"A raging forest fire enveloped a stretch of road in central Portugal this weekend, killing more than 60 people, including at least 30 motorists who were trapped in their cars."
"California is ordering immediate spillway inspections at about 70 aging dams that it believes might not be sound enough to protect downstream communities in a flood, a state dam regulator said Wednesday."
"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will delay implementation of an Obama-era chemical safety rule for nearly two years while it reassesses the necessity of the regulation."
"Neil Shook was relaxing at home in Woodworth, N.D., on a Saturday afternoon just over a week ago. 'My wife was outside and she yelled at me to come outside and take a look at this,' he recalls. A massive brown cloud covered the horizon to the west."
"Cities lining the U.S. coasts should brace for a lot more flooding — from 'nuisance' floods that shut down streets during high tides to deluges that take lives and wipe out infrastructure."
Extreme weather hypotheticals can be hard to cover. But when news teams Texas Tribune and ProPublica partnered on an award-winning investigation into how a major hurricane in Houston could kill thousands and cripple the national economy, they produced an innovative digital reporting package that brought home the human impacts.
"TOMS RIVER, N.J. — In one of the largest beach repair projects in U.S. history, the federal government has begun dumping so much sand on a stretch of the New Jersey shore that it could fill a football stadium more than five times over."
"At the end of a Senate hearing last month, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) challenged Dave McCurdy, president of the American Gas Association, to say how Congress and the public can be confident about the cybersecurity defenses of the nation's natural gas infrastructure when no one is keeping score."
As some warned, federal environmental agencies have begun to purge web info on topics like climate change. WatchDog TipSheet has that story, plus items about an unusual libel lawsuit, a news outfit using satellite for groundtruthing, a new source of online water data, how journalists can protect against surveillance and more.
The 2017 hurricane season officially begins this week and experts say it may be worse than usual. So the latest TipSheet has sources and tools to help you prepare for your hurricane coverage. Understand the importance of landfall and storm path, find out about this year's big wild card, and get tips for staying safe.
