Disasters

"A devastating Texas drought that has browned city lawns and caused more than $5 billion in damages to the state's farmers and ranchers could continue for another nine years, a state forecaster said on Thursday."

"'It is possible that we could be looking at another of these multiyear droughts like we saw in the 1950s, and like the tree rings have shown that the state has experienced over the last several centuries,' State Climatologist John Nielson-Gammon told Reuters.

"An ongoing federal investigation into last year's massive rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has found that a particularly lax U.S. regulatory regime was a significant factor in the events leading up to the disaster."

"ISLAMABAD -- Environmentalists are blaming climate change for the unprecedented massive monsoon rains in Pakistan, which so far this year have affected eight million people, claiming 350 lives and damaging 1.3 million homes."

"Five prefectures' nuclear burden a hot potato no one wants to catch."

"Five engineer climbers will take four more days to meticulously photograph every marble block as they look for damage caused by the August earthquake."

"Global warming-denying governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry can't escape a major reckoning at home."

"SEATTLE -- Utility crews have found a total of eight natural gas leaks in the north Seattle neighborhood where a home exploded, injuring two residents in a two-alarm fire."

"The United States secretly sought Japan's support in 1972 to enable it to dump decommissioned nuclear reactors into the world's oceans under the London Convention, an international treaty being drawn up at the time."

"SAN BRUNO -- Much of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s natural-gas transmission system could be at risk of catastrophic failure, but the company's record-keeping system is so flawed that the true danger is impossible to determine, federal investigators said Monday in their final report on last year's San Bruno disaster."

"Even minuscule amounts of BP's crude oil has affected fish in profound ways in the Gulf of Mexico—even when oil in the water was nondetectable. This according to a paper in early view in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science)."