March thread: Share what's on your radar

March 26, 2021

Welcome to My World’s on Fire, interactive edition! Once again, I’m taking your usual links email and opening it up for discussion. I really enjoyed getting some insight into your interests last month, as well as hearing your thoughts on the stories I shared.

Before we get into today’s links, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be taking next week off and returning to your inboxes with some newsletter news on April 8th. As I consider some changes (including a move off of Substack), I would love to hear your thoughts. The linked survey is anonymous and can be filled out in less than 5 minutes!

Now, for some of the news I’ve been following lately:

  • It’s been ten years this month since the 2011 Japan tsunami, which killed more than 20,000 people. I first heard about this phone booth – a space created for survivors to speak to lost loved ones – in a beautiful This American Life episode, but there is something striking about seeing it in photos. (Reuters)

  • On the theme of anniversaries, re-upping this piece about the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Alaska, which Jon Mooallem describes incredibly here and in his book about it, This is Chance!(New York Times)

  • How fears over liability could be stifling resiliency innovation in Texas. I know there are newsletter readers across some of these industries, so I’m really curious to hear your thoughts! (Houston Chronicle)

  • “‘I think this is a very widely felt conclusion among Katrina evacuees that this is just like what happened to us in New Orleans with the failure of the levees. In both cases, you had a public agency that had not invested in upkeep of the infrastructure of the city.’” Some of the 30,000+ Hurricane Katrina survivors living in Houston weigh in on last month’s energy emergency in Texas. (The Guardian)

  • Solutions journalism alert! A profile of the New Orleans Resilience Corp, which some experts say could be a model for communities across the country. (Atmos)

  • What it’s like in the “off-season” at the National Hurricane Center. (Washington Post)

  • Last year, I wrote about Nic’s, a restaurant in Paradise, California that was the first new business opened following the 2018 Camp Fire. They were open for less than six months when the pandemic shut their doors, kicking off a difficult year. I recently had the chance to catch up with owner Nicki Jones, who shared that they recently received a grant from football player Aaron Rodgers and the North Valley Community Foundation to help cover their payroll and utility costs. You can watch a video of them chatting with Rodgers about the impact this will have on their business on their Facebook page! (SF Gate)

  • And now for something I learned about while researching an upcoming article – scientists have created “emberometers” to better understand how embers spread during wildfires. Why is that such a big deal? As this article explains, “According to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), up to 90 percent of homes and buildings ignited in a wildfire are lit by embers.” (National Geographic)

  • Such a cool feature on how researchers are using old native-language newspapers to better understand the history of extreme weather in Hawaii. (Future Human)

  • Space. Hurricane.(NBC News)

Share in the comments what you’ve been reading, listening to, and watching in disaster news – old favorites, current events, long articles, short social media posts, self-promotion are all welcome. Or, you can weigh in on one of the links I posted.

I’m excited to hang out with you all in the comments and maybe even “meet” some of you for the first time. And don’t worry, there’s still a little something for reading to the end.