In the Virgin Islands, Hurricane Maria Drowned What Irma Didn’t Destroy
"As islanders wait for doctors, medicine, fuel and manpower to rebuild, the economic toll from the storms is only starting to come to light."
"As islanders wait for doctors, medicine, fuel and manpower to rebuild, the economic toll from the storms is only starting to come to light."
"Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator who has aggressively pushed to dismantle regulations and downsize the organization, is threatening to reach outside his agency and undermine the Justice Department’s work enforcing antipollution laws, documents and interviews show."
"Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has taken at least four noncommercial and military flights since mid-February, costing taxpayers more than $58,000 to fly him to various parts of the country, according to records provided to a congressional oversight committee and obtained by The Washington Post."
"It's been one week since Category 4 Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, destroying the entire island's communications infrastructure, power grid, and leaving thousands homeless. The humanitarian crisis in the storm's wake is growing by the hour."
"When extraordinary hurricanes and floods battered parts of the United States and Caribbean this month, Paolo Bacigalupi’s readers started sending him news clips. In 'Ship Breaker,' which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, Mr. Bacigalupi, a science fiction writer, had invented a monster 'Category 6' hurricane."
"A sprawl of mobile home parks house 10,000 people in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, but their drinking water is chronically contaminated. Now some solutions are in sight."
"The United States and Mexico have agreed to renew and expand a far-reaching conservation agreement that governs how they manage the overused Colorado River, which supplies water to millions of people and to farms in both nations, U.S. water district officials said."
"The Environmental Protection Agency says it has recovered 517 containers of 'unidentified, potentially hazardous material' from highly contaminated toxic waste sites in Texas that flooded last month during Hurricane Harvey. The agency has not provided details about which Superfund sites the material came from, why the contaminants at issue have not been identified and whether there’s a threat to human health."
"When Jane Horton bought her dream 800-square-foot farmhouse in 1975, she thought little of the semiconductor manufacturing plant across the street. Even after the company’s buildings were demolished and a chain-link fence went up around the campus, she still had no knowledge of the toxic dangers lurking beneath her feet — let alone of the fact that they were invading her home."
"José A. Rivera, a farmer on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, stood in the middle of his flattened plantain farm on Sunday and tried to tally how much Hurricane Maria had cost him. 'How do you calculate everything?' Mr. Rivera said."