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Natural Disaster

Mourners carry a cross in Port-au-Prince, in January, 2019, to honor the victims of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti

Haiti Faces Difficult Questions Ten Years After a Devastating Earthquake

By Editors' Choice

By Edwidge Danticat, The New Yorker — This past December, as what would have been my mother’s eighty-fourth birthday approached, I kept dreaming of death. In the most frequent of these dreams, my mother, who died, of ovarian cancer, in October, 2014, in Miami, is telling me to run out of the single-story house where I spent most of my childhood, in Port-au-Prince, before the house falls on top of me…

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Destruction on the island of Grand Bahama in the Bahamas in the wake of Hurricane Dorian.

Hurricane Dorian Makes Bahamians the Latest Climate-Crisis Victims

By News & Current Affairs

The country has a tiny carbon footprint but carries the burden of being ground zero for global warming. By Erica Moiah James, The New York Times — MIAMI — Whoever thought Dorian might be a good name for a hurricane has some explaining to do. In the Bahamas, when we have to deal with difficulties, we try to make the saddest people among us laugh, knowing that they will return the…

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Hurricane Dorian

Why Hurricane Dorian Defied Forecasts and Sank the Bahamas

By Commentaries/Opinions

The storm evolved swiftly and unpredictably. But it was other weather phenomena that caused Dorian to stall, devastating the island nation. By Eric Niiler, Wired — Jason Dunion has been flying on “hurricane hunter” planes for the past 20 years to collect data on tropical storms. Yet Sunday’s flight into Hurricane Dorian was the first time he had felt the awesome power of a Category 5 storm. Dunion, a scientist at…

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An aerial view of Mozambique's Sofala province shows standing water. Sofala and Manica provinces were the hardest hit by Cyclone Idai.,

Mozambique Floods Cover More Ground Than NYC, Chicago, D.C., and Boston — Combined

By News & Current Affairs

Post-flood satellite images of Mozambique show that Cyclone Idai submerged about 835 square miles of homes and fields — an area larger than New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston combined. By Eric Holthaus, Grist — Aid workers in Mozambique describe the floodwaters as “inland oceans extending for miles and miles.” Idai’s official death toll in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi reached 761 on Monday, but that total will surely rise. There are…

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Some Puerto Ricans had to restore downed power lines themselves after Hurricane Maria.

Puerto Rico has not recovered from Hurricane Maria

By News & Current Affairs

By Lauren Lluveras, The Conversation — Puerto Rico was in crisis long before Hurricane Maria hit on Sept. 20, 2017. For years, this U.S. territory had been struggling with debt, economic crisis and drought. In May 2017, the government defaulted on US$73 billion in loans and declared bankruptcy. Then Hurricane Maria slammed the island with 155-mph winds and coastal flooding that rose to 6 feet within 30 minutes of landfall. The storm caused the longest power blackout in…

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Caribbean residents see climate change as a severe threat but most in US don’t — here’s why

By News & Current Affairs

People in the U.S. and the Caribbean share vulnerability to climate change-related disasters, but only in the Caribbean is the public truly worried. Why? By Elizabeth J. Zechmeister and Claire Q. Evans, The Conversation — During the 2017 Atlantic basin hurricane season, six major storms – all of which were Category 3 or higher – produced devastating human, material and financial devastation across the southern United States and the Caribbean.

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