Disasters

"A strengthening Hurricane Irene eased away from the northwestern Caribbean on Monday, leaving nearly one million people in the dark in Puerto Rico, a billionaire’s mansion torched by lightning in the British Virgin Islands and fears of a dark night of drenching rain and floods across Hispaniola."

"TOKYO — Broad areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could soon be declared uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, after a government survey found radioactive contamination that far exceeded safe levels, several major media outlets said Monday."

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moving forward on recommendations made by an internal task force studying the Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown. But it is not moving quite the way its chairman wanted."

"SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Puerto Ricans awoke to flooded and debris-strewn streets Monday following the overnight passage of Hurricane Irene, which next took aim at the Dominican Republic on a path that could take the storm to the U.S. by the end of the week."

"Without money to build a new satellite, the federal government will no longer be able to forecast severe weather events far enough in advance for communities to take life-saving action five years from now. That was the message that Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, delivered on Wednesday at a town-hall-style meeting in Denver."

"The famine in the Horn of Africa is manmade - the result of artificially high prices for food and civil conflict, the World Bank's lead economist for Kenya Wolfgang Fengler told Reuters Tuesday."

"For forensic meteorologists, who use the science of weather to testify in court about what has already happened, rather than predict what will occur, business could soon see an uptick."

"Japan insists its nuclear crisis was caused by an unforeseeable combination of tsunami and earthquake. But new evidence suggests its reactors were doomed to fail."

David McNeill and Jake Adelstein report for the Independent August 17, 2011.

SEE ALSO:

The planned oil-drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's coast could bring spills harder to control than the Deepwater Horizon blowout. For centuries, native Inupiat have huted bowhead whales, bearded seals, walruses, and Caribou here. The Interior Department has approved exploration here by Shell, the company recently cited by the United Nations for decades of oil pollution in the Niger Delta.

"The legacy of George Washington's centuries-old logging venture in the Great Dismal Swamp is contributing to the possible demise of a valuable ecosystem as a barely contained fire burns on the Virginia-North Carolina border, experts say."