[BUMPED UP and UPDATED] This is a breaking story, so there isn’t much known about it (or its causes), but there’s a huge fire in Notre Dame in Paris and the roof and spire have collapsed. UPDATE 5:54 Paris’ Notre … Continue reading →
In the comments to yesterday’s post about climate change, a lot of people mentioned this article that appeared in The New Yorker and caused a big sensation. I had already read the article and found it to be absorbing. It … Continue reading →
The wreckage of the doomed Ethiopian flight of a Boeing 737 Max is starting to tell the tale: A screwlike device found in the wreckage of the Boeing 737 Max 8 that crashed last Sunday in Ethiopia indicates the plane … Continue reading →
It’s official; the Boeing 737 Max has been temporarily grounded everywhere: The US plane-maker said it would suspend all 371 of the aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration said fresh evidence as well as newly refined satellite data prompted the decision … Continue reading →
Sunday’s crash of an Ethiopian airliner is a terrible tragedy in which 157 people lost their lives. The scenes of anguish and destruction are horrific and heartbreaking. Air travel’s safety record has improved tremendously, but any crash feels intolerable and … Continue reading →
…whether in Paradise, California, or any other disaster-prone area, that is the question. Paradise and many other towns in California seem especially vulnerable to fire. But although quite a few fires have raged near Paradise for many decades, it was … Continue reading →
One of the earliest posts I ever wrote on this blog (in January 2005) was called “The tsunami and the forgetting“. It was about the phenomenon of people forgetting—and certainly forgetting the details of—huge and terrible disasters, even recent ones. … Continue reading →
That question was asked recently several times on this blog, and this article provides a lucid answer. I highly recommend the entire article. Since the November 8 fire, I’ve certainly learned far more about wildfires that threaten homes than I … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Part I can be found here.] In my research so far about what happened in the Paradise fire and why it went so wrong, I kept trying to get a good timeline, with distances. When exactly did the fire … Continue reading →
[NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series.] Not too long after the Paradise fire, commenter “Cicero” wanted to know why the people of Paradise left town so late: I am not clear how close the wildfire was to … Continue reading →
You may be surprised to learn that there are a lot of towns in America called “Paradise.” Twenty-six, to be exact. Or maybe it’s twenty-five now, because one was destroyed in a single day by an inferno that swept through … Continue reading →
It seems like a no-brainer: the catastrophic fires that have swept through California in recent years could be made much less severe by a more effective and frequent use of controlled burns to thin the forest more. But although that … Continue reading →