"Several wildfires raged unchecked across drought-parched Colorado on Thursday, one threatening oil and gas wells close to the Utah border and another about 300 miles to the southeast chased a group of Boy Scouts from their camp near New Mexico."

"Downtown Calgary could look like a bit of a ghost town today, with entire neighbourhoods shut down and office workers told to stay home due to massive flooding."

"Federal prosecutors unveiled new criminal indictments on Wednesday against a former BP Plc executive and a former BP engineer charged with obstructing investigations into the April 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill."

"COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- As the West battles one catastrophic wildfire after another, the federal government is spending less and less on its main program for preventing blazes in the first place."

"TOKYO — Japan’s new nuclear regulator adopted a fresh set of safety guidelines on Wednesday, starting a process that could allow some of the country’s idled reactors to come back online early next year."

"TransCanada Corp., which says Keystone XL will be the safest pipeline ever built, isn’t planning to use infrared sensors or fiber-optic cables to detect spills along the system’s 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) path to Texas refineries from fields in Alberta."

"State and federal investigators in Louisiana are working to uncover what caused fatal blasts at two different chemical plants in the span of two days."

"The U.S. Justice Department filed a joint lawsuit with Arkansas on Thursday against oil producer Exxon Mobil Corp over the pipeline spill in March of thousands of barrels of heavy Canadian crude oil in a suburban neighborhood."

"Rising seas and increasingly severe weather are expected to increase the areas of the United States at risk of floods by up to 45 percent by 2100, according to a first-of-its-kind report released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday. These changes could double the number of flood-prone properties covered by the National Flood Insurance Program and drastically increase the costs of floods, the report finds."