Tag Archives: station

We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 23, 2013

by KaraBloomer Posted on December 23, 2013

Mother Jones

A team of U.S. Army AH-64D Apaches from the 1-151 Attack Reconnaissance Battalion, S.C. National Guard, take off from Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Fla., as part of an integrated live fire exercise with the U.S. Navy George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group, December 16, 2013. While working with the Navy for this exercise, the 1-151 ARB mission was to find, fix and destroy small boat targets. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Capt. Jamie Delk)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 23, 2013

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This Pacific island has so much plastic pollution it might become a Superfund site

by DougE92 Posted on November 20, 2013

This Pacific island has so much plastic pollution it might become a Superfund site

By

Forest and Kim Starr

There’s so much plastic crap floating in the Pacific Ocean and washing up on shorelines that one atoll in the midst of the mess could be declared a Superfund site.

Tern Island is the largest island in the French Frigate Shoals, a coral archipelago 550 miles northwest of Honolulu, part of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge. Replete with lagoons, wildlife, and alluring white sands, the island could be a paradise on Earth. But it’s not. Plastic pollution there is so bad that a year ago the Center for Biological Diversity asked the feds to consider adding Tern Island and the rest of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, plus a part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that’s in federal waters, to its Superfund list — a list of the nation’s most polluted places. From the petition [PDF]:

The reefs and shores of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands are littered with hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic garbage. Derelict fishing gear and debris entangles innumerable fish, sea birds, and marine mammals, often resulting in injury and death. Plastic pollution harms wildlife via entanglement, ingestion, and toxic contamination, causes substantial economic impacts, and is a principal threat to the quality of the environment.

A Superfund designation would help mobilize federal efforts to clean up the area. But it would be unprecedented — out of the hundreds of sites on the Superfund list, none was put there because of plastic pollution. “It’s not really common for people to make petitions like this,” an EPA spokesman said after the petition was filed.

But after giving the unusual request some consideration, the feds are on board with a preliminary study that will help decide whether such a listing is warranted.

Well, they’re kind of on board.

The EPA and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service don’t plan to study the whole region as requested, but they have committed to assessing whether Tern Island, which at 25 acres is the area’s biggest island, should be added to the Superfund list. From Honolulu Civil Beat:

[W]hat has distinguished Tern Island from the other islands, and piqued the EPA’s interest, is that the island’s monk seals are showing elevated levels of PCB’s. The toxic, cancer-causing chemicals may be entering the marine food chain through tiny plastics, said Dean Higuchi, a spokesman for the EPA. …

The environmental study will focus on whether toxic substances are entering the marine food chain through micro-plastics and potentially accumulating at increasing levels, as well as the general effects of micro-plastics on marine creatures and wildlife.

The EPA is also concerned about old landfill sites with buried electrical equipment on the island, which may be releasing PCBs and other hazardous contaminants. Tern Island was the site of a U.S. Naval Station during World War II. 

The federal study could ultimately affect an area larger than the 25-acre island. Improving the government’s understanding of micro-plastics in the environment could lead to more stringent controls on pollution from storm-water drains and water-treatment plants.


Source
Plastic Debris Could Make Remote Pacific Island a Superfund Site, Honolulu Civil Beat

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Looks like the Arctic has been heating up even faster than we thought

by porvluef Posted on November 15, 2013

Looks like the Arctic has been heating up even faster than we thought

By

Shutterstock

Exhaustive efforts to calculate temperatures around the world based on satellite and weather station data may have missed a spot: the Arctic.

The area around the North Pole is warming faster than anywhere else in the world, but there’s been a shortage of temperature data from the region. New research suggests that efforts to fill in those data gaps over the last 16 years using calculations and assumptions have underestimated the rate at which temperatures are rising.

That could help to explain why the apparent increases in global temperatures have been slightly lower than forecast by climate models — and slightly lower than had been the case before 1997.

