In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, this interdisciplinary book brings together five years of empirical research funded by the National Science Foundation. It explores the causes of flooding in the United States and the ways in which local communities can reduce the associated human casualties and property damage. Focussing on Texas and Florida, the authors investigate factors other than rainfall that determine the degree of flooding, and consider the ...

If Hurricane Ike had made landfall just fifty miles down the Texas coast, the devastation and death caused by what was already one of the most destructive hurricanes in US history would have quadrupled. Ike made everyone realize just how exposed and vulnerable the Houston-Galveston area is in the face of a major storm. What is done to address this vulnerability will shape the economic, social, and environmental landscape of the region for decades to come.In Lessons from Hurrica...

**A New York Times BestsellerA Forbes Top 10 Conservation and Environment Book of 2016The ultimate guide to interpreting natural signs in water**From oceans to puddles, lakes to streams, rain to fog, our planet is covered in water of all kinds. And once you learn to read water’s hidden clues the way writer and navigator Tristan Gooley can, the world becomes a trove of secret signs. In How to Read Water, Gooley shares hundreds of techniques ...

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, NPR, GQ, The Economist, Bookforum, and Lit HubThe definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan—by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat DarknessOn March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of...

The brilliantly told and gripping story of the most familiar - yet, amazingly, still poorly understood - substance in the universe: Water.The extent to which water remains a scientific mystery is extraordinary, despite its prevalence and central importance on Earth. Whether one considers its role in biology, its place in the physical world (where it refuses to obey the usual rules of liquids) or its deceptively simple structure, there is still no complete answer to...

Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black ...

More than 300,000 books sold! Genesis, the seven days of Creation ... Where does the text that makes up the first part of the Bible come from? Is its text a mere introductory poem ... or is it a narrative? What's behind its words? Alberto Canen has found an alternative way to answer these and other questions in the Genesis. He has found a route no one had been to before, and invites the reader to discover it and make their findings with him. The author has found that hidden in the bottom o...

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas casinos use billions of gallons of water for fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and indoor canals. Meanwhile, the town of Orme, Tennessee, must truck in water from Alabama because it has literally run out.Robert Glennon captures the irony—and tragedy—of America’s water crisis in a book that is both frightening and wickedly comical. From manufactured snow for tourists in Atlanta to trillions of gallons of water flushed down the to...

The dramatic story of one of the biggest natural disasters in Canadian history, the Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016, told by three of the firefighters who fought to save the city.On May 1, 2016, a wildfire burning to the southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta, led to the declaration of a local state of emergency. Two days later, the fire had reached Fort McMurray, forcing the evacuation of 88,000 citizens and destroying 2,400 buildings. In total, the fire would consume...

Severe weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes have increased fourfold in the last two decades, shaking the foundations of our existence. Weather-related tragedies have fascinated humans throughout time. For those who loved The Perfect Storm andKrakatoa, the millions who log onto daily weather forecasting sites and check weather apps, and people who can't get enough front-page headlines of global natural disasters. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods, forest fires, blizzards, an...

Better water management will be crucial if we are to meet many of the key challenges of this century - feeding the worlds growing population and reducing poverty, meeting water and sanitation needs, protecting vital ecosystems, all while adapting to climate change. The approach known as Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is widely recognized as the best way forward, but is poorly understood, even within the water sector. Since a core IWRM principle is that good water management m...

Enter the eye of the storm in this gripping real-life thriller—A Perfect Storm on land—that chronicles “the sum and substance of the most catastrophic mass-tornado attack in recorded American history” (Ron Rowers, Pultizer Prize winner): a horrific three-day superstorm with 358 separate tornadoes touching down in twenty-one states and destroying entire towns.April 27, 2011 was the climax of a three-day superstorm that unle...