June 20, 2014

What happened this week?

Tornado damages homes and businesses in South Dakota town. A tornado plowed through the heart of a small town in eastern South Dakota on Wednesday, causing heavy damage to numerous homes and businesses... Read More

Nebraska town devastated: How rare are double tornadoes?. Twin tornadoes destroyed almost three-quarters of Pilger, a small Nebraska town. According to one expert, the last powerful double tornado on record occurred in 1999... Read More

State of emergency after tornado, storms batter parts of Ontario. A state of emergency has been declared in the central Ontario community of Angus, Ont., after a tornado swept the county, tearing off roofs and ripping down trees in its path... Read More

Guatemala, Earthquake: Terremoto also hits Chile, Ecuador. Three big earthquakes have struck the western hemisphere. A terremoto en Guatemala hoy, a 5.2 magnitude temblor, has hit. Then a strong terremoto en Ecuador erupted, a temblor registering a 5.7. And finally a 4.8 temblor has hit Chile... Read More

Interesting Facts

Waiting for the Rain: Techno-Scientific Landslide Mitigation in Teziutlán, Puebla, Mexico. How the development of a landslide early warning system by National Autonomous University of Mexico researchers and National Center for Disaster Prevention engineers becomes a site where humans and non-humans become increasingly interconnected in the making of disaster mitigation techno-science... Read More

Tornadoes- May 2014. According to data from the Storm Prediction Center, during May, there were 150 preliminary tornado reports, compared to the 1991–2010 average of 276 for the month... Read More

So When Is Tornado Season Over?. After a week full of storms, wind damage, and even a few June tornadoes, you might be asking yourself when tornado season actually ends... Read More

Climate Change And Ocean Currents Linked For The Last 6 Million Years. After analyzing core samples from the seabed off the coast of Spain and Portugal, near the Strait of Gibraltar, scientists say they have proof of shifts of climate change over the past six million years... Read More

What's new in Disaster Risk Reduction?

Federal Flood Funding Could Save Springfield Millions of Dollars. Millions of federal dollars have been approved to alleviate flooding concerns in Springfield. The goal is to bring many Springfield areas out of the floodplain, and to enhance economic development.  It could save the city millions of dollars in flood damage in the long run... Read More

Building worldwide flood resilience should trump emergency reaction: Zurich. A new research paper from Zurich Insurance Group Ltd. and several collaborators is calling for greater emphasis on building flood resilience around the world rather than emergency recovery and provides a framework for mitigating risks before floods occur... Read More

Pallone Announces Start of Port Monmouth Flood Control Project. $17.7 million project will reduce the risks that coastal storms pose to residents and businesses in the Port Monmouth area... Read More

Flood control project proves successful under heavy rain. The Rochester flood control system is holding up after being put to the test by heavy rains Monday night. Officials said this system has paid for itself time and time again, and that things could have been much worse Monday night without a sophisticated flood control system in place... Read More

Carbon pricing won't solve climate change. Innovation will. Putting a price on carbon doesn't work because no one wants to pay the real cost of using fossil fuels. But funding R&D and demonstration projects that lower clean-energy costs will create real economic incentives to fight climate change... Read More