One problem is that satellites orbiting the Earth can’t get a good view on the poles, so temperatures at the surface of the ice and snow must be estimated based on air temperatures. Another is that it’s not so easy to maintain or monitor weather gauges in the remote and frigid part of the world. (Data gaps also exist in Antarctica and Africa.)

A pair of scientists set about testing the methods that have been widely used to fill in the Arctic data gaps. In doing so, they say they have identified an inadvertent bias that made temperatures around the North Pole seem cooler than they actually are.

“We have developed a method for using satellite data to fill in the gaps in the Met Office data,” the scientists wrote in a summary of their research, which was published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. “Our global record suggests that surface temperatures have been warming two and a half times faster than Met Office estimates over the past 16 years. Temperature trends starting in 1997 or 1998 are particularly affected.”

Some press coverage is touting the research as solving the “mystery” of the “missing heat.” But it’s important to remember that any notions of a “global warming pause” during the last 15 years have never been anything more than climate-denier spin. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently described global temperature rise as unequivocal. These new findings raise the possibility that our globe is warming even faster than anybody realized.

“The existence of bias in recent global mean temperature estimates has been confirmed by multiple means,” the scientists conclude in their paper. “This bias leads to an underestimation of recent temperature trends. … The pace of this change means that Arctic coverage has dominated bias in the global temperature estimates.”


Source
Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Looks like the Arctic has been heating up even faster than we thought

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One giant coal plant reopening in Minnesota, another shuttering in Massachusetts

by pwbqczv Posted on October 10, 2013

One giant coal plant reopening in Minnesota, another shuttering in Massachusetts

By

H.C. Williams

This coal power plant, Brayton Point, is shutting down in 2017.

For this coal-news update, we’ll get the depressing outlier out of the way first: One of the Midwest’s largest coal-burning plants is about to be fired back up following a two-year hiatus.

A filthy 900-megawatt generator in Minnesota was severely damaged in late 2011. But following $200 million in repairs, Xcel Energy says it should be up and running again within a week. From E&E Publishing:

Once at full power, Sherburne’s Unit 3, combined with two 750-megawatt coal burners, known as Units 1 and 2, should be able to produce 2,400 megawatts of electricity, according to Xcel.

The refired Unit 3 generator will also help burnish Sherco’s reputation as Minnesota’s largest point-source emitter of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas that scientists have linked to global climate change.

But the development is an unusual one in a world where coal is being slowly but surely kicked to the curb. This week, the private equity firm that just bought the coal-fired Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset, Mass., one of the biggest polluters in the region, announced it would shut down the facility in 2017. From the Providence Journal:

The New Jersey-based energy firm cited a host of issues in announcing its decision to close the plant, including low electricity prices because of the surplus of natural gas and the cost of meeting stricter environmental rules. The move comes just five weeks after it closed on the purchase of the facility from the Virginia-based energy conglomerate Dominion Resources.

The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign is cheering the news:

With [the] announcement that the Brayton Point Power Station in Massachusetts would retire by 2017, the campaign officially marked 150 coal plants that have announced plans to retire since 2010.

According to the Clean Air Task Force, retiring these 150 coal plants will help to save 4,000 lives every year, prevent 6,200 heart attacks every year and prevent 66,300 asthma attacks every year. Retiring these plants will also avoid $1.9 billion in health costs.

We’ll end this coal update with the sad news that coal miners continue to die on the job in America. The Wall Street Journal reports on three fatal mining accidents that occurred on three consecutive days. They happened while more than half of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration staff is being furloughed by the government shutdown. “The fact that this occurred over the weekend, when there may be a greater expectation an MSHA inspector would not be present, is a red flag,” administration head Joseph Main told the newspaper.


Source
Coal on the decline — 150 coal plants set for retirement, Sierra Club
New owners to shutter outmoded Brayton Point Power Station in 2017, Providence Journal
Coal-Mining Accidents Kill Three in Three Days, The Wall Street Journal
Minnesota’s largest coal unit to restart, despite concerns over pollution, emissions, E&E Publishing

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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One giant coal plant reopening in Minnesota, another shuttering in Massachusetts

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One nuke plant in Wisconsin will shutter, another in California might not be switched back on

by BrandiNic Posted on May 6, 2013

One nuke plant in Wisconsin will shutter, another in California might not be switched back on

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ Julius FeketeSan Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Americans worried by the threat of a nuclear meltdown could soon have two fewer reasons to fret.

