Ten Across Conversations

Ten Across Conversations

Ten Across Conversations examines pressing issues impacting communities along the U.S. Interstate 10 corridor. From Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles, California, this region provides a compelling and comprehensive window into the major challenges and opportunities of the 21st century in their most extreme. Join founder and executive director, Wellington “Duke” Reiter, as he chats with subject experts bringing unique insights and new ways of thinking to reveal our collective capacity to create a more resilient future. For more information about the Ten Across Initiative visit www.10across.com.

Episodes

December 18, 2025 29 mins
This 2025 Ten Across podcast year in review takes a deep dive into the critical issues shaping the future of the Interstate 10 corridor.  

We’ve curated a series of interview clips and reflections that will examine contemporary U.S. climate, economic, and governance-related concerns as presented along this transect. From rising risks in insurance markets to the shifting responsibilities for disaster recovery, we’ll examine the urgen...
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Economic and social science research suggests climate risks are beginning to inform where people choose to live, raise families, and invest, foreshadowing the decline of a near 75-year trend of domestic migration to the Southern U.S. This is the focus of urban planner and trusted climate adaptation scholar Jesse M. Keenan’s new book, North: The Future of Post-Climate America.  

As the costs of environmental risks to homes, communiti...
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Despite more than two years of intense negotiations, the Veterans Day deadline to agree on the allotment of reduced water supplies under the Colorado River Compact passed without a consensus. If the seven states divided into the upper and lower basins of the river cannot put forward a joint proposal by February 14, the federal government will institute its own plan—which will likely result in appeals to the Supreme Court.  

Since th...
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In October, stakeholders representing an unusual combination of sectors — public, private, academic, non-profit and journalism — gathered with insurance industry experts at the 10X Convergence in Jacksonville, Florida, to explore solutions to unsustainable insurance and disaster recovery costs throughout the Interstate 10 region.

Insurers continue to cancel homeowners policies across California, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida as expo...
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As a prelude to the Ten Across Convergence in Jacksonville coming up on October 22nd—where insurability planning will be a focal topic—we’re sharing a conversation Charlie Sidoti and Stephen Brandt, founders of the nonprofit InnSure. Concerned about the risk protection gap growing with climate change in the U.S., these two have applied their combined decades of insurance industry expertise to form a professional network dedicated t...
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The Ten Across Resilience Network convened in Jacksonville, Florida, in April to share strategies from their communities—the hottest in the nation—for mitigating the mortality and economic loss caused by extreme heat, and to identify common obstacles to both long-term planning and immediate response. Representatives from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) joined the exercise to discuss and document the findings.  

With co-a...
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The human interventions intended to make Louisiana's coastline habitable and productive over the past century have contributed to the region's most existential threats. Without redress, displaced river sediment, compromised wetlands, and land subsidence will increasingly expose the state to extreme storm surge and sea level rise.  

In 2007, following the devastating impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Louisiana adopted its Coast...
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Negotiators representing seven states, 30 tribes, and Mexico are running out of time to agree on new rules to guide sharing of Colorado River water before a federally mandated deadline next fall. Failure to do so would forfeit water allocation authority to the Bureau of Reclamation, and costly state and tribal litigation would be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.  

Potable water supply for much of the West is not all that’s at s...
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Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast from Florida to Louisiana in 2005 and is still the costliest disaster in U.S. history. New Orleans, a city resting below sea level, is uniquely dependent on engineering for its safety. On August 29th, nearly every defense seemed to fail, allowing storm surge to flood 80% of the city.  

As terrible as the storm itself, arguably, were the human failures that contributed to what happened to N...
Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina—still the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history—made landfall in New Orleans. Many mark the storm as the transition point to a new age of extreme weather impacts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency more than tripled the size of its Disaster Relief Fund going forward as a result of Katrina and two other major hurricanes in 2005.  

Yet two decades later, disasters of this scale h...
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Recent Ten Across Conversations episodes have considered how current changes in staffing, research, and responsibilities within federal agencies like FEMA and NOAA may affect disaster readiness and response at the local level. Many cities find themselves pressed to rethink how their own limited resources might secure the information and support necessary to address the growing risks they face.  

Collaborative regional networks are p...
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Local broadcast meteorologists have become more vocal about the evidence of climate change in their communities’ weather in recent years. While some have encountered dramatic pushback, others have found audiences that are eager to understand the causes of recent record-breaking disturbances in familiar weather patterns.  

In Phoenix, meteorologist Amber Sullins—formerly a climate skeptic, herself—uses her role to inform an increasin...
The global climate has undoubtedly changed. Earlier this year, Copernicus, one of the most trusted weather models in the world, calculated that global average temperatures have increased by 1.4°C (2.5°F) since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This seemingly slight increase has had an outsized effect on weather patterns, challenging our ability to predict and prevent disasters resulting from more extreme weather.  

Most Americ...
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This episode deals with some mature topics. Listener discretion is advised.  

This week, we’re bringing you the second half of our discussion with author E.A. (Elizabeth) Hanks about her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. Elizabeth undertook her journey along the iconic Interstate 10 transect to better understand herself and the nation we inhabit—and her experience is a perfect subject for a Ten Across conversa...
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Earlier this year, E.A. Hanks—also known as Elizabeth—made her literary debut The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. Considering its framing, it is no surprise that the book was recommended to Ten Across by many. The 10 documents Elizabeth's re-creation of a fraught childhood road trip taken with her mother in 1996, traveling Interstate 10 from end to end. In retracing her mother’s path, she reflects on the diverse nature of...
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Previous episodes in our AI series have focused on the evolving features of artificial intelligence itself: its potential to democratize education and to improve city planning and weather forecasting. In this final installment, we examine its costs: the accelerating resource demands of AI and other data-intensive technologies.  

Maya Chari, this year’s Ten Across + APM Research Lab data journalism fellow, recently investigated the t...
Over the course of a calendar year ending in May 2025, the United States absorbed nearly $1 trillion in damages due to extreme weather. This amount, representing 3% of U.S. gross domestic product, was driven by rising insurance costs and a series of disasters primarily concentrated in the Ten Across geography, such as Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the fires in Los Angeles.  

More than ever before, timely and detailed forecasts ar...
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This is the second episode in our limited series about artificial intelligence trends shaping life in the I-10 corridor and beyond. In this episode we chat with experts from the Ten Across cities of Phoenix, Houston and Jacksonville on the power of digital twins to more seamlessly convene stakeholders around shared goals.    

As virtual representations of actual places and systems, digital twins at their most advanced can incorporat...
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As we were publishing this episode, news from The New York Times broke that Jeremy Greenberg, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster command center has left his post, a day after President Trump said he would wind down the federal agency by November. CBS reported that Tony Robinson, regional administrator of FEMA Region 6, which includes Ten Across states New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, also intends to ...
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Last week, news broke that the depletion of groundwater across the Colorado River Basin has been quietly, rapidly outpacing the more visible decline of the river itself. Even as the seven basin states negotiate reduced consumption of river water—inevitably driving dependence toward local aquifers instead—this newly published research shows that the majority ofmost of the water lost throughout the basin in recent years has been unde...
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