• Hurricane Isaac downgraded from Category 1 hurricane to tropical storm

    Hurricane Isaac was downgraded from a category 1 hurricane to a tropical storm. The storms winds have dropped below 70 mph, but the storm is moving very slowly throughout the gulf area at about 6 mph; at this point officials estimate that Isaac is expected to cause $1.5 billion in insured losses

  • New Jersey infrastructure badly needs shoring up, and soon

    According to experts, changes to the way New Jersey maintains its infrastructure must be made soon, or the state could be vulnerable to catastrophic failures in its water and power systems as well as collapsing roads; the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority says more than $56.9 billion will be needed just to maintain state roads, rails, and public transportation systems through 2035; when you add in improvements to account for environmental changes and the expanding population in the state, the bill skyrockets to more than $123 billion

  • Japan awards tsunami buoy contract to SAIC

    The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) in Tokyo, Japan, has awarded (SAIC) a contract for the production and delivery of six SAIC Tsunami Buoy (STB) systems; the STB systems will be deployed at locations in the northwest Pacific Ocean approximately 200 nautical miles east of Sendai, Japan

  • Activists in arms over plans to ship plutonium to New Mexico

    A proposal to ship tons of plutonium to New Mexico, including cores of nuclear warheads which would be dismantled at a structurally questionable lab on top of an earthquake fault zone, has activists and nuclear watchdogs up in arms

  • U.S. always ends up regulating new technologies for public safety; the Internet is no exception

    Homeland Security News Wire’s executive editor Derek Major talked with CSIS’s James Lewis about the cybersecurity challenges the United States faces, Stuxnet, China’s hacking campaign, cyber arms control efforts, and more; on the stalled cybersecurity bill, opposed by critical infrastructure operators as being too burdensome, Lewis says: “It takes America about 20-40 years to come to terms with a new technology, but we always end up regulating it for public safety. This will be no different. We are in year 17.”

  • Tampa Bay’s infrastructure receives C grade – some say it is a gentleman’s C

    All eyes are Tamp Bay as it anxiously awaits the full brunt of tropical storm Isaac; long-time residents of the city and the neighboring counties will not be happy to learn that the city has been given a C grade for its infrastructure; engineer Kathy Caldwell, past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, who teaches at the University of Florida, said: “None of us would expect our children to come home with the reports cards that we gave the region’s infrastructure”

  • Cooling coal emissions would clean air, lower health, climate-change costs

    In the United States there are about 1,400 electric-generating unit powered by coal, operated at about 600 power plants; the estimated health costs of burning coal in the United States are in the range of $150 billion to $380 billion, including 18,000-46,000 premature deaths, 540,000 asthma attacks, 13,000 emergency room visits, and two million missed work or school days each year; scientists estimate that implementing large-scale cryogenic systems into coal-fired plants would reduce overall costs to society by 38 percent through the sharp reduction of associated health-care and climate-change costs

  • Siemens software which controls power plants vulnerable to hackers

    RuggedCom is a Canadian subsidiary of Siemenswhich sells networking equipment for use in harsh environments with extreme and inclement weather; many critical infrastructure operators of power plants, water systems, dams, and more; a security specialist discovered a flaw in the software, a flaw which allows hackers to spy on communication of infrastructure operators and gain credentials to access computer systems which control power plants as well as other critical systems

  • Maldives to build floating islands to save country from rising sea levels

    The Maldives Islands, a low-lying chain of twenty-six atolls in the Indian Ocean, are sinking; more precisely: due to global warming, the sea level is rising over the islands, most of which sit lower than three feet above the rising water; the Maldives government has embarked on an ambitious project: build floating islands, anchor them to the ocean floor, then relocate most of the population of 300,000 – and some of the tourist attractions – to them

  • New hurricane simulator to help find way to minimize storms’ destruction

    Hurricanes in Miami can range from just rain and light wind to shredded houses, overturned cars, massive flooding, and death. Now, almost twenty years after Hurricane Andrew, Florida International University is using a new simulator to find ways to prevent the massive damage a hurricane can create

  • Explaining the scale of Japanese tsunami

    Tsunamis are caused by earthquakes under the seabed; some tsunamis, including the disaster that hit Japan last year, are unexpectedly large; scientists suggest that their severity is caused by a release of gravitational energy as well as elastic energy

  • Decline and fall: all built structures are destined to break down or fail

    A series of infrastructure-related accidents in Ontario this summer has caused people to ask: Just how safe are the structures that we build? The answer a materials science and engineering professor offers may not be reassuring: “Nature always looks for ways to use energy in a favorable state — gravity always pushing things downwards is an example. Any built structure naturally goes against nature. Therefore, all structures will eventually be broken or destroyed — given the right amount of time, they will break down or fail.”

  • U.S. may already have authority to issue infrastructure protection regulations

    While the president and Congress continue to debate the cybersecurity bill, the White House Office of Management and Budget may already have sufficient statutory authority to enact new regulations through the normal notice-and-comment rulemaking process; the basis for such regulations would be the Data Quality Act (DQA) which sets the standards for the integrity of data used by federal agencies in public disseminations

  • How to act if there is a fire on a high-speed train

    Researchers have used computer models to analyze the best way to evacuate the Spanish High Speed Train (AVE) in the case of fire; the involvement of the crew in organizing the fast transfer of passengers, completing the process before the train comes to a halt, and collective collaboration to assist those with reduced mobility are just some of the strategies to be followed

  • Mystery of dramatic leveling off of methane in the atmosphere solved

    Increased capture of natural gas from oil fields probably accounts for up to 70 percent of the dramatic leveling off seen in atmospheric methane at the end of the twentieth century; methane has twenty times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, although CO2 is filling the atmosphere in far larger amounts