A nuclear power plant in Wisconsin will be powered down on Tuesday and the owner of a trouble-plagued plant in California is considering shutting it down for good.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Kewaunee [Power Station] owner Dominion Resources Inc. has announced it will shut the plant on May 7, a move that is expected to result in the loss of hundreds of jobs.

The reactor is closing because the Wisconsin utilities that had purchased its electricity declined to continue buying it, citing the low price of natural gas. Dominion put the power plant up for sale in 2011, but no buyer emerged.

So in a few short weeks, the mission of those who work at Kewaunee will change from generating power to cleaning up the power plant site.

Meanwhile, stubborn maintenance problems at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station between San Diego and Los Angeles might finally achieve what decades of anti-nuclear activism has failed to do: permanently shutter the facility, which operates along the Pacific shoreline in a seismically active region.

San Onofre is one of two nuke plants operating in California. The 2,200-megawatt, double-reactor facility has been powered down since new tubes leaked radioactive water into the sea in January 2012. New troubles continue to emerge and repair costs keep on mounting. (Those would be the costs for real repairs. Not like the jerry-rigged repairs we told you about last week, in which workers at the facility patched together a leaking pipe using plastic, masking tape, and broomsticks.)

The facility’s owner has decided that if it can’t be at least partially fired up this year, then it may never be fired up again. From the AP:

Costs tied to the long-running shutdown of California’s San Onofre nuclear power plant have soared to $553 million, while the majority owner raised the possibility [last month] of retiring the plant if it can’t get one reactor running later this year. …

[Southern California Edison] has asked federal regulators for permission to restart the Unit 2 reactor and run it at reduced power for a five-month test period, in hopes of stopping vibration blamed for tube damage. Without that approval, Chairman Ted Craver told Wall Street analysts in a conference call that a decision on whether to retire one or both reactors might be made this year.

Whenever activists have pushed to shutter the plant in the past, they’ve been told that Californians would run out of electricity and endure blackouts without their biggest single source of power. That hasn’t happened during the facility’s 15-month outage. The recent wind-turbine building spree in the state has helped fill the gap; windy weather led to wind producing more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity at one point last month.

Of course, it isn’t easy to kill a nuclear power plant – they’re like zombies, wreaking havoc even after their vital organs have stopped functioning. The nuclear waste lives on after the generators have been switched off, and that waste must be continuously kept cool to prevent a meltdown. Just look at the never-ending debacle in Fukushima. The shutdown and cleanup at the Kewaunee nuke plant in Wisconsin, which hasn’t even melted down, is expected to cost nearly $1 billion and take until the 2070s to complete.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is doling out financial support to help industry build new nuclear power plants, part of its “all of the above” energy policy.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Los Angeles to ditch coal by 2025

by w0ujpysd Posted on March 20, 2013

Los Angeles to ditch coal by 2025

By Susie Cagle

Coal currently powers almost 40 percent of sprawling and thirsty Los Angeles, Calif. But the “era of coal” is sunsetting.

By 2025, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will phase out all coal-fired power, putting it slightly ahead of the 2027 deadline imposed by the state. The LADWP is the country’s biggest municipal utility.

“By divesting from coal and investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, we reduce our carbon footprint and set a precedent for the national power market,” L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D) said in a press release.

