AN EXPANDING LIST OF NEWS AND INFORMATION RESOURCES RELATED TO WILDFIRES IN CALIFORNIA . . . 

CLICK HERE - Cal Fire - California Fire Map - 2018 Statewide Incidents Map

CLICK HERE - Cal Fire - Incident Information - Current Fire Information

CLICK HERE - City of Redding, CA - Carr Fire Activity Map

CLICK HERE - Shasta County Sheriff’s Office - Carr Fire Information

CLICK HERE - ‘Get out with your life’: California’s Carr fire kills 3 more, in addition to 2 firefighters

CLICK HERE - Redding fire claims three more lives as blaze continues to burn out of control

Stalled cars and rescue vehicles on a flooded section of Interstate 610 in Houston on Aug. 27.  ALYSSA SCHUKAR

CLICK HERE - BiPartisan Budget Act of 2018 (Public Law 115-123) - Long Term Disaster Recovery Investment Plan - Construction Account - As of July 5, 2018 (2 page .PDF file)

bizjournals.com - by Olivia Pulsinelli - July 6, 2018

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced July 5 how it will allocate billions of dollars for more flood-mitigation efforts. 

Of the allocations announced July 5, the largest portion is more than $13.9 billion for the construction of nearly 60 projects to reduce damage from floods and storms across multiple states and Puerto Rico.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Orange County, Texas - see page 11 in the 75 page report within the link below.  It describes the proposed construction for the levee in Orange County and includes a map showing the placement of the proposed levee.

A transmission tower and downed lines in the mountainous terrain of eastern Puerto Rico. Workers from the island and throughout the United States have worked to restore power after Hurricanes Irma and Maria last September.

It took months to restore electricity in Puerto Rico after hurricanes dealt a one-two punch. Many homes are still without power, and the system’s future is far from certain.

nytimes.com - by JAMES GLANZ and FRANCES ROBLES - Photographs by TODD HEISLER - May 6, 2018

 . . . After Maria and the hurricane that preceded it, called Irma, Puerto Rico all but slipped from the modern era . . .

 . . . an examination of the power grid’s reconstruction — based on a review of hundreds of documents and interviews with dozens of public officials, utility experts and citizens across the island — shows how a series of decisions by federal and Puerto Rican authorities together sent the effort reeling on a course that would take months to correct. The human and economic damage wrought by all that time without power may be irreparable.

sciencedaily.com - April 30, 2018

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Impact of Healthy Lifestyle Factors on Life Expectancies in the US Population - https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.032047 - Circulation. 2018;CIRCULATIONAHA.117.032047

Summary:  Maintaining five healthy habits -- eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, keeping a healthy body weight, not drinking too much alcohol, and not smoking -- during adulthood may add more than a decade to life expectancy, according to a new study.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLES WITHIN THE LINKS BELOW . . .

CLICK HERE - These 5 healthy habits could help you live a decade longer, study suggests

CLICK HERE - Healthy lifestyle may prolong life expectancy in US adults

DC just proposed a first-of-its-kind regulatory body—and utilities should pay close attention.

CLICK HERE - Joint Release: Councilmembers Allen and Cheh to introduce bill modernizing DC’s energy grid

icf.com - by Steve Fine and Matt Robison - April 17, 2018

Two Washington, D.C. City Council members proposed a remarkable change in utility regulation last week. Mary Cheh and Charles Allen introduced a bill to create a Distributed Energy Resource Authority (DER Authority): a first-of-its-kind regulatory body that would be empowered to undertake traditional utility planning functions, and with a specific mandate to assess any proposed utility grid investment greater than $25 million and open it up to competitive bids.

Energy Innovation's Michael O'Boyle and Silvio Marcacci outline the barriers to high-penetration wind and solar in the least-cost era

The following is a viewpoint from Michael O'Boyle, electricity policy manager for Energy Innovation, and Silvio Marcacci, communications director for Energy Innovation

utilitydive.com - by Michael O'Boyle, Silvio Marcacci - March 21, 2018

Wind and solar are now cheaper than virtually anyone predicted, and renewable technologies have reached an inflection point: Rapid cost declines made renewable energy the cheapest available sources of new electricity, even without subsidies, in 2017.  In many locations across America, building new wind energy projects is cheaper than running existing coal-fired power plants.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Cape Town, South Africa

meetingoftheminds.org - by Manohar Patole - April 3, 2018

The growth of urban settlements is subject to a range of factors influenced by demographic, economic, political, environmental, cultural, and social factors. Weather variability, or climate change, has recently risen up this list. These two factors: climate change and urban population growth, are dramatically affecting urban water management. On one hand, growing populations increase urban water demand and on the other, climate change has increased water variability (volume, distribution, timing and quality) . . . 

