Disaster

Over the past couple of weeks, President Trump has taken a beating in the mainstream media for, among other things, suggesting that the mayor of San Juan had politicized federal disaster relief efforts in response to Hurricane Maria and that it was, in fact, local mayors and residents who were failing to help the recovery effort and not the federal government.  Here are just a couple of the tweets as a refresher on the topic:

As Santa Rosa residents scramble to flee the path of no fewer than 15 major wildfires raging across eight Northern California counties, police in the Sonoma county seat have instituted a sunrise-to-sunset curfew as they crack down on unscrupulous looters who’ve been raiding abandoned homes.

Wine country is burning.

Thousands of residents of Napa Valley, Sonoma and six other counties have been forced from their homes – and thousands more are preparing to flee – as 14 wildfires tear through Northern California, resisting fire fighters’ efforts to contain them.

Residents of coastal towns and cities across the Southeastern US are breathing a sigh of relief as Hurricane Nate is rapidly weakening after twice making landfall in the Southeastern US late Saturday into early Sunday. The NHC has downgraded it to a tropical depression as it moves inland over Alabama; NHC has also discontinued all storm-related warnings for coastal areas, though heavy rains and flooding continue in some areas. The storm's maximum sustained winds have dropped to 40 mph, and as of late-morning Sunday, the storm was traveling near Birmingham, Alabama.

In late February, concerns about a potential nuclear "incident", reportedly in the vicinity of the Arctic circle, emerged when trace amounts of radioactive Iodine-131 of unknown origin were detected in January over large areas in Europe, according to a report by the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, the French national public expert in nuclear and radiological risks. And while Norway was the first to measure the radioactivity, France was the first to officially inform the public about it.