As California’s Storms End, Reckoning With Flood Insurance About To Begin
"Just 1.3 percent of homeowners in the state have national flood insurance policies."
"Just 1.3 percent of homeowners in the state have national flood insurance policies."
"U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to California on Thursday to tour areas hit hard by a series of deadly "atmospheric river" storms that inflicted widespread flooding, felled trees and brought mudslides to a state long gripped by extreme drought."
"The latest in a series of intense winter storms continued to lash Northern California on Tuesday, bringing thunderstorms, heavy rain, wind and hail to the waterlogged region as the death toll from the extreme weather climbs."
If you’re looking to engage key constituencies for your journalism — whether editors, sources, students or people who have been marginalized — a new set of short videos from award-winning journalists (like KESQ's Angela Chen, at left) can serve as a helpful resource. Inside Story has a roadmap of how to make smart use of these video nuggets to, for instance, convince newsroom powerbrokers to give you more time and support for ambitious stories.
Water has always been a precious commodity in the western states. Now, with rapid population growth and a drying climate, the way this resource is shared and distributed is becoming more contentious across the region. Freelance journalist Jennifer Oldham talks about the tensions between supply and demand and how to drill down into water rights laws and policies.
"The raft to Bannon Island does not inspire confidence. But Dyrone Woods climbed aboard the piece of crumbling Styrofoam secured to the remains of a wood pallet anyway."
"So far, the downpours are largely in line with past storms, an official said. But their quick pace is testing the limits of the state’s infrastructure."
"In a world getting used to extreme weather, 2023 is starting out more bonkers than ever and meteorologists are saying it’s natural weather weirdness with a bit of help from human-caused climate change."
"Scientists have discovered that the pace of groundwater depletion in California’s Central Valley has accelerated dramatically during the drought as heavy agricultural pumping has drawn down aquifer levels to new lows and now threatens to devastate the underground water reserves."
"A coalition of California tribes and environmental justice groups filed a civil rights complaint Friday against the State Water Resources Control Board, charging it with discriminatory water management practices that it says have led to the ecological decline of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta."