Recovery

'Forty-nine innocent people killed at one time,” said Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings, who responded to Pulse as the county sheriff on June 12, 2016. “That’s something akin to what you might see on a battlefield in war.'

This is in addition to the clean-up happening elsewhere in the county. Bay County has picked up around 5 million cubic yards of debris, and when all is said and done, officials are expecting to have about 9 million cubic yards of debris cleared.

The mounting backlog has overwhelmed Anchorage’s building department, and comes as a deadline approaches for disaster aid. Jan. 29 is the last day to apply for a state individual assistance grant.

The outage was caused by a faulty network management card from a third-party equipment vendor that caused invalid traffic replication.

With the start of a new Congress, Dunn has been talking to his colleagues about the devastation of Hurricane Michael — over and over again if need be — to push the issues forward.

Disaster officials are scrambling to secure a place to sort and process the remnants of nearly 19,000 structures destroyed in the wildfire that began on Nov. 8 and killed 86 people.

The hundreds of search and rescue volunteers who responded to the Camp Fire — and many others involved each year in California's natural disasters and mass tragedies — come from diverse backgrounds.

Polluted flood waters swamped coal ash ponds at power plants. Rising waters engulfed private septic systems in back yards. The unwholesome mix inundated hog waste lagoons on farms. And the torrent overwhelmed municipal waste water treatment plants in towns large and small.

The fires, larger and more damaging each year, pose a major threat to the state’s 33 million acres of forested land, 40 percent of which is on private property. But they are especially problematic for the individuals and families who own a cumulative 9 million acres of heavily wooded property in the state.

Last week, teams from the state, local governments, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration visited quake-shredded roads, severed water pipes and buckled buildings.

An eight-month LA Times investigation found that government officials did not heed decades-old warnings to build bigger basins that could have made the mudslides far less catastrophic.

In the affected neighborhoods themselves, residents insisted they were sympathetic to the Camp Fire survivors' plight. Some, however, clearly didn't want to bear the cost of Paradise's recovery.

Burned area emergency response teams are groups of government scientists and fire professionals that assess what damage has been done to cultural and natural resources and what future threats lie ahead.

One home’s roof was torn off completely, revealing its second-story rooms to news helicopters above. Twenty homes were evacuated after a possible gas leak.

The gift was an award for his actions Nov. 27, when he called 911 and calmly reported his mother was “on the floor unresponsive,” and then that she was seizing. The 911 dispatcher told Xavier paramedics were on the way and asked the boy to monitor when his mom wakes up.