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Two years after Superstorm Sandy struck the Northeast, hundreds of Staten Islanders are deciding whether to sell their shorefront homes to New York state, which wants to knock them down and let the empty land act as a buffer to the ocean.

Stephen Drimalas was one Staten Islander faced with this tough decision. He lived in a bungalow not far from the beach in the working-class neighborhood of Ocean Breeze. He barely escaped Sandy's floodwaters with his life.

"I had to speed outta here," Drimalas said. "Another minute or two and I wasn't getting out. That's how fast it came in."

He was folding laundry before he fled. And when he came back the next day, the clothes were there on the top of his bed, but the bed was floating in water. He slept in his car on cold nights — before the FEMA check showed up — because he couldn't afford a motel room.

He fought with his insurance company, and when that money finally came through, he rebuilt his severely damaged home. A year after Sandy, it sounded like he'd be staying.

“ I had to speed outta here. Another minute or two and I wasn't getting out. That's how fast it came in.

- Stephen Drimalas

"This was a freaky thing that happened," he said. "It was a superstorm; it was a perfect storm. So I don't think we'll ever get another one again in my lifetime."

But about a third of his neighbors never came back. And when the city tore down several condemned homes, his block started looking gap-toothed and forlorn.

He wondered, "What if I wanted to move? Who'd pay money for a house in a flood zone?"

And Drimalas was still spooked from the night the storm rushed in.

"You know what happened, a couple of weeks ago, we had bad weather, and you hear the wind howling and everything like that," he said. "Then you start thinking, 'Uh oh, is the water coming again?' You know? It goes through your mind now 'cause, you know, it's in your head."

Then New York state offered to buy his home as part of program to get people out of dangerous areas likely to flood again. And after thinking it over, Drimalas took the deal. In the past two years, he's cycled through all the emotions of the victim of disaster: grief, fear, anger, defiance. But now there's a new one: contentment.

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"Everything's working out well," Drimalas said. "The state's giving me a nice price. I'm happy with it."

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He wouldn't say exactly how much he's been offered, but it's enough to cover the mortgage on this 900-square-foot home and the mortgage on a condo he owns in Florida. About 500 of his Staten Island neighbors have joined Drimalas in the buyout pipeline.

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Some On Staten Island Opt For Buyout Of 'Houses That Don't Belong'

"And little by little, they're moving out," Drimalas said. "You'll start seeing more and more U-Haul trucks here. People just want to go."

The state will spend about $200 million to purchase land in Ocean Breeze and two other Staten Island neighborhoods. That's about 550 acres of waterfront property in New York City that now faces an extremely unusual fate: permanent abandonment.

"We are going to demolish the homes," said Barbara Brancaccio, a spokeswoman for Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Office of Storm Recovery.

"Essentially, they go back to nature," she said. "We didn't bring this possibility to the community. The community came to us and said, 'We want to go.' "

But a handful of people are planning to stay. Brancaccio says that a year from now, those holdouts can expect their neighbors to be rabbits, raccoons and wild turkeys. Drimalas says it's happening already.

"You know what [I saw] in my yard the other day? A muskrat," he said.

Drimalas is preparing to relocate to his Florida condo. It's 2 miles inland and 30 feet above sea level. Right now he's selling or giving away his stuff, including a really big barbecue grill.

"My family's going to come take whatever they want first, whatever they need, and then I'll just sell the rest," he said.

For all he's been through, Drimalas is one of the lucky ones. Two of his neighbors, both in their 80s, drowned in Sandy's floodwaters. Drimalas may be saying goodbye to his home, but he gets to start again.

super storm

sandy

Hurricane Sandy

Chiquita Brands International, the banana and produce firm whose trademark blue stickers have been ubiquitous in American kitchens for decades, is being sold to two Brazilian companies in a deal valued at around $1.3 billion. The Charlotte-based company traces its roots to the 1870s, when American entrepreneurs brought bananas to U.S. consumers from the Caribbean.

The two Brazilian firms are produce and juice company Cutrale Group and the global investment conglomerate Safra Group. Chiquita's board voted to approve the deal days after its shareholders rejected a merger with a different company.

From the Charlotte Observer:

"The acquisition ends months of corporate wrangling. Chiquita had tried to fend off the Brazilians and instead merge with an Irish produce company, Fyffes. But shareholders voted down the Fyffes deal Friday, leaving Chiquita little choice but to agree to the rival takeover offer."

The deal values Chiquita's stock at $14.50 per share — a 33.8 percent premium on Chiquita's closing price when the Fyffes deal was first announced in March. The $1.3 billion value of the deal reflects nearly a 50-50 split of cash (about $680 billion) and assumed debt.

"We are pleased with the substantial value and significant all-cash premium we have delivered through this exciting agreement with the Cutrale Group and the Safra Group," Chiquita CEO Ed Lonergan said of the deal.

Chiquita's stock has risen sharply in value since the wrangling began. It's currently trading at around $14.35.

