As Congress hammers out disaster aid funding in the final days of the lame-duck session, advocates are pressing lawmakers to include $2.3 billion for more than two dozen national parks damaged by hurricanes, storms, wildfires and other natural disasters in the past two years.
The bulk of the funding request, $1.7 billion, would go for repairs on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, which was ravaged by Hurricane Helene in late September.
The rest would go toward restoring severely damaged areas of national parks from Yosemite in California, where a popular trail was hit by a rockslide in April, to Acadia in Maine, where back-to-back storms in January wiped out trails and beach areas.
