A bus carrying dozens of Texas high school band members home from a trip to Disney World plunged into a ravine off of an interstate highway in Alabama on Tuesday, killing its driver and injuring several others, authorities said.

A new storm is expected to bring additional weather misery this week to areas struggling to recover from a relentless series of weekend storms and tornadoes.

A Mobile County Public School System caught fire Monday afternoon in Grand Bay. According to Grand Bay Fire, all students were safely evacuated from the bus.

A brazen theft of an ATM was caught on camera in Alabama Tuesday. Surveillance video from the scene at a Givorns Foods shows a white truck with a Georgia license plate crashing through the storefront.

A Russell County Circuit Court jury returned a $7.5 million verdict late Wednesday against retail giant Walmart at its Phenix City store.
In July 2015, Henry Walker, a retired Army sergeant, was purchasing a watermelon at the store when his foot got caught in the wooden pallet and he fell, breaking his foot and hip, according to court testimony.

The relentless hurricane season is keeping Bloomington-based insurers busy. With seven weeks to go, the 2017 hurricane season is already the third most active on record.

The mayor of New Orleans late Thursday declared a state of emergency for the city ahead of Tropical Storm Nate, which has already been blamed for 22 deaths in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Tropical Storm Nate formed off the coast of Nicaragua on Thursday and it was expected to drench parts of Central America and Mexico before potentially hitting the U.S. Gulf Coast as a hurricane over the weekend.

At not-food-in-food recall on Monday night covers 38,475 pounds of ground turkey, including the Publix store brand, that might have metal shavings from the processing equipment. In addition to Publix ground turkey and ground turkey breast in 1.3-pound styrofoam trays, 1.2-pound trays of Fit & Active Fresh Ground Turkey and 1-pound trays of Weis Markets Fresh Ground Turkey Breast are covered in the recall. All have ink jet printing on the side of the trays with the numbers 7268 and 7269.

Insurance claims are already pouring in from policyholders with properties damaged by Hurricane Irma. The United States mainland sustained about $18 billion of insured loss, with the majority of damage seen in Florida, followed by Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama, according to catastrophe modelling firm Karen Clark & Co.

The full breadth of Hurricane Irma’s catastrophic attack on the Florida Keys is just now starting to emerge. Two days after Irma made landfall there, authorities and residents were finally able to reach some of the islands Tuesday.

A fire at a fertilizer plant in rural Alabama on Saturday spread caustic smoke and prompted an order for hundreds of residents to stay inside before it was extinguished, local media reported.

How bad have 2017’s pop-up thunderstorms, microbursts and hailstorms been? State Farm has some numbers. The company, Alabama’s largest home and auto insurer, says it has seen nearly double the wind and hail related homeowner claims it saw during the first six months of last year.

A suspected tornado near Birmingham, Alabama, flattened businesses and injured one person Thursday, while the mayor of a coastal Louisiana town urged residents to evacuate ahead of a rising tide — two lingering effects of a weakening Tropical Depression Cindy that was fueling harsh weather across the Southeast.

Alabama officials, like state and local leaders around the country, expect disaster recovery costs to continue to grow as people live in vulnerable areas and climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters.