporters: Shiloh-area native Dr. Robert Bullard, known as the “father of environmental justice” for his pioneering research, and representatives from the Sierra Club.

“The point of transportation is to connect, and yet there were so many places where transportation functioned to divide, sometimes contributing to racial and economic divisions,” Buttigieg told the audience. “We can do something about it, and we are.”
In the case of Shiloh, however, what exactly can be done and who should do it remains unclear. All the while, the flooding continues.

When asked by ABC News if he would meet with the Shiloh families who’d come to Cleveland, Buttigieg said he “would want to take that up directly with them.”

“We’ll continue to do everything we can, both within and beyond any kind of formal and official steps, to try to support that community because I’ll never forget what they’re going through,” Buttigieg said.

After they were denied another meeting with the secretary, Williams and Bullard put together a petition with roughly 5,000 signatures demanding a binding agreement to cover damage to residents’ properties.

On Tuesday, the group traveled another 900 miles, heading to Washington to deliver their petition directly to the U.S. Transportation Department before Buttigieg’s term ends.

“We want to see a victory,” Bullard said. “How this community overcame all odds and got the resources from the federal government to make them whole.”

Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous joined the group to call for justice in Shiloh.

“Their community’s been turned into a drainage ditch by the Alabama Department of Transportation with U.S. Department of Transportation dollars,” Jealous said.

After relentless flooding and tireless advocacy, Shiloh’s 150-year legacy still hangs in the balance. While Washington politics churn on, their homes continue to sink and runoff drowns their generational wealth.
Bullard stressed that there is still time for Washington to act.

“It’s already been two administrations that have allowed this to happen,” Bullard said. “This should not — and must not — bleed into a third administration.”

ABC News Senior National Correspondent Steve Osunsami contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump paid his respects to former President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday at the Capitol Rotunda.

Trump is set to meet with Senate Republicans later Wednesday to discuss how to move forward on advancing his agenda once he returns to the White House.

Carter, the nation’s 39th president, is lying in state as part of his state funeral in the nation’s capital.

Carter is being honored with a funeral service on Thursday at Washington National Cathedral, just miles north of the White House.

President Joe Biden is set to deliver the eulogy. Trump said he will also be attending the funeral despite their history of mutual criticism.

Trump, who has praised Carter as a “good man,” has in recent days taken aim at his Panama Canal treaty that resulted in the U.S. ceding control of the critical waterway to the Central American nation.

The president-elect, who will be sworn in later this month, has also griped about flags being half-staff during his inauguration because of the 30-day mourning period for Carter. Trump said that “no American can be happy about it.”

Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, was remembered with several events in his home state of Georgia before his remains were transported to Washington on Tuesday.

Members of Carter’s family walked down Pennsylvania Avenue behind his flag-draped casket being carried in a horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol.

Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson gave remarks in the Rotunda. Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a eulogy celebrating his presidency but also his humanitarian work after he left office.

“We have heard much today and in recent days about President Carter’s impact in the four decades after he left the White House, rightly so,” Harris said. “Jimmy Carter established a new model for what it means to be a former president, and leaves an extraordinary post presidential legacy.”

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(WASHINGTON) — When unemployed marine biologist Lanny Flaherty poked his head into the ranger’s station at the Wallowa Whitman National Forest in the Pacific Northwest and asked to be a volunteer, he said it put him on a 13-year career path with the U.S. Forest Service that included stints as a botanist, a wildfire resource adviser and a range ecologist.

When he wasn’t researching the effects of vegetation on fire behavior or identifying fungi on national forest land, the 40-year-old Flaherty said he was a “red-card” carrying certified firefighter, helping battle some of the biggest wildland fires in the nation.

In 2016, he helped fight the Great Smoky Mountain wildfires, the largest arson blazes in Tennessee history, and in 2021, he helped extinguish the Dixie Fire that swept through five Northern California counties, scorching nearly a million acres and destroying more than 1,300 structures.

