Disaster

The wildfires that have destroyed 6,000 homes and caused dozens of deaths across Northern California last week have finally been brought to heel as slackening winds allowed the 9,000 firefighters deployed by Cal Fire to make meaningful advances in their battle against the flames. With the biggest fires mostly under control, some residents have begun to return to their homes. However, more than 40,000 remain displaced.

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

The Northern California wildfires are fast-moving, unpredictable, and for some, unsurvivable.

The videos below will show you what it’s really like, trying to survive an ever-changing inferno…and why you shouldn’t wait for the official evacuation order.

An oil rig in Lake Pontchartrain, La. exploded Sunday night, leaving seven people injured – five of them critically – with one person still missing, NBC News reported.

Hurricane force winds returned to Northern California on Saturday, revitalizing the massive Tubbs fire that’s destroyed much of Santa Rosa. With the fire headed toward the few neighborhoods in the city of 140,000 that haven’t already been destroyed, state authorities ordered thousands more residents to evacuate as residents in some of the hardest hit neighborhoods began venturing back into the city to see what, if anything remains of their homes.

Six years after a tsunami crashed into the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing three of the plant’s seven reactors to melt down in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, a Japanese district court in Fukushima prefecture ruled this week that Tokyo Electric Power and the Japanese government were liable for damages totaling about 500 million yen ($4.44 million) in the largest class action lawsuit brought over the 2011 nuclear disaster, Reuters reported citing local media sources.