In the southeastern town of Mallacoota, around 4,000 residents fled toward the waterside as winds pushed an emergency-level wildfire towards their homes. The town was shrouded in darkness from the smoke before turning an unnerving shade of bright red.
Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews said there were plans to evacuate the trapped people by sea. There were grave fears remain for four people missing. “We can’t confirm their whereabouts,” Andrews told reporters today.
He has requested assistance from 70 firefighters from the United States and Canada.
Victoria Emergency Services Commissioner Andrew Crisp confirmed “significant” property losses across the region.
Fire conditions worsened in Victoria and New South Wales states after oppressive heat Monday mixed with strong winds and lightning strikes.
A firefighter died Monday when extreme winds flipped his truck. Samuel McPaul, 28, was the third volunteer firefighter in New South Wales to have died in the past two weeks. He was an expectant father.
Australia’s wildfires have razed more than 1,000 homes in the past few months, with the most-populous state of New South Wales bearing the brunt.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Residents in the Fargo and Moorhead, Minn., area who are used to snowstorms were told to stay home after a foot of heavy, wet snow made that fell on top of a sheet of ice made travel difficult and stoked early fears about spring flooding.
“This is one the worst storms we’ve had, just because we had ice on the bottom of it and we received several more inches than we expected,” Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney said. “We’re telling people to be patient. Help your neighbor if you can.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Through today and into Tuesday, the storm could bring 4 to 8 inches of snow to parts of New England as well as freezing rain to areas of Vermont, New Hampshire, eastern New York and western Massachusetts, Andrew Orrison, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center, said.
“It could be rather damaging for some of the areas up through there where you can have down trees, power lines, and as a result, power outages to a number of people,” he said Sunday.
Major cities in the Northeast are expected to only see rain, but Boston could get snow and freezing rain, Orrison said.
As of Sunday, the storm had brought at least 14 inches of snow in Fargo, N.D., and about a foot in western Nebraska.
The system is expected to move across the Great Lakes and arrive in New England by Tuesday morning, bringing the possibility of severe ice storms, said Patrick Burke, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Md.
Several airlines issued travel notices for the upper Midwest as a result of the weather, including United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines, offering people who are traveling just before the new year the chance to change tickets without being charged a fee.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The Grapevine section of Interstate 5 in towering Tejon Pass north of Los Angeles was finally opened after a 36-hour closure forced by dangerous conditions that set in Christmas night.
Vehicles were being escorted in both directions by California Highway Patrol units.
The storm had largely departed by Thursday evening but cold air remained. The CHP said the closure continued into Friday because overnight temperatures fell into single digits and miles of roadway froze.
In the inland region to the east, the Cajon Pass section of Interstate 15 reopened after being closed for many hours. The major route for travel between greater Los Angeles and Las Vegas also reopened in the Mojave Desert after a lengthy shutdown between Baker and Primm, Nev.
Adding to the traffic misery, accidents caused massive morning backups on icy state Route 14, a major commuter route between Los Angeles and high desert cities in the snow-blanketed Antelope Valley. Other high desert routes had similar problems.
The National Weather Service said the cold low pressure system that brought the heavy rain and snow to Southern California was over Arizona and moving east. Rain and snow made roads and highways slick in a broad area stretching from Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon in the north to southeastern Arizona, including the desert along Interstate 10 east of Benson.
In California, I-5 rises to more than 4,100 feet in Tejon Pass between Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley, making it susceptible to storm closures, especially on the steep section known as the Grapevine.
Cajon Pass rises to more than 3,700 feet between the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains on I-15, which also carries commuter traffic in addition to people traveling between southern Nevada and Southern California’s cities.
Moisture wrapping around the low continued to bring some snow showers in the mountains in Southern California.
Dry, warmer weather was expected in Southern California through most of the weekend. Another cold, low-pressure system is forecast to bring precipitation late Sunday through Monday before a drying trend sets in on New Year’s Eve.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Typhoon Phanfone stranded many people in seaports and airports at the peak of holiday travel, set off landslides, flooded low-lying villages, destroyed houses, downed trees and electrical poles and knocked out power in entire provinces. One disaster response officer described the battered coastal town of Batad in Iloilo province as a “ghost town” on Christmas Day.
“You can’t see anybody because there was a total blackout, you can’t hear anything. The town looked like a ghost town,” Cindy Ferrer of the regional Office of the Civil Defense said by phone.
The storm weakened slightly on Thursday as it blew into the South China Sea with sustained winds of 74 miles per hour and gusts of 93 mph after lashing island after island with fierce winds and pounding rain on Christmas Day, the weather agency said.
Most of the 28 deaths reported by national police and local officials were due to drowning, falling trees and accidental electrocution.
The typhoon slammed into Eastern Samar province on Christmas Eve and then plowed across the archipelago’s central region on Christmas, slamming into seven coastal towns and island provinces without losing power, government forecasters said.
Provincial officials, army troops, police and volunteers spent Christmas away from home to tend to thousands of displaced residents in town gymnasiums and schools turned into emergency shelters. Many more people spent Christmas Eve, traditionally a time for family reunions, in bus terminals.
More than 25,000 people were stranded in seaports across the central region and outlying provinces after the coast guard prohibited ferries and cargo ships from venturing into dangerously choppy waters.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Thousands of firefighters in New South Wales took advantage of cooler weather and continued to strengthen containment lines. More than 70 fires, however, were still burning across the state with areas in the south coast currently at the “watch and act” level issued by fire services.
More than 12 million acres of land have burned nationwide over the past few months, with nine people killed and more than 950 homes destroyed. New South Wales has received the brunt of the damage, with around 850 homes razed in the state.
Authorities are bracing for conditions to deteriorate as high temperatures return. Sydney is forecast to hit 31 degrees Celsius (88° Fahrenheit) on Sunday before reaching 35° C (95° F) on Tuesday. The city’s western suburbs could reach 41° C (106° F) on Sunday.
Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Rose Barr said a heatwave was currently building in southern parts of New South Wales before worsening on the weekend.
“Some areas are forecast to reach extreme heatwave conditions,” she said. “With the increasing heat and winds, the fire danger will worsen into the new week, with Monday and Tuesday most likely to be the most significant fire weather days.”
Fire danger ratings remained very high in northwestern New South Wales, and high in Sydney.
Meanwhile, South Australian firefighters Thursday were battling wildfires in Adelaide Hills, which has been downgraded to the “advice” level.
South Australia state last week had 86 homes destroyed after wildfires flared in catastrophic conditions. A return of extreme temperatures, however, are expected with Adelaide, the state capital, set to reach a sizzling 40° C (104° F) today to start a four-day heatwave — its second such hot spell in just over a week.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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After years of fear and uncertainty, bottom trawler fishermen — those who use nets to scoop up rockfish, bocaccio, sole, Pacific Ocean perch and other deep-dwelling fish — are making a comeback here, reinventing themselves as a sustainable industry less than two decades after authorities closed huge stretches of the Pacific Ocean because of the species’ depletion.
The ban devastated fishermen, but on Wednesday, regulators will reopen an area roughly three times the size of Rhode Island off Oregon and California to groundfish bottom trawling — all with the approval of environmental groups that were once the industry’s biggest foes. The two sides collaborated on a long-term plan that will continue to resuscitate the groundfish industry while permanently protecting thousands of square miles of reefs and coral beds that benefit the overfished species.
Now, the fishermen who see their livelihood returning must solve another piece of the puzzle: drumming up consumer demand for fish that haven’t been in grocery stores or on menus for a generation.
“It’s really a conservation home run,” said Shems Jud, regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund’s ocean program. “The recovery is decades ahead of schedule. It’s the biggest environmental story that no one knows about.”
The process also netted a win for conservationists concerned about the future of extreme deepwater habitats where bottom trawlers currently don’t go. A tract of ocean the size of New Mexico with waters up to 2.1 miles deep will be off-limits to bottom-trawling to protect deep-sea corals and sponges just now being discovered.
“Not all fishermen are rapers of the environment. When you hear the word ‘trawler,’ very often that’s associated with destruction of the sea and pillaging,” said Kevin Dunn, whose trawler Iron Lady was featured in a Whole Foods television commercial about sustainable fishing.
Groundfish is a catch-all term that refers to dozens of species that live on, or near, the bottom of the Pacific off the West Coast. Trawling vessels drag weighted nets to collect as many fish as possible, but that can damage critical rocky underwater habitat.
The groundfish fishery hasn’t always struggled. Starting in 1976, the federal government subsidized the construction of domestic fishing vessels to lock down U.S. interests in West Coast waters, and by the 1980s, that investment paid off. Bottom trawling was booming, with 500 vessels in California, Oregon and Washington hauling in 200 million pounds of non-whiting groundfish a year. Unlike Dungeness crab and salmon, groundfish could be harvested year-round, providing an economic backbone for ports.
But in the late 1990s, scientists began to sound the alarm about dwindling fish stocks.
Just nine of the more than 90 groundfish species were in trouble, but because of the way bottom trawlers fished — indiscriminately hauling up millions of pounds of whatever their nets encountered — regulators focused on all bottom trawling. Multiple species of rockfish, slow-growing creatures with spiny fins and colorful names like canary, darkblotched and yellow eye, were the hardest hit.
By 2005, trawlers brought in just one-quarter of the haul of the 1980s. The fleet is now down to 75 boats, said Brad Pettinger, former director of the Oregon Trawl Commission who was key in developing the plan to reopen fishing grounds.
“We really wiped out the industry for a number of years,” Pettinger said. “To get those things up and going again is not easy.”
In 2011, trawlers were assigned quotas for how many of each species they could catch. If they went over, they had to buy quota from other fishermen in a system reminiscent of a carbon cap-and-trade model. Mandatory independent observers, paid by the trawlers, accompanied the vessels and hand-counted their haul.
Fishermen quickly learned to avoid areas heavy in off-limits species and began innovating to net fewer banned fish.
Surveys soon showed groundfish rebounding — in some cases, 50 years faster than predicted — and accidental trawling of overfished species fell by 80 percent. The Marine Stewardship Council certified 13 species in the fishery as sustainable in 2014, and five more followed last year.
As the quota system’s success became apparent, environmentalists and trawlers began to talk. Regulators would soon revisit the trawling rules, and the two sides wanted a voice.
They met more than 30 times, slowly building trust as they crafted a proposal. Trawlers brought maps developed over generations, alerted environmentalists to reefs they didn’t know about, and even shared proprietary tow paths.
“All we could do on our end is make a good-faith offer, and I really credit the guys in the industry for taking that up,“ said Seth Atkinson, an attorney with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “These were tough compromises.”
Last year, regulators approved a plan to reopen the 17-year-old Rockfish Conservation Area off Oregon and California, while banning future trawling in extreme-depth waters and making off-limits some habitat dubbed essential to fish reproduction, including a large area off Southern California.
“A fair number of fishermen thought it was a good deal and if it was going to happen, it was better for them to participate than not,” said Tom Libby, a fish processor who was instrumental in crafting the agreement. “It’s right up there with the best and most rewarding things in my career — and I’ve been at it 50 years.”
Some groups, like Oceana, wanted even more protections from bottom trawling, which it calls the “most damaging fishing method to seafloor habitats off the West Coast.” In a news release, the group emphasized that the agreement it did get safeguards 90 percent of the seafloor in U.S. waters off the West Coast.
Even so, with fragile species rebounding, trawlers could harvest as much as 120 million pounds a year, but there’s only demand for about half that much. That’s because groundfish have been replaced in stores by farmed, foreign species like tilapia.
A trade association called Positively Groundfish is trying to change that by touring food festivals and culinary trade shows, evangelizing to chefs and seafood buyers about the industry’s rebound and newfound sustainability. They give out samples, too.
“We are treating this almost like a new product for which you have to build awareness — but we do have a great story,” said Jana Hennig, the association’s executive director. “People are so surprised to hear that not everything is lost, that not everything is doom and gloom, but that it’s possible that you can manage a fishery so well that it actually bounces back to abundance.”
(Gillian Flaccus, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The blaze, which started Tuesday, was only partly under control by Wednesday, but had begun to shift from populated areas to forested land, the interior minister, Gonzalo Blumel, said. There were no reports of casualties as residents had been evacuated.
The mayor of Valparaíso, Jorge Sharp, told local news outlets early Wednesday that there were indications that the fire had been set on purpose.
“This fire presents characteristics of evident intentionality,” Sharp told the national television station, citing the fact that fire appeared to start in several places at around the same time.
The fire’s rapid spread was worsened by steady winds and warm, dry weather that came as the country experienced its worst drought on record, according to government officials.
“2019 has been the year with the least rainfall in history, as far as records show, and it has worsened over the past few months, beyond all our expectations,” said Alfredo Moreno, the minister of public works, in a news conference last week.
Valparaíso is a port city in central Chile filled with vividly painted homes that line its hillside streets. It has seen large fires in years past, including one that left 12 dead in 2014.
Photos taken in the city Tuesday showed homes engulfed in flames.
The affected area includes some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where the rugged topography and narrow, winding roads make access difficult for firefighters.
The roads in some of the affected neighborhoods are unpaved and homes can lack running water. The municipal government sends trucks with water to supply residents a couple of times a week. The housing can be precarious, made of tin, cardboard or wood.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Colorado State University’s first review of the global climate patterns that could influence the next hurricane season, which begins June 1, found only a 10 percent chance for below normal activity, lead author and researcher Phil Klotzbach said.
The probability for an above normal season was 45 percent with the same chances given for a normal season.
CSU’s December outlook does not predict a specific number of storms, but forecasts the amount of accumulated cyclone energy, or ACE, for the season. ACE is a measure of the strength and longevity of a tropical cyclone.
“All in all, I’d say conditions favor a near- to somewhat-above-average season given the odds of El Niño appear to me to be fairly low,” Klotzbach said. “Of course, my ability to predict El Niño this far in advance for next year’s hurricane season is extremely low.”
El Niño is a periodic global climate pattern that forms when the waters in the equatorial Pacific warm. The resulting changes in where towering thunderstorms form and shifts in wind directions high in the atmosphere work against Atlantic basin hurricanes.
But predicting El Niño, even a few months in advance, can be difficult.
This year, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration believed El Niño would grow to moderate strength and live through August, September and October — peak hurricane months.
Instead, it abruptly died in August, and the 2019 hurricane season ended with 18 named storms, including six hurricanes and three major hurricanes of Category 3 or higher. A normal season has 12 named storms, including six hurricanes and three major hurricanes.
“Making successful seasonal hurricane forecasts requires that one make a successful El Niño forecast,” said Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground who writes the Eye of the Storm blog for Scientific American. “When there are neutral conditions in December, as is the case now, there is not much we can say about what the state of El Niño will be next hurricane season — it could be virtually anything.”
Klotzbach notes that three quiet hurricane seasons between 2013 through 2015 led CSU researchers to believe that the Earth may be entering into a decades-long period of relaxed hurricane activity.
Then came the past four years that were not only above average in number of storms, but also damaging, with Hurricane Matthew (2016), Harvey, Irma and Maria (2017), Michael (2018) and this year’s Category-5 Hurricane Dorian.
The chances of a storm hitting the U.S. based on historic activity is also considered in this month’s report.
Florida has the highest chance of having a hurricane make landfall at 51 percent. There is a 21 percent chance a major hurricane could hit the Sunshine State.
“No one can completely understand the full complexity of the atmosphere-ocean system,” CSU’s report says. “But, it is still possible to develop a reliable statistical forecast scheme.”
CSU’s first detailed forecast is scheduled for release April 2.
(Kimberly Miller, THE PALM BEACH POST)
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Fires blighting New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a combined 306 million tons of carbon dioxide since Aug. 1, which is more than half of Australia’s total greenhouse gas footprint last year, according to Niels Andela, an assistant research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and collaborator with the Global Fire Emissions Database. That compares with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service’s estimate of 270 million tons in just over four months.
Destructive blazes have erupted in 2019 from the Arctic to the Amazon and Indonesia in what scientists are calling an exceptional year for wildfires. As places like Australia grapple with extreme weather conditions such as severe droughts and frequent heat waves — often aggravated by climate change — they’re likely to suffer from more persistent and ferocious fires that will typically start earlier and last longer.
“We have been closely monitoring the intensity of the fires and the smoke they emit and when comparing the results with the average from a 17-year period, they are very unusual in number and intensity, especially in New South Wales, for being so early in the fire season,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus, the European Union’s atmosphere observation program.
NASA uses satellite data to analyze the correlation between historic fire detection and modeled emissions from historic fires. That relationship is used to predict emissions based on active fire detection in almost real-time. Andela acknowledged that the methodology is still under development and that there is a large degree of uncertainty associated with the estimates, meaning they could be on the high side. It could take months for more accurate estimates to be generated by fresh satellite data, he said.
Around 200 blazes were burning across the world’s driest inhabited continent on Monday. New South Wales, the most populous state, remains at the forefront of the disaster with almost 800 houses lost since the fire season began unusually early in the midst of winter.
Organic matter aerosol and carbon monoxide, good tracers of smoke, have already transported across the Tasman Sea to as far as South America, Copernicus said in an emailed response to Bloomberg.
Wildfires across the globe have released approximately 6.38 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the first 11 months of this year, according to Copernicus. These blazes can be responsible for far greater air pollution than industrial emissions and produce a combination of particulates, carbon monoxide and other pollutants, which can be hazardous to the health of all life on the planet, the European group said.
(Heesu Lee, BLOOMBERG NEWS)
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Around 200 wildfires were burning in four states, with New South Wales accounting for more than half of them, including 60 fires that are not contained.
The disaster has led to renewed criticism that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s conservative government has not taken enough action on climate change.
Morrison rejected calls to downsize Australia’s lucrative coal industry. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and liquefied natural gas.
“I am not going to write off the jobs of thousands of Australians by walking away from traditional industries,” he told Channel Seven.
Morrison made the rounds on several Australian television networks Monday morning in the aftermath of his much criticized family vacation to Hawaii during the wildfire crisis.
He eventually cut short his vacation and returned to Sydney over the weekend before visiting evacuation and emergency control centers and the families of two firefighters killed battling blazes last Thursday southwest of Sydney.
“We all make decisions. You do as a parent, I do as a parent. We’ll seek to balance our work life responsibilities and we all try to get that right,” Morrison told Channel Seven.
Video posted on Facebook by firefighters in South Australia state and shared with The Associated Press shows a firefighter giving water to a thirsty koala Sunday as fires raged in Cudlee Creek, a town 25 miles northeast of Adelaide, the state capital.
Nearly 11,600 square miles of land has burned nationwide during a torrid past few months, with nine people killed and more than 950 homes destroyed. About 850 homes have burned in New South Wales, which last week was paralyzed by a seven-day state of emergency amid catastrophic conditions.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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New South Wales, Australia’s most-populous state, has declared an emergency as the heatwave that has produced the hottest day on record exacerbates devastating bush fires. Today’s catastrophic warning, the highest level of danger, means fires could spread rapidly and will be extremely difficult to control. It is the second such warning for greater Sydney this season.
“We are expecting another very dangerous, another very difficult day today given the widespread geographic area of catastrophic fire danger ratings,” New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told a news conference. “Catastrophic fire danger is as bad as it gets.”
The crisis could lead to road closures and diversions, potentially disrupting Christmas travel plans for thousands of Sydney residents pouring out of the city for a summer break along the coast. Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday said he would cut short his vacation in Hawaii and apologized for taking leave while the wildfires ravage Australia, reflecting the political pressure building on his government that denies the blazes are linked to climate change.
In New South Wales alone, eight people have been killed, more than 6 million acres — an area the size of Massachusetts — have been burned and 800 houses destroyed since the fire season started unusually early this year. Fires are also raging in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland.
The fourth day of a historic heat wave in Australia shattered monthly heat records for the state of Victoria and numerous localities and caused destructive bush fires to expand their reach. In Victoria, the temperature of 118.2 degrees on Friday at Horsham and Hopetoun was the hottest December day on record for the state, crushing the old record of 116 degrees set in 1976.
The ongoing heat wave has set an extraordinary slew of records that are typically broken by fractions of a degree, but in this case were broken by two degrees or more. Australia set all-time records for the hottest day ever recorded nationwide on both Dec. 17 and 18, with the 19th likely to be ranked at least among the top 5 hottest days in the country’s history.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) reports preliminary data showing that for Dec. 18, the nationally averaged maximum temperature was 107.4 degrees. This beat the old record of 105.6 degrees, which had been set just the day before. Before this heat event, the country’s hottest day was Jan. 7, 2013, which had an average high temperature of 104.5 degrees.
A temperature of 96.8 was forecast for Sydney today.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES; BLOOMBERG NEWS; THE WASHINGTON POST)
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Geoffrey Keaton, 32, and Andrew O’Dwyer, 36, were in a truck convoy fighting blazes southwest of Sydney when a tree fell and caused the vehicle to roll off the road. The two men, both fathers to 19-month-old children, died at the scene while three other firefighters were injured and taken to a hospital.
New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the injured firefighters were in stable condition.
Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons spent the night consoling families of the victims.
“To not be coming home after their shift is a tremendous grief and I applaud the families and the loved ones for their remarkable comprehension of what’s been unfolding,” he told reporters.
“Both of these men were very well respected, they were very close, they’re a close-knit brigade, they’re a very community-focused brigade, work together, socialize together, they’re very interactive together.”
Morrison said the two firefighters were “bravely defending their communities with an unmatched spirit and a dedication that will forever set them apart amongst our most courageous Australians.”
“Their sacrifice and service saving lives and saving properties will be forever remembered. I wish those injured all the best in their recovery,” he added.
The Rural Fire Service said up to 40 houses could be destroyed southwest of Sydney.
Cooler conditions provided desperately needed relief today, but scorching temperatures are forecast at the weekend with Sydney’s western suburbs expected to reach 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit).
New South Wales declared a seven-day state of emergency Thursday as around 2,000 firefighters battle 100 wildfires across the state.
Around 7.4 million acres of land has burnt nationwide during a torrid past few months, with six people killed and more than 800 homes destroyed.
The annual Australian fire season, which peaks during the Southern Hemisphere summer, started early after an unusually warm and dry winter.
The Bureau of Meteorology said Wednesday was the hottest day on record in Australia with an average of 41.9 Celsius (107.4 F), beating the landmark set a day earlier by one degree.
Adelaide, in the southeast, is currently in the midst of a heatwave peaking at a sizzling 46 Celsius (115 F) on today, while Melbourne was forecast at 44 Celsius (111 F), which would be the Victoria state capital’s hottest since the devastating Black Saturday wildfires in 2009.
Melbourne was shrouded in smoke wafting from the New South Wales wildfires much like the haze that has often blanketed Sydney during the past month, making its world-famous skyline barely visible.
The unprecedented conditions has reignited debate on whether Australia’s conservative government has taken enough action on climate change. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and liquefied natural gas.
Protesters on Thursday camped outside Morrison’s Sydney residence demanding urgent action on climate change.
Morrison has received criticism for going on a family holiday in Hawaii during the wildfire crisis, but said he would cut short his vacation and return to Sydney on Saturday.
“I deeply regret any offence caused to any of the many Australians affected by the terrible bushfires by my taking leave with family at this time,” Morrison said.
“I have been receiving regular updates on the bushfires disaster as well as the status of the search for and treatment of the victims of the White Island tragedy,” the prime minister said.
(Tristan Lavalette, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The death toll rose to four after heavy overnight rains caused flooding in Greenup County, Ky. Water rescue crews were called in about 8 a.m. Tuesday to aid two people, and at least one of them died, Kentucky State Police Trooper Bobby King said. He said crews were still trying to rescue another person.
National Weather Service teams confirmed at least 18 tornado paths: nine in Mississippi, six in Alabama and three in Louisiana. The number could rise since teams were still surveying damage.
Col. Bryan Olier, chief of staff at the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, told a news conference that at least 25 counties were affected, 150 homes reported damaged or destroyed and about a dozen people injured.
“We had a storm front that went from the southwest corner of the state to almost central — some 60 to 80 miles,” Gov. Phil Bryant said.
The Storm Prediction Center logged more than three dozen reports of storm damage from east Texas to Georgia.
