Latest Natural Disasters Headlines
All the headlines from our Natural Disasters Topic Page, ordered by recency.
Montana’s Wildfire Season Second-biggest So Far This decade
Sep 17 2015 // Montana’s fire season began quietly but has quickly grown to the second-largest so far this decade after lightning storms last month ignited a rash of blazes that spread rapidly amid bone-dry conditions. This season...
Massive California Blazes, And It’s Not Even Official Wildfire Season Yet
Sep 16 2015 // A pair of massive blazes in the Northern California are a bleak reminder of how bad things can get in a state with persistent drought and windy conditions. A more worrisome thought is California’s official wildfire...
Forrest Service Maps Shows Expansion of WUI in West as Wildfires Burn
Sep 16 2015 // A new U.S. Forest Service report shows the continued expansion of housing development near forests, an area referred to as the wildland-urban interface, with direct implications for the cost of wildfire...
Wildfire in California Damages Five Big Power Plants
Sep 15 2015 // A California wildfire damaged five power plants at Calpine Corp.’s Geysers geothermal complex in Lake and Sonoma Counties. The so-called Valley Fire burned local power distribution lines, cooling towers and...
FEMA Provides Federal Funds to Help Fight Oregon Wildfire
Sep 15 2015 // The Federal Emergency Management Agency has authorized the use of federal funds to help with firefighting costs for the Dry Gulch Fire in Baker County, Ore. FEMA Regional Administrator Kenneth D. Murphy determined that the...
Massive Northern California Wildfire Destroys 400 Homes and Businesses
Sep 14 2015 // Two fast-burning wildfires overtook several Northern California towns, killing at least one person and destroying hundreds of homes and businesses and sending thousands of residents fleeing highways lined with buildings,...
Hurricane Museum Seeks to Close $15M Funding Gap
Sep 11 2015 // Ten years after back-to-back storms Katrina and Rita galvanized plans for a Lake Charles, La., museum focused on hurricanes, supporters have secured about $42 million in pledges to build it. The Advocate reports supporters...
Report: Florida Ranks 2nd in U.S. in Natural Disaster Risk
Sep 9 2015 // A new report says Florida ranks second only to California in the number of homes at risk for a natural disaster. The research firm, RealtyTrac, said in a report released last week that Florida had 6.7 million homes in...
California Struggles with Wildfires, Thunderstorms, Triple-Digit Heat
Sep 9 2015 // Wildfires burned amid a week of triple-digit temperatures across California, while some sections of the state saw sudden thunderstorms and flash floods. High temperatures were expected from Sacramento to San Bernardino,...
Hurricane Season’s Peak: Gone with the Wind Shear
Sep 9 2015 // The day during the Atlantic hurricane season when a tropical storm or worse is most likely to be swirling around the basin may come and go with a whimper. The best the Atlantic probably will come up with by Thursday, the...
Hurricane Katrina: Every Number Tells a Story
Sep 7 2015 // In a 25-year span leading up to 2005, homeowners insurers in Louisiana wrote a total of $13 billion in homeowners insurance premium, from which they earned $1 billion in profit, according to the chief actuary at the state...
Study: Ventura, Oxnard in California Could Be at Greater Tsunami Risk
Sep 7 2015 // A study says two California coastal cities are at greater risk from tsunamis than previously thought. The study released in August by the American Geophysical Union examined the flooding risk if earthquake faults in the...
Kansas Earthquakes Linked to Injection Wells, Geologist Says
Sep 7 2015 // The Kansas Geological Survey believes an increase in earthquakes in two southern Kansas counties is linked to saltwater injection after oil and natural gas drilling, according to an agency scientist. The agency had said in...
Earthquake Coverage Increasingly Expensive, Hard to Find in Missouri
Sep 7 2015 // Missouri is the third largest market for earthquake insurance in the U.S., after California and Washington, but the coverage is getting more expensive and scarcer in high-risk areas, state insurance officials say. On...
Lloyd’s: Cities Hurt More by Market Crashes Than Natural Disasters
Sep 4 2015 // A stock-market crash could erase as much as $170.3 billion from major cities’ gross domestic product in the U.S. and Canada and is the biggest threat to their economies, Lloyd’s of London said. The losses,...
Aon Benfield August Cat Report Highlights Global Droughts, El Niño, Typhoons
Sep 4 2015 // The monthly report for August from Aon Benfield’s Impact Forecasting catastrophe model development team cites the “severe drought conditions” in the western U.S. as resulting in “economic losses...
Hurricane Strikes Cape Verde in East Atlantic — First Time Since 1892
Sep 1 2015 // Something rare happened out in the Atlantic — a hurricane hit Cape Verde. The islands off the coast of Africa lend their name to some of the most powerful storms the Atlantic produces, yet they themselves rarely get...
Fighting Western U.S. Wildfires Costing More than $1B, Agriculture Chief Says
Sep 1 2015 // U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the federal government has spent more than $1 billion fighting this year’s deadly wildfires, which have scorched drought-stricken Western states. Vilsack told a news...
Storm Watch Ends For Hawaii Islands, But Hurricane Churns
Aug 31 2015 // Greg Colden, a farmer on Hawaii’s Big Island, said he is most worried about the damage that more rain and sustained winds could do to the area as Hurricane Ignacio passes by this week. “I’m more worried...
Tropical Storm Erika Fades Before Florida After 20 Deaths in Caribbean Island
Aug 31 2015 // Tropical Storm Erika, which killed at least 20 people on the small Caribbean island of Dominica, broke up in the waters off Cuba, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said on Saturday. All tropical storm warnings and watches...
