If you stood on the banks of the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado after the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire, the rumbling water may have appeared black. This slurry of ash and charred soil cascaded toward the reservoirs that supply drinking water for the downstream city of Fort Collins, home …
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This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. No matter where you live, extreme weather can hit your area, causing damage to homes, power outages, and dangerous or deadly conditions. If you’re on the coast, it may be a hurricane; in the Midwest or …
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THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. When wildfires rage, the immediate threat is obvious—but smoke from the fires actually kills far more people than the flames. As fires become more frequent, that smoke is leading to a public health crisis. In a new study …
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THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Extreme heat has already made 2024 a busy wildfire year. More acres had burned in the US by mid-July than in all of 2023, and several communities had lost homes to wildfires. As fire season intensifies across the …
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This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2015 a lightning strike started what became known as the Rough Fire, which eventually burned more than 150,000 acres of forest east of Fresno and just west of Kings Canyon National Park. The …
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Not long after the deadliest wildfire in modern American history swept through Lahaina, Maui, on August 8, speculation began swirling about a notorious igniter of out-of-control blazes: electrical equipment. Although investigators have yet to officially determine the cause of the wildfire, witnesses reported power poles snapping in the 60-mile-an-hour winds …
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Canadian firefighter Scott Rennick knew this summer would be bad. It was May 2023 and Rennick was commanding one of British Columbia’s six incident management teams, or IMTs, specialized crews tasked with managing the most complex fires. His 18-person crew had just arrived in the northeast city of Fort Saint …
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