Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Alarming post-Sandy Factoid: The National Flood Insurance Program is Still Broke

October 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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If you ever want to have a really strange conversation with a politician, ask about floods. Rising water messes up more American cities, more extensively, more often, than virtually any other kind of disaster. But we don't talk about it. From 1993, when the Mississippi nearly took out Saint Louis, and did take out chunks of Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota; to a less-heralded storm that did similar damage to Florida the same year; to the destruction of Grand Forks; to Katrina; to rivers that tore through much of the mid-Atlantic in 2005 and 2006; to Irene washing big parts of the Hudson ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Sarwidi Versus the Volcano

September 12, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Ash, lava in house

THE WORLD"S ONLY LOW-COST VOLCANO BUNKER is not a high-tech affair. Called the Rulinda—the name is a portmanteau of the Indonesian words for “emergency-protection room”—the bunker is a brick box that can, in theory at least, shelter nine adults from superheated ash for up to an hour. It features walls two feet thick, a door customized to face away from the relevant volcano’s particular blast pattern, and ground-hugging breathing holes that block toxic ash while admitting (mostly) healthy air. Any half-decent mason can throw up a Rulinda in a day or two for about $320. The science in ... Read More

More like this: Environment, September-October 2012
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Antbots to the Rescue!

June 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Robot ant

In the aftermath of a major disaster, the last thing you want to do is send first responders running into mounds of unstable, potentially dangerous rubble. But right now, if rescuers want to look for survivors, measure radiation levels, or just see what’s going on inside, they don’t have many other options. Nuno Martins, an associate professor of computer and electrical engineering, and his fellow researchers at the University of Maryland Robotics Center think the best way to solve this problem is with robots. Hundreds of tiny, ant-sized, autonomous, communicating robots. Their project, ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Christchurch Still Shaken By Quake One Year Later

February 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

When Don Mathias, a self-employed machinist and welder in Christchurch, New Zealand, saw a four-ton lathe leaping across the floor of his workshop, he knew this was no ordinary earthquake. “Everything jumped up in the air,” said the 53-year-old. “It was like being charged by a bull. When I saw that lathe moving I thought, ‘Nowhere’s safe in this building. I’ve got to get out.’” With more debris raining down from the mezzanine floor above, he staggered through the door and ran down an alleyway … and straight into a flight of stairs that weren’t there two minutes ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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EarthScope: A Seismic Shift in Data Gathering

February 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Earthscope: What Lies Beneath

On Feb. 7, 1812, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake pummeled the Mississippi River town of New Madrid. The quake, which was then the largest in U.S. history, was the fourth temblor to hit the region in a three-month span, and newspapers reported that people as far away as New York and Charleston, S.C. felt the vibrations. In one account, the shaking centered in the Louisiana Territory, about 150 miles south of St. Louis, caused bells to toll out of turn in Boston. Even though hundreds of smaller quakes occur annually in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, scientists are at a loss to explain when and how ... Read More

More like this: Science
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Oklahoma Earthquakes and the Wages of Fracking

November 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

When towns to the east of Oklahoma City jiggled over the weekend with two of the state’s strongest-ever earthquakes, some people asked an obvious question: Does the recent expansion of “fracking” for natural gas in Oklahoma — shooting water and chemicals and sand into shale deposits to free trapped methane — account for the trembling ground? Maybe. Oil and gas exploration has caused minor earthquakes in the U.S. since the ’30s, and a new report from Britain suggests that fracking itself can cause small quakes. It was “highly probable,” according to the report, that a ... Read More

More like this: Environment, European Dispatch
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Year After BP Oil Spill: Where Are We?

May 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and blowing out an oil well a mile below the ocean's surface. In the four frantic months it took to seal off the well, almost five million barrels of crude oil spewed into the Gulf, causing untold economic and environmental havoc. A year after the spill, Dr. Molly Redmond talks about the impact of the spill on the gulf.  Redmond, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was on the scene in the gulf within a few weeks of the beginning of the spill and she is among ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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Japanese Nuclear Crisis: How Does This End?

April 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The fate of the badly damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant in Japan has been front-page news worldwide for weeks. But given the massive destruction at the power plant — with radiation leaking by air, ground, and sea — can the situation be contained? In this podcast, Dr. Theo Theofanous talks about the current state of Fukushima, with reactor cores in partial or total meltdown, and the options that the Japanese have for averting even greater disaster. Theofanous is a professor of chemical and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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Behind the Japanese Nuclear Reactor Crisis

March 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Ever since the massive 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, the world's eyes have been fixed on the crippled nuclear reactors at Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant. Explosions, radiation leaks, maybe a meltdown — a truly terrifying situation for the people of Japan and for the world. But with so little good information coming out of Fukushima, what exactly is going on? And what does this mean for nuclear power in Japan and in the rest of the world? In this podcast, Dr. Theo Theofanous talks about the latest developments at Fukushima. Theofanous is a professor of chemical ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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Japan’s Earthquake: Deciphering the Fury

March 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The events that have afflicted Japan since the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami of March 11 are all too well known, but the events that occurred before and the even more ominous events that may occur in the near future are less known. With the help of seismologist Chen Ji from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Curiouser & Curiouser host Jai Ranganathan explains the plate tectonics underlying the enormously powerful earthquake, how that crustal shift generated a deadly tsunami, and why that release of pent-up fury may presage even greater violence in the future, and not ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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