"SALMON, Idaho -- U.S. wildfire managers facing increasingly strained resources have opened talks with Pentagon commanders and Canadian officials about possible reinforcements of personnel and aircraft to battle dozens of blazes raging across the drought-parched American West."
"Yosemite area wildfire destroys two homes and sends tourists, residents packing. Although officials haven't closed Yosemite, wildfire has forced the closing of one of three entrances to the national park."
As wildfires rage across the West, the costs of the fight to protect lives and property are up. But budget cuts imposed by an austerity-minded Congress have meant that funds to protect people are down.
"At least three people were killed by an ammonia gas leak from a pipeline owned by state oil monopoly Pemex in southern Mexico on Tuesday and 1,500 people were evacuated from the area and taken to shelters, the company said."
"The Interior Department [Wednesday] proposed a new rule designed to strengthen the safety of offshore oil and gas production technologies as industry reaches into deeper and riskier waters."
"An advisory panel to Tokyo Electric Power Co. urged the utility to tighten water-management procedures at its crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant weeks before 300 metric tons of radioactive water seeped out, the panel’s chairman said."
"Quebec's government last week added rail giant Canadian Pacific Railway Corp. to its list of companies deemed responsible for cleanup costs following last month's deadly oil train derailment."
"Japan will raise the severity rating of a recent toxic water leak at the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant to level 3, or 'serious incident', on an international scale for radiological releases, underlining the deepening sense of crisis at the site."
"Trains smack of progress, freedom and adventure. It’s said that railroads revolutionized America. The Association of American Railroads (AAR) touts the safety record of the rails: 'In 2012, North American railroads safely delivered more than 2.47 million carloads of hazardous materials.' But sometimes trains leak, derail or just plain explode."
"TOKYO -- Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the most serious setback to the clean up of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl."
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