Natural disasters

If you call 911 in rural Georgia, the nearest emergency responders might come from the local prison. In 1963, the Georgia Department of Corrections began a program to train incarcerated people as firefighters to support not only their prisons, but also the surrounding communities. Over time, the program has grown dramatically. Today, prison fire teams from 19 Georgia state prisons, including a women’s prison, and six county prisons are trained in firefighting and emergency medical response. The crews respond to motor vehicle accidents, structure fires, brush fires, hazardous materials incidents and search and rescue efforts, among other emergencies – all without being paid a salary. Jackson County, Georgia, describes incarcerated firefighters as responding to “every structural fire in Jackson County, where they serve as manpower support to every Fire Department on scene.” The all-female firefighting crew at Lee Arrendale Stat...

The U.S. power grid is the largest and most complex machine ever built. It’s also aging and under increasing stress from climate-driven disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves. Over the past decade, power grids have played roles in wildfires in multiple states, including California, Hawaii, Oregon and Minnesota. When wind speeds are high and humidity is low, electrical infrastructure such as aboveground power lines can blow into vegetation or spark against other components, starting a fire that high winds then spread. Under extreme conditions, utilities may opt to shut off power to parts of the grid in their service areas to reduce wildfire risk. These outages, known as public safety power shutoffs, have occurred mainly in California, where wildfires have become larger and more destructive in recent decades. On April 5-6, 2024, Colorado utility Xcel Energy carried out that state’s first public safety power shutoff, cutting power to thousands of custo...

In the U.S., wildland firefighters are able to stop about 98% of all wildfires before the fires have burned even 100 acres. That may seem comforting, but decades of quickly suppressing fires has had unintended consequences. Fires are a natural part of many landscapes globally. When forests aren’t allowed to burn, they become more dense, and dead branches, leaves and other biomass accumulate, leaving more fuel for the next fire. This buildup leads to more extreme fires that are even harder to put out. That’s why land managers set controlled burns and thin forests to clear out the undergrowth. However, fuel accumulation isn’t the only consequence of fire suppression. Fire suppression also disproportionately reduces certain types of fire. In a new study, my colleagues and I show how this effect, known as the suppression bias, compounds the impacts of fuel accumulation and climate change. What happened to all the low-intensity fires? Most wildfires are low-inten...

People often think of disasters as great equalizers. After all, a tornado, wildfire or hurricane doesn’t discriminate against those in its path. But the consequences for those affected are not “one-size-fits-all.” That’s evident in recent storms, including the widespread storms that brought deadly tornadoes and downpours to several states over the 2024 Memorial Day weekend, and in the U.S. Census Bureau’s national household surveys showing who was displaced by disasters in 2023. Overall, the Census Bureau estimates that nearly 2.5 million Americans had to leave their homes because of disasters in 2023, whether for a short period or much longer. However, a closer look at demographics in the survey reveals much more about disaster risk in America and who is vulnerable. It suggests, as researchers have also found, that people with the fewest resources, as well as those who have disabilities or have been marginalized, were more likely to be displaced f...

When people talk about the “Anthropocene,” they typically picture the vast impact human societies are having on the planet, from rapid declines in biodiversity to increases in Earth’s temperature by burning fossil fuels. Such massive planetary changes did not begin all at once at any single place or time. That’s why it was controversial when, after over a decade of study and debate, an international committee of scientists – the Anthropocene Working Group – proposed to mark the Anthropocene as an epoch in the geologic time scale starting precisely in 1952. The marker was radioactive fallout from hydrogen bomb tests. On March 4, 2024, the commission responsible for recognizing time units within our most recent period of geologic time – the Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy – rejected that proposal, with 12 of 18 members voting no. These are the scientists most expert at reconstructing Earth’s history from the evidence...