The mayor’s office said the switch will reduce Los Angeles’ greenhouse gas emissions to 60 percent of 1990 levels. The fashion’s back, but the epic smog might be gone forever. Dumping coal: Even hotter than flannel.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

On Tuesday, commissioners at the Department of Water and Power moved forward with plans to dump the utility’s interest in a coal-burning plant in Arizona and convert another one in Utah to natural gas. …

Villaraigosa declared victory Tuesday, calling the coal divestment plan “game-changing” even though it won’t meet the timeline he set. “I believe the only way to get the goal is to set aggressive timetables,” he said. “Climbing mountains that have never been climbed before [isn’t] easy.” …

The DWP is in negotiations to sell its 21% share of the Navajo Generating Station in Page, Ariz., which will allow the utility to stop receiving power from the plant by 2015, four years before its current contract is up. Getting free of coal at the Intermountain Power Project in Delta, Utah, is more complicated because the DWP does not own the plant and is bound by contract to buy its power through 2027.

On Tuesday the Board of Water and Power Commissioners approved an amendment to its contract with Intermountain Power to allow the plant to transform its power supply to cleaner natural gas. …

A report released by the utility last year estimated that ending coal-power consumption at the Utah plant four years ahead of schedule would cost nearly $1 billion over four years in higher replacement fuel costs and other expenditures.

The whole plan “envisions clean energy and efficiency first, with natural gas fitting in as needed,” according to Take Part.

The move puts Los Angeles on track with Washington state, which is also set to end coal power by 2025, though both are a little behind Oregon, which aims to dump coal by 2020.

It’s not the whole U.S. by any means, but all that soon-to-be-ditched coal power is way more than Finland will get rid of when it dumps the dirtiest fossil fuel by 2025 too.

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New York’s Sandy-flooded South Ferry subway station is still a useless mess

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 18, 2013

New York’s Sandy-flooded South Ferry subway station is still a useless mess

By Philip Bump

In 2009, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority proudly announced the reopening of the South Ferry subway station following an extensive, $530 million remodel. The station is right at Manhattan Island’s tip, under the terminal from which the Staten Island Ferry docks and departs. And when Sandy hit, South Ferry became an aquarium.

This is what the station looked like immediately after the storm.

MTAPhotos

And this is what it looked like yesterday.

benyankee

That’s from a gallery of photos taken by Benjamin Kabak, who runs Second Avenue Sagas, a blog focused on New York transit. He took a tour of South Ferry station yesterday, and marveled about how little progress has been made. Here’s how he described the tour:

Led by Wynton Habersham, a 30-year vet of the MTA, I saw a station in ruins. Tiles have fallen from the ceiling and walls, debris is everywhere and the electronics — the hidden aspect of the station — are completely wrecked. “It’s like throwing a computer into seawater,” Habersham said of the rampant destruction. The station filled up with 80 feet of water, and crews eventually pumped out 14.5 million gallons of damaging brackish saltwater.

While the station looks bad, the cosmetic impact is nothing compared to the destruction to key signal systems and train control infrastructure. All of the equipment inside the signal relay room will have to be replaced, and in fact, the entire signal system south of Rector St. will likely have to be completely overhauled as well. Vital infrastructure — the very systems that keep trains from colliding with each other and on the right tracks — is useless, corroded from saltwater exposure. …

[I]f all goes according to plan, perhaps we’ll see South Ferry reactivated in 2014. But the MTA has to decide how to repair the station and what hardening takes place.

benyankee

Storm debris left on top of a sign in the station.

Initial estimates of the cost to repair the station run about $600 million. But that is only listed as a “restore” project by the MTA; it’s not clear the extent to which it includes preventative measures for a station more at risk from future flooding than most. As Curbed NY notes:

The $600 million cost to rebuild it will be even more than the $545 million renovation it underwent in 2009. It will cost about $350 million to repair physical damage to the station, $200 million to replace the 600 electromechanical relays, circuit breakers, and switch boards that were corroded by the salty water, and $30 million to replace third rails.

The MTA must also decide if they should move the electronic equipment to higher elevation, which would require changing the layout of the station. This decision has to be made before any signal repair work begins, and the challenges to replacing all of this equipment highlight post-storm issues faced by the whole system.

