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In the Wake of Fires and Floods

/in , /by /High Country Newsby Jonathan Thompson

The image that popped up on my Twitter feed last week was beyond alarming, it was  surreal: An entire house, a big one, sliding off its foundations and floating slowly down the muddy, swollen Yellowstone River. It was such an unexpected sight, so bizarre, that I could do little more than gawk at it, mutter an expletive and scroll down to the next crazy image of disaster.

But then I read the caption, and that stopped me: This wasn’t just some random building, it was an apartment complex that housed several Yellowstone National Park employees and their families.

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Newsom Declares Statewide Emergency as Fires Burn Across California

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Colleen Shalby, Leila Miller, Rong-Gong Lin II

Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a statewide emergency in order to help California respond to the fires burning across the state amid an extreme heat wave that brought more warnings about power outages on Tuesday.

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Threat of Mudslides Returns to California After Devastating Fires. How Do They Work?

/in , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Rong-Gong Lin II, Joseph Serna, Rosanna Xia

With parts of California yet again burned by severe fires, the state is facing a new winter of mudslides.

Why do mudslides happen so often in California?

Mudslides have always been at the heart of the peril of living close to the mountains in California. All it can take is an intense amount of rain in a short amount of time to create damaging flows of mud and debris that can kill people and destroy buildings.

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Will California Fires Create Toxic Rain? Experts Say No—Here’s Why

/in , /by /Newsweek (New York)by Shane Croucher

Experts debunked a message shared thousands of times on social media that warned of the threat of “extremely toxic” rain as a consequence of the Camp Fire in California. The Facebook post told people not to let animals or pets out into the “toxic” rain, to wash them thoroughly if they do get out, and to keep a set of “outside” clothes and to change out of them immediately upon arriving home.

 

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