• Robot with LiDAR Laser Explores Danger Zones

    In a disaster such as a chemical plant incident or flooding, emergency services need ways to quickly get an overview of the situation. But in many cases, they are not permitted to enter the scene itself in order to avoid putting themselves at risk.

  • Avalanche Detection Using Passive Radar

    In winter, avalanches pose the biggest danger in mountains. Avalanche monitoring is therefore of critical importance to ensure the safety of people and infrastructure.

  • On Hurricanes and Hoaxes: A Case for Finding Common Ground

    Conspiracy theories offer an easy, emotionally satisfying answer to a complicated problem. Instead of facing the reality of climate change, or reckoning with their own complicity, people can choose a different story: that climate disasters are manipulated, that scientists are corrupt, and that the crisis is exaggerated for political gain.

  • Trump’s Cuts to Federal Wildfire Crews Could Have “Scary” Consequences

    President Donald Trump’s moves to slash the federal workforce have gutted the ranks of wildland firefighters and support personnel, fire professionals warn, leaving communities to face deadly consequences when big blazes arrive this summer. States, tribes and fire chiefs are preparing for a fire season with minimal federal support.

  • Trump Says He’s Sending Water to LA. It’s Actually Going to Megafarms.

    The president’s executive orders on California water will help irrigate Central Valley farms. They won’t do anything to fight wildfires.

  • What It Takes to Regrow a Community After Wildfire

    As it recovers, Altadena finds inspiration in other wildfire-devastated communities that have replanted lawns, gardens, and green spaces with fire-resistant native species.

  • Can Voice-to-Text AI Help Scientists Predict Earthquakes?

    By using automatic speech recognition designed to encode waveforms for translation, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory were able to modify this voice-to-text AI to correctly predict the timing of a slip during a repeating collapse sequence producing approximately magnitude-5 earthquakes at the Kīlauea volcano on Hawai’i.

  • Perfect Storm: Megafires Set the Stage for Debris Flows

    Storms now pounding Southern California are raising the specter of more danger for residents — debris flows in areas already reeling from devastating fires. Flows pose bigger threat than typical mudslides.

  • Trump Wants States to Handle Disasters without FEMA. They Say They Can’t.

    Trump has called the FEMA a “disaster” and suggested it might “go away.” He said states would best take care of hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires on their own, with the federal government reimbursing some of the costs. But emergency managers say the federal agency’s role is irreplaceable.

  • Huge Areas May Face Possibly Fatal Heat Waves if Warming Continues

    A new assessment warns that if Earth’s average temperature reaches 2 degrees C over the preindustrial average, widespread areas may become too hot during extreme heat events for many people to survive without artificial cooling.

  • Climate Change Primed LA to Burn — Catastrophically

    A new analysis finds that human-caused warming helped dry out the vegetation that turned Los Angeles into a firestorm.

  • How Emotions Influence How People Deal with Natural Disasters

    Researchers led by a University of Montrel architecture professor look at how fear, anger and pride combine to shape responses to climate risks in four Latin American communities.

  • In Times of Crisis, States Have Few Tools to Fight Misinformation

    While officials in Southern California fought fire and falsehoods, Meta —the parent company of Facebook and Instagram —announced it would eliminate its fact-checking program in the name of free expression. As social media companies are pushing back against efforts to crack down on falsehoods, questions are asked about what, if anything, state governments can do to stop the spread of harmful lies and rumors that proliferate on social media.

  • The L.A. Fires Show a Need to Rethink Our Wildland Firefighting Systems

    As bad as the fires in the Los Angeles area have been—more than 12,000 structures burned, about 180,000 people evacuated, more than 35,000 acres scorched, and at least 25 deaths—they could have been even worse, but in some ways Angelenos got lucky. Asystem built on luck, however, is not a durable system. It is already strained, and it risks breaking down in a world of greater and more frequent wildfires.

  • Climate Misinformation Is Rife on Social Media – and Poised to Get Worse

    The decision by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to end its fact-checking program and otherwise reduce content moderation would open the floodgates to more climate misinformation on Meta’s apps, including misleading or out-of-context claims during disasters. Crowd-sourced debunking is no match for organized disinformation campaigns in the midst of information vacuums during a crisis. The conditions for the rapid and unchecked spread of misleading, and outright false, content could get worse with Meta’s content moderation policy and algorithmic changes.