“The cat flew,” said Tonia Tyler of Pineville, La. “It picked the cat up, and the cat flew — my cat — it flew across the yard. And I knew right there, I said ‘Oh God, we’re not going to make it.’”
In north Alabama, Lawrence County Coroner Scott Norwood said the bodies of Justin Chase Godsey, 35, and Keisha LeAnn Cross Godsey, 34, were found more than 200 yards from their home, the Decatur Daily reported. The couple’s elementary-school-age son was hospitalized.
Betty Patin, 59, died when an apparent tornado struck her home in Vernon Parish, La., said Chief Deputy Calvin Turner.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The wintry weather was part of a storm system that hit parts of the Midwest and was expected to extend into the Northeast through today, the National Weather Service said.
In Missouri, the storm dumped 3 to 9 inches of snow across parts of the state. Much of Missouri was under either a winter weather advisory or winter storm warning Monday.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol said three people were killed Sunday night when a driver lost control and overturned on U.S. 67 in St. Francois County in the eastern part of the state. A motorist who was stranded after a previous crash and two good Samaritans who were trying to help were struck.
And in mid-Missouri’s Callaway County, an 18-year-old was killed when his vehicle went off the side of Missouri 94 and overturned.
The patrol also said in a tweet Sunday night that it had responded to 525 calls from stranded motorists and to nearly 560 other traffic crashes. The University of Missouri was starting classes late Monday because of the storm.
In Nebraska, a crash Sunday on Interstate 80 northeast of Lincoln left three passengers ages 10, 15 and 19 dead. The crash happened when the driver of an eastbound sport utility vehicle lost control amid slick conditions, struck another eastbound vehicle before veering into the median, rolling and entering the westbound lanes. The SUV was then hit by a car and a pickup truck, according to the Nebraska State Patrol.
In Kansas, the storm brought up to 11 inches of snow. The Kansas Department of Transportation said multiple roads are partially or completely snow covered. A 21-year-old man died Sunday when a pickup truck in which he was riding overturned on an icy Wichita road.
Weather also is believed to be a factor in a collision Monday between an SUV and a pickup truck that killed a woman and her adult son along a road east of Indianapolis following a night of snowfall, police said. Fifty-four-year-old Amy Cox and her 24-year-old son, Isaac Cox, of New Palestine, were pronounced dead at the scene.
At St. Louis Lambert International Airport, about 20 departing flights and 20 arriving flights were canceled as of 6 a.m. Monday because of the winter storm. Lambert officials said in a tweet that crews worked through night and the landing strips were in good condition.
The storm also closed Emporia State University in Kansas.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A new study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also made an unexpected connection between acidification and a climate cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — the same shifting forces that other scientists say have played a big role in the higher and faster rates of sea level rise hitting California.
El Niño and La Niña cycles, researchers found, also add stress to these extreme changes in the ocean’s chemistry.
These findings come at a time when record amounts of emissions have already exacerbated the stress on the marine environment. When carbon dioxide mixes with seawater, it undergoes chemical reactions that increase the water’s acidity.
Across the globe, coral reefs are dying, oysters and clams are struggling to build their shells, and fish seem to be losing their sense of smell and direction. Harmful algal blooms are getting more toxic — and occurring more frequently. Researchers are barely keeping up with these new issues while still trying to understand what’s happening under the sea.
Scientists call it the other major, but less talked about, carbon dioxide problem.
The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and has long been the unsung hero of climate change. It has absorbed more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide released by humans since the Industrial Revolution, and about 90 percent of the resulting heat — helping the air we breathe at the expense of a souring sea.
Here in California’s coastal backyard, some of the nation’s most economically valuable fisheries are also the most vulnerable. Scientists for years have worried that the West Coast would face some of the earliest, most severe changes in ocean carbon chemistry.
Many have noted how West Coast waters seemed to acidify faster, but there was little historical data to turn to. Ocean acidification has become a field of research only in recent decades, so information has been limited to what scientists have since started monitoring and discovering.
This study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, came up with a creative way to confirm these greater rates of acidification. Researchers collected and analyzed a specific type of shell on the seafloor — and used these data to reconstruct a 100-year history of acidification along the West Coast.
“This is the first time that we have any sort of record that takes it back to the beginning of the (last) century,” said Emily Osborne, a NOAA researcher and lead author of the study. “Prior to this, we didn’t have a time series that was long enough to really reveal the relationship between ocean acidification” and these climate cycles.
The study analyzed almost 2,000 shells of a tiny animal called foraminifera. Every day, these shells — about the size of a grain of sand — rain down onto the seafloor and are eventually covered by sediment.
Scientists took core samples from the Santa Barbara basin — where the seafloor is relatively undisturbed by worms and bottom-feeding fish — and used the pristine layers of sediment to create a vertical snapshot of the ocean’s history.
The more acidic the ocean, the more difficult it is for shellfish to build their shells. So using a microscope and other tools, researchers measured the changes in thickness of these shells and were able to estimate the ocean’s acidity level during the years that the foraminifera were alive.
“We can read the deposits like pages in a book,” said Osborne, a scientist for NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program. “In Santa Barbara, there are just beautifully preserved laminated records of the seafloor that allow us to generate these high-resolution reconstructions.”
Using these modern calibrations, the scientists concluded that the waters off the California coast had a 0.21 decline in pH over a 100-year period dating back to 1895 (the lower the pH, the greater the acidity, according to the logarithmic pH scale of 0 to 14).
This is more than double the decline — 0.1 pH — that scientists estimate the ocean has experienced on average worldwide.
From these records, Osborne could see clear changes whenever El Niño or other climate cycles shifted the ocean’s chemistry more dramatically. The data revealed an unexpected connection to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a warming and cooling cycle involving strong winds that pull warmer surface water on or offshore. The swings in upwelling of more nutrient- and carbon-rich waters alleviated or amplified the acidification.
This climate pattern has already been connected to shifts in sea level rise and other effects along the West Coast. More data and better understanding of these connections will help scientists adjust their models.
So there’s this bottom-up pressure from the oscillation, as well as the top-down stress of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere getting absorbed by surface water, Osborne said. “This makes the extremes even more extreme. It’s like a double whammy for this region of the world.”
Restoring the ocean’s kelp forests and other marine vegetation will help sequester some of this carbon, but ultimately, how much worse this all gets depends on the choices people make in the next decade. Efforts to rein in human-produced greenhouse gases play a significant role in temperature, wind patterns, acidification and how fast the sea will rise.
“While the ocean has served a very important role in mitigating climate change by absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere, there’s a capacity at which the ocean can’t absorb anymore,” Osborne said. “From this study, and so many other published studies, there’s no question that the answer is to curb our carbon emissions.”
(Rosanna Xia, L.A. TIMES)
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The magnitude 6.9 quake struck an area about 4 miles northwest of Padada town in Davao del Sur province at a depth of 18 miles, according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. The area has been battered by a series of powerful quakes in recent months.
A child was killed in a village in Davao del Sur’s Matanao town when a wall of her house tumbled down as the ground shook and hit her in the head, officials said.
Davao del Sur Gov. Douglas Cagas said a three-story building housing a grocery store collapsed in downtown Padada during the quake, trapping an unspecified number of people inside. Search and rescue efforts were under way, he told the DZMM radio network, adding that an unknown number of people were injured in his province.
Matanao Mayor Vincent Fernandez said his two-story town hall was badly damaged by the intense shaking, along with two bridges and several buildings already weakened by previous quakes.
“The shaking was different this time, it wasn’t swaying. It’s like a roller was rumbling by underneath,” Fernandez told DZMM from an emergency shelter. As he was being interviewed, he paused briefly, saying the ground was shaking again in the latest of dozens of aftershocks.
Fernandez appealed for food packs and tents to be used by residents who needed immediate shelter from the rainy weather. Many buildings that can be used as evacuation centers have been damaged by recent earthquakes, he said.
President Rodrigo Duterte was safe with his daughter in his house in Davao city, where the earthquake was felt strongly. He returned to sleep after the tremors, said Brig. Gen. Jose Niembra, who heads the presidential security force.
Classes in Davao del Sur province will be suspended today to allow checks on the stability of school buildings.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Activists with the Sea Shepherd group said they witnessed about 80 small fishing boats pulling nets full of endangered totoaba fish from the water near the port of San Felipe on Sunday.
Those same nets catch vaquita porpoises. Perhaps as few as 10 of the small, elusive porpoises remain in the Gulf of California, which is the only place they live.
While totoaba are more numerous, they are also protected. But their swim bladders are considered a delicacy in China and command high prices.
The Mexican government prohibits net fishing in the gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortez, but budget cuts have meant authorities have stopped compensation payments for fishermen for not fishing.
Sea Shepherd operates in the area to remove the gill nets that trap vaquitas, but the group said the mass fishing seen Sunday was a new tactic, in which a number of boats would surround and enclose totoabas to ensure they couldn’t escape the nets.
The mass turnout overwhelmed the relatively few Mexican navy personnel present, the group said. In the past, fishermen have attacked Sea Shepherd boats as well as naval vessels.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Helicopter crews landed on White Island despite the danger and helped evacuate the dozens of survivors, some of them critically injured.
Hours after the disaster, authorities said the site was still too dangerous for rescuers to search for the missing. But aircraft flew over the island repeatedly, and “no signs of life have been seen at any point,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
The missing and injured included New Zealanders and tourists from Australia, the U.S., China, Britain and Malaysia, the prime minister said. Some of those who were exploring White Island volcano were passengers from the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Ovation of the Seas, docked on neighboring North Island.
“My god,” Michael Schade tweeted as he posted video of the eruption. “My family and I had gotten off it 20 minutes before, were waiting at our boat about to leave when we saw it. Boat ride home tending to people our boat rescued was indescribable.”
His video showed a wall of ash and steam around White Island and a helicopter heavily damaged and covered in ash. He said one woman was badly injured but seemed “strong” by the end.
The terrifying disaster immediately raised questions of why people were allowed to visit the island some 30 miles off mainland New Zealand after scientists had noted an uptick in volcanic activity in recent weeks. White Island is the tip of an undersea volcano.
Authorities said 47 people were on the island at the time. Some were walking along the rim of the crater just before the eruption. In addition to the dead and missing, 31 survivors were hospitalized, and three others were released, officials said. Some of the victims were reported severely burned.
The eruption took place about 2 p.m. and consisted of two explosions in quick succession, the prime minister said. It sent a plume of steam and ash an estimated 12,000 feet into the air. One of the boats that returned from the island was covered with ash half a yard thick, Ardern said.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said 13 Australians were hospitalized and 11 others were believed to be among the missing or dead.
“Ï fear there is worse news to come over the course of perhaps today or over the next few days,” he said. “This is a terrible tragedy, a time of great innocence and joy interrupted by the horror of that eruption.”
The GeoNet agency, which monitors volcanoes and earthquakes in New Zealand, had raised the alert level on White Island on Nov. 18 from 1 to 2 on a scale where 5 represents a major eruption, noting an increase in sulfur dioxide gas, which originates from magma deep in the volcano. It also said that volcanic tremors had increased from weak to moderate strength.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said about 100 tourists were on or near White Island when it erupted in the afternoon.
“Some of those, at this stage, are unaccounted for,” she said. “A number of people are reportedly injured and are being transported to shore.”
She said the incident appeared to be “very significant.”
“All our thoughts are with those affected,” she said.
Ardern said there were no confirmed fatalities.
St. John medical responders said in a statement they believed there were 20 people on the island who were injured and in need of medical treatment. It said it had dispatched seven helicopters to the island with paramedics aboard.
The GeoNet agency said a moderate volcanic eruption had occurred and raised its alert level to four, on a scale where five represents a major eruption.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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On Thursday, the air quality index in Sydney was worse than that in Beijing or Mexico City.
While bushfires rage across all of eastern Australia, hardest hit has been New South Wales. Its Rural Fire Service reported 108 ongoing fire incidents as of Thursday afternoon, which so far have affected an estimated 4 million acres.
That’s an area 5.5 times the size of Rhode Island, or 92 times the size of Washington, D.C.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology issued a fire weather warning for virtually the entirety of New South Wales for Friday, advertising “severe fire danger” for the “Greater Sydney Region,” with “very high” fire danger for the Southern Ranges. Sydney is home to more than 5 million people.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Thursday that humanitarian experts also reported more than 1,000 houses were destroyed and thousands more damaged.
Kammuri toppled trees and electrical posts, ripped off tin roofs and battered a provincial airport as it blew across island provinces in the southern fringes of the main northern Luzon island on Tuesday before blowing into the South China Sea.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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As the storm system moves slowly northeastward, some areas could get an additional foot of snow overnight and into the morning, forecasters said. Winter storm warnings and advisories were posted for most of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.
“It’s going to get cranking tonight and tomorrow morning,” said Frank Nocera, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Norton, Mass. Metropolitan Boston, which already had 4 to 8 inches of snow in some suburbs, could see those amounts double by today, he said, and further school closings and commuting problems were possible.
The storm delivered the first major snowfall of the season in the Northeast, but other than coming at a relatively early date, it did not pack many surprises for weather experts.
“I would call it a pretty typical snowstorm,” said Matt Doody, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “In the Northeast, we get these storms during this time of year, especially between now and February — even into as late as March.”
As the storm blasted its way into the region from Sunday into Monday, the hardest-hit areas were mainly in central New York; the region around Albany, the state capital; and western Massachusetts.
From Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, schools and colleges closed for an early-season snow day Monday.
More than 770 flights within, into or out of the United States were canceled Monday, according to FlightAware.com, with many of the scrubbed flights involving the New York and Boston airports.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Speaking before the start today of a two-week international climate conference in Madrid, the U.N. chief said the impact of rising temperatures, including more extreme weather, is already being felt around the world, with dramatic consequences for humans and other species.
He noted that the world has the scientific knowledge and the technical means to limit global warming, but “what is lacking is political will.”
“The point of no return is no longer over the horizon,” Guterres told reporters in the Spanish capital. “It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”
Delegates from almost 200 countries will try to put the finishing touches on the rules governing the 2015 Paris climate accord at the Dec. 2-13 meeting, including how to create functioning international emissions trading systems and compensate poor countries for losses they suffer from rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change.
Guterres cited mounting scientific evidence for the impact that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are already having on the planet, including record temperatures and melting polar ice.
The Trump administration has announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris agreement. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading a delegation of Democratic lawmakers to the talks.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The National Weather Service predicted more than a foot of snow in swaths of upstate New York and New England, as well as ice accumulations in parts of Pennsylvania.
“We’ve got our shovels ready. We’ve got the snowblower ready. We’re prepared,” said Paul Newman of Wethersfield, Conn.
The same storm has been pummeling the U.S. for days as it moved cross country, dumping heavy snow from parts of California to the northern Midwest and inundating other areas with rain.
It has been blamed for several deaths.
The bodies of a boy and a girl, both 5, were found in central Arizona after their vehicle was swept away Friday while crossing a swollen creek.
Two adults and four other children were rescued by helicopter, but a 6-year-old girl is still missing. Rescuers are combing the area of Tonto Basin, about 50 miles northeast of Phoenix, with helicopters, drones, boats and dogs.
“We want to bring her home safely to her family,” said Lt. Virgil Dodd of the Gila County Sheriff’s Office. “She needs to come home today, and we’re going to do that.”
Two boys, ages 5 and 8, died Saturday near Patton, Mo., when the vehicle they were riding in was swept off flooded roads.
A 48-year-old man died in a separate incident near Sedgewickville, Mo., and a storm-related death was reported in South Dakota.
Major highways reopened Sunday in Wyoming and Colorado, a day after blizzard conditions clogged roads with snow drifts.
Road crews were able to reopen all of Interstate 25 and most of I-80 in Wyoming early Sunday after strong winds abated. Major interstates in Colorado were also reopened.
Still, authorities warned travelers to remain alert for slick conditions and blowing snow.
As the storm shifted east, flight delays and cancellations continued to pile up. As of 7:30 p.m., there were more than 800 Sunday flights canceled in the U.S., compared with about 400 on Saturday, according to flight tracking site FlightAware. Nearly 6,000 U.S. flights were delayed.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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It was the opposite sight at city restaurants, which remain shuttered while city officials work to determine if a recent rain storm contaminated the city’s water supply.
Residents started reporting discolored tap water on Friday. Although city crews tested the water at those first locations and found it to be “well within standards,” city officials decided to notify the State Water Resources Control Board of the situation.
City and state officials decided Saturday that it would be safest to put out a boil-water order — the first in the city’s history — until more testing could be completed. The city provides water service to about 14,000 customers, which includes about 50,000 residents and about 250 bars and restaurants.
“We are taking all of the necessary steps to address this situation,” City Manager Chris Hazeltine said. “Restoring normal water service is our top priority.”
On Sunday, city crews determined rainwater likely infiltrated the city’s water system through the clear well — a reservoir that holds about 10 million gallons of drinkable water. City spokeswoman Jessica Parks said divers are checking the inside of the well to ensure “everything is in its place” and inspectors are checking the reservoir’s covering, which protects the water inside from the elements.
Additionally, water samples were collected from throughout the city’s water system and were sent to an outside lab for processing, Parks said. Technicians will be checking for chlorine residuals, an important indicator of water quality, the presence of bacteria and organisms and turbidity, or clarity.
The results will then be sent to state officials, who will determine next steps, which could include further testing. Because of this, city officials can’t estimate how long the boil order will be in place.
“If that takes one day or five days, we’re going to do what it takes to ensure our water is safe for our consumers before we lift the advisory,” Parks said.
Boiling water for at least one minute kills bacteria and other organisms that might be present in contaminated water. Until city officials can determine definitively that the water supply is safe, boiled or bottled water should be used for drinking, making ice, brushing teeth, washing dishes and preparing food.
The city began distributing free bottled water at Lake Poway Sunday morning, and officials say they will continue to do so between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. until the boil-water order is lifted. Free water will also be available during those times at Poway City Hall on Civic Center Drive.
Although more than a dozen Poway Unified School District schools use the city’s water system, the campuses will be open on Monday.
District officials plan to provide bottled water to all affected schools because water fountains will be turned off until further notice. Families were asked to pack water bottles for their students in an effort to ease demand.
Officials with the district’s Food and Nutrition Department will prepare all food items requiring water at an unaffected location. Restroom toilets can be used normally and hand sanitizer will be in all bathrooms.
The affected schools include Chaparral, Garden Road, Midland, Painted Rock, Pomerado, Tierra Bonita and Valley elementary schools as well as Meadowbrook Middle School, Twin Peaks Middle School, Abraxas High School, Poway High School and the Twin Peaks Center, which hosts the New Directions program and adult education courses.
Updated information can be found on the city’s website at poway.org. City officials encouraged residents to sign up for emergency alerts at alertsandiego.org, which will also push out updates. Information will also be available via the SD Emergency App.
(Lyndsey Winkley, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The cliff failure occurred south of Seagrove Park, in front of the Wave Crest condominium complex, according to observers.
“At this time, all trains are safe to move through this section of the bluffs,” Kimy Wall, spokeswoman for the North County Transit District, said in an email. “For added safety, trains are on restricted speed limits and engineers are monitoring the area.”
Wall declined to say when the collapse occurred.
“The first time we saw it was this morning when we woke up,” said Ken Knight of central Washington, who’s vacationing in the area. “It’s probably a foot or two from the ties on the track. It’s close.”
Today, the North County Transit District will close portions of the tracks south of the Solana Beach train station to make repairs. Bus service will be provided to assist travelers.
Coaster trains will run on their regular Saturday service schedule from Oceanside Transit Center to Solana Beach Coaster station and passengers will be taken by bus between Solana Beach train station and Santa Fe Depot, according to the NCTD. Travelers who are headed north and board the train south of the Solana Beach station will be bused to Oceanside Transit Center, while passengers heading north between Solana Beach Station and Oceanside Transit Center will have a regular train schedule.
Service for the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner will also be affected. For more information go online at PacificSurfliner.com or call 800-872-7245.
Regularly scheduled train service for Amtrak and the Coaster is expected to resume on Sunday, according to the news release.
Del Mar has seen a significant increase in bluff collapses in recent years, largely attributed to the destabilizing effects of urban runoff and erosion from ocean waves. Sea-level rise driven by climate change is expected to exacerbate failures in coming decades.
The most recent incident comes after a Thanksgiving storm soaked the San Diego region.
Regional transportation officials have planned a number of drainage improvements and other improvements aimed at stabilizing the bluffs. Long-range plans are also underway to relocate or stabilize the train tracks that service Amtrak, Coaster and freight operations.
Beachgoers in Del Mar and other areas are encouraged to keep a safe distance from steep cliff sides, roughly 25 to 40 feet.
While parts of the bluffs are made of sturdy mudstone, other sections are precarious, specifically stretches filled with loose materials when the railroad was constructed.
(Joshua Emerson Smith & Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The storm caused the death of at least one person in South Dakota and shut down highways in the western U.S., stranding drivers in California and prompting authorities in Arizona to plead with travelers to wait out the weather before attempting to travel.
The storm was expected to track east through the weekend — into the Plains late Friday, the Midwest by today and the Northeast on Sunday — pummeling a huge portion of the country with snow, ice or flash flooding.
The National Weather Service said travel could become impossible in some places.
The weather could be particularly disruptive on Sunday, when millions of holiday travelers head home. Airlines for America, the airline industry’s trade group, expects 3.1 million passengers during what could be the busiest day ever recorded for American air travel.
The weather service issued storm warnings Friday for a swath of the country stretching from Montana to Nebraska to Wisconsin, with heavy snow anticipated in parts of Utah, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming.
Strong winds gusting to 90 mph were possible in mountains and foothills, and could reach 65 mph in the Plains, creating poor visibility.
One hopeful traveler asked the weather service Friday on Twitter whether it would be advisable to drive to Duluth, Minnesota, over the weekend. The agency warned: “If you are in Duluth by tonight, you will likely be stuck there until at least Sunday afternoon due to heavy snow and blizzard conditions.”
Delta said inclement weather could disrupt travel at airports in the upper Midwest today and the Northeast on Sunday and Monday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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They described in a press conference Thursday what they said were “widespread, systematic attacks” on indigenous tribes under the Bolsonaro administration, which is seeking to promote economic development in the Amazon often at the expense of environmental regulation.
The document the group sent to the court includes 33 actions and comments from Bolsonaro.
The allegations range from the president’s vocal support of small-scale illegal mining in protected areas, to his criticism of some public servants working with environmental and indigenous affairs, and the data they produce.
Bolsonaro’s office declined to comment.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The storm frustrated holiday travelers who found themselves crawling along alternative routes in sometimes icy conditions when the California Highway Patrol shut the main artery linking the state’s north and south for more than nine hours.
More than 7 inches of snow fell in Pearblossom by noon while enough snow piled up in nearby Palmdale to snap tree branches, the National Weather Service said.
Still, some found a way to enjoy the spectacle of a white Thanksgiving Day and feel gratitude for a break in the recent dry conditions that have fueled destructive wildfires throughout the state. In Santa Barbara County, Fire Department spokesman Mike Eliason stood alone atop a ridge and surveyed the smoldering landscape of the Cave fire as snow began to fall.
“This is just really unique. We’ve never had fire with active snowfall near the point of origin,” Eliason said. “It was a very thankful moment. Thankful that no one got injured, no one lost their home, that the snow came over heavy rain. And I’m just thankful that everybody got home safe.”
Some firefighters were allowed to return home as weather conditions helped bring the fire under control, he said.
The holiday’s chilly and gray conditions may seem worse than usual because they are such a sudden departure from earlier in the month, said climatologist Bill Patzert.
A new winter storm is expected to arrive in Northern and Central California on Saturday, persist through the busy Sunday travel day and continue through Tuesday.
It could hit Southern California by next Wednesday and Thursday. Satellites show even more rain could be lined up behind that.
Thursday’s storm was the second to hit the region this week. At around 4:30 a.m.
Thursday, authorities closed I-5 through the Tejon Pass and urged motorists to use Highway 101 instead. Because Highway 101 is at a lower elevation, it generally doesn’t get enough snow to force a closure.