Chiquita says its annual revenues tally more than $3 billion. The company has approximately 20,000 workers, including several hundred in Charlotte. Today's announcement didn't mention any possible changes in the company's staffing or headquarters.

bananas

Economy

Think of California's Santa Barbara County and you might picture the area's famous beaches or resorts and wineries. But in the northern reaches of the vast county, oil production has been a major contributor to the economy for almost a century.

So it's no surprise that the oil industry there is feverishly organizing to fight a local ballot initiative — Measure P — that would ban controversial drilling methods such as hydraulic fracturing. What is turning heads, however, is the sheer volume of money flooding into this local race, mainly from large oil companies.

To date, firms such as Chevron and industry groups have chipped in more than $7 million to a campaign to defeat Measure P and a similar proposal farther up the California coast in San Benito County. That compares with just under $300,000 spent so far by the environmental groups that support the initiative and organized to get it on the local ballot.

Jim Byrne, spokesman for the "No on Measure P" campaign, is unapologetic about oil companies spending as much as they are.

"If I owned a business, I would want to do anything in my possibility to save that business," he says.

Byrne says Measure P would effectively shut down all new drilling operations in Santa Barbara County. There isn't even any "fracking" going on there right now — the industry says it doesn't work given the geology. But a process called steam injection is currently widely in use. That and other so-called "high intensity" drilling processes would be banned if the measure is approved by voters next month.

"They go after methods that have been utilized safely, responsibly and under the most stringent regulations for the last 50 years," Byrne says.

But supporters like to point out that there are provisions in the measure to protect existing drilling operations in the county. There are currently just over 1,100 active wells, mainly clustered in the northern part of the county.

Rancher Chris Wrather, a spokesman for the "Yes on Measure P" campaign, likens the proposal to an insurance policy.

"It will provide protection for the future, and that's what we really want," Wrather says.

After all, there's talk that California's Monterey Shale formation — which extends into Santa Barbara County — could be the site of the next North Dakota-type boom. Wrather's group is worried that a sharp rise in drilling could threaten the area's drought-stressed water supply.

Another worry, says Wrather, is the fact that supporters are being outspent 23 to 1.

"It really has the feel of trying to buy this election," he says.

In this post-Citizens United world, there's a lot more scrutiny on money in politics, especially when there are well-organized charges that it could be influencing small, local races like this one. But legal experts like professor Rick Hasen of the University of California, Irvine Law School caution against tying all the spending in the Measure P race to a broader national trend.

Hasen, for one, says he's not surprised about all the spending by the opposition.

"There's much more at stake in terms of the financial interest of those who would engage in oil drilling in this area than the amount that's being spent on the election," says Hasen, who also hosts a popular campaign finance blog.

Indeed, the stakes are high. If Measure P passes — or fails — it could set a precedent for other counties across California, and possibly even the country.

Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, just returned from a four-day trip to all three of West Africa's Ebola-stricken countries. Speaking with Melissa Block of All Things Considered, she said she saw promising signs of recovery but had also gained a sense of just how much work must still be done.

In Liberia, Power was struck by the gratitude expressed to the United States for "rescuing these countries in their hour of greatest need."

A Liberian told her: "America is the only country that is treating us like we are Nina Pham [the Dallas nurse recently declared Ebola-free]. America is hugging us like President Obama hugged Nina Pham."

The U.S. has deployed 3,000 ground troops to help construct 17 Ebola treatment units in Liberia, and Power said the effect is already noticeable. She visited a medical laboratory six hours away from the capital, Monrovia, where the assistance of U.S. troops had helped cut the wait time for results of an Ebola test from a week to just a few hours. This means fewer people will become infected by spending days waiting with already diagnosed Ebola patients to find out their diagnosis. And more beds will be available for those who actually have the disease.

"The morale of everyone associated with the anti-Ebola effort is increasing, and the recruitment of local workers was increasing," Power said. "The knowledge that there are more beds has all these knock-on effects." People are more likely to "come forward and be a hygienist or a sanitation worker knowing there will be a place for [them] if protocol is breached" and they fall ill.

She also saw better safety precautions resulting from improved training efforts. And employees and volunteers are sticking with assignments longer.

But Power says these promising signs aren't reflected evenly across the infection zone. Efforts in Monrovia and Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, still need to be replicated outside these central cities, especially in rural areas where the disease continues to spread:

"It does show you what can be scaled, if you have the resources, if you have the international health workers, if you have the helicopters to get to the more distant areas."

Power, who didn't interact with patients or enter an Ebola treatment unit, was screened when she arrived back in the U.S., then allowed to leave the airport. She will be taking her temperature twice a day for 21 days and calling it in to state health workers.

She supports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggestions for returning health care workers: They should visit a doctor who can approve them to return to daily life as long as they continue to monitor their temperature. She also warned against measures that would discourage health care workers from working in the Ebola zone.

"The way we will keep the American people safe is we will contribute to ending Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and we will mobilize the world to do the same," she said. "Anything that deters or discourages or stigmatizes workers who are part of that solution ... is something we want to avoid."

And she paid respect to the foreign health care workers who have come to help: "We are going out of the way to remind everybody ... of the heroism being exhibited by doctors and nurses who have traveled to these countries."

Samantha Power

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