Disasters

"Evacuations are now taking place in five North Carolina mountain counties as nearly 20 wildfires totaling more than 10,000 acres continue to spread."

"Are the many hog and poultry farms of eastern North Carolina creating 'fields of filth,' as two groups of environmental activists put it last summer? And if they are, what happens when a hurricane comes along and dumps a foot and a half of water on them?"

"Oklahoma’s oil and gas regulator plans to shut some disposal wells and reduce the volume of others as its initial response to Sunday’s earthquake near the oil hub of Cushing."

"The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said on Friday it had opened an investigation into the Colonial Pipeline Co accident in Helena, Alabama, which killed one worker and seriously injured four others."

"An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.0 struck near Cushing, Oklahoma, on Sunday damaging several buildings and prompting evacuations, but there were no reports of injuries, authorities said."

"When the remnants of Hurricane Matthew threatened the coastal lowlands of South Carolina, 335,000 people fled for higher ground. Marquetta Goodwine stayed put."

"FONDTOUTANU, Haiti — There is no food, so along the road through the mountains there are children begging for something to eat. Most of the trucks rumble past with donations for somewhere else. But one stopped here the other day with sacks of rice, beans and dried herring, setting off a stampede."

"A group of House Democrats on Wednesday urged federal officials to investigate the company that owns an Alabama pipeline that exploded this week."

"Beaches in the Southeastern U.S. took a tremendous beating last month from Hurricane Matthew. The U.S. Geological Survey has found that the storm washed over and damaged 15 percent of sand dunes on Florida's Atlantic Coast, 30 percent along Georgia's coastline and 42 percent of the dunes on South Carolina beaches."

"Several damaging Los Angeles-area earthquakes of the 1920s and 1930s, including the deadliest ever in Southern California, may have been induced by oil production during the region's drilling boom of that era, U.S. government scientists reported on Tuesday."