Two Bay Area firefighters traveled to Florida on Tuesday last week, ahead of Hurricane Helene, and a third is on the way.

They are members of California’s Task Force 4, one of 14 Urban Search and Rescue teams that were deployed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to states affected by the storm.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.