30,000 people a day passed through the station in 2011, putting it in the top 10 percent of stations. In 2013, that figure will be zero. After that? Who knows.

benyankee

A service alert issued before the storm lies on the empty platform.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Shell gets massive, involuntary aid package from Alaska, U.S. Coast Guard, and you

by donnajansen Posted on January 11, 2013

Shell gets massive, involuntary aid package from Alaska, U.S. Coast Guard, and you

By Philip Bump

“I’ve been working this case relatively nonstop since the 27th.”

Petty Officer First Class David Mosley didn’t sound all that tired when I spoke with him yesterday, but, then, he’s a public affairs specialist, a professional. A few times he stumbled over his words, once or twice forgot specific numbers. On the whole, though, no problems as he walked me through the massive complement of U.S. Coast Guard staff and sea vessels and aircraft deployed to fix Shell’s mistake.

U.S. Coast Guard

Two weeks from yesterday, the Kulluk, a drilling rig managed by Noble Drilling and owned by Shell, broke free of its tow lines as tug boats struggled in inclement weather to move it away from the Alaskan shore. On Dec. 31, it ran aground within an important bird area on Kodiak Island. A unified command comprised of representatives of Shell, Noble, the Coast Guard, the state of Alaska, and local representatives spent the next week and half determining whether the rig was safe to move and, ultimately, moving it to a nearby harbor. Some 700 people were involved in the effort by the time it had been safely docked.

How many of that 700 were from the Coast Guard? “That’s a very good question,” Mosley told me. He noted that “the command center at Coast Guard Center Anchorage was very much involved in the unified command,” proving the point by listing just the people who came to mind:

Captain Mehler, the federal on-scene coordinator, all the way down to your storekeepers and yeomen and people like myself, public affairs specialists, who were all swept up and involved in this in some way. The people who provided support on Base Kodiak and Air Station Kodiak, moving gear around and making things happen on the base. Maintenance crews with the helicopters, the C-130s. You’ve got the crews that were involved with the Alex Haley. We had stationed the Coast Guard Cutter Hickory and the Coast Guard Cutter Spar, both of which are 225-foot buoy tenders that were activated and would have come out to the scene as needed.

Wikipedia

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter

Alex Haley.

The Alex Haley has a crew of 90, plus 10 officers and a four-person aircrew. The Spar and Hickory each have a complement of about 50 people. He continued:

We brought people in, whether it was our strike teams or other folks that came in from the lower 48, from California and as far away as the Carolinas. We brought in these folks that are specialized in responding to these situations. It was not only a large response locally, it was a far-reaching response.

Those folks from the Carolinas, for example, were media specialists, brought in to help Mosley handle the onslaught of questions about Shell’s latest Arctic mistake during a slow news week. The strike teams are oil spill response experts, on stand by in case the worst case happened. (It didn’t.)

Mosley explained who foots the bill for a scenario like this. There’s a federal fund, the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, that was set up after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. The fund is financed by a per-barrel excise tax on imported fuel as well as “cost recovery” from at-fault companies and any civil penalties imposed on a company responsible for a spill. It’s not clear how that money might be applied here; Mosley suggested that would be “hammered out” with Shell.

When it comes to search-and-rescue, Mosley says not to expect money back. “I have yet to see an incident in which we do search and rescue that we look for reimbursement,” he said. “That’s why the taxpayers pay us to do our jobs.” Among the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue efforts in this case? Three round-trip Jayhawk helicopter flights out to the Kulluk, each trip rescuing six members of the rig’s 18-person crew. Bringing people back onto the rig to test its integrity. Overflights to assess damage. The Coast Guard also reached out to the Department of Defense to borrow two Chinook helicopters to transport equipment. All of that? On your tab.

Kullukresponse

Ski-equipped U.S. Army Chinook helicopters.

When the unified command first set up shop after the Kulluk‘s grounding, it was in a Shell office in Anchorage. As the number of people involved in the response swelled, the group decamped to a nearby hotel. Among those who made the trip was Shannon Miller, who works for Alaska’s division of spill prevention and response. Probably since its role was more modest, Miller had a better estimate of how many employees of the state of Alaska worked with the command. Twenty-two, she guessed — but that doesn’t include other resources, like the emergency towing package provided by the state.