 . . . How will cities adapt? Reframe. Develop new responses.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Microgrid at Princeton University

utilitydive.com - March 20, 2018

The National Academy of Sciences defines “resilience” as the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.  Since the September 2017 DOE NOPR to FERC, the energy industry has been working overtime to better define resilience.  FERC unanimously set aside the “90 days on-site fuel storage” provision espoused by DOE and opened a new docket (AD18-7) to more fully examine the current state of grid resiliency, asking the nation’s seven RTO’s and ISO’s to provide their definition of resiliency relative to the bulk power system by March 9.  Those ISO/RTO comments reflected regional variances as expected while sharing a common thread of the paradigm shift underway from central station power plants to more distributed generation . . . 

Members of the D.C. homeless community have constructed an encampment in front of the Central Union Mission. These crowded spaces can become breeding grounds for diseases such as the flu. (Carmen Heredia Rodriguez/KHN/Carmen Heredia Rodriguez/KHN)

washingtonpost.com - by Carmen Heredia Rodriguez - March 3, 2018

 . . . For the healthy, the flu represents a serious health concern. But for the homeless — who deal with higher rates of chronic illness, fewer resources and crowded conditions in shelters — catching the flu can be a matter of life or death.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

This map depicts the general location of the sixteen weather and climate disasters assessed to cause at least one billion dollars in direct damages during 2017.

climate.gov - by Adam B. Smith - January 8, 2018

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) tracks U.S. weather and climate events that have great economic and societal impacts (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions). Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 219 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index, as of December 2017). The cumulative costs for these 219 events exceed $1.5 trillion.

During 2017, the U.S. experienced a historic year of weather and climate disasters.  In total, the U.S. was impacted by 16 separate billion-dollar disaster events including: three tropical cyclones, eight severe storms, two inland floods, a crop freeze, drought and wildfire.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

cbsnews.com - by Jonathan Lapook - December 26, 2017

As the holiday season continues, the U.S. is also entering peak flu season. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up to 650,000 people worldwide could die from complications of the flu . . .

 . . . It's very early in the flu season but it's shaping up to be a nasty one. Texas is one of 23 states already seeing high flu activity, more than double the number from the week before.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

CLICK HERE - Texas Department of State Health Services - 2017 - 2018 Texas Influenza Surveillance Activity Report

CLICK HERE - CDC - FluView - Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report

CLICK HERE - TEXASFLU.org

AN EXPANDING LIST OF NEWS AND INFORMATION RESOURCES RELATED TO THE FIRES IN CALIFORNIA . . .

CLICK HERE - Cal Fire - Current Fire Information

CLICK HERE - U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - DIMRC - Fires and Wildfires

Just one of the fires raging in Southern California has already burned an area larger than Detroit, fueled by winds nearing hurricane strength. Here’s a look at the numbers behind the state’s worst fire season ever. By BEN LAFFIN on Publish Date December 7, 2017. Photo by Hilary Swift for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video

nytimes.com - By JENNIFER MEDINA, MIRIAM JORDAN and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA - December 7, 2017

LOS ANGELES — Firefighters battled to hold back flames that on Thursday threatened tens of thousands of homes in Southern California and forced new evacuations, as officials implored residents to remain vigilant in the face of a rash of wildfires across greater Los Angeles that will quite likely not abate for days.

More than 200,000 people in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties have been told to leave their homes . . .

. . . Across seven counties, millions of cellphones shook and squawked with a warning of “extreme fire danger,” in California’s largest-ever use of a disaster alert system.

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló Nevares testifying on Capitol Hill this week.

microgridknowledge.com - by Elisa Wood - November 17, 2017

Puerto Rico’s energy commission has opened a docket to investigate ways to encourage microgrids and distributed generation to build an energy system with more fortitude against hurricanes.

Island officials described the docket this week in testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Half of the island’s population remains without power two months after Hurricane Maria’s strike.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

The Apple One 4.9 MW solar project, built by Cypress Creek Renewables, is pictured in Newton, North Carolina, United States in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters March 28, 2017. Cypress Creek Renewables/Handout via REUTERS

reuters.com - by Nichola Groom - October 12, 2017

President Donald Trump’s administration has vowed to revive the coal industry, challenged climate-change science and blasted renewable energy as expensive and dependent on government subsidies.

And yet the solar power industry is booming across Trump country, fueled by falling development costs and those same subsidies, which many Republicans in Congress continue to support.

Data provided to Reuters by GTM Research, a clean energy market information firm, shows that eight of the 10 fastest-growing U.S. solar markets between the second quarters of 2016 and 2017 were Western, Midwestern or Southern states that voted for Trump, with Alabama and Mississippi topping the list. And solar firms are ramping up investments in these regions, signaling their faith that key renewable energy incentives will remain in place for years to come.