Word: floodings
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Every July the country's leading disaster scientists and emergency planners gather in Boulder, Colo., for an invitation-only workshop. Picture 440 people obsessed with the tragic and the safe, people who get excited about earthquake "shake maps" and righteous about flood insurance. It's a spirited but wonky crowd that is growing more melancholy every year...
...what has happened in the year that followed the carnival of negligence on the Gulf Coast? In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked day and night--like men bailing a sinking ship, literally--to rebuild the bulwarks. They have got the flood walls and levees to where they were before Katrina, more or less. That's, er, not enough, we can now say with confidence. But it may be all that can be expected from one year of hustle...
...Rhino Buggies, the firm Watson runs with his son and three staff, makes cars that out-hum the Hummer. They can drive over boulders as big as a Barina and through water that would flood a Falcon. The $58,000 Blizzard has a Nissan Patrol chassis, engine and gearbox, but nothing else about it is ordinary. It's Mad Max in a suit: stylish, smooth riding, thanks to adjustable shock absorbers, but tough enough for anything, from the Outback to the Apocalypse. That's too tough for Australian transport authorities. "They say it's too intimidating for on-road...
...kind of post-Fidel chaos that could result in tens of thousands of Cubans rafting into South Florida - just the sort of diplomatic and logistical crisis that has long spooked U.S. Presidents as much as Fidel Castro himself has. The U.S. also has to worry about a flood of joyous Cuban exiles suddenly heading back to their homeland and potentially exacerbating the chaos there, though the U.S. believes it has a solid Coast Guard plan to prevent that...
...ongoing Israeli air campaign has hamstrung the government's ability to cope with the flood of refuges trying to escape the Israeli onslaught in the south and in southern Beirut. Volunteers have had to take matters into their own hands. "We are welcoming thousands of refugees," said Salim Abu Ismail, the president of the civic center in Baaqline, the largest town in the Chouf, an oasis of calm amid the escalating violence. But the town is struggling to keep up. "Fruits and vegetables are available from the farms but some supplies have to come from Beirut. This will...