On the freeway just north of Lake Hughes Road, the California Department of Transportation began operating a new gate that allows drivers to turn around and travel back in the other direction when road conditions are dicey.
The 52-foot-long steel gate weighs 5 tons, and crews can open it by hand in less than two minutes. The gate enables drivers to avoid surface streets, which become congested when the freeway is closed, said Caltrans spokesman Eric Menjivar.
“We were pretty excited to get this new gate into use,” Menjivar said. “We think this ‘snow gate’ will help people get to where they need to get to.”
On the northern side of the Grapevine, Shell gas station assistant manager Abraham Diaz said his day was filled with a rotation of commuters stymied by the highway closure. “Some are frustrated, some are upset. Some go, ‘You know what? Forget this. I’m going home,’” Diaz said.
Shortly before 3 p.m., the freeway was reopened in both directions.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The deluge forced residents of a San Diego condominium complex to evacuate, and city lifeguards rescued eight people from about a half-dozen vehicles in flooded streets.
The system moved into the region Wednesday, vexing travelers who were trying to reach their destinations on Thanksgiving eve. It greatly intensified early Thursday and slammed into northwestern San Diego County, accompanied by thunder and lightning.
San Onofre reported 2.78 inches of rain by 3:15 p.m. Thursday, most of which had fallen since midnight. Encinitas got 2.07 inches, Carlsbad got 2.03 inches, and Lemon Grove got 2.22 inches.
El Cajon, Escondido, Chula Vista, and Vista set new precipitation records for Nov. 28.
Much of the storm had moved east and was drenching the Las Vegas Strip late Thursday afternoon. But forecasters say showers will continue to fall across greater San Diego well into today, along with residual snow.
South County was spared heavy rain during the early phase of the storm. But the script flipped when a series of cells swirled ashore, hitting San Diego and Chula Visa especially hard. It didn’t escape the notice of passengers at San Diego International Airport, where 36 mph winds whipped against terminal windows.
Up the coast, in Solana Beach, winds gusted to 52 mph, adding another layer of froth to the breaking waves.
Residents of a condo complex at 2356 Grove Ave. in San Diego were evacuated after a storm drain overflowed Thursday at 12:40 p.m. and flooded the structure, according to authorities. Imperial Beach and San Diego fire departments responded. Public Works officials were investigating a possible pump malfunction.
San Diego lifeguard rescue teams responded to about 10 incidents in multiple cities where vehicles were trapped in flooded streets, including in San Diego, Chula Vista and National City.
Most notably, lifeguards rescued eight people around 2 p.m. from about a half-dozen vehicles at the intersection of Palm Avenue and Picador Boulevard.
“We had a flurry of calls when the really heavy stuff started coming into town,” said Rick Romero, spokesman for the San Diego lifeguards. “We had multiple car accidents and flooding.”
By then, the lower San Diego River was rising, leading to the closure of Avenida del Rio, a key entrance to the Fashion Valley mall. The area had recorded 1.44 inches of rain by 3:15 p.m. Forecasters said the river would rise to 8 feet, 2 inches’ on Thursday night — about 3 feet below flood stage.
Hundreds of residents across the county lost power throughout the day, including nearly 2,000 homes in East County at one point, according to SDG&E. It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the outages were caused by the weather.
By late afternoon, snow was falling on Mount Laguna and Palomar Mountain and was expected to spread into the Cuyamaca Mountains. All three areas could receive a foot or more of snow, forecasters said. Snowflakes the size of nickels were falling in Pine Valley and in Julian.
The snow level could drop to 3,000 feet and affect travel along Interstate 8, east of Alpine, as well as Sunrise Highway and Highway 79, forecasters said.
The white flakes left ski resort operators seeing green.
“Big snowfall reports coming in with so far the highest total being 17 inches at Lake Arrowhead northwest,” the weather service reported. “Wrightwood 15 inches. Big Bear Snow Summit 14 inches. Rates have been observed to 2 inches of snow per hour.”
The snow was expected to continue well into the night. So was the formation of fog across many areas of San Diego County, including near the airport and in Ramona.
Forecasters say the weather will clear a bit this afternoon. But San Diego residents won’t be able to look off to the east and see the snow-covered mountains until Saturday.
Late in the afternoon, the weather service issued a statement not everybody will want to read: “Another storm system is expected to impact SoCal next week, Tuesday through Thursday.”
(Gary Robbins & Joshua Emerson Smith, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE)
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At least 31 people were reported killed, hundreds were injured and thousands were left homeless by the 6.4 magnitude quake that struck before dawn Tuesday. In small villages not yet reached by emergency crews, residents issued desperate pleas for water and other supplies.
Even as aftershocks continued to rattle already-damaged buildings and survivors’ nerves, hundreds of people — police officers, soldiers, firefighters, teams from neighboring countries and local residents — used whatever they could to reach people still trapped under debris.
“We have lost human lives,” Prime Minister Edi Rama told reporters during a visit to a hospital caring for victims in Tirana, the capital city. “We have also saved a lot of lives.”
Local television showed scenes of dramatic rescues overnight and throughout the day, as well as images of those killed.
The coastal city of Durres and the town of Thumane were among the hardest hit by the quake, the strongest to strike Albania in decades. Buildings collapsed or broke apart, trapping people inside, and others were damaged badly enough that people were wary of staying in them.
One story struck a chord with the nation — showing how fine the line was between hope and tragedy, with nothing but random chance separating the two.
The Lala family was asleep in a four-story concrete home in the Marshes neighborhood of Durres when the quake struck, and the building collapsed on itself like a sandwich. Two older women were killed, and so were two children, ages 5 and 10.
But just a few feet away from them, a 17-year-old boy survived. And Italian rescue workers on the scene said they would continue to dig because people have been found alive, against all odds, after much longer periods trapped in earthquake wreckage.
The government sought Wednesday to reassure the victims whose homes were destroyed or damaged to the point of being unsafe that it will find them accommodation. All of those people would have temporary shelter soon and new homes next year, the prime minister said.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Winds gusted to nearly 60 mph south of Julian, where temperatures dropped into the 30s. And runoff began to gather in the lower San Diego River, which is expected to rise rapidly late today, possibly blocking the Avenida del Rio entrance to the Fashion Valley Mall by the time it opens at 5 p.m.
Farther south, officials in Tijuana were preparing for potential flooding due to the storm and to long-term issues with the city’s drainage systems.
The National Weather Service described Wednesday’s showers as the prelude to a much stronger jolt of wind, rain and snow that is expected to hit today.
“It looks like the heaviest precipitation on Thursday could come from roughly midday to early evening,” said Joe Cordera, a weather service forecaster. “The cold air that’s coming in could lead to thunderstorms.”
Forecasters say they are still expecting that coastal areas will get 1 to 2 inches of rain by the time the system pushes east on Friday. Areas east of Interstate 15 are projected to get 2 to 3 inches of precipitation. And 12 to 18 inches of snow could fall on Mt. Laguna, Palomar Mountain, and in the Cuyamaca Mountains.
The snow level could drop to 3,000 feet tonight, affecting communities like Julian, and an inch or two of snow could fall on wind-whipped Interstate 8, east of Alpine.
At least 5 inches of snow fell Wednesday in the upper reaches of the San Bernardino Mountains, where the winds gusted to 83 mph.
A flash-flood watch will be in effect in San Diego County from the coast to the inland foothills until 10 p.m. tonight, and a winter storm warning will be in effect in the mountains until 10 p.m. on Friday.
“People at the coast probably won’t be able to see the snow in the mountains until Saturday morning,” Cordera said.
The rains could close trails in many areas, notably Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve near Rancho Peñasquitos and Sorrento Hills.
Regionally, the leading edge of the storm mostly brought showers Wednesday in greater San Diego. But Encinitas got a jolt.
Sheriff’s officials said a lightning strike ignited a power pole behind a bicycle store on South Coast Highway 101 near West I Street in Encinitas.
A witness called 911 shortly before 1:10 p.m. and reported that an electrical transformer had been hit and that flames had spread to a nearby pole, said sheriff’s Lt. William Amavisca.
Off to the east, the story involved strong winds. The weather service said one wind gust reached 57 mph at Harrison Park, a peak south of Julian, in the Cuyamaca Mountains.
The situation is more dire in Tijuana, which is in a state of alert this week as rainstorms are forecast to cause flooding and mudslides throughout the city, officials said.
On Wednesday, the city announced all public schools would be closed today. Additionally, officials warned residents to avoid the roads.
“This situation is very concerning, people are in imminent risk,” said Representative Oscar Eduardo Valenzuela Rodriguez.
Over the last decade, Tijuana has struggled to upgrade its infrastructure to meet the demand of its rapidly growing population.
The city’s wastewater treatment plant routinely gets overburdened during storms, causing sewage flows from Tijuana’s canyons to pour into the Tijuana River and flow into the Pacific Ocean. Those sewage flows routinely prompt beach closures in Imperial Beach and Coronado.
On Wednesday, San Diego County health officials closed Imperial Beach beaches and asked the public to “avoid water contact in the closure area due to sewage-contaminated runoff from the Tijuana River.”
Storms also wreak havoc on the city’s roads — some of which are dirt roads that turn into mud during the rainy season.
The city’s fire chief, Jose Luis Jimenez Gonzalez, encouraged residents to avoid driving or walking through heavy flows of water.
“The moment these rainfalls begin, people should not cross water,” he told local media. “They are very dangerous and we have had to rescue people who have tried and failed to cross.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Two separate storm systems choked transportation across the center of the nation, bringing 40 inches of snow in some areas. The storms caused the cancellation of hundreds of flights and the delay of thousands more.
While the storms were weakening and expected to drop less snow today, the weather systems would be “in a very active mode” going into the Thanksgiving holiday and the weekend, the National Weather Service said Wednesday night.
The storm that caused heavy snow from the Central Rockies to the Great Lakes would bring rain and snow to northern New York State and New England on Wednesday night into Thanksgiving Day, the Weather Service said, though the snowfall would not be as heavy as it was in the Midwest. The agency said 4 to 6 inches of snow were possible in northern New Hampshire and northern Maine.
The high winds in the Midwest would also be moving east. It would likely be very windy on Thanksgiving across much of the Northeast, the service said.
The low-pressure system in the West moved inland Wednesday, and would likely bring 1 to 2 feet of snow to areas of Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and the Wasatch and Northern Rockies.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The storm was heading to South Dakota, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, while a “bomb cyclone” weather phenomenon began toppling trees, knocking out power and dumping snow as it barreled into California and Oregon — making for a double whammy of early wintry weather.
The National Weather Service in Northern California urged people to wait to travel for the holiday until the weather improves.
At Denver International Airport, about 10 inches of snow mixed with winds that limited visibility prompted the cancellation of about 30 percent of the airport’s average daily 1,600 flights.
The storm dumped nearly 3 feet of snow in parts of northern Colorado and closed long stretches of highways there and in Wyoming. One person was killed, and two others were injured when a tractor-trailer jackknifed and was hit by two other trucks on Interstate 70 near the Colorado ski town of Vail.
The system moved east, allowing the Denver airport to begin returning to normal.
Southwest Airlines canceled about 200 flights. Spokesman Brad Hawkins said it would take “a couple of days” to get stranded passengers on other flights because there are few seats available during the pre-Thanksgiving travel crush. That makes it hard for airlines to rebook passengers.
About 1,100 people spent the night at the airport, including many cadets from the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs who either missed flights or wanted to get to the airport before road conditions deteriorated, airport spokeswoman Alex Renteria said.
Blizzard and wintry weather warnings extended into the Great Lakes states with the storm expected to bring high winds and snow to Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin late Tuesday and a chance of snow over the weekend for parts of New England, said Alex Lamers, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
“That could be a coast-to-coast storm,” he said.
The storm system could mean disappointment for fans of the larger-than-life balloons flown at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.
Organizers were preparing for the possibility of grounding the iconic balloon characters because of 40-50 mph gusts in the forecast.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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“The summary findings are bleak,” the report said, because countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions even after repeated warnings from scientists. The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”
The world’s 20 richest countries, responsible for more than three-fourths of emissions, must take the biggest, swiftest steps to move away from fossil fuels, the report stated. The richest country of all, the United States, has formally begun to pull out of the Paris accord.
Global greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 1.5 percent every year over the past decade, according to the annual assessment, the Emissions Gap Report, which is produced by the U.N. Environment Program. The opposite must happen if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, including more intense droughts, stronger storms and widespread food insecurity by mid-century. To stay within relatively safe limits, emissions must decline sharply, by 7.6 percent every year, between 2020 and 2030, the report warned.
Separately, the World Meteorological Organization reported Monday that emissions of three major greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — have all swelled in the atmosphere since the mid-18th century.
Under the Paris agreement, reached in November 2015, every country has pledged to rein in emissions, with each setting its own targets and timetables. Even if every country fulfills its current pledges — and many, including the United States, Brazil and Australia, are currently not on track to do so — the Emissions Gap Report found average temperatures are on pace to rise by 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.76 Fahrenheit) from the baseline average temperature at the start of the industrial age.
According to scientific models, that kind of temperature rise sharply increases the likelihood of extreme weather events, the accelerated melting of glaciers and swelling seas — endangering the lives of billions of people.
The Paris agreement resolved to hold the increase in global temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit; last year, a U.N.-backed panel of scientists said the safer limit was to keep it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
There are many ways to reduce emissions: quitting the combustion of fossil fuels, especially coal, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel; switching to renewable energy like solar and wind power; moving away from gas- and diesel-powered cars; and halting deforestation.
A separate analysis released this month looked at how much coal, oil and natural gas the world’s nations have said they expect to produce and sell through 2030. If all those fossil fuels were ultimately extracted and burned, the report found, countries would collectively miss their climate pledges, as well as the global 2 degree Celsius target, by an even larger margin than previously thought.
A number of countries, including Canada and Norway, have made plans to reduce emissions at home while expanding fossil-fuel production for sale abroad, that report noted.
“At a global level, it doesn’t add up,” said Michael Lazarus, a lead author of the report and director of the Stockholm Environment Institute’s U.S. Center.
To date, he noted, discussions on whether and how to curb the production of fossil fuels have been almost entirely absent from international climate talks.
The International Energy Agency recently singled out the proliferation of SUVs, noting that the surge of SUVs, which consume more gasoline than conventional cars, could wipe out much of the oil savings from a nascent electric-car boom.
Diplomats are scheduled to gather in Madrid in December for the next round of negotiations over the rules of the Paris agreement. The world’s biggest polluters are under pressure to raise their pledges.
“This is a new and stark reminder,” Spain’s minister for ecological transition, Teresa Ribera, said of the Emissions Gap Report in an email. “We urgently need to align with the Paris agreement objectives and elevate climate ambition.”
If there is any good news in the report, it is that the current trajectory is not as dire as it was before countries around the world started taking steps to cut their emissions. The 2015 Emissions Gap Report said that, without any climate policies in place, the world was likely to face around 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming.
Coal use is declining sharply, especially in the United States and Western Europe, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief. Renewable energy is expanding fast, though not nearly as fast as necessary. And city and state governments around the world, including in the United States, are rolling out stricter rules on tailpipe pollution from cars.
Those who have followed the diplomatic negotiations say they are confronted by something of a cognitive dissonance when they think about this moment. The world’s biggest polluters are nowhere near where they should be to draw down emissions at a time when the toll of climate change is near impossible to ignore.
And yet, renewable energy is spreading faster than could have been anticipated even a few years ago; electric buses and cars are proliferating and young people are protesting in rich and poor countries alike. In the United States, how to deal with climate change is a resonant issue in the presidential campaign.
“There’s a bit of a ‘best of times, worst of times’ about this,” said David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute, a research and advocacy group.
(Somoni Sengupta, THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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"Significant damage is likely and the disaster is potentially widespread," the United States Geological Survey says in its damage estimate. It adds that economic damages will likely be more than $100 million, noting that previous earthquakes of this severity "have required a regional or national level response."
The epicenter was only about 20 miles northwest of the capital city, Tirana (population 375,000), the USGS says. The quake hit some 15 miles northeast of the coastal city of Durres (population 122,034), at a depth of 20 kilometers, according to the agency.
The cities of Durres and Thumana were the worst hit, Albanian Defense Minister Olta Xhaçka said in an update on the devastation wrought by the quake. She added that while workers are trying to reach anyone who might be trapped by rubble, the work is slow going, as many buildings are still at risk of collapsing.
"The 6.4 magnitude quake hit Albania around 4 a.m. local time and could be felt some 200 miles north in Sarajevo," Matthew Algeo reports for NPR from Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The quake was also felt across the Adriatic Sea, in the Puglia region of southern Italy, according to the USGS.
The quake flattened brick-and-mortar buildings, leaving massive heaps of rubble where restaurants and other buildings had been. Emergency crews used cranes to carefully lift pieces of walls and other debris, hoping to find survivors.
Images from Albanian public broadcaster RTSH show residents gathering in city parks and sidewalks during the night, wary of staying inside as aftershocks rippled through the area.
A number of nations, from Italy and Greece to France and Turkey, have offered to help Albania with rescue and recovery efforts, according to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.
(Bill Chappell, NPR)
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The Cave fire started just after 4 p.m. near East Camino Cielo and Painted Cave Road and by 8 p.m. had grown to at least 2,500 acres, according to the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.
It initially moved into a few canyons and rapidly expanded as it was pushed south by 15-mph down-canyon winds with 30-mph gusts. By 7:30 p.m., the fire was spotting in front of itself and had started at least one blaze near Highway 154 and Cathedral Oaks Road, said Mike Eliason, a public information officer with the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.
“As this fire gets pushed down canyon, it’s going to start getting closer to homes,” Eliason said.
The fire has burned down to the top of Cieneguitas Road near the San Marcos Foothills Preserve, according to Santa Barbara city’s Office of Emergency Services.
There was no information available on whether any homes have burned, said Capt. Daniel Bertucelli, a Santa Barbara County Fire Department public information officer.
“We’re going to fight fire throughout the night, and tomorrow when the sun comes up, we’ll get a better understanding of what sort of damage we have,” Bertucelli said.
Winds were expected to increase, especially at higher elevations, until about 1 a.m., with some areas of the Santa Ynez Mountains expected to see gusts of up to 65 mph, according to the weather service.
Bertucelli said he was driving 55 mph down Highway 154 earlier in the evening, and the fire was keeping up with him, growing alongside the roadway as he drove. Once he reached lower elevations, though, the wind was much lighter.
Through the early morning hours today, meteorologists were forecasting a decrease in wind, and the area was expected to see rain this afternoon or evening.
“Hopefully Mother Nature will help us out tomorrow,” Bertucelli said.
The fire is burning through dense, old brush, and that much of the area hasn’t burned since the Painted Cave fire in 1990.
The area where the Cave fire is burning was also dry, with relative humidity reported at 14 percent as of 5:25 p.m., according to the National Weather Service.
Mandatory evacuations have been ordered for the area of Highway 154 east to Ontare Road and from Foothill Road to the top of Camino Cielo. An evacuation warning has been issued for Highway 154 west to Fairview Avenue and Ontare Road east to Gibraltar Road.
The fire caused traffic nightmares and closed roads as it progressed Monday night. Residents trying to evacuate on San Marcos Road were blocked around 7 p.m. by cars clogging Cathedral Oaks as people tried to take pictures, California Highway Patrol reports showed. Because 154 was closed, evacuees had to come down old San Marcos, officials said.
As the fire grew, mutual aid started to arrive to help county and national forest firefighters. The Ventura County Fire Department sent two strike teams, about 10 fire engines, Monday evening, and the L.A. County Fire Department sent a Firehawk helicopter, which is capable of performing nighttime water drops.
The Red Cross opened an evacuation shelter at the Goleta Valley Community Center at around 6 p.m.
Shelters for animals opened had opened by 6:40 p.m. Small animals could go to the Goleta Animal Shelter. Large animals could be taken to Earl Warren Showgrounds, county officials said.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove, L.A. TIMES; U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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It took four hours on Friday to cut and pull the line away from the 35-foot whale as it swam about a mile from Scripps Pier, officials said.
They said the whale was not able to swim freely and forage for food because of the line, and would have died if it had remained entangled.
Officials said bird watcher Gary Nunn reported seeing the distressed whale late Thursday. The SeaWorld team went out by boat early Friday, found the whale and started working to remove the heavy fishing line.
They got the last of the line pulled away and the whale started swimming free toward the northwest about 1:30 p.m. Friday.
The rescue team is trained in whale-entanglement response and works under the authority of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the company said in a statement. SeaWorld San Diego also is involved in marine rescues with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and the state Department of Fish & Wildlife.
SeaWorld has been involved in 36,000 marine and bird rescues in the last 55 years, more than 20,000 by SeaWorld San Diego alone, the company said.
(Pauline Repard, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The California Division of Safety of Dams has determined that the water level in the reservoir should no longer go above 295 feet, which is 20 feet below the spillway elevation — a formal term for the top of the dam.
If the water level exceeds that measurement or nears that measurement when rain is forecast, city officials say they plan to open valves at the dam for a controlled release of some of the water. The released water would enter the San Dieguito River and eventually the Pacific Ocean.
City officials say they plan to closely monitor weather forecasts, rainfall and the water level in the Hodges Reservoir to determine when releases would be necessary. Any decision to release water would be posted on the city’s website and social media accounts, they said.
Hodges Reservoir was created with the building of Hodges Dam on San Dieguito Creek in 1918. Operated and maintained by the city’s Public Utilities Department, the reservoir serves the San Dieguito Water District and Santa Fe Irrigation District in addition to the city.
While state officials have deemed the dam safe at the restricted water level of 295 feet, city officials are finalizing plans for upgrades.
(David Garrick, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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National Weather Service forecasters have issued a flash-flood watch for the coast and inland valleys, where 2 to 3 inches of rain is possible from late Tuesday through Friday. The heaviest rain is expected from Wednesday afternoon through Thanksgiving morning. Thunderstorms are also possible Wednesday through Friday.
Forecasters say the system could drop 2 inches of rain in San Diego over the three-day holiday period, 3 inches or more in places like Miramar, Carlsbad, Escondido and Valley Center, and more than 3 inches east of La Mesa and El Cajon.
A winter storm watch has also been issued for the mountains, which could get 4 to 8 inches of rain and as much as 2 feet of snow above 5,000 feet. Smaller amounts could fall as low as 3,000 feet. The National Weather Service says the system could dump 6 inches or more of snow on Palomar Mountain, and possibly significant accumulations at Julian and Pine Valley.
The cold storm, which should keep highs in the 50s at the coast and inland valleys on Thanksgiving and on Friday, is expected to tap into a weak “atmospheric river,” a band of moisture a couple of hundred miles wide that stretches far out into the Pacific. Weather service meteorologist Samantha Connolly said the moisture tap does not appear as substantial as initially feared, but the storm will still pack a punch and have significant impacts on travel before, during and after the holiday.
This second big storm in a little more than a week should lift San Diego’s rainfall total on the season, which began Oct. 1, above 2 inches. Normal through the end of November is 1.58 inches.
The two big storms could give an advantage to procrastinators who have yet to enter the Union-Tribune’s 17th annual Precipitation Prediction Contest. Today is the deadline to enter.
Tell us how much rain you think San Diego will get this season, down to the hundredth of an inch, from Oct. 1, 2018, to Sept. 30, 2019. Get it right and you could win two-day ski lift tickets for four at Snow Valley Mountain Resort in Running Springs, plus two-nights lodging at Arrowhead Pine Rose Cabins. The second-place finisher gets a $50 rain gauge from Grangetto’s Farm and Garden Supply.
To break any potential ties, also tell us which calendar day you think will be the wettest. Measurements are taken at San Diego International Airport, site of the city’s official weather station. Normal annual rainfall is 10.34 inches.
If you haven’t already entered, you can online by going to https://tinyurl.com/yhdanzgk, where you’ll find the contest’s rules. You can also email your entry to rob.krier@sduniontribune.com. Mail-in entries, which must be postmarked by today, should be sent to Precipitation Prediction Contest, C/O Robert Krier, San Diego Union-Tribune, 600 B St., San Diego CA 92101.
