Disasters

"A cyclone barreled into eastern India on Friday, bringing down trees and power lines and “extensively” damaging the tourist town of Puri, but there were no early reports of casualties with a million people evacuated before it made landfall."

"The Trump administration on Thursday made public its rollback of a major offshore-drilling safety regulation, significantly weakening an Obama-era rule that was put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 people and sent 4.9 million barrels of oil gushing into the sea, causing the worst oil spill in American history."

"Five weeks after historic flooding in the midwest, waters still cover pasturelands, corn and soybean fields. Much of the water has receded, but rivers still run high and washed out roads force people to take long detours. Residents in Missouri are putting their ruined possessions on the street and corn stalks heaped by floodwaters look like snowdrifts in the fields."

"Aid workers in northern Mozambique scrambled planes and helicopters packed with aid to communities cut off, sometimes without any supplies, for at least two days after Cyclone Kenneth brought torrential rain to the region."

"The Environmental Protection Agency published a 150-page document this past week with a straightforward message for coping with the fallout from natural disasters across the country: Start planning for the fact that climate change is going to make these catastrophes worse."

"The Antarctic’s second-largest colony of emperor penguins collapsed in 2016, with more than 10,000 chicks lost, and the population has not recovered, according to a new study."

"A leak in a container holding hazardous chemicals created a massive chemical spill early Thursday and sent 37 people to the hospital, including seven in critical condition, said authorities in Beach Park, Illinois."

"A grand duel is taking place out West, but no cowboys are involved. It’s between the native sagebrush, which has dominated the Western landscape for more 12,000 years, and a newer, highly invasive and flammable species called cheatgrass."

"U.S. senators are fighting over the details of an approximately $13 billion disaster aid package to help these states and Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. But congressional feuding over disaster aid is unlikely to stop even after the current impasse is resolved. In a typical year, taxpayer spending on the federal disaster relief fund is almost 10 times higher than it was three decades ago, even after adjusting for inflation, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data."

"Another tropical cyclone is expected to make landfall on Mozambique’s coast on Thursday, just over a month after a more powerful storm struck the Mozambican port city of Beira further south and killed hundreds of people."