disaster
gregladen | September 29, 2017The White House calls the disaster in Puerto Rico a "good news story," implying that the federal government is doing a great job there.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump put out a tweet today that seems to imply that the US needs to consider whether or not it wants to help Puerto Rico, which, by the way, is actually part of the United States.
Here is the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, responding to some of this:
Hat tip: Media Matters for America
gregladen | February 6, 2017Great disasters are great stories, great moments in time, great tests of technology, humanity, society, government, and luck. Fifty years ago it was probably true to say that our understanding of great disasters was thin, not well developed because of the relative infrequency of the events, and not very useful, not knowledge that we could use to reduce the risks from such events.
This is no longer true. The last several decades has seen climate science add more climatic data because of decades of careful instrumental data collection happening, but also, earlier decades have been added to…
gregladen | August 25, 2015The terrorists have defeated the railroads, and by extension, the people. Well, not totally defeated, but they won a small but important battle.
We have a problem with the wholesale removal of petroleum from the Bakken oil fields, and the shipping of that relatively dangerous liquid mainly to the east coast on trains, with hundreds of tanker cars rolling down a small selection of tracks every day. I see them all the time as they go through my neighborhood. These trains derail now and then, and sometimes those derailments are pretty messy, life threatening, and even fatal.
There has been…
milhayser | November 5, 2012
Hurricane Sandy Impacts Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge (DE) by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Hurricane Sandy made landfall on October 29th, drawn northwest by two cold fronts into the most populous area of the United States. Coby Beck has a telling wind map of the colossal storm on A Few Things Ill Considered, which was abetted by "a full moon causing the highest high tides of the year." Sandy wreaked widespread devastation, and left over 100 Americans dead. Greg Laden writes that we have learned a lot from killer storms over the decades, and we were more prepared for Sandy than any…
milhayser | September 14, 2011
Natural disaster struck twice last month on the east coast of the United States: first, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake rattled windows from Atlanta to Boston, and then a waning hurricane whirled all the way to New York City and on to Canada as a tropical storm. The temblor caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, but the storm caused billions, and killed dozens of people. Sharon Astyk provides a firsthand view of the damage in upstate New York, where the storm turned her farm into a swamp, her creek into a raging torrent, and her locust trees into goat fodder and firewood. She…
lborkowski | July 5, 2011One of the disturbing aspects of the recent E. coli outbreak in Germany was the apparent lack of sufficient hospital surge capacity to handle a sudden influx of seriously ill patients. Der Spiegel reported:
On Monday, hospitals all over northern Germany struggled to treat thousands of patients suffering from the effects of the bacteria. More than one-third of the people infected with E. coli have also come down with a life-threatening complication known as hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS) which attacks the blood, kidneys and brain, and has left doctors racing to save lives. Ambulances have…
milhayser | May 26, 2011
Time goes on and turns our attention, but radioactive isotopes take a long time to decay. On Greg Laden's Blog, Analiese Miller and Greg update us on the nuclear crisis in Japan. Although the dangers faced at the Fukushima power plant have diminished, the long term consequences have just begun. Greg writes "it has been a while since extensive fission has occurred in the leaking reactor" and "there is real progress in hooking up the plants to outside power sources." Meanwhile, Ana's extensive news feed documents irradiated produce, neglected and euthanized livestock, and a widened evacuation…
lborkowski | May 19, 2011On April 5, 2010, an explosion occurred at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia. The blast rocketed through 2.5 miles of underground chambers and tunnels nearly 1,000 feet beneath the mountains, and it killed 29 miners and severely injured another. The youngest victim was Cory Thomas Davis, age 20, who loved spending weekends hunting and fishing in the mountains, and the oldest was Benny Willingham, age 61, a Vietnam veteran of the US Air Force who had been a coal miner for 30 years and was five weeks away from retirement.
Shortly after the tragic day, then-…
milhayser | May 3, 2011
The staggering 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan March 11 sent a thirty foot tall tsunami raging up to six miles inland, with diminished waves reaching all the way to the Pacific Islands and the shores of North America. In Japan, thousands are dead, and the devastation is stunning. On Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau reflects that due Japanese diligence may have spared millions of lives, noting "the earthquake in Haiti last year, which was 100 times weaker, killed 230,000." On Observations of a Nerd, Christie Wilcox recounts her experience in Hawaii, from…
milhayser | February 22, 2011
January 28th marked the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, when one of the rocket boosters separated from the external fuel tank after liftoff and aerodynamic forces tore the shuttle apart. Like millions of Americans, Ethan Siegel and Greg Laden watched the orbiter disintegrate live on TV. Ethan writes that while "we found and fixed the flaws that caused the accident, and returned to space 32 months later with the Space Shuttle Discovery," we "lost our eagerness for human space exploration in a way that would have been unfathomable 20 years prior." NASA shifted its…
lborkowski | November 16, 2010When severe flooding in Pakistan left millions of people without food, shelter, and water, I wrote a post wondering why that disaster was getting less attention than Haiti's earthquake. I suspected the gradual nature of the disaster was part of the problem, and commenters had additional suggestions, ranging from Haiti's closeness to the US to the US public's overall view of Pakistan as a nation.
Last week, The New York Times' Lydia Polgreen put some numbers on the Haitian earthquake vs. Pakistani floods comparison and delved into reasons for the disparity:
In all, $3.4 billion has been…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2010tags: BP Spills Coffee, Upright Citizen's Brigade Comedy Team, BP, British Petroleum, oil spill, disaster, environment, social commentary, Gulf of Mexico, comedy, humor, satire, funny, fucking hilarious, streaming video
What would happen if BP spilled a bunch of coffee on their conference room table? Pretty much the same thing if they spilled a whole bunch of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This Upright Citizen's Brigade theater sketch spoof explores the delicate mapping between the two scenarios, and the delightful comedy that ensues. Kevin Costner's voice, or a reasonable facsimile, guest stars…
sastyk | May 17, 2010We still don't have the faintest idea how much oil is spewing out of the well in the Gulf. Nor do we have the faintest idea what the full environmental consequence of what may well be the biggest single-event human-caused. ecological disaster of all time (the very fact that I have to add the word "single-event" to that statement should tell you something). We know that it is almost certainly more than all the low estimates to date, and we know that the ecological consequences will be huge, lasting and we do not understand them.
That is, we know some of the potential effects, we know they…
stoat | April 28, 2010 Ah, tis the electoral season, so it is no-holds-barred on the Tories.
Thanks to Paul and Ow.ly.
Original by Michael Schofield. I've cropped mine a little.
Meanwhile, it looks like Brown is in trouble. Mind you, I've no idea if the original comment was justified ot not.
Remember: Vote Green.