Kullukresponse

The emergency towing system hangs on a pendant below an Air Station Kodiak MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter.

Alaska has a strategy to get its money back. The costs the state accrues are internally invoiced and calculated, and Shell will be sent a bill for whatever portion of those invoices the state feels is appropriate. (One can assume that this, too, will be “hammered out.”) The process, Miller expects, will take months. There is also an emergency response fund that can allocate money for the incident. The fund collects revenue through a two-cent-per-barrel surcharge on oil produced in the state, as well any as money recovered from companies at fault.

I reached out to Shell in both Houston and Alaska to gauge the company’s willingness to absorb costs incurred by public entities. Neither location made a representative available to answer questions by deadline. [See update at bottom.] The company did clear up one gauzy point, albeit to other outlets. As we reported earlier this week, Shell was motivated to move the Kulluk when it did to avoid paying tax to Alaska on the rig in the new year. From United Press International:

[Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)], ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he questioned claims made by Shell that Kulluk was towed from its grounding [site] because of inclement weather.

“Reports that financial considerations rather than safety may have factored into Shell’s considerations, if true, are profoundly troubling,” he said in a letter to Shell Oil President Marvin Odum.

Shell spokesman Curtis Smith told Bloomberg News that avoiding a Jan. 1 tax issue in the state was “a consideration” but “not among the main drivers for our decision to begin moving the Kulluk.”

Shell made a bad bet. Hoping in part to avoid an estimated $6 million tax bill,  it decided to risk the stormy weather on Dec. 27. The bet didn’t pay off.

Lucky for the company, it wasn’t only betting with its own money. It was gambling yours, too.

Update: Shell’s Curtis Smith provided this statement by email in response to my questions:

We will live up to all of our obligations related to the response and recovery of the Kulluk. Throughout this incident, we have spared nothing in terms of personnel or assets to reach this safe outcome.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Huge, unusual storm slams into Philippines because that is what happens all the time now

by Myrna Posted on December 4, 2012

Huge, unusual storm slams into Philippines because that is what happens all the time now

By Philip Bump

This is Typhoon Bopha, as seen from the International Space Station.

Click to embiggen.

That’s what it looks like from space. It’s hard to get a sense of scale from that image, so here’s another, showing it against the arc of the Earth. It extends for more than 300 miles in diameter.

NASA

More importantly, here’s what it looks like from the ground.

The storm, which Capital Weather Gang refers to as a “beastly super typhoon,” made landfall as the equivalent of a category 5 storm. The site explains why this storm is unusual.

The relatively compact storm is tracking at an unusually far south latitude, not far from the equator. Writes Wunderground’s Jeff Masters:

“Mindanao rarely gets hit by typhoons, since the island is too close to the Equator, and the infrastructure of Mindanao is not prepared to handle heavy typhoon rains as well as the more typhoon-prone northern islands. Bopha is potentially a catastrophic storm for Mindanao.” …

Storms this strong do not usually occur this far south because the coriolis force, which helps storms spin up, is weak at such latitudes. Bopha became a typhoon just 3.8 degrees above the equator, says the UK Met Office.

Yahoo News describes its passage over the island earlier today.

About 40 people were killed or missing in flash floods and landslides near a mining area on Mindanao, ABS-CBN television reported, saying waters and soil had swept through an army post.

A television reporter said she saw numerous bodies lined up near the army base. A military spokesman earlier said about 20 people, including six soldiers, were missing. …

But the relatively low death toll was due in part to an early evacuation. More than 155,000 people were in shelters late on Tuesday.

The storm has moved into the South China Sea, where it is expected to weaken.

This story is part of Grist’s on-going series “Massive, unusual, deadly storms from around the globe.” The odds are good that the series will eventually become a daily feature. Maybe hourly.

CIMSS

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