“I’m so proud of everything I’ve done,” Flaherty told ABC News. “Stumbling into the Forest Service was the first time in my life where I was like, ‘Oh, this fits. I’m running with it. This is me.'”

But while on assignment last week with a U.S. Forest Service fire engine crew in Louisiana restoring federal land and structures at the Kisatchie National Forest that had been devastated by hurricanes, Flaherty said his job came to an abrupt end.

As a probationary range ecologist, he was among several thousand probationary workers terminated from the U.S. Forest Service in the Trump administration’s sweeping reduction in the federal workforce being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to end up under the bus on what’s obviously a politically motivated illegal termination,” said Flaherty, whose two-year probationary period wasn’t scheduled to end until November of this year. “I mean, I’ve got 13 years’ worth of qualifications and I was cast aside as a probationary employee, despite having proven myself time and time again in a multitude of different positions.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, announced that 2,000 USFS “probationary, non-firefighting employees” were being let go. At least 1,000 probationary employees of the National Park Service, which is under the U.S. Interior Department, were also terminated, including those who worked as secondary firefighters.

“To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement.

Rollins, according to the USDA statement, “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people.”

“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve people, not the bureaucracy,” the USDA statement reads.

‘These fires are going to get exponentially bigger’

While hosting a roundtable in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday with U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters, Rollins praised their response to the devastating January wildfires in Los Angeles County that decimated the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Following the meeting, the USDA released a statement, saying, Rollins is “committed to ensuring that the United States has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world to save lives and protect our beautiful homeland.”

But the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) told ABC News that the USFS cuts will severely weaken the agency’s ability to respond to wildfires.

Steve Gutierrez, NFFE’s national business representative, said that based on data the union requested from the USFS, the number of fired probationary non-fire personnel is about 3,400.

Flaherty said that in the past five years, 40% to 50% of his job was fighting wildfires as part of what the Forest Services refers to as “militias” comprised of trained secondary firefighters.

“When a fire breaks out, we’re out there like everybody else getting into the fray,” Flaherty said.

Gutierrez, a former USFS firefighter, told ABC News that the cuts affect about 10% of the U.S. Forest Service’s total workforce. He said many of the terminated employees held dual jobs, like Flaherty, including working as firefighters responding to all-hands-on-deck blazes throughout the country.

“When I say ‘non-fire personnel,’ we can’t totally think that they don’t ever touch fire, that they’re not important,” Gutierrez said. “They’re all part of this logistical machine that helps support fire. They’re either ecologists, they’re mechanics, they’re pilots, they’re water systems operators, they’re grants and agreements folks, they’re land management, minerals and geologists to help recovery efforts from the aftereffect of fire.”

He added, “They support all of what happens before fire, during a fire and after a fire.”

Gutierrez said some of the federal employees who got fired had just helped battle the Los Angeles fires just weeks ago.

“They just fought this fire in LA, one of LA’s most devastating wildfires that we’ve ever had and now they’re terminated because they have ‘poor performance,'” Gutierrez said. “It’s just crazy to me that you can be so utterly disrespectful and ultimately it’s a slap in the face to these brave men and women who have risked their lives for the American public.”

Making matters worse, Gutierrez said, is an imposed hiring freeze, which has stalled the annual task of “fuels management,” which means clearing federal lands of fire hazards like dead trees and overgrown brush.

“If we’re not able to get that process moving immediately, fires are not going to just be, like, small. These fires are going to get exponentially bigger. Communities are going to burn and people are going to die, and that’s what’s going to happen,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not going to be just a California problem. It’s going to be a United States problem. I mean, there are several states, New Jersey, for example, they had a fire every year, every month for the past year. There was a fire in New York, right there in Manhattan. It’s not going to stop. It’s a national issue.”

Almost stranded in Louisiana

Flaherty said that when he got a call in Louisiana from his forest supervisor relating that he was terminated effective immediately with no severance package, he was initially told he’d have to get his own transportation back to Oregon.

