Disasters

"The Senate easily cleared a disaster relief bill on Tuesday, sending the legislation to President Trump's desk."

"For the sprawling effort to restore Puerto Rico’s crippled electrical grid, the territory’s state-owned utility has turned to a two-year-old company from Montana that had just two full-time employees on the day Hurricane Maria made landfall."

"A House-passed bill aimed at helping communities impacted by a string of recent natural disasters cleared a key hurdle in the Senate on Monday evening."

Climate change has undermined the risk calculations for dams. President Obama had a program to make dams more resilient, but President Trump plans to do away with this key dam safety program.

"Fires, floods and hurricanes are already costing the federal government tens of billions of dollars a year and climate change will drive those costs ever higher in coming years, a new federal study warns. The report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s auditing arm, urges the Trump administration to take climate change risks seriously and begin formulating a response."

"Federal wildlife officials say Hurricane Irma didn't wipe out a herd of tiny, endangered deer found only in the Florida Keys."

"The California Department of Insurance said on Thursday its preliminary estimate for insured wildfire losses was $1.05 billion, based on claims received by the state’s eight largest insurers, adding that it expected the numbers to rise."

"As wildfires rage across California and the West, Democratic and Republican senators have joined forces to help rural communities better prepare for and prevent catastrophic wildfires."

"OROVILLE, Calif. — The costs to repair the nation's tallest dam after a nearly catastrophic failure of the spillways will top $500 million, nearly double the original estimate of $275 million, a California Department of Water Resources official said Thursday."

"An oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last week may be the largest in the U.S. since the 2010 blowout at BP Plc’s Macondo well that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig and killed 11 people."