Disasters

"A House-passed bill aimed at helping communities impacted by a string of recent natural disasters cleared a key hurdle in the Senate on Monday evening."

Climate change has undermined the risk calculations for dams. President Obama had a program to make dams more resilient, but President Trump plans to do away with this key dam safety program.

"Fires, floods and hurricanes are already costing the federal government tens of billions of dollars a year and climate change will drive those costs ever higher in coming years, a new federal study warns. The report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s auditing arm, urges the Trump administration to take climate change risks seriously and begin formulating a response."

"Federal wildlife officials say Hurricane Irma didn't wipe out a herd of tiny, endangered deer found only in the Florida Keys."

"The California Department of Insurance said on Thursday its preliminary estimate for insured wildfire losses was $1.05 billion, based on claims received by the state’s eight largest insurers, adding that it expected the numbers to rise."

"As wildfires rage across California and the West, Democratic and Republican senators have joined forces to help rural communities better prepare for and prevent catastrophic wildfires."

"OROVILLE, Calif. — The costs to repair the nation's tallest dam after a nearly catastrophic failure of the spillways will top $500 million, nearly double the original estimate of $275 million, a California Department of Water Resources official said Thursday."

"An oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last week may be the largest in the U.S. since the 2010 blowout at BP Plc’s Macondo well that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig and killed 11 people."

"This archipelago in the Gulf of Alaska is home to one of the busiest commercial fishing ports in the country. Inside the Ocean Beauty seafood plant in Kodiak, where a maze of conveyer belts carry gutted salmon past workers in hairnets and gloves, manager James Turner ticks off everything that contributes to his monthly electricity bill: canning machines, pressure cookers, freezers lights."

"One of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the northeastern Atlantic bore down on Ireland on Monday, unleashing strong winds and rain that killed at least three people and visited destruction on an island with little experience of such powerful storms."