Brianna Sacks joins The Washington Post as an extreme weather and natural disasters reporter

In this role, Brianna will explore how climate change is transforming the United States through violent storms, intense heat, widespread wildfires and other forms of extreme weather. She will deploy to disaster zones and do enterprise reporting on the preparations for, responses to and aftermaths of such weather events.

Brianna comes to The Post from the Daily Beast, where she was a senior reporter. She spent nearly seven years at BuzzFeed News, where she discovered a passion for disaster reporting after spending almost three weeks on the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2017 chronicling the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Her reporting prompted calls for accountability by lawmakers as the storms wreaked devastation on people, housing and the environment.

While on the disaster beat, Brianna dug into why and how survivors of the Camp Fire, which swept through Northern California in 2018, kept dying and how the Bahamian government used Hurricane Dorian to detain and deport Haitian immigrants without following protocol. Brianna’s reporting on how the U.S. Forest Service had failed to fairly compensate and provide adequate physical and mental health care to wildland firefighters and ensure they were being properly compensated for on-the-job injuries helped push the Labor Department to streamline its claims processes and, for the first time, include cancers and lung diseases among conditions eligible for workers’ compensation.

As a national and investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News, Brianna reported on a man who started an effort to fundraise for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and later pleaded guilty to fraud; unearthed new sexual harassment and misconduct allegations against Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) and exposed how an elite fencer was allowed to go to the Tokyo Olympics despite being under investigation over sexual assault allegations by Safesport. Her reporting on how major companies, including Costco, failed its workers during the pandemic earned an American Society of Journalists Crisis Coverage Award.

Brianna loves being in nature and running. She is an ultramarathoner and holds the fastest-known time for a woman on the Backbone Trail, a 67-mile traverse in the Santa Monica Mountains. She makes up for all those lost calories with a lot of french fries.

Brianna has a bachelor’s degree in American studies from George Washington University and a master’s degree from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Please welcome Brianna when she starts Nov. 7.