Disasters

"More than 1 million homes and businesses in a swath from Indiana to Virginia remained without power on Wednesday, five days after deadly storms tore through the region."

"More than 2,000 temperature records have been matched or broken in the past week as a brutal heat wave baked much of the United States, and June saw more than 3,200 records topped, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Monday."

"LOS ANGELES - The future of the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant could balance on an inescapable question: Is it worth the money to fix it?"

"TOKYO — The nuclear accident at Fukushima was a man-made disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture, a high-level parliamentary inquiry concluded on Thursday, in a report that also warned that the plant may not have stood up to earthquake damage — a worrying concern as the quake-prone country starts to bring its reactor fleet back online."

"To date in 2012, more than 173,000 acres have already burned in Colorado, destroying more than 600 homes and taken six lives, 7News reports. Now with 4th of July approaching, the heat combined with relative low humidity and unseasonable dryness has firefighters saying that fireworks are "not worth the risk" this year during the worst wildfire season in a decade."

"The US Air Force, which grounded the remaining seven of its eight C-130 air tankers after a crash in South Dakota on Sunday, has cleared the fleet to fly again today."

"Nearly two years after the pipeline explosion that killed eight people and devastated a neighborhood in San Bruno, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. considers 239 of its natural-gas transmission lines to be at risk of a similar failure, according to a company assessment obtained by The Chronicle."

"With widespread power outages still plaguing a multistate swath from Indiana to Virginia after the severe “derecho” event on Friday night, the late June heat wave continues to make headlines. Numerous all-time high temperature records were set on Saturday, with additional records expected to be set during the first few days of July.

"After several years of relatively benign fire seasons, the West is headed into a hot, dry summer of potentially ferocious blazes like the ones that have scorched Colorado in recent weeks."