Alabama residents who lost their jobs because of the devastating April 27 tornadoes will be eligible for new employment helping their communities recover.

Gov. Robert Bentley announced a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor that will be used to hire temporary workers to help local governments in the hardest hit areas. The workers will clear debris and start the rebuilding process and also may staff shelters and food banks.

Alabama Department of Industrial Relations Director Tom Surtees announced today that workers who became unemployed as a direct result of recent severe storms, tornados, straight-line winds, and flooding in Cullman, DeKalb, Franklin, Jefferson, Lawrence, Marshall, Tuscaloosa and Walker counties may qualify for unemployment assistance.
People who live in or worked in these counties and become unemployed due to the severe storms, flooding, tornadoes, and straight-line winds during the period of April 15, 2011, and continuing may be eligible for the assistance under the Disaster Unemployment Assistance (DUA) program, which was triggered when President Obama designated the area as a disaster area on April 28, 2011.

Unemployment can be deadly, especially for men, researchers have found.

In the new study, investigators analyzed 40 years of data from 20 million people in 15 countries and found that being unemployed increases a person's risk of premature death by 63 percent. The quality of a nation's health-care system did not affect this level of risk, the study authors noted.

They also found that unemployment boosts men's risk of premature death much more than it does women's risk (78 percent vs. 37 percent) and that the risk of death is particularly high for people younger than 50.