“This is NOT A Drill. This is NOT A Drill. This is NOT A Drill,” announced the Butte County Sheriff’s Department...
...who on February 12, 2017, ordered California residents to immediately evacuate areas downstream from the Oroville Dam.
The warning came following an unprecedented and dire assessment from the California Department of Water Resources...
...which anticipated “a failure of the Auxiliary Spillway at Oroville Dam within the next 60 minutes.”
At 770 feet (230 m) high, the Oroville Dam holding back Lake Oroville is the tallest dam in the United States...
...but record heavy rains threatened to top the barrier and have overwhelmed the dam’s overflow spillways.
Massive chunks of concrete were seen washing away before an emergency spillway was activated for the first time ever.
The emergency release, however, appeared to create a dangerous new hole that threatened to erode the entire dam’s foundation.
After the evacuation order, nearly 200,000 people were sent scrambling into traffic jams on highways heading north.
By some estimates, total failure of the dam would put the area 20 to 80 feet (6 to 24m) under water.
A last-ditch attempt was launched to save the dam, and large boulders were dropped from helicopters to try to fill the hole.
The structure has managed to hold together thus far, but new rains are expected to continue adding pressure on the dam...
Occurring only 10 miles (15 km) from the US border, the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster gave a dark warning for American railways...
...when shortly after midnight on July 6, 2013, much of the Canadian town was leveled by a massive train explosion.
The accident occurred when a 74-car freight train was left incorrectly parked on a 1.2% downhill grade aimed at the town...
...and a fire on the lead locomotive rendered the train’s air brakes ineffective as gravity slowly overcame the handbrake.
Witnesses reported seeing the brakes turn to smoking and molten metal as the unmanned train careened out-of-control...
...approaching a bend in the track in Lac-Mégantic at 65 mph (105 km/h), more than triple the speed limit.
72 of the train cars were unpressurized tankers that were each loaded with 30,000 gallons (113,000 l) of Bakken crude oil...
...which upon derailing, exploded in a “tsunami of fire” that consumed everything in a 0.6-mile (1 km) radius.
50% of Lac-Mégantic was destroyed by the oil blaze and 47 people were presumed dead, including 5 that were completely vaporized.
The train represented only a fraction of the 750,000 barrels of oil that are carried across the United States everyday...
...and it is believed that over 25 million Americans are currently at risk living in the “blast zones” of those oil tanker cars...
The first requirement for working in America’s nuclear ICBM silos is pledging to follow a president’s order to end the world.
Known as “missileers,” the technicians face immense pressure to always be at the ready to incinerate millions.
The end of the Cold War should have supposedly lowered the probability of having to initiate a nuclear apocalypse...
...but budget cuts and failing infrastructure may mean America’s nuclear arsenal is closer to an accidental disaster than ever before.
Down to 450 missiles from a peak of 1,000 in the 1970s, the silos are increasingly outdated and still run on floppy disks.
The conditions heap even more stress on the missileers who have no choice but to work to pay back the cost of their $300k educations.
Former missileers claim that the cramped 24-hour shifts under fluorescent lighting create a dangerous “zombie state”...
...and it has been alleged that the “grinding minutiae” of the job and crippling student debt are triggering mental breakdowns.
Court-martial rates in the nuclear-missile force are at least twice as high as the rest of the Air Force...
...and in one of the most egregious cases, 2 nuclear missileers were found guilty of cooking and snorting Bath Salts on base.
Worse still, in 2013, the 2-star general in charge of the program was removed after spending 3 days blackout drunk in Russia...
In 2016, the US Geological Survey included “human-induced” earthquakes in its seismic hazard forecast for the first time ever...
...signaling a dangerous new threat to areas of the United States that are unprepared to face a potential megaquake.
The change came after mysterious tremors have been rocking in interior of the country for several years...
...and it is now believed that high-pressure hydraulic fracturing is to blame for quakes that have reached nearly 6.0 in magnitude.
Known as “fracking,” the technique injects water and “trade secret” chemicals deep underground to release hydrocarbon deposits.
Research suggests the waste water from the process is cracking open long dormant faults and lubricating fault lines.
Some fear that the man-made quakes in the Midwest could next trigger a massive earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic zone...
...site of an 1812 earthquake that was the largest ever on the US mainland and caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards.
Studies predict that a modern megaquake would displace 7.2M people, cause $300B in damage, and result in 86,000 casualties...
Although the Flint lead poisoning scandal captured headlines in 2016, a far larger drinking water crisis may exist in the US...
...as nearly 3,000 communities have lead levels twice as high as Flint, and nearly 1,100 have levels at least 4 times as high.
The problem is so large in scope, that health officials have no idea if the poison water is a ticking time bomb...
...or if America is already silently in the middle of one of the greatest man-made disasters in history.
A survey from the American Water Works Association found that up to 96M Americans could be ingesting lead from unsafe water...
...and millions of children could already be suffering from brain damage and developmental impairment.
As centuries-old pipes continue to decay, it is estimated that 50M additional people will be exposed to even more toxins...
...including illegal concentrations of arsenic, radioactive uranium, and deadly bacteria from raw sewage.
In some of the worst cases of contamination, methane levels are already high enough in water supplies to make faucets flammable...