(Robert Krier, Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Instead, they spotted a number of the animals, including mothers with calves, raising hopes that the critically endangered species can survive.
“We’re not sure when we go down there if we’re going to see vaquita again,” said Robert Pitman, a recently retired marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Each time, there are fewer and fewer of them. We were quite relieved to see them. We had several sightings over three days. The most we saw in one time was six separate animals, which gives us some slim amount of hope.”
Nonetheless, they said the trip also brought discouraging news, as observers saw scores of illegal fishing vessels in areas set aside for vaquita.
“At least one day we saw over 80 fishers there,” said Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, head of the Marine Mammal Research Group for the Mexican National Commission of Natural Protected Areas.
Vaquita are the world’s smallest cetacean and most endangered marine mammal. They live in shallow waters off the northern Gulf of California in Mexico. Grayish colored, with delicate features and dark marks around their eyes and mouth, they measure up to 5 feet long, and weigh about 110 pounds.
They’re resilient animals and versatile predators that eat two dozen types of fish and squid, Rojas-Bracho said. Left alone, they’re well-adapted to the rich marine ecosystem they inhabit.
Their populations have plunged, however, as vaquita become entangled in gillnets set by fishermen in the upper Gulf. That has worsened as an illicit market has grown for another endangered species endemic to the region, the giant totoaba fish. Poachers catch those fish in order to export their lucrative swim bladders, and vaquita become trapped and drown in the totoaba nets.
Every loss of vaquita is a critical blow to the species’ recovery. Marine biologists estimate there are fewer than 20 of the porpoises left, and say they could even number in the single digits. Although Mexican environmental laws prohibit fishing in the federally protected Vaquita Refuge, researchers said they aren’t enforced.
“There are laws on the books, but there’s no serious protection,” Pitman said.
Beyond the lack of enforcement, Rojas-Bracho said, are active efforts to sabotage monitoring and recovery of the species. Although some Gulf fishermen interested in conservation and sustainable fisheries assist scientists in their efforts to protect vaquita, others have damaged or stolen the equipment they use to do so, he said.
“In recent times, because of the increase of illegal fishing, we are in a difficult crossroads,” he said. “There are illegal fishers sabotaging our monitoring program. What they do is they vandalize our monitoring equipment, and they steal our equipment, because we have lines and ropes, and they use that for fishing.”
Without acoustic monitoring gear, Rojas-Bracho said, researchers had to use visual observations to survey vaquita this year, and they were joyful to see a number of healthy animals. On one day, they saw six distinct animals in two groups, Rojas-Bracho said. Over the course of the trip, they spotted three mother and calf pairs.
“So the good news is they are producing calves,” he said. “And we have the survivors who have been able to survive all these years, and it’s important to protect them, because the survival of vaquita depends on these individuals we have now.”
In recent years, they learned other potentially good news about the species. Scientists had assumed that vaquita mothers only calved every other year, which would allow their population to expand at 4 percent a year, given proper protection.
In 2017 and 2018, however, they saw the same female with two calves, suggesting that vaquita may breed annually, potentially doubling that rate of growth, Rojas-Bracho said. Pitman cautioned that researchers aren’t certain that annual breeding is the norm, noting that the female who gave birth two years in a row may have lost a calf, and become pregnant again the next year.
If they can breed annually, however, that’s important, because captive breeding has been a nonstarter. A risky effort to breed vaquita in captivity failed when a female animal died shortly after she was captured in 2017.
The key to vaquita recovery is clearing the waters of hazardous fishing gear, researchers said. They’re testing rigs that would not entangle the porpoises, but those haven’t been approved and made available yet, Rojas-Bracho said. Getting the right gear in place is essential to the survival of both fishermen and vaquita, he said.
“Conservation biology means having sustainable fisheries, and having vaquita survive,” Rojas-Bracho said. “It’s not one or the other. And if we have alternative gear, it’s just a matter of the political will to do it.”
Moreover, the researchers said, the problem can’t be addressed merely in terms of dollars and pesos. The disappearance of a species is an ecological and ethical casualty that transcends balance sheets, they said.
“We are working our way towards an impoverished planet,” Pitman said. “There’s money to be made chopping down all the forests, and killing off all the wildlife. And it’s extremely shortsighted, but that’s what we do as humans.”
Vaquita are collateral damage to the illicit fishing trade, but humans may eventually pay the price as well, Rojas-Bracho said.
“You cannot tell a species to justify their existence, in terms of human needs,” he said. “If you think only of the utility of species, then the world is going to look like the parking lot of any supermarket in the U.S.”
(Deborah Sullivan Brennan, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The system also will drop snow to the 5,000-foot level, and the accumulation could be significant in some areas.
The rainfall totals are preliminary estimates. But forecasters say that computer models clearly indicate that a storm will arrive in Southern California as an atmospheric river — a column of moisture that can drench a region, especially when it collides with mountains.
The storm will slump down the California coast and start moving ashore in greater San Diego on Wednesday. It appears that the heaviest rain will come on Thursday — Thanksgiving Day — with lighter precipitation on Friday. Thunderstorms are possible.
“This storm will spread rain more broadly across the county than the last one, and it will move into Orange County,” said Matt Moreland, meteorologist-in-charge of the weather service office in Rancho Bernardo.
The system also will bring unseasonably cold air, particularly on Thursday, when the daytime high in San Diego is expected to stay below 60 degrees.
The storm that hit San Diego County on Tuesday and Wednesday dropped more than 4 inches of rain in several areas, including on Palomar Mountain, and in Valley Center and Henshaw Dam. San Diego received only 0.77 inches.
(Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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While fire weather warnings have been downgraded slightly for today, Thursday featured “catastrophic” fire danger — the highest threat level — in the state of Victoria, along with dangerous conditions in South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland.
Fires burning in New South Wales covered Sydney and other areas of the state’s eastern coast in a stifling blanket of hazardous smoke. Tiny particles in the smoke, known as particulate matter 2.5, can enter the lungs and aggravate asthma and other chronic health conditions, as well as raise the risks for other illnesses.
The extreme heat has been relentless. On Wednesday, for example, temperatures in a portion of every mainland Australian state and the Northern Territory hit at least 104 degrees. While not unheard of, this is nevertheless unusual, particularly for this time of year.
What’s especially worrisome to public officials and residents throughout the most fire-prone areas is that typically, Australia sees its peak fire activity during the summer, rather than the spring. The heat and “Code Red” fire danger in Victoria on Thursday were more akin to the “worst conditions you’d see in February or March,” according to Victoria’s emergency services minister Lisa Neville.
“This shows us what the risks will be in summer around Victoria, so we still have a long way to go to be ready,” she said, according to The Guardian newspaper.
The record heat this week has toppled November records in South Australia, too. Nullarbor, for example, hit a blazing 116 degrees. The heat even spread to Tasmania, which typically has more moderate temperatures due to cooler winds from the surrounding ocean. Hobart, for example, tied its record for the hottest November day on Thursday, the BOM reported.
A large area of South Australia was more than 29 degrees above average for this time of year, the BOM found. In other words, the heat experienced this week was more typical of February in the Land Down Under, which, given drought conditions in many areas, is concerning for the long fire season ahead.
The size of the fires that are still burning are difficult to fathom. Two fires west of Port Macquarie in New South Wales have each burned more than 250,000 acres. In total, the state of New South Wales has seen at least 2,471,053 acres go up in smoke, the majority of it burning in sparsely populated areas.
More than 600 homes have been destroyed by bush fires so far this season in New South Wales, according to the Rural Fire Service, and six have been killed so far.
Research shows that human-caused climate change is playing a role in amplifying the fire risk and ratcheting up the heat across large parts of Australia. Wildfires are worsening with climate change because heat and drought make the landscape more flammable. Months of rainfall deficits have left the Australia parched; January through October 2019 was the second-warmest and second-driest such period on record.
Because of the combination of drought and heat, fires are burning in ecosystems that typically don’t see bush fires, according to an interview Science Magazine published with David Bowman, a fire ecologist and director of the Fire Center at the University of Tasmania in Hobart
“We’re seeing recurrent fires in tall, wet eucalypt forests, which normally only burn very rarely. A swamp dried out near Port Macquarie, and organic sediments in the ground caught on fire,” Bowman said. “When you drop the water table, the soil is so rich in organic matter it will burn. We’ve seen swamps burning all around.”
(Andrew Freedman & Diana Leonard, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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Even the widespread flooding in the spring was worse for many farmers than the images of sodden river towns would suggest, said Scott Irwin, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois. While the images of overwhelmed levees were dramatic, “that’s not the real story.” Across much of the Midwest and Northern Plains soils were saturated throughout the spring, he said, and many farmers couldn’t get crops in the ground or had to delay planting until perilously late in the season. “Farmers told me in Eastern Illinois it felt like they were in a monsoon from April til May.”
It was the wettest year on record for the lower 48 states, with the kind of extreme rainfall events that are increasingly associated with climate change. And then fall came in with unseasonably heavy rains and snow. That was the case for Aaron Heley Lehman, a farmer in central Iowa and president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union. “This has definitely been a bad year for almost all farmers in Iowa, even if you weren’t on river bottom ground and having your grain bins explode and your land underwater for weeks and weeks at a time,” he said. “It was still a very rough year.”
The Agriculture Department tracks how many acres of insured farmland went unplanted, a statistic referred to as prevented planting, and this year’s figures are the highest since the agency started reporting the figures in 2007. Overall, farmers reported being unable to plant on some 19 million acres for all crops in 2019 with more than 70 percent of those acres occurring in the rain-soaked Midwest.
For the two most important Midwestern crops, corn and soybeans, the 2019 figures showed 11.4 million acres for corn and 4.5 million acres for soybeans that went without crops being planted.
That’s 13 percent of the total corn acreage in the United States that went unplanted, and nearly 6 percent of total soy acreage. By comparison, 2013 was another wet year but had just 3.9 percent and 2.3 percent unplanted acres.
According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, farm subsidies from sources like trade assistance, disaster assistance and federally subsidized crop insurance made up 40 percent of farm income in 2019, $33 billion out of an expected $88 billion total.
The intense downpours are characteristic of climate change, said Barbara Mayes Boustead, an author of the National Climate Assessment’s chapters on the Midwest and Northern Great Plains. While linking individual weather events is a complex and time-consuming process involving attribution science, the trends are clear, she said. “Climate change has changed the atmosphere itself,” Boustead said. So even if it is difficult to prove the precise impact of climate change on this year’s season, she added, “events like this become more likely as climate changes.”
And the rain is not just intense, but comes at inopportune times, said Dennis Todey, the director of the Agriculture Department’s climate hub in Ames, Iowa. Rains are falling hard not in the middle of the growing season, when it could be of the most use, but in the spring and fall, “exactly the time we don’t want more water on our cropland.”
“Almost all farmers agree that they’ve been dealing with much more volatile conditions,” said Lehman, the Iowa farmer.
Some of the farmers in states like the Dakotas, who planted very late in the season, have already experienced heavy rains and early snows that are further hindering their ability to get crops in.
(John Schwartz, THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The 23-million acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which is roughly the size of Indiana, has attracted relatively little public attention compared with the neighboring Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But it ranks as one of the most ecologically valuable and promising oil prospects in the country.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management announced it is considering four possible options for the reserve, from slightly scaling back the 11.7 million acres eligible for development to expanding the leasing area to 18.3 million acres.
The Obama administration had put half of the reserve off limits to development six years ago, on the grounds that specific areas provided crucial habitat for hundreds of thousands of migrating birds and tens of thousands of caribou. But it is also the site of significant oil deposits, and recent discoveries suggest that it could hold as much as 8.7 billion barrels in undiscovered oil.
The bureau did not pick a “preferred alternative” in its new proposal. But its Alaska state director Chad Padgett said the plan, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period, reflects the administration’s emphasis on energy development.
“With advancements in technology and increased knowledge of the area, it was prudent to develop a new plan that provides greater economic development of our resources while still providing protections for important resources and subsistence access,” he said.
The agency’s draft Environmental Impact Statement is required to include an alternative of keeping the existing protections for the reserve in place. Under one scenario, BLM would cut the amount of area eligible for drilling from 11.8 million acres to 11.4 million. But the other two plans would expand energy development significantly, to either 17.1 million acres or 18.3 million acres, which amounts to 80 percent of the reserve.
Under this last scenario, federal officials would allow drilling around Teshekpuk Lake, a 22-mile-wide reservoir created by the thawing of ice-rich permafrost. The lake hosts hundreds of thousands of breeding shorebirds, along with denning polar bears and tens of thousands of molting geese and caribou.
Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska program director at the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife, said her organization would fight any move to expand fossil fuel development in the remote region.
(Juliet Eilperin, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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University of Washington researchers left Nome on Nov. 7 on the 261-foot ship, crossed through the Bering Strait and will record observations at multiple sites including Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow, America’s northernmost community. Sea ice is creeping toward the city from the east in the Beaufort Sea, but to find sea ice in the Chukchi, the Sikuliaq would have to head northwest for about 200 miles.
In the new reality of the U.S. Arctic, open water is the November norm for the Chukchi. Instead of thick, years-old ice, researchers are studying waves and how they may pummel the northern Alaska coastline.
“We’re trying to understand what the new autumn looks like in the Arctic,” said Jim Thomson, an oceanographer at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory.
Chukchi sea ice in early November was at its lowest level on record, said Rick Thoman, a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ International Arctic Research Center and a former National Weather Service forecaster.
Low ice is a problem for people of the coast. Communities north and south of the Bering Strait rely on near-shore ice to act as a natural sea wall, protecting land from erosion brought on by winter storms.
The formation of sea ice requires the ocean temperature to be about 28 degrees, the freezing point of saltwater.
Forecasters 20 years ago took it as a given that the water temperature would be cold enough to form sea ice.
“Even at the end of summer you couldn’t get enough heat into the ocean to raise the water temperature significantly above freezing,” said Andy Mahoney, a sea ice physicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute.
Climate warming has brought a harsh new reality. High summer temperatures have warmed the entire water column in the Bering and Chukchi seas. Water temperatures from the surface to the ocean bottom remain above normal, delaying ice formation.
“We’ve got a cold atmosphere. We’ve got a strong wind. You’d think we’d be forming ice, but there’s just too much heat left in the ocean,” Mahoney said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A plume of warm tropical moisture flowed into the county and caused widespread downpours, especially in Valley Center, which recorded 2.09 inches through 4 p.m. Palomar Mountain got 1.16 inches and Escondido reported 0.96 inches.
Forecasters say that a cold storm in the north is pulling the tropical moisture into the San Diego area. The two systems will merge in Southern California by early today, producing a much stronger storm that will peak between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., the weather service said.
In addition to rain, the system could drop an inch or so of snow on the peaks of Palomar Mountain and in Mount Laguna. The San Bernardino Mountains could get 6 to 10 inches of snow.
A flash flood watch will be in effect across San Diego County until early Thursday.
“There will be very heavy rain cells, (today), and there could be a lot of lightning,” said Alex Tardy, a weather service forecaster.
Heavy fog is expected in the mountains above 5,000 feet.
The warm spell San Diego has been enjoying will be snapped by the storm. The city’s projected daytime high today is 60. San Diego reached 91 degrees Monday, setting a record for the date. The seasonal high is 69.
In response to the storm, two inclement-weather shelters for homeless people will open in downtown San Diego.
A 134-bed temporary shelter will open at Father Joe’s Villages, 1501 Imperial Ave., and a 30-bed shelter will open at PATH/Connections Housing, 1250 Sixth Ave.
Meals will be provided at both shelters.
The San Diego Housing Commission operates the inclement-weather program in partnership with the city.
The program takes effect when temperatures drop below 50 degrees with a 40 percent chance of rain, when the temperature is below 45 degrees regardless of rain, or in exceptional weather conditions, such as one or more inches of rain within 24 hours and sustained high winds.
SeaWorld will be closed today. The Del Mar race track will be closed Thursday due to concerns about how the rain will affect the track. Late Tuesday, officials at General Dynamics-NASSCO were weighing whether to close the San Diego shipyard today.
(Gary Robbins, Gary Warth, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Deforestation between August 2018 and July 2019 reached 3,769 square miles, a 30 percent increase over the previous year, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research said.
The area of deforestation is the largest recorded since 2008 and is about the size of the U.S. states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
Concern about the Amazon heightened after President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January. His administration has advocated the loosening of protections around natural reserves and indigenous lands as a way to promote economic development.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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After record heat on Sunday and Monday, San Diego County should see its biggest one-day temperature drop of the year today, and Wednesday should be cooler still.
The temperature at San Diego International Airport shot up to 91 degrees before noon Monday, shattering the Nov. 18 record of 86 set in 1949. Records were also expected inland.
Stefanie Sullivan, a forecaster for the National Weather Service, said an upper-level low pressure system southwest of San Diego on Monday set up a strong easterly flow that resembled a Santa Ana and brought in warm air from the east.
Now a strong low-pressure system that was off the coast of Washington on Monday is moving down the coast. The northern low is expected to replace the low to the southwest with a lot of cold air. After topping 90 on Monday, San Diego is unlikely to reach 70 today and should barely top 60 on Wednesday.
That cold low from the north should also deliver the first big storm of the season. Some light rain is possible this afternoon, but the bulk of the rain is expected Wednesday, when thunderstorms are also possible. Occasional showers are likely on Thursday.
The weather service has issued a flash-flood watch for all of San Diego County except the desert. Coastal areas should get 0.5 to 1 inch of rain, while the inland valleys could get 1.5 and inches, and as much as 2 inches could fall in the mountains. Warmer, dry weather is expected over the weekend.
(Robert Krier, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Stores and museums in Venice were mostly closed in the hardest-hit area around St. Mark’s Square, but tourists donned high rubber boots or even hip waders to witness and photograph the spectacle.
Most were disappointed when officials closed the historic square as winds rippled across the rising waters. The doors of the famed St. Mark’s Basilica were securely shut to the public, an authorities took precautions — stacking sandbags in canal-side windows — to prevent salt-laden water from entering the crypt again.
Venice’s Tide Office said the peak tide of nearly 5 feet hit just after 1 p.m., but a weather front off the coast blocked southerly winds from the Adriatic Sea from pushing the tide to the predicted level of 5 feet, 2 inches. By early evening, the level was less than 3 feet.
Still, it marked the third time since Tuesday night’s more than 6-foot mark — the worst in 53 years — that water levels in Venice had topped nearly 5 feet. Since records began in 1872, that level had never been reached even twice in one year, let alone three times in one week.
While Venetians had a bit of relief, days of heavy rainfall and snowfall elsewhere in Italy swelled rivers to worrisome levels, triggered an avalanche in the Alps and and led to dramatic rescues of people unable to flee rising waters.
In Venice, many store owners in the swanky area around St. Mark’s completely emptied their shops, while others put their wares as high as possible and counted on automatic pumping systems to keep the water at bay. In one luxury boutique, employees used water vacuums and big squeegee mops to keep the brackish lagoon waters from advancing.
Venice’s mayor has put the flooding damage at hundreds of millions of euros, and Italian officials have declared a state of emergency for the area. They say Venice is both sinking into the mud and facing rising sea levels due to climate change.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The water reached 6.14 feet above average sea level Tuesday, the second-highest level ever recorded in the city and just 2 inches lower than the historic 1966 flood. Another wave of exceptionally high water followed Wednesday.
“Venice is on its knees,” Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said on Twitter. “St. Mark’s Basilica has sustained serious damage, like the entire city and its islands.”
One death was blamed on the flooding, on the barrier island of Pellestrina. A man in his 70s was apparently electrocuted when he tried to start a pump in his dwelling, said Danny Carrella, an official on the island of 3,500 inhabitants.
In Venice, the crypt beneath St. Mark’s Basilica was inundated for only the second time in its history. Damage was also reported at the Ca’ Pesaro modern art gallery, where a short circuit set off a fire, and at La Fenice theater, where authorities turned off electricity as a precaution after the control room was flooded.
Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said no damage had been reported to art collections in museums throughout the city. Many sites remained closed to tourists, and La Fenice canceled concerts Wednesday and tonight.
Tourists floated suitcases through St. Mark’s Square, where officials removed walkways to prevent them from drifting away. Wooden boards that shop and hotel owners have placed on doors in previous floods couldn’t hold back the water.
The water was so high that nothing less than thigh-high boots afforded protection, and one man was even filmed swimming bare-chested in St. Mark’s Square during what appeared to be the height of the flood.
“I have often seen St. Mark’s Square covered with water,” Venice’s patriarch, Monsignor Francesco Moraglia, told reporters. “Yesterday there were waves that seemed to be the seashore.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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At one point Tuesday, 16 fires raged out of control at emergency level simultaneously across New South Wales, a near record number.
There were no fires burning at emergency level early today, but rain that would quench the fire danger is not forecast for months. Friday experienced similarly intense fires that killed three residents and destroyed more than 150 homes.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The mid-autumn taste of winter brought record single-digit temperatures to Chicago and environs; set snowfall records in Buffalo and Detroit; dusted cars with snow in Memphis, Tenn.; and froze lakes in Minnesota weeks earlier than usual.
Wisconsin farmer Bob Grove still has soybeans in the field, 20 miles south of Milwaukee, but said he can’t harvest them because the snow will clog the machinery.
“Normally, you don’t see this kind of weather to well into December,” Grove said. “It’s caught us off guard, as far as getting crops harvested. Doing what we can in between snow, rain, mud.”
The roughly 10 inches of snow in Buffalo and Detroit by Tuesday morning was a record depth for the time of year, weather service records show. Areas of Vermont and Maine saw similar totals as a wintry mix also closed or delayed hundreds of schools in northern New England.
“This is an air mass that’s more typical for the middle of January than mid-November,” National Weather Service meteorologist Kevin Birk said in Chicago, where Tuesday morning’s low of 7 degrees broke the previous record of 8, set in 1986. “It is pretty much about the coldest we can be this time of year (and) it could break records all over the region.”
In St. Louis, the mercury dipped to 11 degrees, breaking a record for the date that had stood since 1911.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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In mid-Michigan, three people were killed in a two-vehicle crash that the Eaton County sheriff’s department attributed to heavy snowfall. And in Kansas, the highway patrol reported that a truck lost control on an icy highway and slammed head-on into another truck, killing an 8-year-old girl in the other vehicle.
In Chicago, where as much as 6 inches of snow fell, an Envoy Air flight from Greensboro, N.C., slid off an icy runway at O’Hare International Airport as it tried to land at about 7:45 a.m. None of the 38 passengers and three crew members was injured, according to the city’s aviation department.
Snowfall totals could reach up to a foot or more in some areas of Indiana, Michigan and Vermont, according to the National Weather Service. Other places in the path of the air mass saw ice and rain. Denver saw just a few inches of snow but suffered numerous accidents on icy roadways because the snow fell during the morning commute.
About 1,220 flights were canceled at Chicago’s airports and officials in the area opened warming centers. In Michigan, some schools closed early, as did dozens of schools in the St. Louis area.
The snow and ice was just the first punch from a weather system that pushed frigid air from Siberia across an area stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the East Coast. Temperatures below freezing were forecast as far south as Texas’ Gulf Coast.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study’s conclusions. EPA officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently.
“We are committed to the highest quality science,” Andrew Wheeler, the EPA administrator, told a congressional committee in September. “Good science is science that can be replicated and independently validated, science that can hold up to scrutiny. That is why we’re moving forward to ensure that the science supporting agency decisions is transparent and available for evaluation by the public and stakeholders.”
The measure would make it more difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to public health regulations already in place.
“This means the EPA can justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best information to protect public health and the environment, which means more dirty air and more premature deaths,” said Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association.
Public health experts warned that studies that have been used for decades — to show, for example, that mercury from power plants impairs brain development, or that lead in paint dust is tied to behavioral disorders in children — might be inadmissible when existing regulations come up for renewal.
For instance, a groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University project that definitively linked polluted air to premature deaths, currently the foundation of the nation’s air-quality laws, could become inadmissible. When gathering data for their research, known as the Six Cities study, scientists signed confidentiality agreements to track the private medical and occupational histories of more than 22,000 people in six cities. They combined that personal data with home air-quality data to study the link between chronic exposure to air pollution and mortality.
But the fossil fuel industry and some Republican lawmakers have long criticized the analysis and a similar study by the American Cancer Society, saying the underlying data sets of both were never made public, preventing independent analysis of the conclusions.
The change is part of a broader administration effort aimed at the scientific underpinnings of policymaking. Senior administration officials have tried to water down the testimony of government scientists, publicly chastised scientists who have dissented from President Donald Trump’s positions and blocked government researchers from traveling to conferences to present their work.
In this case, the administration is focused on public health studies conducted outside the government that could justify tightening regulations on smog in the air, mercury in water, lead in paint and other potential threats to human health.
Scott Pruitt, the former administrator of the EPA, had made publication of underlying scientific data a top priority and tried to push a proposal through the regulatory system in 2018. After he resigned that July, Pruitt’s successor, Wheeler, delayed the transparency rule and suggested the EPA needed time to address the chorus of opposition from environmental and public health groups.
But a draft of the revised regulation headed for White House review and obtained by The New York Times shows that the administration intends to widen its scope, not narrow it.
The previous version of the regulation would have applied only to a certain type of research, “dose-response” studies in which levels of toxicity are studied in animals or humans. The new proposal would require access to the raw data for virtually every study that the EPA considers.
“EPA is proposing a broader applicability,” the new regulation states, saying that open data should not be limited to certain types of studies.
Most significantly, the new proposal would apply retroactively. A separate internal EPA memo viewed by The New York Times shows that the agency had considered, but ultimately rejected, an option that might have allowed foundational studies like Harvard’s Six Cities study to continue to be used.
An EPA spokeswoman said in an emailed statement, “The agency does not discuss draft, deliberative documents or actions still under internal and interagency review.”
On Wednesday, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology will hold a hearing on the EPA’s efforts. A top pulmonary specialist and a representative of the country’s largest nonprofit funder of research on Parkinson’s disease, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, are expected to testify that the EPA’s proposed rule would eliminate the use of valuable research showing the dangers of pollution to human health.
Pruitt’s original proposal drew nearly 600,000 comments, the vast majority of them in opposition. Among those commenting were leading public health groups and some of the country’s top scientific organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners said it was “deeply concerned” that the rule would lead to the exclusion of studies, “ultimately resulting in weaker environmental and health protections and greater risks to children’s health.” The National Center for Science Education said ruling out studies that do not use open data “would send a deeply misleading message, ignoring the thoughtful processes that scientists use to ensure that all relevant evidence is considered.” The Medical Library Association and the Association of Academic Health Science Libraries said the proposal “contradicts our core values.”
Industry groups said the rule would ensure greater public understanding of the science behind regulations that cost consumers money.
“Transparency, reproducibility and application of current scientific knowledge are paramount to providing the foundation required for sound regulations,” the American Chemistry Council wrote to the EPA in support of the plan.
At a meeting of the agency’s independent science advisory board this summer, Wheeler said he was “a little shocked” at the amount of opposition to the proposal, but he was committed to finalizing it.
Beyond retroactivity, the latest version stipulates that all data and models used in studies under consideration at the EPA would have to be made available to the agency so it can reanalyze research itself. The politically appointed agency administrator would have wide discretion over which studies to accept or reject.
“It was hard to imagine that they could have made this worse, but they did,” said Michael Halpern, deputy director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group. He added, “This is a wholesale politicization of the process.”
Academics are not typically required to turn over private data when submitting studies for peer review by other specialists in the field, or for publication in scientific journals, the traditional ways scientific research is evaluated. If academics were to turn over the raw data to be made available for public review, the EPA would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to redact private information, according to one federal estimate.
The Six Cities study and a 1995 American Cancer Society analysis of 1.2 million people that confirmed the Harvard findings appear to be the inspiration of the regulation.
The proposal gives the public 30 days to offer comments on the changes to the EPA’s plan. Agency officials have said they hope to finalize the measure in 2020.
“The original goal was to stop EPA from relying on these two studies unless the data is made public,” said Steven Milloy, a member of Trump’s EPA transition team who runs Junkscience.org, a website that questions established climate change science and contends particulate matter in smog does not harm human health.
He dismissed concerns that the new rule could be used to unravel existing regulations, but he said he did expect it to prevent pollution rules from getting tougher.
(Lisa Friedman, THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Temperatures will be 15 to 25 degrees below normal over the eastern two-thirds of the United States early in the week, the National Weather Service said. The agency expects record-setting cold for today through Wednesday, and the chilliest temperatures are forecast for Wednesday on the East Coast.
It is the second Arctic front to cross part of the country in recent days; the first caused temperatures to drop on the East Coast from Thursday into Saturday morning.
The polar plunge — with temperatures that are more typical of January — was felt deepest in the Northern Plains and upper Midwest on Sunday, before setting in on the Southern Plains and Ohio Valley today, and in the South on Tuesday.
Residents of the Twin Cities face a 19-degree forecast today that would challenge a record set in 1986, according to the National Weather Service office there. One silver lining: No snow is predicted.
Lows will tumble into the single digits in the Plains, most likely tonight and into Tuesday. By then, the eastern third of the country will be on deck for the blast, with lows in the 20s Wednesday.
In parts of the Florida Panhandle, residents who were sweating through blazing heat early this month may be bundling up in coats Wednesday and Thursday as temperatures plummet into the 30s. The rest of the state will be only a few degrees cooler than usual.
The weather predictions are unwelcome news for organizers of Veterans Day ceremonies across the country today.
The forecast may not be as unusual as a temperature swing Nov. 11, 1911, when both a record high of 82 degrees and a record low of 13 degrees were recorded in Columbia, Mo. But it is causing some worry nonetheless.
The National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Mo., is hosting a full slate of events over the weekend but is taking precautions for an expected spike in visitor traffic. A ceremony today will be held indoors, said Mike Vietti, communications director for the museum.
In Minnesota, a group of a couple of dozen veterans was planning to walk 11 miles from Minneapolis to the State Capitol in St. Paul today to commemorate the signing of the Armistice Nov. 11, 1918. At the Capitol, they will ring a replica Liberty Bell 11 times at 11 a.m. (The forecast, at least, is a tad higher than 11 degrees.)
“We’re used to the cold; it’s just going to be a stroll for us,” said Michael McDonald, 70, who served as an Army Reserve soldier during the Vietnam War.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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New South Wales state Emergency Services Minister David Elliott said residents were facing what “could be the most dangerous bushfire week this nation has ever seen.”
Fires in the state’s northeast have razed more than 3,300 square miles of forest and farmland since Friday.
Fire conditions are forecast to be worse on Tuesday than they were at the peak of the current fire emergency on Friday.
“The catastrophic weather conditions mean that things can change very quickly,” Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.
“You might think you’re OK, and a few minutes later you won’t be. Please heed all the messages you receive. Tomorrow (Tuesday) is not the day to be complacent,” she added.
Catastrophic fire danger has been declared for Sydney and the Hunter Valley region to the north on Tuesday with severe and extreme danger across vast parts of the rest of the state.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Around 1,500 firefighters were battling 70 fires across Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, with the most intense in the northeast where flames were fanned by strong winds, Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said.
Firefighters found a body on Saturday in a burned car near Glen Innes, he said.
A woman who was found on Friday unconscious and with serious burns near Glen Innes had died in hospital, he said.
Another seven people have been reported missing in the vicinity of the same fire.
At least 100 homes were estimated to have been destroyed since Friday, but that damage toll could rise significantly as firefighters were able to extinguish flames and access fire zones, Fitzsimmons said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The “odd-even” scheme will restrict private vehicles with odd-number license plates to driving on odd dates while even-numbered plates are allowed on even-numbered dates. It was begun days after authorities began emergency control measures and ordered the closure of schools as pollution levels reached a three-year high.
The state-run Central Pollution Control Board’s air quality index for New Delhi was “severe” at 436, about nine times the recommended maximum.
India, home to 10 cities with the world’s worst air quality, has been struggling to contain this annual catastrophe that killed an estimated 1.24 million citizens in 2017.
Air pollution in New Delhi and northern Indian states peaks in the winter as farmers in neighboring agricultural regions set fire to clear land after the harvest and prepare for the next crop season. The pollution in the Indian capital also peaks after Diwali celebrations, the Hindu festival of light, when people set off fireworks.
Some people distraught over the pollution said they wanted to leave the city of more than 20 million people due to its poor air quality.
“I feel like moving out as well because I’m young and I’m still on a stage of building up my life and my career,” resident Divyam Mathur said.
Traffic police officers, wearing protective masks, signaled cars to stop for not following the vehicle restrictions on Monday. New Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal appealed for residents to follow the rule and for private taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers to support it.
Authorities said almost 1.2 million registered vehicles in New Delhi will be off the road every day during the two-week restrictions.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The new proposals — the latest in a series of regulatory breaks granted by the administration for the sagging U.S. coal industry and for electric utilities using coal-fired power plants — reduces “heavy burdens on electricity producers across the country,” EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement.
One of the two proposals released by Wheeler on Monday would relax some 2015 requirements on coal-fired power plants for cleaning coal ash and toxic heavy metals — including mercury, arsenic and selenium — from plant wastewater before dumping it into waterways.
The other would give some utilities up to several years more to clean up or close the more than 400 unlined coal ash dumps around the country that lie within a few feet of groundwater.
The rewrite serves to “insert a grab bag of loopholes into what had been a strong national set of health protections,” Thomas Cmar, attorney for the coal program of the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice.
It’s “allowing the power industry to continue dumping toxic contaminants in our waterways at the expense of public health,” Cmar said.
President Donald Trump has embraced a series of regulatory breaks and boosts sought by the coal and utility industries, including overturning U.S. support of the Paris climate accord and scrapping a legacy Obama climate program aimed at pushing dirtier-burning coal plants out of the country’s electrical grid.
But coal production in the U.S. has continued falling amid a boom for natural gas and some renewable energy, and U.S. coal facilities are closing despite the proposed regulatory relief. Coal magnate Robert Murray, an influential Trump donor and fundraiser who had presented the new administration with a written “action plan” of desired breaks for the coal industry, sought bankruptcy protection for his Murray Energy last week.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The cleanup on Oct. 26 came from a comprehensive survey of the lower 20.5 miles of the San Diego River to document trash locations. Over 180 trash sites were identified and mapped in the 7-mile section that volunteers cleaned, which stretches from Dog Beach to Mission Valley.
The San Diego River Park Foundation, which organized the cleanup, said the trash along the river was largely the result of homeless encampments, followed by stormwater debris. San Diego doesn’t treat stormwater, which leads to more pollution.
Sarah Hutmacher, chief associate director of the San Diego River Park Foundation, said even though they still account for the largest source of trash, homeless encampments along the river have declined significantly, from 97 percent in 2017 to 60 percent this year.
The San Diego River Park Foundation partnered with the city of San Diego and its Clean SD initiative and worked with volunteers, public agencies like the Metropolitan Transit System and Caltrans, and private property owners to remove the sites by the end of the month.
Overall, 24,257 pounds of trash were removed over 1,202 hours of service by volunteers.
The cleanup follows a recent effort to address the large amount of pollution in the river. At the end of 2017, Mayor Kevin Faulconer said the city would remove trash and homeless encampments along the river twice a week through the end of March 2018.
The trash removal comes at a critical time, as winter rains wash trash into the water and out to the ocean. Hutmacher said trash becomes much more difficult to remove once it’s washed into the river or scattered by rains.
She said she also hopes the cleanup will teach San Diegans the impact that their pollution can have on the environment.
“Trash is the most visual indicator of neglect,” Hutmacher said.
(Celina Tebor, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The earthquake Thursday, which the U.S. Geological Survey measured at magnitude 6.5, struck about 25 miles southwest of the city of Davao, a regional capital of 1.6 million people.
A village elder was killed in Batasan when the village hall collapsed on him, said Emmylou Taliño-Mendoza, governor of Cotabato province.
Elsewhere in the province, at least four other people were killed, according to the governor, including a 7-year-old child who was crushed by falling debris and two adults buried in a landslide.
Tuesday’s quake, which was magnitude 6.6, caused widespread destruction of schools and other buildings on Mindanao.
Classes in much of the area had been canceled since then. The island was also struck by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake Oct. 16, which killed at least five people.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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Dozens of fires across the state destroyed more than 100 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands from wine country to Los Angeles to flee their homes and left millions without power.
But the firestorms over the last week did not result in any fatalities, and the losses were much lower than in the last two years when thousands of homes were lost and dozens were killed.
Officials emphasized that the fire season is far from over and that many communities remain at risk. New fires Thursday ripped through neighborhoods in San Bernardino and Riverside County, destroying homes.
But given the dangerous weather conditions, the outcome could have been much worse.
Fire officials said they learned from catastrophic fires over the last two years, and that the public did, too. More resources were on hand when the fires hit, the evacuations were more extensive and more people heeded the warnings.
“The citizens responded very effectively,” said Cal Fire spokesman Rich Brocchini. “A lot of the success lies on the shoulders of the residents by following the evacuation orders and wanting to understand the severity of what could potentially happen. When you remove people from a dangerous situation, you will have less lives affected.”
The toll of wildfires in California has been staggering over the last two years. Much of Paradise was destroyed last year at the same time that the Woolsey fire devoured more than 1,000 homes from Oak Park to Malibu.
When the Easy fire in Simi Valley threatened the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday, Ventura County Fire Chief Mark Lorenzen said his department was prepared with far more aircraft and firefighters than it had when the Woolsey blaze hit. He credited the aggressive air support in the first hours of the Easy fire with preventing it from burning into subdivisions.
Mother Nature helped a bit, too.
In Southern California, the expected 30 hours of wind — which garnered the first “extreme red-flag warning” that National Weather Service forecasters can recall making — swept through, not quite living up to its forecast.
Daniel Swain, climatologist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the air pressure differential between the high desert and the coast was smaller than predicted, lessening the intensity of extreme fire weather fueled by dry air rushing toward the sea.
“They did cause some damage, but not the widespread damage that you can see during these extreme events sometimes,” he said.
The last gusts were still whipping up chaos here and there throughout the day Thursday. A fire in the foothills of San Bernardino destroyed six homes.
More than 500 firefighters were battling the blaze, and by Thursday afternoon, they were making good progress: The fire was 50 percent contained and had not grown larger for much of the day. One firefighter was taken to a hospital for smoke inhalation, said the San Bernardino County Fire Department.
“When we first got on scene of the fire, we had a wind-driven, rapid-rate-of-spread fire heading downhill into the city of San Bernardino,” said Scott Howes, deputy fire chief for the San Bernardino National Forest.
Lissa Washburn, 43, a San Bernardino resident, said smoke was polluting the air even at her home, which not in the evacuation zone. “It smells like fire outside, and our cars are covered with ash,” Washburn said.
Other crews beat back fires in Fullerton and Jurupa Valley.
In Simi Valley, fire crews managed to keep the larger Easy fire in place, holding their lines and keeping the blaze from running into neighborhoods.
Officials lifted all mandatory evacuation orders affecting 26,000 residents in Simi Valley, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks.
Mike DesForges, spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department, said crews would work to put out hot spots still smoldering in thick brush. Strong winds were still a major concern, so strike teams were stationed in neighborhoods to keep an eye on the fire line.
“If there’s hot spots that break out, they’ll go in and handle that,” DesForges said.
At the height of the fire, roughly 7,000 homes were in harm’s way.
The fire had burned 1,723 acres and was 10 percent contained Thursday.
The size of the fire pales in comparison to Ventura County’s previous wind-driven monsters: the Thomas fire that burned almost 282,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 structures and killed two people in 2017; and the Woolsey fire that started near Simi Valley last year and roared all the way to the ocean, killing three and burning 1,600 structures to the ground.
The sense of dodging a bullet was more pronounced in Northern California, which had just endured two horrific fire seasons in a row. In 2017, fires erupted throughout wine country and points north and east, killing 44 people and destroying more than 6,000 homes. The next year brought the worst fire in California history. The Camp fire tore through the wooded town of Paradise and surrounding areas, killing 86 people and destroying 14,000 homes.
With the Kincade fire burning in rural northern Sonoma County last week, officials moved to prepare for a 36-hour wind event beginning late Saturday night across the region. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. shut off power to more than 2 million people to prevent its electric lines from sparking fires. And officials took the extraordinary precaution of evacuating 200,000 people, some as far as 20 miles away in Bodega Bay on the coast.
It made for a miserable week but not a fatal one. The fact that so many people had recently witnessed catastrophic fire firsthand inevitably made it easier for officials to get them to obey evacuation orders.
In Southern California, an extreme wind event began Tuesday night.
Forecasters were expecting an air pressure differential between the high desert and the coast not seen in October since 2007, when howling winds fueled the Witch Creek fire in San Diego County, torching nearly 200,000 acres and leaving two dead. That differential was a record for the month, at negative 10.2 millibars, driving strong winds as high-pressure air sought a path through mountain slopes and canyons to fill lower-pressure voids on the coast.
This week, given the dry fall vegetation and low humidity, officials issued the extreme red-flag warning.
The pressure differential hit only negative 9.3 millibars, and that “may have made the difference between a historic event (and) just a severe, strong one,” sparing California from the worst, Swain said.
Wind gusts recorded Thursday were still strong — 67 mph in a Ventura County coastal valley, the National Weather Service reported, not much weaker than a peak recorded Wednesday of 78 mph at Boney Peak in the Santa Monica Mountains.
The winds should decrease today.
“Luckily, we are not seeing any more Santa Ana winds within the next week,” said meteorologist Lisa Phillips of the National Weather Service’s Oxnard office.
But in a sign of the danger that could still loom, forecasters don’t see any rain ahead for the next few weeks, either.
(Ruben Vives & Matthew Ormseth, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The cycle of fire began Wednesday morning when flames surrounded the library and museum in Simi Valley and stalked nearby neighborhoods as it swiftly scorched hundreds of acres in Ventura County. As the day wore on and the winds howled, more than a dozen other smaller fires erupted in communities including Riverside, Santa Clarita, Brea, Whittier, Lancaster, Calabasas, Long Beach, Nuevo and Jurupa Valley.
The outlook was brighter in Northern California, where thousands of evacuees began to return home as firefighters started to gain the upper hand on the wine country blaze that has scorched more than 76,000 acres and burned dozens of homes.
The biggest battle Wednesday was in Ventura County, where 800 firefighters trying to control the wind-whipped fire surrounding the presidential library were stymied by intense gusts that sent embers flying far beyond the body of the blaze. Helicopters repeatedly dropped loads of water around the Reagan complex, which is perched atop a hill blanketed in dense brush, amid 60-mph winds.
The Easy fire began near Easy Street and Madera Road in Simi Valley shortly after 6 a.m. and bounded toward the library, a repository of records and artifacts from the Reagan administration, officials said.
“Unfortunately it was about the worst time it could happen — 40-mile-an-hour sustained winds and fuels that were ripe and ready to carry fire,” said Ventura County Fire Chief Mark Lorenzen.
Though flames surrounded the 125,000-square-foot center for several hours, the library was not damaged, officials said.
The library, which holds the presidential archives and includes grounds with the graves of Reagan and his wife, Nancy, was well-equipped when flames surrounded it. It relies on a combination of high-tech defenses such as fireproof doors, sprinklers and an underground vault, as well as a decidedly no-tech measure — hundreds of goats brought in every year to graze on brush and create a firebreak.
The blaze, which had chewed through 1,400 acres of brush as of late Wednesday, burned at least one home on Tierra Rejada Road and threatened an additional 7,000 in parts of Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Moorpark.
Rory Kaplan, who has lived just south of the library for nearly two decades, fled among an exodus of neighbors Wednesday morning. About 26,000 people were evacuated because of the Easy fire, officials said.
Kris Mae, 69, hunkered down at an evacuation center in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday after leaving her home a few miles from the library. Her car had been packed for a month, with several suitcases, boxes of important files and a fire safe — just in case.
“It’s too hard to pack and unpack over and over,” she said.
Though California has experienced multiple deadly blazes in the last few years, weather officials warned that this week could lend itself to conditions that are even worse.
Abnormally strong winds that began Tuesday night are expected to continue through today and could reach up to 80 mph in mountain areas. Such wind conditions, which weather officials deemed “extreme red-flag” danger, have not been seen since 2007, when they helped unleash the sixth-most destructive fire in California history.
By midday Wednesday, Southern California was facing peak fire weather, with winds of up to 78 mph at Boney Peak in the Santa Monica Mountains in Ventura County, while relative humidity fell to rock bottom, clocking in at zero at Mount Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains and peaks in the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest, Phillips said.
The air was exceedingly dry throughout Ventura County. Relative humidity was 8 percent at Sinaloa Lake and 7 percent in Moorpark. With the winds, that could be a dangerous combination, experts said.
“The magnitude of the wind gusts really is going to be a concern,” said Daniel Swain, climate scientist with the University of California at Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The forecast of extreme Santa Ana winds prompted Southern California Edison to say it might shut off power to more than 340,000 customers in Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
As conditions worsened in Southern California, the weather farther north provided a respite for firefighters who had been battling strong winds.
Firefighters in wine country were able to double the containment of the massive Kincade fire to 30 percent, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The fire has already burned 76,825 acres and destroyed nearly 100 homes, officials say.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said Wednesday that it would begin restoring power to customers whose electricity was shut off this week in its latest bid to reduce wildfire risk. Crews will inspect utility lines, repair damage and restore power to about 365,000 customers in its service area, except for Kern County, which is still experiencing strong winds, according to PG&E.
(Gary Robbins, Karen Kutcher & Alex Riggins; Wendy Fry, Alexandra Mendoza, Teri Figuero, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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But it also appeared to spare San Diego County calamity, going into a slow fade after whipping the region with gusts that approached 70 mph in the mountains.
“It’s knock-on-wood for us,” said Jimmy Taeger, a forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Rancho Bernardo.
The winds began shortly before dawn, leading San Diego Gas & Electric to cut electricity to a growing number of customers in hopes of minimizing the chances that a spark from one of its power lines would start a wildfire. By late morning, more than 25,000 SDG&E customers were in the dark. By Wednesday night, the number dipped to about 19,000.
Ten San Diego County school districts canceled classes at all or some of their schools on Wednesday because of the critical fire weather conditions and potential power shutoffs.
With another predicted day of dry, windy conditions, eight school districts planned to close today: Dehesa School District; Julian Union High School District; Julian Union School District; Mountain Empire Unified School District; Rancho Santa Fe School District; Spencer Valley School District; Vallecitos School District; and Valley Center-Pauma Unified School District.
Vallecitos, which is in the North County community of Rainbow, announced it would be closed Friday, too.
People hoping to gamble in Valley Center also found themselves out of luck as Harrah’s Resort SoCal closed around noon because of high winds and mandatory power outages in the area.
The resort “will be closed ... until further notice,” Harrah’s said in a statement. “We are waiving cancellation and change fees for stays with arrivals from October 30 until power is restored.”
The danger hasn’t passed; the county will remain under a red flag fire weather warning until 6 p.m. today, about the time that throngs of children take to the streets for Halloween.
But forecasters believe the winds will be relatively mild. And Taeger said, “We’re not seeing any strong offshore winds in the near-term.”
Wednesday’s bluster represented the latest in a series of seemingly endless Santa Ana wind events. At least four windstorms have hit San Diego County during the second half of October, raking a critically dry landscape. San Diego hasn’t received a half-inch or more of rain since February.
Things could have been worse.
The high-pressure system that produced Wednesday’s winds was centered over Idaho, which meant that the most forceful winds ended up angling through parts of Orange, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties.
The ferocity of the Santa Anas became immediately apparent, spreading a wildfire toward the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley.
If the high pressure had been centered near Utah, the winds would have struck harder in greater San Diego. As it was, things got tense.
The winds spiked to 68 mph at Sill Hill, an exposed peak in the Cuyamaca Mountains, 64 mph in Alpine, along Interstate 8, and 60 mph at Hellhole Canyon, an appropriately named spot east of Valley Center, as well as 44 mph at Witch Creek, east of Ramona.