“He offered no solution whatsoever, despite being fully aware of the fact that I would be stranded in Louisiana and unable to make travel arrangements short of purchasing myself a ticket. I was not in Louisiana on my own time, I was there on official travel and his plan was to, I guess, just wing it,” Flaherty said.

Flaherty said his union, the NFFE, intervened and got the USFS to cover his transportation by temporarily rescinding his termination until it got him back to Oregon.

“It’s just really sad that the top of the food chain doesn’t understand the impacts of what they’re doing when they swipe their pen,” said Gutierrez, responding to Flaherty almost being stranded in Louisiana. “They don’t understand the complexities of the entirety of the government.”

Flaherty said the “insult still rings true even though I am back home.”

“To me, that just kind of sums up how callous and poorly thought out all of this is,” Flaherty said. “I have deep, deep concerns for the amount of stress that everybody has been put through in every agency, and it just continues. It’s harming people’s physical and mental well-being, and it’s criminal.”

‘Dream job’

Eric Anderson said that in June 2024 he landed a job as a biological science technician and lead fire effects monitor for the National Park Service, after working since 2021 as a seasonal employee.

“I spent two years, three years working as a temporary hire to keep my face seen, to improve my qualifications, to gain more experience. And now, I finally get into a position that I knew three years ago, OK, my predecessor, is probably going to be retiring. I think I can improve my qualifications and become useful to do that position. And I worked toward it, I applied, and I got the position.”

Like Flaherty, Anderson, 48, a married father of two high school-aged children, told ABC News that he was fired in what he called, “the Valentine’s Day massacre.”

“You finally get your dream job that you’ve been working toward for many years, and it just got pulled out from under you for politics,” said Anderson, who was stationed at the Indiana Dunes National Park on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

He said he received his dismissal letter in his email inbox from an Interior Department administrator he had never met.

“The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs, and it is necessary and appropriate to terminate, during the probationary period, your appointment to the position of BioScience Tech (Fire Eff. Monitor),” reads the dismissal letter Anderson shared with ABC News.

“This is a lie. This says I’m fired because of my performance and my inability to do the job and that I’m no longer needed. My performance evaluations are excellent, and I’m crucial to the program. I have qualifications that we need within our unit to function,” Anderson said. “It’s a bit maddening.”

A former Peace Corps volunteer from 2000 to 2002 in Kenya, East Africa, Anderson said he used to work as a consultant in the private sector and took a huge pay cut when he joined the NPS as a seasonal employee.

“My bosses worked really hard to justify that I should be kept on, noting that in my position description, yes, it says biological science technician, but if you just read down a few lines, you see the box checked that says wildland firefighter, which was supposed to be in the protected ones that weren’t getting fired,” Anderson said.

In his job as a biological science technician, he said he would collect plant samples for analysis and prepped parklands in the winter months for the fire season, eliminating hazardous fuels by conducting prescribed or controlled burns. His work also included rehabilitating burned land.

“When bulldozers come through trying to protect towns, someone has to put that back together. So, we worked very much on how do we keep this from washing down the mountain during the next atmospheric river,” Anderson said. “By mid-August or so, we’re pretty much done with our sampling at various parks around the Great Lakes that we go to, and then we are available to do wildland fire or help as collaterals for wildland fires,” Anderson said. “A lot of the people that were let go in the last week were also collateral firefighters.”

In September, Anderson worked on the front lines of the Line Fire that burned more than 44,000 acres in and around the San Bernardino National Forest and threatened the community of Highland, California. In August 2023, Anderson said he helped battle the Happy Camp Complex Fire, which burned more than 21,000 acres in the Klamath National Forest in Northern California’s Siskiyou County.

He just returned in January from conducting prescribed fires in the Florida Everglades.

“Maybe, this is that Peace Corps volunteer in me that looks for mission-driven work. I know that’s just my personality type. I need to be working somewhere that I feel it’s important,” Anderson said. “I very much want to go back and work for the place that I was just fired from. I live what I do. These are all very qualified, excellent people doing good work that needs to be done and they’re just slashed without any real cause.”

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