Disasters

"To reach a lost American place, here just a moment ago, follow a thin country road as it unspools across an Appalachian valley’s grimy floor, past a coal operation or two, a church or two, a village called Twilight. Beware of the truck traffic. Watch out for that car-chasing dog."

"Japanese officials struggled through the day on Tuesday to explain why it had taken them a month to disclose large-scale releases of radioactive material in mid-March at a crippled nuclear power plant, as the government and an electric utility disagreed on the extent of continuing problems there."

"Firefighters battled Monday to contain several large blazes that have burned hundreds of square miles of rural Texas and destroyed dozens of homes since last week, getting reinforcements from out of state as they struggled against some of the worst wildfire conditions in state history."

"Japan has raised its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday."

"Japan's unfolding reactor crisis is fueling a battle over nuclear power across the Pacific, in earthquake-prone California."

"An internal review of the Coast Guard’s performance during the BP oil spill cleanup last year has concluded that the agency was caught badly unprepared and that the response operation was dogged from the beginning by significant planning failures."

Japan on Monday expanded the evacuation zone around its crippled nuclear plant because of high levels of accumulated radiation, as a strong aftershock rattled the area one month after a quake and tsunami sparked the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl."

"A lot of dead dolphins continue to wash ashore along the Gulf Coast and now a lot of sea turtles — most of them rare Kemp's ridleys — are washing up dead too, federal officials said Thursday."

"More than 900,000 households remained without electricity on Friday after the strongest aftershock to hit since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan rocked a wide section of the country’s northeast."

"U.S. officials say the nation’s health system is ill-prepared to cope with a catastrophic release of radiation, despite years of focus on the possibility of a terrorist 'dirty bomb' or an improvised nuclear device attack."