OSU study: Unprecedented combination of weather, drought fueled devastating 2020 wildfires
OSU
Fall 2020 wildfire impacts in Oregon were devastating, wide-ranging
Estimated 11% of Cascades burned last fall and this summer s forecasts look as bad or worse than last year
CORVALLIS, Ore. (KTVZ) – An unprecedented combination of strong easterly winds and low humidity coupled with prolonged drought conditions drove the spread of catastrophic wildfires in the Oregon Cascades last September, a new study has found.
“The individual wind and humidity conditions were rare but not unprecedented, but the combination of the two was,” said Larry O’Neill, an associate professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and a co-author of the paper. “And individually, they were some of the worst conditions we’ve seen since we began keeping records from instrumented data.”
20/20 Custom Molded Plastics expanding in Ohio, Indiana
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Structural foam molding specialist 20/20 Custom Molded Plastics Ltd. is adding equipment including a massive 8,000-ton press and more than 100 jobs to its plants in Holiday City, Ohio, and Bluffton, Ind.
President Ron Ernsberger said business is very good, with all end markets doing well. We are planning for double-digit sales growth again this year. With the new machines we have on order, it will be 2023 until we see a year where we are running all of the machines, he said in response to emailed questions. It is hard for me to understand. Material pricing is high and going up, we cannot get enough employees, raw material is being allocated, and we are dealing with a pandemic. I only wish I knew what was driving demand today, but we are very busy.
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Road map to U.S. fusion power plant comes into clearer focus sort of
Feb. 19, 2021 , 5:00 PM
Plans to build a prototype fusion power plant in the United States have come into tighter focus, as a new report lays out a rough timeline for building the multibillon-dollar plant and a strategy for developing its design. The United States should strive to start construction of the pilot by 2035 and to have it running by 2040, according to a report released this week by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). To meet that tight schedule, the report calls for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to help fund two to four teams that, in collaboration with private industry, would develop by 2028 different conceptual designs.
Feb 16, 2021
The Columbia River basin will see an increase in flooding over the next 50 years as a result of climate change, new modeling from Oregon State University indicates.
The magnitude of flooding – the term used to describe flooding severity - is expected to increase throughout the basin, which includes the Columbia, Willamette and Snake rivers and hundreds of tributaries. In some areas, the flooding season will expand, as well.
“The flood you’re used to seeing out your window once every 10 years will likely be larger than it has been in the past,” said the study’s lead author, Laura Queen, a research assistant at OSU’s Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.