WORLD
March 29, 2011 | By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times
Structural engineer Kit Miyamoto was giving a speech in Japan on earthquake safety when this month's record quake struck, giving him a front-row seat for the unfolding disaster and what steps might save lives next time. "This disaster basically paralyzed the whole country," said Miyamoto, president of West Sacramento-based Miyamoto International, standing amid the wreckage in this battered coastal city. "We can learn a lot of lessons for California. " What worked, and what didn't?
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
March 15, 2011 | Catherine Saillant and Abby Sewell
Officials tried to reassure Californians on Monday that the kind of nuclear crisis facing Japan was highly unlikely at the state's two nuclear power plants. Southern California Edison officials acknowledged that the San Onofre nuclear power plant was built to withstand a magnitude 7.0 quake ? not the 9.0 temblor that hit Japan. But quake experts said the chance of a similar-sized quake ?and a tsunami ? occurring in the southern half of California were highly unlikely. "There's no offshore fault in any of Southern California that's exactly like the one that broke in Japan," said Thomas H. Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC. Photos: Scenes of earthquake destruction Steven Day, a seismology expert at San Diego State, said the highest magnitudes believed to be possible at the nearest significant fault lines to the two Central and Southern California plants ?
NATIONAL
November 25, 2010 | Brian Bennett
The threat level has never gone below yellow, once went to red and now may fade to black. The Homeland Security Department is poised to end its five-tiered, color-coded terrorism warning system, a post-Sept. 11 endeavor that has been called too vague to be useful and has been mostly ignored or mocked by the public. So forgotten is the system that the Homeland Security Department hasn't changed the alert level in four years, even after the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
NATIONAL
March 21, 2010 | By Ashley Powers
Dennis Walaker, the mayor of this flood-threatened city, closed a meeting Saturday by handing out celebratory cigars to officials -- to be smoked after the swollen Red River had crested. The city had spent an anxious week stacking 1 million sandbags to hold back the river, which was expected to near last year's record height of 40.8 feet. But on Saturday, with flood threats looming throughout the Upper Midwest, all signs seemed to indicate that the city would avoid calamity. The Red River, which flows north through tabletop-flat corn and beet fields, is projected to reach a high mark of 37 feet Sunday -- 19 feet above flood stage.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
March 4, 2010 | By Cara Mia DiMassa
For all the attention generated by the massive earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, experts in California remain skeptical that residents of this quake-prone region are any better prepared for the inevitable Big One. California saw a rise in quake awareness and retrofitting after the state recorded a series of major temblors over seven years: Whittier in 1987, Loma Prieta in 1989 and Northridge in 1994. But there hasn't been a devastating temblor in the state since the Northridge quake, and experts are concerned that quake preparedness may have declined in recent years.
NATIONAL
February 17, 2010 | By Bob Drogin
The crisis began when college basketball fans downloaded a free March Madness application to their smart phones. The app hid spyware that stole passwords, intercepted e-mails and created havoc. Soon 60 million cellphones were dead. The Internet crashed, finance and commerce collapsed, and most of the nation's electric grid went dark. White House aides discussed putting the Army in American cities. That, spiced up with bombs and hurricanes, formed the doomsday scenario when 10 former White House advisors and other top officials joined forces Tuesday in a rare public cyber war game designed to highlight the potential vulnerability of the nation's digital infrastructure to crippling attack.