"New government data released Monday revealed that the U.S. has already experienced more billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 than in any other year since authorities started tracking such data 40-plus years ago." "The staggering tally comes with four months of the year still remaining."
Seattle-based correspondent Brett Walton has a habit of adding extra days to his reporting schedules. In this FEJ StoryLog, Walton shares how he used one such buffer to stretch a grant and produce not just one story on California’s small drinking water systems, but a second on the aftermath of wildfire on another town’s water system, plus finish a third pending project on household water debt.
"The construction of former President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border desecrated Indigenous cultural sites, hurt wildlife, destroyed vegetation, dried up key water resources, exacerbated the risk of flooding and triggered erosion that has left mountain slopes “unstable and at risk of collapse,” according to a new report."
"Sanitation workers Thomas Noatak and Joseph Moses start every workday riding a four-wheeler along the muddy roads of this small Yup’ik village on southwestern Alaska’s vast Kuskokwim River, looking for human waste."
"Drought is making it harder for golf lovers to justify the game’s copious use of water".
"The Dakota Access oil pipeline’s future remains uncertain after the Army Corps of Engineers on Friday released a long-awaited draft environmental study that will help determine whether it receives an easement needed to keep operating."
"Using explosives is illegal, wasteful and devastating to marine life and people’s livelihoods. Yet in Sri Lanka and around the world it’s thriving as a quick and easy route to a lucrative haul".
"The state of Utah is not doing enough to save its imperiled Great Salt Lake and stop an impending ecological collapse, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by national and western environmental groups."
"The Asian financial hub of Hong Kong was drenched on Friday by the heaviest rain since records began 140 years ago, killing one person and injuring 83, media reported, as unusually wet weather caused by typhoons brought more disruption to southern China."
"Gabriel Prout worked four seasons on his father’s crab boat, the Silver Spray, before joining his two brothers in 2020 to buy a half-interest plus access rights for a snow crab fishery that’s typically the largest and richest in the Bering Sea. Then in 2021, disaster: an annual survey found crabs crashing to an all-time low."
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