There were gusts to 53 mph at Santa Ysabel, near Julian, and 39 mph at Ramona and Fallbrook. Escondido hit 38 mph while Olivenhain clocked in at 31 mph. Winds snapped above 20 mph at Oceanside and Imperial Beach, clipping off the top of breaking waves.
In Baja California, wildfires closed freeways and caused evacuations Wednesday.
Early Wednesday night, a wildfire raced up a canyon in the La Sierra neighborhood, destroying at least six homes in its path, according to witnesses and a spokesman for the Tijuana police department.
The fire was reported about 6:20 p.m. between Boulevard Cuauhtemoc south and Boulevard Fundadores. The neighborhood is very close to the Lomas de Rubi neighborhood, where a landslide in 2018 destroyed 89 homes.
The fire was said to be under control late Wednesday night and no injuries were reported.
Earlier in the day, the Tijuana-to-Ensenada freeway was closed around the 57-kilometer mark in Playas de Rosarito because of a wildfire that caused evacuations.
Residents in the Plaza Del Mar subdivision were evacuated to the Casa del Abuelo shelter in Primo Tapia.
Rosarito Mayor Araceli Brown said Tuesday a total of 65 properties, including three ranches, were damaged or destroyed in Friday’s wildfire, which ripped through 3,177 acres in the coastal town, south of Tijuana.
Classes were canceled in Tijuana, Tecate and Rosarito because of the Santa Ana winds and the red-flag warnings on both sides of the border.
(Gary Robbins, Karen Kutcher & Alex Riggins; Wendy Fry, Alexandra Mendoza, Teri Figuero, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The city declared a state of emergency Monday and then upgraded it to a state of disaster after getting a fuller picture of the destruction across the coastal city, south of Tijuana, with a population of about 70,000 residents.
At least eight fires swept across four Baja California cities Friday, damaging or destroying hundreds of homes and buildings, and killing at least three people across the state.
Clementina Martinez, 41, said she lost everything when wind-fueled blazes swept across the hilltop where she lives in Colonia Morelos. All that remains of her home is a cement slab.
She’s staying inside a tent where her home once stood.
“I feel a lot of emotion right now. I’m thanking God for bringing these friends into my life ... to help me,” said Martinez, referring to volunteers who have already erected a steel frame for her new residence.
Roberto Alcantara, 31, who owns the Remodelación y Construcion Alcantara construction company, volunteered to build Martinez a brand new home. He is part of an outpouring of community support involving private companies, the municipal government, nonprofits and churches.
His workers started Monday, working a couple hours on the Martinez home after their full-time regular day job in construction.
“This community has given to me a lot, given me work, so I think it’s time for me to give back some muscle,” said Alcantara.
Rosarito Mayor Araceli Brown said a total of 65 properties were partially or completely destroyed when Friday’s wildfire ripped through 3,177 acres in the city.
She said she felt proud to see neighbors helping one another and touched by the donations that have poured into Colonia Morelos.
“This is the real community of Rosarito that you see right here, lending a hand to each other,” said Brown.
Brown toured the areas most affected Friday, along with the city’s fire chief.
Matilde Cabrera Garcia, 35, described the moments she and her family were woken up by a driver who warned them of the approaching wildfire.
“We were all sleeping. It was like 4 in the morning and this car passed by honking and warned us the fire was right behind our home. So, we left very quickly,” said Cabrera.
Cabrera lives with her husband and two daughters, Valeria and Briana. They are now staying with neighbors while volunteers remove debris from what remains of their home.
Cabrera’s husband, Mario, wistfully showed off pictures of the beautiful marble counter tops he had put into the home, but said he was confident they would rebuild with the community’s help.
“We’re sad for the loss, but what is important is that we are okay. We didn’t lose anyone’s life or any family members,” said Matilde Cabrera.
One man in the Colonia Morelos neighborhood died when the flames ripped through the home he lived in with his father-in-law, officials said.
Neighbors said the man was disabled and might not have understood how to get out of the home or he might have been too afraid to leave.
Still, more work remains to be done.
Volunteers with Iglesia Ancla and other organizations continued demolition and removing the fire debris from several homes that were partially destroyed into the late evening Tuesday.
“I do this from the heart,” said Alex Garcia Gonzalez, one of the volunteers.
(Wendy Fry, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The upshot of the study is that 110 million people around the globe live below the current high tide level — including many partially protected by existing sea walls or other infrastructure, as in New Orleans. Even under a scenario of very modest climate change, that number will rise to 150 million in 2050 and 190 million by 2100.
If climate change and sea level rise follow a worse path, as many as 340 million people living below the high tide level could be in peril, to say nothing of how many could be affected in floods and extreme events.
Such figures are three times — or more — higher than earlier estimates.
“We’ve had a huge blind spot as to the degree of danger, and that’s what we’ve been striving to improve,” said Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central, who authored the new study in Nature Communications with colleague Scott Kulp.
The reason for the big change is that prior research has relied on data about coastal elevations that comes from radar measurements from the 2000 space shuttle Endeavor mission. But that data set has problems. The instrument detected the height not only of the coastal land surface but anything else that was on it, such as houses or trees. This introduced error into land elevation estimates averaging about 6 1/2 feet globally, the new study says.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The region has thus far been spared the devastation and evacuations seen in Northern California and Los Angeles County, but low humidity and high winds have led the National Weather Service to issue a red-flag warning for San Diego County’s mountains and valleys as well as inland Orange County through 6 p.m. Thursday.
San Diego Gas & Electric officials say they may shut off power to about 41,000 customers primarily in the backcountry to help reduce the chances of electrical equipment igniting a fire.
The potential SDG&E shutoffs prompted five county school districts to cancel classes today:
Julian Union High School District
Julian Union School District
Mountain Empire Unified School District
Rancho Santa Fe School District
Spencer Valley School District
Three weeks ago, amid temperatures well into 80s inland, SDG&E warned about 40,000 customers they could see their power lines de-energized because of Santa Ana wind conditions. Eventually, the utility cut off power to 19,000 customers.
This time, daytime highs will be in the 70s in most areas and in the 50s in the mountains. Brian D’Agostino, SDG&E’s director of fire science and climate adaptation, said conditions this week “could be the strongest event that Southern California has experienced thus far this year.”
That’s because the wind is expected to gust harder and forecasters anticipate extremely low humidity levels.
“Even though this event is going to be colder than the last one, it’s also going to be even drier than the last one,” D’Agostino said. “We could potentially see relative humidity values below 5 percent as we head into the peak of this event.”
The weather service has also issued a high wind warning through 6 p.m. Thursday. The winds will gust 30 mph to 40 mph in the corridor that extends from Valley Center and Escondido all the way to the sea, with gusts up to 80 mph at Big Black Mountain, east of Escondido.
“Low humidity is a factor because it draws all the moisture out of all the vegetation,” D’Agostino said. “It makes it combust much more easily. The energy from the fire is not having to evaporate water (so the fire) can move through the vegetation much more quickly.”
While rural and mountainous communities make up the majority of areas potentially affected by power shutoffs, SDG&E has also alerted customers in portions of coastal towns of Encinitas and San Clemente as well as segments of inland communities such as El Cajon, Escondido, San Juan Capistrano and Rancho Santa Fe that lines may be de-energized.
SDG&E officials say in addition to fire and weather conditions, the utility takes a number factors into account when it decides to turn off the power. Among them: observations from the field (flying debris, tree damage and impacts to power lines), the availability of firefighting resources and reports from emergency responders.
Though the term was little-known by most Californians as recently as one month ago, what investor-owned utilities call “Public Safety Power Shutoffs,” or PSPS, have become dirty words for some customers, especially in Northern California.
Pacific Gas & Electric has cut power four times this month to millions to its customers in Northern and Central California, prompting howls from ratepayers, criticism from Gov. Gavin Newsom and the holding of an emergency meeting by the California Public Utilities Commission.
“The state cannot continue to experience PSPS events on the scope and scale Californians have experienced this month, nor should Californians be subject to the poor execution that PG&E in particular has exhibited,” said the commission’s new president, Marybel Batjer.
The commission on Monday promised to launch an investigation “to ensure that the state’s experience this year with PSPS is not repeated.”
This year marks the first time PG&E, the utility that filed for bankruptcy protection in January, has employed the blackout strategy as a way to prevent high winds from knocking branches into power lines and sparking wildfires in its service territory.
The company was criticized for not cutting off power before last November’s Camp fire in Butte County that killed 85 people, scorched 153,336 acres and forced evacuations of 52,000 people. Cal Fire in May determined the fire was caused by electrical transmission lines owned and operated by PG&E.
SDG&E was criticized for the 2007 Witch Creek, Guejito and Rice wildfires that destroyed more than 1,300 homes, killed two people, injured 40 firefighters and forced more than 10,000 to seek shelter at Qualcomm Stadium.
Since then, the utility has spent $1.5 billion of ratepayer funds on efforts to prevent and fight wildfires — including a network of 190 weather stations that provide readings of wind speed, humidity and temperature in fire-prone areas every 10 minutes and deploying two helicopters to douse fires with water as quickly as possible.
SDG&E has de-energized lines since 2013, much earlier than PG&E and Southern California Edison, the state’s third large investor-owned utility.
“Making the decision to turn off power is not a decision we take lightly,” said SDG&E spokeswoman Allison Torres. “We realize it’s an inconvenience and it’s a disruption to our customers. But we want to let them know we are monitoring these conditions in real time. We’ve leveraged some of the most state-of-the-art weather equipment and fire predictive models to ensure we’re turning off power where we need to maintain public safety.”
Some backcountry customers have complained SDG&E has been too quick to cut off power, and others have said the shutoffs appear to be random. Blackouts come at considerable hardship to those dependent on medical devices powered by electricity and rural residents needing power to pump well water.
County Supervisor Dianne Jacob earlier this month tweeted, “Instead of taking the easy way out and pulling the plug on vulnerable communities, SDG&E should redouble its efforts to fully harden power lines and other infrastructure.”
D’Agostino said winds may be light in some areas without power because the lines feeding a given neighborhood are exposed to gusty conditions.
SDG&E has estimated about 60 percent of its power lines — roughly 10,000 miles — are underground but Torres acknowledged it is more difficult to place lines below grade in backcountry areas.
“The majority of the areas in fire threat districts are mountainous, with sensitive environmental issues” that affect permitting, Torres said. “But we are evaluating. So if it makes sense, we will proceed with undergrounding projects.”
(Rob Nikolewski, Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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A red-flag warning for high fire danger will cover the period from 11 p.m. today to 6 p.m. Thursday. The warning covers the mountains and inland valleys, where relative humidity is expected to be in the single digits.
San Diego Gas & Electric notified nearly 33,000 customers across inland San Diego County and southern Orange County on Monday afternoon that they might experience power outages during the windstorm to minimize the chance that power lines will spark wildfires.
Winds could gust to 50 to 70 mph near the mountain peaks and in Ramona and Alpine. Communities farther west, such as Escondido, El Cajon and Rancho Bernardo, could see gusts in the 30s or 40s. Strong winds are not expected at the coast.
The winds should die down by trick-or-treat time Thursday and stay calm Friday and Saturday, but extremely dry air will remain in place, keeping the fire danger elevated.
Temperatures should be lower than they were during last week’s Santa Ana, with highs in the 70s.
(Robert Krier, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Santa Ana winds that move from east to west are expected again on Wednesday and Thursday, according to the director of the Tijuana Fire Department. The city will return to a “red alert” on those days — a warning issued for weather conditions that could bring extreme fire behavior.
One man was arrested Friday for burning weeds and garbage in an empty lot next to a home in the San Antonio de los Buenos district in Tijuana, police said. Santa Ana winds carried the flames down the street, where four houses were destroyed in the Artesanal neighborhood.
“Although there are declarations that affirm the fires are due to winds and climate change ... neglect and negligence have also been the cause of these fires,” said Jorge Alberto Ayón Monsalve, the new secretary of public safety and citizen protection.
Ayón Monsalve said the residents in San Antonio de los Buenos could have avoided losing their homes had the man not decided to burn trash during the Santa Ana.
Between Friday and Sunday, Tijuana firefighters put out more than a hundred fires in nearly every part of the city. At least 85 fires sparked between Friday and Saturday. There were at least 63 more between Saturday and Sunday.
The fires sparked in dozens of neighborhoods from the coastal Playas de Tijuana near the border to El Florido in far southeastern Tijuana.
One firefighter suffered a heat injury on Saturday. A spokeswoman said he is expected to fully recover.
Director of Civil Protection José Luis Rosas Blanco said people intentionally burn their grass and garbage during heavy winds so that the ashes will be carried away.
“Even though these types of fires are favored by weather conditions, it also has a lot to do with the ignition of the fire, or the start of it, with 90 percent of them starting because of an intentional act,” Rosas said. “And we are asking you to do us a favor of avoiding this kind of situation in the presence of Santa Anas.”
Rosas said the city will have a high fire danger through the end of the year because last year’s rains allowed a lot of foliage to grow, providing added fuel for fires. Stronger-than-normal winds are expected through December, he said.
Just as Tijuana firefighters were beginning to get a handle on the emergencies late Saturday evening, another series of fires destroyed eight homes in two neighborhoods.
The first occurred in the Fausto González neighborhood in the San Antonio de los Buenos district, where neighbors helped rescue residents from their burning homes, according to the Tijuana Fire Department. Seven homes burned, with six of those destroyed on Jacaranda and Pino streets.
A total of 14 adults and 11 children were in the homes, authorities said.
In the Los Girasoles neighborhood, one home was destroyed and another badly damaged by the wind-fueled fires on Saturday night.
Water service was temporarily shut off in some parts of the city as firefighters conserved water to continue battling the blazes.
José Luis Jiménez, director of the Tijuana firefighters, said they would be working to clean up hot spots today, as well as preparing for the worsening weather conditions expected in the middle of the week.
Jiménez said the department was able to handle the extreme conditions and multiple fires throughout the city, while preventing residents from being injured, because of their training and the firefighters’ strong commitment to public service.
“No, we are not fighting with our hands,” said Jiménez, responding to a question about whether the fire department lacked proper resources. “There will always be a need for more tools.”
Jiménez said the fire department discussed increasing resources with the new mayor before he took office Oct. 1.
He said his team operates at a national level in terms of response times and skill.
“(In Tijuana) where I have always said we have the best firefighters there can be in the country ... especially the capacity they have in the training and the ease of quickly solving things,” he said.
Tijuana Mayor Arturo González Cruz announced late Monday that the city would maintain a “pre-alert status” in terms of staffing through the end of the year.
“I recognize the effort made by all the agencies involved in the contingency that was presented in recent days; they have responded admirably. We must remain vigilant during this week, due to possible environmental phenomena that may occur,” González Cruz said.
Enrique Betancourt, director of the municipal police, said residents who are burning trash during the Santa Ana conditions could face criminal charges if a fire sparks and ends up injuring someone.
They also could be held civilly responsible for damages.
(Wendy Fry, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The respite from the Diablo winds is expected to be temporary. Meteorologists warned of low humidity and gusts as high as 65 mph today through Wednesday morning that could push the 74,000-acre Kincade fire into new terrain.
By Monday evening, its sixth day, the fire was about 15 percent contained and had destroyed 123 structures, including 57 homes, with nearly 200,000 households under evacuation orders. Down south, firefighters in Los Angeles struggled to control a fire near the Getty Center in the affluent western part of the city.
The Getty fire broke out along the freeway by Getty Center Drive after 1:30 am Monday and blew up to more than 600 acres under Santa Ana winds, destroying eight homes and damaging five in Los Angeles’ Brentwood section. Thousands of people were ordered to evacuate some of the priciest enclaves on Earth.
“Apocalypse bags” were packed. LeBron James fled with his family and couldn’t find a hotel room. News copters filmed the fire, as drivers on the 405 Freeway sailed through the fiery vortex and lived to Instagram it.
In a week of fires up and down the state, the Getty was not the biggest or most destructive. But fires that break out in the Sepulveda Pass and roar up to the rich and famous have a way of becoming more than natural phenomenons. They become shared experiences that unfold in wall-to-wall TV coverage and dramatic social media images that speak to the city’s character and inherent dangers.
Winds were driving the flames south and west, deeper into Brentwood’s canyons, toward Pacific Palisades. The steepness of the canyons drew the flames up in monstrous lashes.
Meanwhile, in Sonoma, Pacific Gas & Electric, the embattled utility company that has cut off power to more than 2 million people in an unprecedented effort to prevent wildfires from sparking, drew more criticism Monday, disclosing that it had failed to notify about 23,000 customers of the precautionary power shutdowns and that its equipment had malfunctioned near two fires in Contra Costa County over the weekend.
In Santa Rosa early Sunday night, people gathered their belongings and escaped from the Kincade fire with only flashlights and cellphones to light the way, caught between the power outage and the fire it was designed to prevent.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation. No deaths have been reported. A firefighter suffered a minor burn and was taken to a hospital, officials said Monday. Another who was burned more seriously was airlifted to University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.
At a news conference Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said firefighters were “holding their own,” particularly around Healdsburg and Windsor, and have kept the flames confined to the east side of the 101 Freeway without any major flare-ups to the west.
But, he added, California is just entering the peak of its fire season, with the winds the biggest wild card.
Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter said his firefighters were working to lift some evacuation orders as soon as possible and carve safe paths for PG&E workers to restore power. But only a thorough drenching can save California from more heartache and destruction, he said.
“We’re nowhere near done with this,” Porter said. “We need widespread, statewide rain before this is over.”
On Monday, firefighters made a stand near the town of Windsor in the Shiloh Ridge area, where an unknown number of homes had burned.
Through a thick blanket of smoke, they hacked at brush on hilly terrain to create a perimeter that would serve as a line of defense for homes and vineyards when the winds kicked back up today.
After gusts as strong as 96 mph on Sunday morning, the lighter winds allowed for a more aggressive attack against the fire, especially by air, said Ben Nichols, a Cal Fire division chief.
“We’ve been chasing this fire for the last four days,” Nichols said. “We finally got the break in the weather.”
Gil Laroucherie had sought refuge at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds with his 53 horses. But the fate of his Windsor ranch ate away at him.
In the predawn darkness, he drove back toward the flames. His place was unharmed, but the sight of the deserted town threatened by fire was sobering.
“I knew pretty well what I was going to see, but the realism of seeing it, it takes you back a bit,” said Laroucherie, 78.
Mike Birleffi ignored the evacuation order, an act of defiance he attributed to stubbornness and a perhaps misguided belief that he could single-handedly ward off the flames.
The 63-year-old carpenter has lived on a 3-acre property in Windsor for 33 years.
During the Tubbs fire two years ago, he made a sign that said “Thank you first responders” in red paint. Now, he had a reason to display it again.
Sunday night, he snuck a few hours of sleep. But mainly, he stood in his driveway and stared north, watching the flames crest on the hill above Shiloh Road.
“It looked kind of like some kind of biblical prophecy,” he said, adding that he didn’t believe in prophecies.
In the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, which was burned to the ground in the Tubbs fire, people who had spent the last two years rebuilding their homes received evacuation orders early Sunday morning.
Debbie and Rick Serdin were not ready to leave their new beige two-story house with a handwritten sign attached to a sapling tree: “We will be back better! Stronger!”
Just weeks earlier, they had marked the two-year anniversary of the Tubbs fire by celebrating the rebirth of their neighborhood with others who had undertaken the long, hard slog of rebuilding.
Overnight, Rick Serdin sprayed water on his new house and his neighbors’ houses, keeping watch as smoke filled the streets.
The Serdins would make one last stand.
“If we lost it again, we weren’t coming back,” Debbie Serdin said. “Everyone knows Coffey Park couldn’t handle it again.”
In the wine country near Jimtown, 25 miles to the north, the fire had already passed through. The damage seemed almost random along Highway 28, with the flames having raced down the tree-covered hills unevenly, leaving splotches of blackened brush.
The wind kicks up flammable material in random patterns, said Rhett Pratt, a Cal Fire spokesman — leaving people to marvel at why one structure was spared and another reduced to ashes.
“This type of fire is really difficult, because it doesn’t completely burn everything,” Pratt said. “It kind of hopscotches. It picks and chooses.”
The historic Soda Rock Winery was a twisted heap of metal. All that remained was its distinctive stone facade, now blackened, and a 20-foot steel sculpture of a boar named Lord Snort.
Just down the road, another local landmark, the Jimtown Store, was unscathed.
The danger was not over, Pratt said. Smoldering debris could pose a big threat when the winds return.
(Julia Wick & Melody Gutierrez, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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There are several reasons for the flooding, including high levels along the river, saturated ground and broken levees. And with forecasters predicting a wetter-than-normal winter, it’s possible flooding could continue in some places all the way until spring, when the normal flood season begins.
“There’s no end in sight. None at all,” said Tom Bullock, who hasn’t been able to live in his northwestern Missouri home since March because floodwaters cut off access to it.
In Missouri’s Holt County, where Bullock serves as emergency management director, roughly 30,000 acres of the 95,000 acres that flooded last spring remain underwater, and at least some of that floodwater is likely to freeze in place this winter.
Similar conditions exist in places along the lower Missouri River, where broken levees will likely take several years to repair.
Nearly every levee in Holt County has multiple breaches and many haven’t even been examined yet. Repairs aren’t likely to start on most of the area’s levees until next year, Bullock said.
One key contributor to the flooding is that the river remains high because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is still releasing massive amounts of water from upstream dams to clear space in the reservoirs to handle next spring’s flooding.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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When her phone finally rang with an automated alert early Sunday morning, she didn’t second-guess it. She walked through her home, which doubles as a small residential care facility, and told the three women she cares for that they all needed to leave.
Two years ago, when the Tubbs fire tore through her nearby neighborhoods, Salonga was caught unprepared. This time, as the Kincade fire laid siege to wine country, she was ready.
“But it doesn’t get easier,” Salonga said as she sat on a cot inside an evacuation center at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, her three residents huddled quietly to her right. “One of my residents is partially blind, so navigating new places is really hard for her.”
As the Kincade fire continued to rage on Sunday, destroying at least 94 structures and forcing the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people, residents wrestled with anxiety, uncertainty and a frightening sense of déjà vu of wildfires past.
Many fled in the pitch darkness of night amid howling winds after Pacific Gas & Electric Co. blackouts left more than 2 million people across the region without power. Shelters were filled to capacity with fire refugees who worried about when they would be allowed back to their homes, jobs or schools.
Most vulnerable to the mounting stress were the young, old and infirm.
Kayla Williams, 26, her husband and two young boys left their Larkfield home just before dawn. Her 9-year-old was experiencing multiple panic attacks. Both boys cried at times, begging to return home.
As she and her family ate lunch at the Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Williams kept her voice low, describing how her 4-year-old son asked her if they’re going to live in a car permanently.
“I don’t know what to tell them,” Williams said. “It’s hard when us as adults are panicking and are trying to stay calm for them.”
Late Saturday, Heather Deghi and her 10-year-old daughter, Ava, could see the glow of the Kincade fire from their home in Windsor. Their neighborhood had been pitch-black for hours after outages, but they didn’t lose electricity until moments before they had to evacuate at 4 a.m. Sunday.
Deghi oversees a care facility for disabled people in Windsor. When the sheriff shouted evacuation orders over a loudspeaker, Deghi and her family left with three clients whose families were not able to retrieve them.
Deghi’s first priority was to keep those in her care calm. Many of her clients live with mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Major disruptions like this wildfire evacuation can profoundly affect those whose health relies on routine and familiarity, Deghi noted.
“I tried to take away from the severity and reality of it as much as I can,” said Deghi, who sought shelter at the Petaluma Veterans Memorial Building.
In Orinda, Ryan Yeager charged medical equipment for his disabled daughter, Violet, at a city charging station. Violet, who uses a wheelchair, suffers from an disorder that requires a breathing device and a tube for nutrition. Yeager had ordered a $2,600 battery that was supposed to provide a few days of power, but it had not yet arrived.
“I don’t mind this as long as we are not having to evacuate,” Yeager said.
