Disasters
FEMA no longer provides ice in emergency situations
Megan Chuchmach of ABC.com reports that new FEMA rules stipulate that states must provide their own ice in emergency situations. FEMA changed its policy is due the high cost of storing ice and its high perishability. Many relief aid workers and state officials did not know about the change, causing problems in areas affected by…
Read MoreCity’s wildfire clean-up exceeded estimates
Following the October 2007 wildfires, the city of San Diego contracted with two companies for demolition and clean-up of homes destroyed in the fire. Original estimates for the service was around $28,000 per home, but the final costs surpassed the original estimate by more than 68 percent according to a watchdog report by Dana Wilkie,…
Read MoreChinese officials buy silence from grieving parents
Chinese officials are offering “hush money” to families who lost children in the May 12 earthquake, reports Edward Wong of The New York Times. “Local governments in southwest China’s quake-ravaged Sichuan Province have begun a coordinated campaign to buy the silence of angry parents whose children died during the earthquake, according to interviews with more…
Read MoreRevisiting Willow Island
The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette published a two-day package marking the 30th anniversary of the Willow Island Disaster, the largest construction accident in U.S. history. Fifty-one construction workers died on April 27, 1978, when a scaffold collapsed during construction of a coal-fired power plant along the Ohio River. The Gazette examines the disaster’s causes, interviews survivors…
Read MoreThe global food crisis
A series by The Washington Post explores the causes and implications of the current global food crisis, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1970s. “A complex combination of poor harvests, competition with biofuels, higher energy prices, surging demand in China and India, and a blockage in global trade is driving food…
Read MoreGaps in Wisconsin tornado warning system identified
After tornadoes ripped through the southern part of the state earlier this month, Ben Poston of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that thousands of southeastern Wisconsin residents are out of range for tornado warning sirens. Using mapping software, Poston plotted nearly 75 siren locations in Milwaukee and Racine counties and then overlayed census data to…
Read More“13 Seconds in August” details bridge collapes
The Star Tribune spent months reconstructing the locations and identities of the more than 150 people who were on the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis when it collapsed into the Mississippi River on August 1. With the help of an aerial photo, an interactive Flash graphic titled “13 Seconds in August” offers the most comprehensive…
Read MoreFEMA aid distribution uneven to victims of NY storms
Patrick Lakamp, Mary Pasciak and Susan Schulman of the Buffalo News report on FEMA’s uneven aid to areas hit by a surprise storm last October. “Almost one-half the nearly 18,000 residents in Western New York who applied for FEMA money got some help. But in Buffalo, one-third of the applicants received aid.” In North Buffalo,…
Read MoreBridge data adds context to collapse
Following the collapse of an I-35 bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, journalists turned to the National Bridge Inventory database, available from IRE and NICAR, to check the bridge’s inspection history. The Saint Paul Pioneer Press. and The Star Tribune reported that inspection data from 2005 showed that the Minnesota Department of Transportation deemed…
Read MoreResidential areas grow in wildfire risk zones
According to a USA Today report by Brad Heath, “Since 2000, roughly 450,000 people — enough to populate a city the size of Atlanta — moved to Western areas endangered by wildfires.” Heath’s analysis combined historical fire data from the USGS Forest Service, Census population data, fire modeling software used by researchers and a wild…
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