By Mike Ives 29 July 2018 ATTAPEU, Laos (The New York Times) – As heavy rains lashed southern Laos over the weekend, volunteers from many countries were continuing to help victims of earlier flooding caused by the failure of a foreign-funded hydropower dam.“It shows the spirit of humanity,” Yen Saisamon, a 17-year-old Laotian volunteer, said […]
By Oscar Lopez and Andrew Jacobs 14 July 2018 SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico (The New York Times) – Maria del Carmen Abadía lives in one of Mexico’s rainiest regions, but she has running water only once every two days. When it does trickle from her tap, the water is so heavily chlorinated, she […]
By Cassie Martin 17 July 2018 (Science News) – America is built on lead. Networks of aging pipes made from the bluish-gray metal bring water into millions of U.S. homes. But when lead, a poison to the nervous system, gets into drinking water — as happened in Flint, Michigan — the heavy metal can cause […]
By Joel Shannon 12 July 2018 (USA TODAY) – The Federal Emergency Management Agency admitted Thursday that it drastically underestimated the devastation that Hurricane Maria was about to unleash on Puerto Rico in 2017, hampering the agency’s ability to react to the worst natural disaster to ever hit the island. The findings are in FEMA’s […]
By Brett Walton 12 July 2018 CAPE TOWN, South Africa (Circle of Blue) – This is what a water panic looks like in a major global city.People hoard water. They queue for hours, well into the night, to fill jugs at natural springs. Like mad Christmas shoppers, they clear supermarkets of bottled water. They descend […]
By Nita Bhalla; editing by Claire Cozens 4 July 2018 NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — After a severe drought last year, East Africa was hit by two months of heavy rains, disrupting the lives of millions of people in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Tens of thousands of survivors of Kenya’s worst floods in recent […]
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, 19 June 2018 (Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy) – Billions of people in thousands of cities around the world will be at risk from climate-related heatwaves, drought, flooding, food shortages, blackouts and social inequality by mid-century without bold and urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, cities […]
8 June 2018 (UN News) – After four consecutive poor rainy seasons that brought Somalia to the brink of famine, the country is now seeing near-record rainfall, and with it, flooding that has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.According to the agency, about 230,000 people, over […]
29 May 2018 (BBC News) – Hurricane Maria killed more than 4,600 people in Puerto Rico, 70 times the official toll, according to estimates in a Harvard University study. A third of deaths after September’s hurricane were due to interruptions in medical care caused by power cuts and broken road links, researchers say.Interviews conducted in […]
By Joshua Hoyos 26 May 2018 (ABC News) – Eight months after being struck by Hurricane Maria, the island of Puerto Rico is bracing for another hurricane season while still cleaning up and restoring power.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that this year’s Atlantic hurricane season will see five to nine hurricanes with […]