Many residents are reliving the trauma of October 2017, when the Tubbs fire destroyed or damaged more than 5,500 structures in Sonoma County.
Daniel Barcenas lost his home in that fire. He has since purchased another house on the edge of Coffey Park, a community of tract homes leveled by flames in 2017. That’s where he was with his 80-year-old grandmother and brother Sunday morning, despite an evacuation order that came right up to their street, stopping short of their front door.
He is staying behind only because his brother, Eduardo, refused to leave.
The Tubbs fire is still vivid in Barcenas’ mind: how the smoke was so thick and black that he could barely see, how traffic caused by fleeing residents choked the subdivision. At one point, he feared he would have to get out of the car and carry his grandmother to safety. Explosions provided the only source of light.
This time, Barcenas and his brother sat on the back porch as a foreboding wind whipped around them.
“It’s like what it must have been like to survive the Titanic,” he said, “and have to go through it all again.”
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Newsom said in a statement that officials were deploying “every resource available” to respond to the wildfires, including the five-day-old Kincade fire in Northern California’s wine country powered by gusts that reached more than 102 mph.
The Kincade fire doubled in size in 24 hours to 54,298 acres and destroyed at least 94 structures. By Sunday night, it was only 5 percent contained.
More than 3,000 state, local and federal personnel were assigned to the Kincade fire alone. Firefighters managed to keep the flames out of populated areas, making a stand in the northeast corner of Windsor where the fire was pushing up to dense neighborhoods. No deaths were reported.
The biggest evacuation was in Sonoma County, where 180,000 people were told to pack up and leave, many in the middle of the night.
The state’s mandatory evacuation footprint stretched across Sonoma and Napa counties, from the vineyards of the Alexander Valley to the coastal community of Bodega Bay, encompassing cities including Calistoga, Sebastopol, Healdsburg, Windsor and Santa Rosa.
To prevent its power lines from sparking in the high winds and setting off more blazes, Pacific Gas & Electric said Sunday that preventative shut-offs impacted 965,000 customers and another 100,000 lost electricity because of strong gusts, bringing the number of residents impacted by blackouts to nearly 2.7 million people.
PG&E officials say they are expecting strong winds to whip up again Tuesday and that they have notified 500,000 customers — or more than 1 million people — that they are likely to have their power turned off for the third time in a week.
Some of those people might not have their power restored from the current outage before the next major shutdown, which would leave them without electricity for five days or longer, said Mark Quinlan, PG&E’s emergency preparedness and response director.
The utility said it could take until Wednesday to inspect the affected lines — by foot, helicopter and drone — and restore power to its customers.
“Ensure you are prepared that your power may not come back” between the end of this weekend’s power outage to the next one, said Andy Vessey, CEO and president of Pacific Gas & Electric.
The fear that the winds could blow embers and spread fire across a major highway prompted authorities to expand evacuation orders that covered parts of Santa Rosa, a city of 175,000 that was devastated by a wildfire two years ago.
“This is the largest evacuation that any of us can remember,” the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office tweeted Sunday. “Take care of each other.”
Hundreds of people arrived at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa by Sunday. Some came from senior care facilities. More than 300 people slept inside an auditorium filled with cots and wheeled beds. Scores of others stayed in a separate building with their pets.
Among them was Maribel Cruz, 19, who packed up her dog, four cats and fish as soon as she was told to flee her trailer in the town of Windsor, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. She also grabbed a neighbor’s cat.
“I’m just nervous since I grew up in Windsor,” she said. “I’m hoping the wind cooperates.”
Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick urged residents in the evacuation zone that stretched from the wine country to Bodega Bay on the coast to get out immediately, citing the 24 lives lost when fire swept through the region in October 2017.
“Although I’ve heard people express concerns that we are evacuating too many people, I think those concerns are not valid at this point,” Essick said at a news conference Sunday, noting that the winds pushed fire toward the towns of Healdsburg and Windsor overnight.
A historic attraction outside Healdsburg was lost Sunday when embers carried by wind sparked a blaze that engulfed the Soda Rock Winery. The stone-walled buildings included a general store and post office founded in 1869.
“We’ve seen the news. We are devastated,” Soda Rock posted on Facebook. “We don’t have much information, but we will update you as soon as we know anything. Our staff is safe — right now what is most important is the safety of the first responders battling the fire. Thank you everyone for your concern.”
During the 2017 fires in Northern California, winds up to 90 mph lasted for about 12 hours. This time, the gusts were stronger and expected to last more than 36 hours, ending tonight, said Matt Mehle, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Monterey office.
Wind-blown embers could spark fires up to a mile away. Fire officials said they feared that if the Kincade fire crosses U.S. 101, it could ignite an area that hasn’t burned in 80 years.
“The fuel in that area is extremely dense, they’re extremely old and dry,” said Steve Volmer, a fire behavior analyst with Cal Fire.
The parched vegetation from the unseasonably hot weather and low humidity was already igniting spots elsewhere, and firefighters scrambled to keep up.
Two grass fires shut down a 6-mile stretch of Interstate 80, including a bridge between the cities of Crockett and Vallejo, and forced the evacuation of 200 people from California State University Maritime Academy. An ember from one fire possibly sparked the other.
Gusts knocked over a 30-foot tree at a farmers market in Martinez, injuring nine people, including a toddler. Six people left with injuries that were not life-threatening were taken to a hospital, police said.
Smoke from another grass fire Sunday forced the closure of a stretch of Interstate 80 running through Sacramento’s downtown. Meanwhile, fire officials spotted downed power lines in the area of a small fire that destroyed a building at a tennis club and three other structures in Lafayette, a suburb in the east San Francisco Bay Area.
A police officer there told the San Francisco Chronicle that the fire started near a power pole that fell and pulled down live wires. He said PG&E had not turned off power to that part of town.
In the neighboring town of Orinda, a firefighter knocked on doors about 2:30 p.m. telling residents to prepare to evacuate. The wind howled. A large redwood tree had crashed into a resident’s yard. Downed branches littered city streets. Funnels of leaves swirled in the air.
“Houses can be replaced,” the firefighter said. “People can’t.”
The city of Vallejo said the blackout shut off its pumping station needed to access its well water, prompting an emergency. The city barred residents from watering yards and asked people to limit bathing and flushing toilets, according to The Vallejo Times Herald.
Many residents said they feel exasperated.
“It has brought a lot of anxiety,” said Cody Rodriguez, 20, who lived for a week at a Santa Rosa shelter during the 2017 fires and checked into a Napa County shelter on Sunday. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to go through this again.’”
In Central California, a tree toppled in strong wind Sunday killed a woman and injured a man who was taken to a hospital, officials said.
In Southern California, a wildfire in the Santa Clarita area near Los Angeles destroyed 18 structures. As of Sunday night, the Tick fire was 70 percent contained.
Firefighters in San Diego County continued to make progress Sunday digging containment lines around a pair of brush fires that broke out Friday in Valley Center and Ramona amid hot, arid and gusty Santa Ana conditions.
The 37-acre Miller fire in Valley Center was 100 percent contained Sunday evening, Cal Fire San Diego spokesman Capt. Issac Sanchez said. It damaged one home and destroyed three outbuildings Friday afternoon near Cole Grade Road and Miller Lane, southeast of Valley Center High School.
The blaze near Ramona was 95 percent contained late Sunday, and fire crews expected to have it fully contained no later than tonight, Sanchez said. Dubbed the Sawday fire, it ripped through 97 acres and destroyed an unoccupied mobile home after igniting about 9:30 a.m. Friday near Sawday Truck Trail and Littlepage Road, near the same area where the Witch Creek fire ignited in 2007.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES; ASSOCIATED PRESS; LOS ANGELES TIMES; Alex Riggins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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It’s a perilous combination that left many anxiously planning for blackouts and the potential for more destructive wildfires, fueled by 36 hours of intense winds. Some fear they will have to confront fires without power, an experience those who fled this week’s Sonoma County fire described as terrifying.
The Diablo winds in the northern part of the state are expected to pick up this evening and last until Monday morning, longer than the windstorms that fueled the three most catastrophic fires in California history.
“This is definitely an event that we’re calling historic and extreme,” said David King, meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s Monterey office, which manages forecasts for the Bay Area. “What’s making this event really substantial and historic is the amount of time that these winds are going to remain.”
PG&E warned the power outages could be spread across 36 counties from Humboldt to Santa Cruz to Bakersfield.
The blackouts have become a political issue, with politicians attacking the bankrupt utility.
Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned PG&E for greed and mismanagement that led to this point in California history, with fires burning across the state and hundreds of thousands left in the dark.
“They simply did not do their jobs,” he said. “It took us decades to get here, but we will get out of this mess. We will do everything in our power to restructure PG&E so they are a completely different entity when they get out of bankruptcy. Mark my words. It is a new day of accountability.”
On Wednesday, PG&E shut down distribution lines that carry power directly to neighborhoods, homes and businesses in the Geyserville area before the wildfire began, but kept electricity flowing through larger transmission lines the company said were built to withstand stronger winds. But the utility reported an outage at a transmission line at 9:20 p.m. in the area where the Kincade fire began, and officials are now investigating whether an equipment failure sparked the ignition.
The fire burned at least 49 buildings and 34 square miles, prompting evacuation orders for some 2,000 people.
Firefighters were hoping to take advantage of a lull in gusts to build a perimeter around the fire near Geyserville, but state Fire Chief Thom Porter worried winds resurfacing tonight would make it difficult to hold those lines.
“We’re working diligently on closing the doors that are open on this fire,” Porter said.
Meanwhile, a fire driven by hot, dry Santa Ana winds howling up to 50 mph threatened the suburb of Santa Clarita north of Los Angeles and forced the evacuation of more than 50,000 people.
Newsom declared states of emergency Friday in Los Angeles County and in Sonoma County.
The cause of the Tick fire in Santa Clarita was unknown, but Southern California Edison said it had cut off power to the area five hours before it broke out Thursday.
At least six homes were destroyed, and officials said that number was expected to rise. No immediate injuries were reported.
Sean Malin, 27, evacuated from Santa Clarita with his mother and their two dogs after police officers drove down their street and told them to leave.
“It’s a huge inconvenience,” he said. “On the other hand, I know that the worst thing we could possibly do is get in the way of a firefight that needs to happen.”
Though the flames and smoke died down Friday and some evacuations were lifted, thousands of people who fled with their pets and livestock remain displaced.
The Los Angeles school district closed all its schools in the San Fernando Valley Friday, citing poor air quality and other safety concerns.
Southern California Edison, which shut off electricity to more than 31,000 customers Thursday, was still considering additional power cuts to 132,000 despite a break in the weather.
Transmission lines were linked to the deadly Camp fire last year in Butte County and are under investigation as a potential cause of the Saddleridge fire this month in northern San Fernando Valley.
The wind conditions predicted for this weekend are much like those before the devastating wine country fires of 2017, said Craig Smith, a former PG&E weather expert and now a fire scientist with the consulting firm Jupiter Intelligence. Those fires killed 22 people in Sonoma County and nine in Mendocino County.
The area of highest risk includes the Bay Area and points north, including the northern Sierra Nevada foothills and California’s North Coast region, said Daniel Swain, climate scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It’s been particularly unusual that the North Coast, the wettest part of the state, is still so dry at this point in the year.
“This is the kind of event that makes me personally nervous, as somebody who has friends and family living in the fire zones in the Bay Area, and I don’t say that about all the events,“ Swain said. “Hopefully, we get lucky and there are no major ignitions. But if they happen, it’s going to be really hairy Saturday night and Sunday. It’s looking really, really extreme.”
PG&E has called some of this fall’s past winds extreme when that wasn’t necessarily the case, Swain said, but “this one really is meteorologically extreme.”
By Friday afternoon, the Kincade fire had destroyed 21 homes and scorched 21,900 acres. With a temporary lull in the wind, firefighters had still managed to reach only 5 percent containment.
“We’ll most likely see the fire spreading once again” this evening, when gusts are expected to reach up to 75 mph, said Drew Peterson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw gusts between 80 and 85 mph.”
Then on Sunday, he said, conditions will worsen. The winds are expected to head down slope, reaching urban areas as far as Oakland, San Francisco and Sacramento.
Residents in Sonoma County got a preview this week, when PG&E cut off power as the Kincade fire moved in.
In Geyserville on Friday, as the fire burned in the surrounding hills, the power remained off in town and gas-powered generators raised a din.
Dino Bugica, 42, started his generator at his restaurant, Diavola, to keep his refrigerators going on Thursday when the power was shut off. His house has no power, so he’s been spending the last two nights in the dark.
The upcoming weekend was supposed to be a busy one, with a celebration of fall and a Day of the Dead event. But with a violent windstorm forecast for Saturday night and the power likely to be off for days, it’ll be a veritable ghost town.
“What are you going to do?” he said. He sent his family to Healdsburg and has spent his evenings making food for firefighters.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The county’s inland valleys, foothills and mountains were hit Friday by some of the strongest Santa Anas that San Diego has experienced in years, according to the National Weather Service.
The winds peaked before dawn, reaching 89 mph at Big Black Mountain near Ramona, 78 mph in the Cuyamaca Mountains, 71 mph at Palomar Mountain, and 64 mph at Alpine. There also were 55 mph gusts along Interstate 8, east of Alpine.
The temperature spiked to 90 and above across inland county, and the relative humidity fell below 10 percent.
San Diego Gas & Electric responded by turning off power to nearly 20,000 customers to minimize the chances that a spark from one of its power lines would start a wildfire. Power was restored to nearly 2,000 of those customers by late Friday afternoon.
The SDG&E outage affects customers in Boulevard, Campo, Cuyamaca, Descanso, Dulzura, Poway, Gutay, Jacumba, Julian, Pauma Valley, Cuca Ranch, Pine Valley, Potrero, Ramona, Santa Ysabel, Alpine and Valley Center.
The power shutoff led schools to close Friday in the following districts: Julian Union High School District, Julian Union School District, Mountain Empire Unified School District, Spencer Valley School District and Warner Unified School District. In San Marcos, Double Peak school was closed.
Here is a sample of Thursday’s strongest winds: Big Black Mountain, 89 mph; Sill Hill, Cuyamaca Mountains, 78 mph; Hellhole Canyon, near Valley Center, 72 mph; Ramona, 71 mph; Palomar Mountain, 71 mph; Round Potrero, 71 mph; Descanso, 55 mph; Campo, 48 mph; Julian, 36 mph.
Forecasters say the next Santa Ana system will move into Southern California late Sunday and slump south on Monday, producing 25 to 35 mph gusts across inland San Diego County. Much of the county will be under a fire weather watch from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday.
The upcoming system will be far cooler than the one that scorched the region on Thursday and Friday. Forecasters say the winds will be produced by a trough of low pressure that is deeper and colder than the one that’s now ending. It appears that Monday’s daytime highs will only reach into the 70s in San Diego County, instead of the 90s.
The weather service says that its long-term computer models indicate that a third Santa Ana system will arrive on Wednesday and last into Thursday. The strength of the system has yet to be determined.
(Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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A day of jangled nerves ended with scores of scorched acres and hundreds of relieved residents. As the sun set and winds died down, the day’s tally across the county was relatively minor: no one was hurt and only a few structures lost.
But the county remains desperately dry, waiting for the first winter rains to arrive and dampen the crackling-dry landscape. Fire officials cautioned residents to remain vigilant and careful over the weekend.
“We were lucky today,” Cal Fire Deputy Chief Nick Schuler said at a noon news conference while crews battled the Sawday fire outside Ramona, the first of the day’s two blazes. “Part of that luck is we were prepared.”
The fires came on the anniversary of a day seared into county memory: 16 years ago, on Oct. 25, the devastating Cedar fire began, a wind-driven inferno that burned from south of Ramona into the city of San Diego, torching 273,246 acres and destroying more than 2,800 buildings, including 2,200 homes.
The Sawday fire began around 9:30 a.m. Friday near Sawday Truck Trail and Littlepage Road, according to Cal Fire. That is not too far away from the origin of the 2007 Witch Creek fire, another devastating October county fire that merged with two others and ended up destroying more than 1,600 structures and charring 247,000 acres.
Once the Sawday fire ignited, it spread quickly. It exploded in size from just 2 acres into 70 acres within a half-hour. Video broadcast on television around 10 a.m. showed smoke blowing almost parallel to the ground — one indicator of the strength of the winds.
Some 150 firefighters battled the blaze, and by 1:15 p.m. Cal Fire said the forward movement had been stopped. By then it had charred 97 acres. All evacuation orders were lifted around 5:30 p.m.
A stretch of state Route 78 was closed Friday morning as crews battled the flames, but reopened later. Authorities ordered evacuations on Sawday Truck Trail, Littlepage Road, Littlepage Lane, Old Julian Highway, Creek Hollow Drive and Creek Hollow Road, and eventually 170 residents had to leave. A temporary evacuation point was opened at Ramona Rodeo Grounds on Aqua Lane.
The Sawday fire destroyed at least one structure, an unoccupied mobile home on the property of Braden and Cathy Hawk.
Braden Hawk told the Union-Tribune that he had spotted smoke in the distance, headed to the mobile home — which had no power to it, he said — and saw that it was on fire.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” he said. “We have no idea how it got started.”
His wife called 911 while he and a neighbor tried to hose down the flames, which soon spread into a stand of trees. Firefighters, Hawk said, were on the scene within minutes.
Just a little more than an hour after getting a handle on the Ramona-area blaze, firefighters had to tackle a second fire that started in the area of Cole Grade Road and Miller Lane in Valley Center. Dubbed the Miller fire, it threatened numerous homes. Aircraft that had worked the Sawday fire were diverted up to Valley Center and went to work there.
Cole Grade Road was closed at the intersections of Miller Lane, Valley Center Road and Oak Glen Place.
Around 3:40 p.m. Cal Fire tweeted the forward advance of the fire had been stopped. It had burned 37 acres, damaged one residence and destroyed three outbuildings, the agency reported.
Firefighting crews in Valley Center were helped by a change in the winds, which died down as the afternoon wore on. Early in the morning, the winds — which reached 89 mph at Big Black Mountain — howled across the backcountry into East County. But by the afternoon, wind speeds dropped in Valley Center — about 10 mph with gusts to 16 mph — and were pushing the fire west, a fire official said.
One Valley Center resident said he was inside his home near Coyote Run Road when he thought he heard “crinkling” outside. Robert Cullen said he looked outside and saw “flames all over the place.”
“I ran out of there without my cellphone or my wallet,” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to make it down the driveway.”
As he made his way from the home, he passed fire crews headed toward it. They were able to save the structure.
The fire also burned around a storage container on the Rabbit Run property of Hannah Gittleson. She said she watched as crews pulled her smoldering belongings from the unit and watered them down.
“I’d rather have it be ‘things’ than anything else,” said Gittleson, who happens to be an emergency services dispatcher.
A few dozen people went to the emergency shelter set up at the Valley Center Community Hall. By the time the center opened, word had spread that the fire was under control. The hall was not set up for anyone to stay overnight, but people were offered snacks and water in an air conditioned room.
Margarita Tomas did not have to be told twice to leave her home. She was a high school student in 2003 and living with her family on the San Pasqual Reservation at Lake Wohlford when a wildfire broke out nearby.
“We were told hours in advance to get out, but our dad said there was nothing to worry about because there had been wildfires before,” she recalled.
The family didn’t leave until the fire had reached the house next door. When her brother went back to the house that night, it was gone. “We lost everything,” she said. “It was hard to get back on our feet, but we finally did.”
Early Friday afternoon, Tomas was at work, about five minutes from home in Valley Center, when a colleague told her to look outside because there was smoke next to her house. She drove home and found that the fire had not reached her house. She began calling family members, including her father, who was out of town.
“He said, ‘Get out now,’” she said.
Tomas arrived at the community hall with two brothers, her sister and her family, two dogs and a cat.
Also riding it out were Don and Gloria Bohannon, who were home when the fire roared their way.
“It looked like hell for a while,” Don Bohannon said. He was hit twice by helicopter water drops as he hosed down parts of his property, which he noted has a lot of defensible space.
The cause of both fires is under investigation.
The dangerous weather recognized no borders.
At least eight fires were burning Friday in four Baja California cities, the largest of which erupted Thursday in Ensenada near Rosarito and forced the temporary closure of Rosarito-Ensenada highways. They reopened around 1 p.m. Friday, authorities said.
In Tecate, fire burned more than 50 houses and left two people dead and two others injured, said Antonio Rosquillas, director of Baja California Civil Protection. In Rosarito, one person died in a structure fire.
“This is the strongest Santa Ana wind related-fires ever (to strike) Baja California in its history, due to the number of cities and houses affected and the number of people that have perished,” Rosquillas said.
The Tijuana Fire Department reported that hundreds had been evacuated from their homes, mostly in the Xicotencatl and Real del Mar in Playas de Tijuana neighborhoods. By Friday evening, 55 structures in Tijuana had been damaged or destroyed, with Xicotencatl taking the heaviest hit.
City officials declared a state of alert, one step down from a state of emergency.
Classes were suspended Friday from preschools to universities — both private and public — in Tijuana, Tecate and Rosarito.
(Greg Moran & Teri Figueroa,Paul Sisson, Gary Warth, Alex Riggins, Alexandra Mendoza S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The National Hurricane Center said Olga, located in the Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana, would contribute to rainfall that could total 8 inches in spots by Sunday. Neither it nor Tropical Storm Pablo, far out in the Atlantic, was expected to reach hurricane strength.
The National Weather Service said a cold front moving into the South would collide with Olga to produce rain and possibly worse through much of the weekend.
The powerful storm spawned multiple reported tornadoes in southwestern Alabama on Friday evening.
The National Weather Service said a “confirmed large and dangerous” tornado was on the ground in Mobile County. It was one of several twisters reported Friday night.
There were no immediate reports of injuries. WKRG showed viewer-submitted images of homes with damaged roofs and uprooted trees as well as possible tornadoes in the air. Alabama Power reported about 2,000 people were without power in the county.
Parts of the central Gulf Coast and Lower Mississippi Valley and western Tennessee Valley could receive as much as 8 inches through this morning, forecasters said.
Streets were flooding around New Orleans and metro Birmingham, where about 3 inches of rain fell Friday morning, and more rain was on the way.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The extreme weather conditions will continue into this weekend, heightening the fire threat and the likelihood of more widespread power outages as utilities, including San Diego Gas & Electric, try to prevent electrical lines from sparking more blazes.
As the winds swept into California on Wednesday night, an eruption of fires big and small followed: first Northern California wine country, then San Bernardino, Orange County, Marin County, Santa Clarita, Eagle Rock and the San Fernando Valley. Firefighters were able to control some, while others exploded out of control.
The Kincade fire started Wednesday night and consumed more than 16,000 acres of northern Sonoma County, pushed by wind gusts higher than 70 mph and forcing the evacuation of Geyserville and other parts of the famed Alexander Valley wine region.
“If you’re in Geyserville, leave now,” the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said in an advisory Thursday morning.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. had shut off power to thousands because of dangerous wind conditions.
It’s unclear whether utility lines played a role in the Sonoma County blaze, but an incident report from PG&E said a transmission line issue occurred near Kincade and Burned Mountain roads at 9:20 p.m. Wednesday, around the time the fire was first reported.
In a mandatory report sent to the California Public Utilities Commission, the company said one of its workers noticed Thursday morning that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection had taped off the area. PG&E said Cal Fire also pointed out a “broken jumper on the same tower.”
PG&E said distribution lines in Geyserville and the surrounding area were shut down at 3 p.m. Wednesday but transmission lines remained energized.
“Those transmission lines were not deenergized because forecast weather conditions, particularly wind speeds, did not trigger the PSPS (public safety power shut-off) protocol,” PG&E said in a statement. “The wind speeds of concern for transmission lines are higher than those for distribution.”
Officials have not determined the cause of the fire.
Santa Ana winds that whipped inland San Diego County on Thursday and pushed temperatures to 100 or above in many areas will last well into today, keeping the risk of wildfires high, according to the National Weather Service.
SDG&E shut off power to about 7,294 customers on Thursday and said that about 35,000 other customers have been notified they they could lose power today.
