From the ScienceCorps organization, this 28 page handbook titled Chemical Hazards in Floods and Disasters.

Regarding environment hazards in general, the Wall St. Journal noted: Houston’s Environmental Threats Come Into Focus. As Harvey’s flooding recedes, risk of toxic pollutants tests health inspectors

From Forbes Magazine: The Next Global Refugee Crisis Will Be Caused By Environmental Disasters. Some rather alarming news about mostly man-made disasters:

The next big migration wave won’t be caused by war or hunger. It will be caused by environmental disasters. People will be fleeing cities and countries to escape environmental pollution that makes life short, sick, and unbearable.

The global consequences of environmental disasters are enormous for everyone, including for investors in global markets. For the countries most affected, this massive migration wave will undermine economic growth, property values, and financial asset valuations—a risk investors must factor into their calculations when they buy into financial and real estate assets in highly polluted countries.

Watchdog for Industrial Disasters to Be Purged in Trump’s Budget. The Chemical Safety Board was created to investigate fires, explosions; Agency’s $11 million budget watches over public, worker safety, Some excerpts from the Bloomberg News article:

When a Texas City refinery exploded in 2005, 15 people died. Months later, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board found that putting workers in temporary trailers near danger zones at the plant raised the death toll.

Since then, temporary trailers have been relocated industry wide.

The example is just one of dozens over the past decade involving the independent agency, which has been targeted for elimination in President Donald Trump’s preliminary budget. While the board, with a 2016 budget of $11 million, is viewed skeptically by some companies and their allies in Congress, it has also drawn its share of supporters.

“I don’t think anyone in the industry wants to see the Chemical Safety Board be abolished,” said Stephen Brown, a vice president with Tesoro Corp., an oil refiner that was the focus of a 2014 CSB report, in a telephone interview. “The goal is a fully functional, professional investigative body that approaches things in a professional manner with integrity.”

Funding for the agency is among the cuts outlined by Trump’s blueprint budget Thursday, a preliminary document that embodies the president’s spending priorities for the nation. The safety agency was created in 1990 to find the root causes of industrial accidents and recommend ways to keep them from happening again.

One of the programs targeted for extinction by the Trump Administration is the Chemical Safety Board. In the Diva’s opinion this is not a smart move; in fact it is too bad that we do not have the equivalent of this board in the natural disaster field.

Is The Threat Of The Dakota Access Pipeline Real?  “I thought pipeline accidents were rare. Turns out, they happen all the time.”

My suspicion was that pipeline accidents are rare, but as I investigated, I found that they actually happen all the time. As shown in the mapstory I produced above, in the last 30 years, there have been over 8,700 liquid pipeline spills, averaging nearly one every day.