Disasters

"Why were two prisons built in a lakebed in the first place?"

"When a wildfire started in the mountains of Fresno County late last month, much of California was on the cusp of a heat wave that would go on to smash records both for its intensity and duration. Over the next week and a half, as the Basin fire swelled to more than 14,000 acres and temperatures in the area reached 112 degrees, at least nine firefighters were treated for heat-related illness. Four were taken to local hospitals, three of them airlifted from the fire line."

"Millions of low-income households are at risk of having their power disconnected this summer, exacerbating the risk of deadly heat as the climate crisis drives up temperatures."

"Hundreds of people in a southern Illinois town were ordered to evacuate Tuesday as water rolled over the top of a dam, just one perilous result of severe weather that raged through the Midwest overnight with relentless rain and tornadoes and hit the Chicago area especially hard."

"The Environment Programme report focuses on potential dangers to the planet, from disease to unlivable places."

"The latest flooding in Vermont has added fresh urgency to concerns about the hundreds of dams in the state, a third of which are more than a century old."

"A fairly controlled fire grew to a 10,000-hectare inferno over the course of a day, causing 9,600 residents of an eastern Canadian community to flee and putting a nearby community on evacuation alert."

"Michael, a resident of Richmond’s Southside who declined to share his last name, sat on Forest Hill Avenue waiting for a bus Tuesday just before 2 p.m., when a car thermometer recorded the temperature at 94 degrees."

"The long overdue federal heat standard proposal gets many things right but will take years to enact, and enforcement will be key, says climate health expert Juanita Constible."