Climate & Environment

As Hurricane Irma closes in on Florida, Texas is still reeling from the effects of Harvey. But it’s now clear that the devastation from the storm has gone way beyond flooded homes and wind-damaged buildings:  In Houston, flood waters have damaged at least 13 Superfund sites, all heavily polluted areas…

Hurricane Irma is gigantic. And it’s coming to South Florida. As of 8 a.m. today, the only real debate among forecasters is how strong the storm will remain when it arrives in Miami this weekend and whether its über-destructive eye wall makes a direct hit on our urban corridor and the 6 million souls who live there.

Jamira Kennedy and her fiance were sitting with their one-month-old son Wednesday morning, talking about loading up on food for Hurricane Irma, when they were startled by two loud knocks at the door. It was the police. Just days before the largest Atlantic storm in history is set to arrive…

Hurricane Irma forecasts this morning seemed to give Miami a glimmer of hope. The world’s major storm-modeling programs showed Irma inching closer toward the Atlantic Ocean, and potentially missing South Florida entirely much like Hurricane Matthew did last year. The National Hurricane Center’s latest update offered no such respite. This…

Despite the panic of 185-mph Irma, a Category Five hurricane expected to hit South Florida, residents and businesses in the historic neighborhood Overtown seem unfazed, Having endured hurricanes Andrew and Wilma, many civilians seem prepared for whatever the storm may bring.

As of 8 a.m. today, Hurricane Irma is still a record-shattering monster in the Atlantic. As the storm churns 15 miles west of Saint Martin, Irma packs 185 mph sustained winds and frighteningly low central pressure of 918 mb. Irma is pounding the Leeward Islands, has Puerto Rico and the Bahamas in its sights, and — as of now — still looks like a very real threat for Florida.

Store shelves were running low across South Florida by Tuesday morning as locals hurried to prepare for Hurricane Irma, which is already one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes in history.

As of 11 a.m., Hurricane Irma drifted toward the Leeward Islands with winds churning at 180 mph, which makes the storm the strongest ever recorded outside the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Miami got lucky during last year’s hurricane season — the Category 5 Hurricane Matthew barely missed the city and wound up making landfall on the north end of Florida. But things don’t quite look as good right now: The Category 5 Hurricane Irma is rapidly approaching the Caribbean, and is…

There is an increasing chance of seeing some impacts from Irma in the Florida Peninsula and the Florida Keys later this week.

From giant African snails to tegus to peacocks, Florida is crawling with all kinds of things that aren’t supposed to be here. Probably none inspires as much fear as the Burmese python, which for years has been ravaging the Everglades and pretty much everything that lives there.

Carissa Kent was working at the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in 2006 when she heard the news: While building a new outlet in Lake Park, Walmart had destroyed the homes of dozens of gopher tortoises, a threatened species that lives in burrows deep underground. Worst of all, the megacompany had done so legally. The State of Florida simply required Walmart to pay only $11,409 in extra costs to level the animals’ habitat.

Your next bike ride in Shark Valley, kayaking adventure through the mangroves, or overnight camping trip in Flamingo might cost a bit more, thanks in large part to the Trump administration’s huge budget cuts to national parks.

Earlier this summer, natural gas began flowing through a new, 515-mile long pipeline from Alabama to Florida, quashing the hopes of thousands of environmentalists and activists who had fought against it. Then, within weeks, the Sabal Trail pipeline began leaking a smelly odorant up in North Florida. On Tuesday, those…

With Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt at the helm, the Trump administration has proposed cutting federal programs that monitor contaminant and fecal-mater levels in the Atlantic Ocean, keep tabs on phosphorous and mercury in the Everglades and Florida Keys, and clean up leaking underground tanks. Florida has the nation’s highest number of leaking, corroded storage tanks that leach carcinogens like benzene into the soil.

The National Hurricane Center says 92L has a 40 percent chance of becoming a tropical storm.

As Hurricane Harvey spins toward Barbados, another storm looming in the Atlantic Ocean has seemingly set its sights on South Florida. The wave is still days away from nearing the Sunshine State, but forecasters say it’s time to pay attention to this one.

The Florida’s Public Service Commission (PSC) has exactly one job: act as a check on the state’s powerful local electricity monopolies such as Florida Power & Light. The board has to sign off on rate increases and regulates safety and service issues — but critics have long said the regulators are barely a rubber stamp.

When a group called Sabal Trail began building a 515-mile natural gas pipeline from Alabama to Florida, protestors rightly worried about the possibility of a leak or explosion. All along, Sabal Trail representatives assured residents who lived by the pipeline that the risk of a gas leak was “minimal.”

Every morning for the past seven years, Ethel Domiguez has fed the cats living in the tangle of vegetation on the beach behind her Collins Avenue condo building. But when she went down to the beach yesterday, she was horrified by what she saw: Workers were bulldozing everything. Most…

There are two tropical disturbances brewing in the Atlantic Ocean right now. It’s likely neither will hit Florida. One, called Invest 99L, very likely could become a depression, but current models predict it will loop back out toward the center of the ocean without hitting us. The other, a tropical wave floating over the Bahamas…