Preparedness and Communications

A 2015 Harvard study found that self-defense gun use is rare — victims use guns in less than 1 percent of contact crimes. That same year, there were more than 9,000 criminal homicides involving a gun, compared with just 265 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm.

The notification system would send out identifying information — such as license plate numbers — for the public to help locate suspects in situations where a law enforcement officer is killed, seriously injured, threatened with death or serious injury, or missing in the line of duty.

Some cities have taken significant steps to make those buildings safer by requiring costly retrofitting aimed at protecting those inside and preserving the housing supply. But many others have ignored the seismic threat.

The WarnMe-Aggie Alert sends text and email messages to UC Davis students and staff and is designed to alert 70,000 people. But the system initially notified only a fraction of those people about the events unfolding less than a mile from the campus and locked campus public safety officials out of some notification lists.

City Commissioner Joe Hay Jr. was concerned about the difficulty first responders were having communicating with dispatch.

The filing also might set the stage for PG&E’s sale, though it’s also possible that California lawmakers could eventually attempt to help the company.

'People in these zones SHOULD GO NOW because it is the safest time to leave,' an alert from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Riverside County Fire Department said.

On one occasion, representatives from a local tow company reported waiting between 30 and 40 minutes for an ambulance to respond to an automobile accident.

'People need to realize assistance for disasters is going to start going down. You’re going to see less and less and less of this and eventually somebody that lives in a floodplain that doesn’t choose to get flood insurance probably is not going to receive any assistance.'

Armed with cellphones, cameras and sometimes handguns, these self-described 'First Amendment auditors' traipse through government buildings, roam the halls of police departments and wander around airports and natural gas plants across the country.

Despite its reputation for both earthquakes and high-tech innovation, the state plan has progressed sluggishly while a handful of other quake-prone countries — including Mexico — have launched successful early-warning programs.

This is whole new tone for a governor's office that told Floridians, basically, that we couldn't afford to both create jobs and protect the environment.

Bay Area officials said Friday that they are stunned by the possibility that money already approved by Congress for an important flood control project on San Jose’s shoreline could somehow be shifted to Trump’s pet project.

The National Science Foundation next year plans to remove more than 150 seismic sensors it installed in Alaska in recent years, closing out a $50 million project that vastly improved the state's limited seismic network, said Mike West, state seismologist.

If the shutdown drags out for several more weeks, federal fire crews won't be ready for the months ahead, following a 2018 fire season that killed scores of people and destroyed thousands of homes in California and other states.