SDG&E said its latest outage notice could potentially affect 28 communities, including: Alpine, Barona, Barrett Lake, Black Mountain Ranch, Boulevard, Campo, Coronado Hills, Cuyamaca, Descanso, East Poway, East Valley Center, Elfin Forest, Julian, Lake Hodges, Mesa Grande, Mount Laguna, Olivenhain, Palomar Mountain, Pine Valley, Potrero, Ramona, a portion of Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Santa Fe, San Marcos, Santa Ysabel, Shelter Valley, Viejas and Warner Springs.
Elsewhere in Southern California, the Tick fire erupted around 1:45 p.m. Thursday and was moving quickly toward Agua Dulce, with 29-mph gusts that were expected to as much as double in strength overnight.
Firefighters scrambled to get air support to protect neighborhoods in the fire’s path. But the rugged topography made it difficult as the blaze raced through narrow gullies up to the backs of homes. Some homeowners tried to ward off flames with garden hoses, but several homes caught fire.
Other fires broke out in Marin, San Bernardino and Orange counties, and one ignited in Eagle Rock.
Southern California Edison said it planned to turn off electricity to as many as 300,000 customers, while PG&E reported cutting power to more than 184,000 customers.
The outages gave some residents a false sense of security. Madonna Tavares, 70, and her husband went to sleep in their Geyserville home around midnight and woke to a banging on their door at 5:30 a.m. “Get out!” their landlord yelled.
With the power out, Tavares and her husband scrambled in the dark to get dressed, find their two small dogs and jump in their car.
Tavares said the smoke outside was so thick she could barely see a foot in front of her.
“They shut off the power and we still had a fire,” she said. “I don’t understand it.”
After Dwight Monson, 68, heard a fire was burning 16 miles from his family ranch, he gathered important documents, packed the cars and evacuated his grandchildren.
At 2 a.m. all was still clear. Monson figured the ranch, tucked amid vineyards and great oaks in the hills above the Russian River, was safe. Then he saw flames on Black Mountain, about three miles to the northeast. The fire had raced 14 miles from where it had started less than five hours before.
Monson placed his hopes on a neighboring vineyard — a thousand acres of lush grapevines between his home and the fire. That prospect dimmed as the mountain was engulfed and a few swirling embers turned into a storm, driven by powerful gusts out of the Mayacamas Mountains. He and his wife, son and brothers fled after 4 a.m.
“We looked up the hill and couldn’t believe what we saw,” Monson said. “To see that whole thing, just red flame.”
By the time they got to a friend’s house in Geyserville, the fire was already there. “It followed us down,” Monson said.
They moved on to a shelter in Healdsburg. Monson said the family lost four homes and a barn.
The fire brought back dark memories in the region. Two years ago, the Tubbs fire and others burned through wine country just to the north and south, killing more than 40 people, destroying more than 6,000 homes and devastating a swath of Santa Rosa.
“There is still a lot of trauma in Sonoma County from the fires of two years ago, and waking up to a day like today brings back a lot of memories,” said David Rabbitt, chairman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.
The wind in the region was expected to abate today but return even stronger Saturday, with gusts as high as 80 mph. Firefighters will still need to contend with unusually high temperatures in the 90s and low humidity levels throughout the Bay Area today.
Destroyed homes could be seen in the area of the Kincade fire, but no official count had been released by Thursday afternoon. The massive Geysers geothermal energy facilities run by Calpine Corp. reported some damage.
(Phil Willon & Taryn Luna, LOS ANGELES TIMES; Gary Robbins & Karen Kucher S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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People captured images of Tuesday’s downpours and flooding on their mobile phones, posting images on social media, including scenes of cars submerged by flood waters.
In one dramatic video, a man on a bulldozer pulls the lifeless body of a little girl out of the water in a flooded area in northern Sharqia Province as shouts and screams are heard in the background. Another video shows a policeman, steps away from the presidential palace in Cairo’s district of Heliopolis, wading into a flooded street to unclog a sewage drain.
Authorities closed schools and universities in the greater Cairo area Wednesday, and companies saw only skeletal staff show up at work.
The mayhem raised questions about Cairo’s ability to deal with such heavy rains as the city’s infrastructure and sewage and drainage systems have suffered from years of poor maintenance.
People took to social media to criticize the government’s lack of preparedness. Cairo, a city of some 20 million people, has been left for decades in neglect and decay, particularly its overcrowded neighborhoods.
Hashtags like “#Egypt is sinking” were trending on social media, attracting many videos and pictures of the most affected areas in Cairo and elsewhere.
Five deaths occurred in the Nile Delta provinces of Sharqia, Gharbia and Kafr el-Sheikh, according to the Interior Ministry.
Three of the victims, including two children, were electrocuted. The other two victims died falling from the rooftops of their flooded homes.
Local authorities in northern Sinai also reported two deaths. Moataz Taher, head of the el-Hassana municipality, said in a statement that a 47-year-old farmer and his 13-year-old daughter died early Wednesday in the flooding.
In the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, the heavy rain caused a three-story building to collapse Wednesday, killing a 7- year-old child and injuring her 19-year-old brother, according to the city’s civil protection authority.
In Cairo, the eastern suburb of Nasr City was hit very hard, but so was Heliopolis, near Cairo International Airport.
The government said the two suburbs had received at least 650,000 cubic meters of precipitation in just 90 minutes on Tuesday, overwhelming the city’s sewage and drain systems.
Trucks fanned out across Cairo to drain water from flooded areas. A key highway connecting Cairo to other provinces was closed, the state-run al-Ahram daily reported.
(Amy Magdy, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The fire was reported shortly after 11 a.m. near Willows Road, according to the California Highway Patrol’s online logs. Willows hits I-8 just west of Viejas Casino and Resort.
At least one structure burned, according to Cleveland National Forest spokeswoman Olivia Walker. Authorities initially shut down eastbound lanes of I-8 as of about 11:20 a.m. By about 11:45 a.m., all freeway lanes were closed.
Crews raced to the scene and kept the fire to 2 acres, Walker said. All freeway lanes were reopened before 3 p.m.
The U.S. Forest Service, which took the lead on the attack on Monday’s fire, has increased staffing in the area, bringing in an additional 135 firefighters from areas including Northern California, Oregon and Idaho.
(Teri Figueroa, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The county is slated to mail out its “personal disaster plan” to roughly 200,000 homes and businesses starting next week. The recently updated 16-page document will be sent to those living in areas designated by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection as “very-high fire severity zones.”
The plans — which will be provided in both English and Spanish — will also be available starting in November up at any one of San Diego County Library’s 33 branches. The document can also be downloaded at readysandiego.org.
“This is the most dangerous time of the year. This is when some of our biggest wildfires have happened,” Supervisor Dianne Jacob said in a news release. “While the county has done a lot to prepare for wildfire, and we’re better prepared than we’ve ever been, the fact remains that our region is only one bad Santa Ana wind away from another disaster.”
The disaster plan provides several forms for residents to complete, such as making a list of emergency contacts and drawing a floor plan that shows exits, fire extinguishers, emergency supply kits and utility shutoff controls.
The county’s blueprint is aimed at preparing residents for floods, earthquakes and wildfire, providing detailed instructions for each type of emergency.
For example, officials recommend that during an earthquake, residents take shelter under a sturdy desk or table to avoid being injured by falling objects. Those threatened by flooding or wildfire should focus on getting ready to evacuate at the instruction of county officials.
The plan also encourages people to sign up for disaster notifications by cell phone at readysandiego.org, as well as track incident updates at sdcountyemergency.com and at twitter.com/calfiresandiego.
The disaster plan was last mailed out to residents in 2006 and has been available online and distributed at various events as well as at the request of residents.
“Do not wait for a disaster to make a plan, because it will cost you and your family time that you may not have,” Cal Fire San Diego Deputy Chief Nick Schuler said in a statement. “Preparing for any type of disaster includes creating a Personal Disaster Plan. The plan will help you address all the individual steps to take before, during and after an emergency.”
Officials said that a recent survey found that only about half of county residents felt prepared to evacuate within 15 minutes if directed to do so, with more than 60 percent having yet to prepare an emergency plan.
(Joshua Emerson Smith, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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A meteorologist said Monday that people took shelter thanks to early alerts, and that it was fortunate the tornado struck Sunday evening, when many people were home.
“Anytime you have a tornado in a major metropolitan area, the potential for large loss of life is always there,” said Patrick Marsh, the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. “We were very fortunate that the tornado did not hit the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium or the State Fair, where you would have had a lot of people that were exposed.”
The tornado crossed over two major interstates. “If that happened at rush hour, I think we’d be talking about a different story,” he said.
The National Weather Service said the tornado that ripped through North Dallas was an EF-3, which has a maximum wind speed of 140 mph. The agency said another tornado in the suburb of Rowlett was EF-1, with maximum wind speeds of 100 mph.
The late-night storms spawned tornadoes in several states, killing at least four people in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A tornado touched down near Seminole, Fla., about 15 miles west of St. Petersburg, around 9:20 p.m. on Friday, the National Weather Service said. A mobile home park was damaged and no injuries were reported, it said.
Another tornado, with winds up to 120 m.p.h., touched down in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, around 11:30 p.m. on Friday and crossed into neighboring Polk County, where it damaged at least 50 homes and businesses, the Weather Service said.
For about 45 minutes, the tornado tore through the county, Paul Womble, the director of Polk County Emergency Management, said on Saturday.
“We were lucky and very blessed to not have any injuries,” he said.
The tornado overturned an 18-wheel vehicle onto a sport utility vehicle. The occupants of both vehicles escaped injury, The Tampa Bay Times reported. It also caused severe damage to a middle school, prompting administrators to cancel classes for Monday and Tuesday.
A third tornado, with winds of nearly 100 m.p.h., struck Lee County in western Florida, on Saturday morning, damaging at least a dozen homes. The Cape Coral Fire Department said on Facebook that there were no reported injuries.
Photos and videos on social media showed a roof torn off a middle school, fallen power lines and vehicles damaged by uprooted trees. Damage estimates were not available on Saturday.
By 11 a.m. on Saturday, the National Hurricane Center said the storm had been downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone. Still, forecasters warned of life-threatening storm surges of up to four feet along the Florida Gulf Coast, and strong winds, tornadoes and isolated flash flooding across the southeastern United States.
The storm left some roads flooded and officials said it was expected to produce two to four inches of rain this weekend across the southeastern United States, with isolated amounts of up to eight inches.
The storm formed in the Gulf of Mexico and became a tropical storm on Friday, the Weather Service said.
Its remnants made landfall at St. Vincent Island, Fla., about 75 miles southwest of Tallahassee on Saturday, and was forecast to head through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. It was expected to reach North Carolina’s coast and move into the Atlantic by late Sunday, officials said.
A post-tropical cyclone is classified as a former tropical storm that no longer “possesses sufficient tropical characteristics” but can bring with it heavy rains and high winds.
The storm produced beach hazards along the Gulf Coast on Saturday, according to officials, who warned swimmers of dangerous rip currents, high surf and coastal flooding.
Tallahassee officials encouraged residents to report power failures and blocked roads.
“While impacts may be less than anticipated, any impact close to home matters,” the city said on Twitter on Saturday.
(Mariel Padilla, NEW YORK TIMES)
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In the modern historical record, the 160-mile Garlock fault on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert has never been observed to produce either a strong earthquake or even to creep.
But new satellite radar images now show that the fault has started to move, causing a bulging of land that can be viewed from space.
“This is surprising, because we’ve never seen the Garlock fault do anything. Here, all of a sudden, it changed its behavior,” said the lead author of the study, Zachary Ross, assistant professor of geophysics at Caltech. “We don’t know what it means.”
The creeping illustrates how the Ridgecrest quakes — the largest in Southern California in two decades — have destabilized this remote desert region of California between the state’s greatest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, and its lowest point, Death Valley.
It also punctures a persistent myth that circulates in California and beyond — that quakes like the Ridgecrest temblors are somehow a good thing that makes future quakes less likely. In fact, earthquakes make future earthquakes more likely. Most of the time, the follow-up quakes are smaller. But occasionally, they’re bigger.
Not only has the Garlock fault begun to creep in one section, but there’s also been a swarm of small earthquakes in another section of the fault, and two additional clusters of earthquakes elsewhere — one south of Owens Lake and the other in the Panamint Valley just west of Death Valley.
Whether the destabilization will result in a major quake soon cannot be predicted. In September, the U.S. Geological Survey said the most likely scenario is that the Ridgecrest quakes probably won’t trigger a larger temblor.
Nevertheless, the USGS said that the July quakes have raised the chances of an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or more on the nearby Garlock, Owens Valley, Blackwater and Panamint Valley faults over the next year.
Strong shaking
A large quake on the Garlock fault has the potential to send strong shaking to the San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita, Lancaster, Palmdale, Ventura, Oxnard, Bakersfield and Kern County, one of the nation’s most productive regions for agriculture and oil.
Military installations could also get strong shaking, such as Edwards Air Force Base, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake and Fort Irwin National Training Center. The fault is crossed by two of Southern California’s most important supplies of imported water — the California and Los Angeles aqueducts — and highways such as Interstate 5.
A major quake on the Garlock fault could then destabilize the San Andreas. A powerful earthquake on a stretch of the 300-mile southern San Andreas fault could cause the worst shaking the Southern California region has felt since 1857 and send destructive tremors through Los Angeles and beyond.
A creeping fault triggered by a nearby quake doesn’t necessarily mean a big quake is coming. The southernmost tip of the San Andreas has traditionally crept in response to distant quakes, including the magnitude 8.2 temblor off the coast of southern Mexico in 2017, nearly 2,000 miles away. “But that doesn’t mean the San Andreas went off,” said USGS research geologist Kate Scharer, who was not part of the study.
What’s unusual now, Ross said, is that the Garlock fault has been seismically quiet in the historical record until now. And though it’s unclear what the creeping and aftershocks might mean for the near future, the newly recorded movement highlights how much of a potential risk the Garlock fault is to California, should it rupture in a big way.
The research was done by some of the nation’s leading experts in earthquake science at Caltech in Pasadena and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, which is operated by Caltech.
The findings confirm what some scientists expected from the Ridgecrest quakes. The largest quake of the sequence, the magnitude 7.1 event on July 5, ruptured along 35 miles over a series of previously unidentified faults over 22 seconds. Its southeastern ends terminated just a few miles from the Garlock fault.
Seismic strain
The Garlock fault accumulates seismic strain at one of the faster rates in California. According to USGS research geophysicist Morgan Page, who was not involved with the study, the average time between quakes of at least magnitude 7 on the central part of the fault is about every 1,200 years.
But there’s huge variation; sometimes, only 200 years might pass between major quakes on the fault; then, however, it could be 2,000 years before an encore. The last time a big quake is believed to have hit the Garlock fault was 465 years ago, give or take a century.
To some scientists, the physics of the magnitude 7.1 quake on July 5 immediately suggested that the Garlock fault would be more likely to rupture as a result.
Here’s one possible explanation: The southwestern side of the fault that ruptured July 5 lurched northwest. This had the effect of moving a block of land away from the Garlock fault, unclamping it and making it easier for blocks of land accumulating seismic strain on both sides of the fault to move — as if a bicyclist had decided to loosen brakes that had been gripping the tire tightly.
Satellite radar imagery shows that the part of the Garlock fault that has begun to creep is about 20 miles long, with the land on the northern side of the fault moving west, while the other side moves east. The radar images show one side of the fault has moved at its largest extent about four-fifths of an inch relative to the other.
Scientists have been helped by state-of-the-art observations with incredible high-resolution details that haven’t been possible in any previous major California earthquake.
The Ridgecrest temblors struck in an area that has an extensive network of earthquake sensors near the seismically active Coso Volcanic Field of Inyo County, which uses heat from magma to fuel a power plant. More seismic stations have been installed since the last big Southern California quake in 1999, and there is now frequent satellite radar imagery taken of Earth’s surface.
Ripening zones
Besides the Garlock fault, there is reason to focus on risks from other nearby faults.
There is a line of potentially ripening fault zones along the Eastern California Shear Zone, one of the state’s most significant seismic zones, which carries a good chunk of the earthquake burden needed to accommodate tectonic movement as the Pacific plate slides northwest past the North American plate.
They include, generally speaking, an unruptured segment about 30 miles long between faults that ruptured in the 1872 Owens Valley quake and the Ridgecrest quakes, and a 75-mile gap along the Blackwater fault system between the faults the caused the Ridgecrest quakes and the magnitude 7.3 Landers quake of 1992. Someday, those fault segments will need to rupture to catch up with the movement of the tectonic plates, but the timing is unknown.
Earthquake scientists not affiliated with the study called the discovery of the triggered creep on the Garlock fault a scientifically interesting development that should be understood better, but emphasize that its implications are not clear.
Although the Garlock fault hasn’t been observed to creep before in response to big quakes, other faults that have crept haven’t been seen to rupture in major quakes.
“It’s actually probably pretty common, and if that’s the case ... that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s portending something terrible,” said Page of the USGS.
(Rong-Gong Lin II; LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The nor’easter brought high winds and rain to the region Wednesday and Thursday. Winds gusted to as high as 90 mph on Cape Cod, Mass., where about 200,000 residents lost power.
The storm left nearly 200,000 people without power in Maine, too. Heavy rain combined with 60 mph wind gusts knocked down trees and power lines, the Maine Emergency Management Agency said, advising residents to look for hazards on Thursday because many roads were unsafe.
In Portland, Maine, the atmospheric pressure at sea level — an indicator of the strength of a storm — was the lowest ever recorded in October, said William Watson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Maine.
Nine boats were tossed ashore in Rockland, Maine, and a pier suffered some damage, said Sarah Flink, executive director of Cruise Maine.
The nor’easter formed off New Jersey, strengthening as it traveled north. New York authorities said a wind-driven fire destroyed three houses in the Fire Island hamlet of Ocean Bay Park early Thursday. No injuries were reported.
Train delays, power outages and school cancellations were reported throughout the region Thursday morning. Leaves and debris that littered roads created a slippery traffic hazard for commuters.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The debut of the nation’s first statewide quake warning system coincides with the 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake that ravaged the San Francisco Bay Area on Oct. 17, 1989, as well as the annual Great Shakeout safety drill.
Warnings produced by the ShakeAlert system will be pushed through two delivery systems: a cellphone app called MyShake and the same wireless notification system that issues Amber Alerts, meaning people may receive both notifications.
The unveiling of the new version of UC Berkeley’s MyShake app is a major achievement in the years of efforts to bring California an earthquake early warning system. Until today, only people with the city of Los Angeles’ ShakeAlertLA app and physically present in Los Angeles County could get the alerts.
Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab, said a few seconds of warning can give people time to drop, cover and hold on before the shaking begins.
In 1989, there was no way to warn residents that the shaking from one of California’s most destructive earthquakes was on its way.
Under the new system, a repeat of the Loma Prieta earthquake could give perhaps 20 seconds of warning to the Marina District in San Francisco, which saw major fires, apartment collapses and deaths; the former site of Candlestick Park where a World Series game was getting under way would get perhaps 15 seconds of warning, as it’s a bit closer to the epicenter; San Jose might get a few seconds.
The idea of earthquake early warnings has been around for a while; even after the magnitude 7.9 earthquake in 1906, a proposal was printed in the San Francisco Chronicle for a system that would sense quakes and send alerts by telegraph ahead of the shaking.
One of the first practical tests of the concept in California came after the Loma Prieta quake. Scientists devised a system to use sensors near the epicenter in the Santa Cruz Mountains to radio in alerts to rescue workers searching for survivors and victims about incoming shaking 60 miles away. The idea was to get the rescue workers an alert about a significant aftershock before the shaking hit. The system was in operation for six months and sent 12 warnings.
Officials say that the MyShake app is a prototype and that there could be bugs that need to be fixed; it’s possible that warnings could be delayed or come late, and there is always the possibility of false alerts or missed warnings. But Allen said the app is now good enough that they’re confident it will save lives, and distributing the app more widely is more helpful than keeping it away from the public.
“We cannot promise you a perfect system,” Allen said, but based on tests, “the system seems to be performing reasonably well.” The app’s systems operate in the cloud, and it was built to scale up to meet demand.
Scientists initially thought it wise to alert users only of incoming shaking from an quake that would cause damage, but many Los Angeles County residents were upset when they did not receive warnings about July’s Ridgecrest quakes, which delivered shaking but no damage to Los Angeles. The temblors were also felt in San Diego County.
Based on that reaction, officials are calibrating the MyShake app to ring an alarm on cellphones when shaking is expected to be felt by most people, but not everyone, in an area. That’s known as intensity level 3 on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale.
At this level of shaking, the earthquake is typically felt quite noticeably by people indoors, especially on upper floors of buildings, and may feel to some like the vibration of a passing truck. But officials thought it wasn’t a good idea to send warnings for shaking at intensity level 2, which most people won’t feel.
“We’re trying to find that sweet spot,” said Ryan Arba, branch chief for seismic hazards for the Office of Emergency Services.
Text messages over the Wireless Emergency Alerts system will be sent only when light shaking, at intensity level 4, is expected in an area — a level at which many are aware of the shaking, walls make cracking sounds and doors, windows and dishes are disturbed.
The Office of Emergency Services said it has funded the program since June with $1.5 million over two years after five years of funding from the state and private foundations, including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Lawmakers set aside more than $7 million in this year’s budget to promote the app, and they hope to have 4 million people download the app by the end of 2020.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES; LA TIMES; ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The earthquake struck about 15 miles southeast of the NuStar Energy fuel storage facility in Crockett 15 hours before the fire Tuesday that consumed thousands of gallons of ethanol, a gasoline additive.
Fire and company officials said the cause of the fire at the facility was still being investigated.
“We do not yet know if it is related to the earthquake,” said NuStar spokeswoman Mary Rose Brown.
Contra Costa County Fire Protection District spokesman Steve Hill said the earthquake was one of several possibilities investigators were considering but added that it was too early to say what caused the explosion.
“I think we dodged some bullets here in the last 24 hours,” Hill said, adding that the tanks were filled at 1 percent capacity, which still amounted to about 250,000 gallons of ethanol.
Video footage of Tuesday’s fire about 30 miles northeast of downtown San Francisco showed an explosion so strong that it blew the lid from one tank high into the air. The fire badly damaged or destroyed the two tanks, the remnants of which were still covered a day later with fire-fighting foam to prevent any rekindling.
Monday night’s 4.5 magnitude earthquake was centered in Pleasant Hill.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Typhoon Hagibis unleashed torrents of rain and strong winds Saturday, leaving thousands of homes on Japan’s main island flooded, damaged or without power.
A riverside section of Nagano, northwest of Tokyo, was covered with mud, its apple orchards completely flooded and homes still without electricity.
Japan’s Kyodo News agency reported that 48 people died from the typhoon, 17 were missing and some 100 were injured.
The government’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency, which is generally more conservative in assessing its numbers, said 24 people were dead and nine were missing.
Experts said it would take time to accurately assess the extent of the damage, and the casualty count has been growing daily.
Hagibis dropped record amounts of rain for a period in some spots, according to meteorological officials, causing more than 20 rivers to overflow. In Kanagawa prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, 39 inches of rain were recorded over 48 hours.
Some of the muddy waters in streets, fields and residential areas have subsided. But many places remained flooded Monday, with homes and surrounding roads covered in mud and littered with broken wooden pieces and debris. Some places normally dry still looked like giant rivers.
Some who lined up for morning soup at evacuation shelters, which are housing 30,000 people, expressed concern about the homes they left behind. Survivors and rescuers will also face colder weather, with northern Japan turning chilly this week.
Soldiers and firefighters from throughout Japan were deployed to assist with rescue efforts. Helicopters could be seen plucking some of the stranded from higher floors and rooftops of submerged homes.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the government would set up a special disaster team to deal with the fallout from the typhoon.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(Stefanie Dazio & Brian Melley, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Typhoon Hagibis made landfall south of Tokyo on Saturday evening and battered central and northern Japan with torrents of rain and powerful gusts of wind. The typhoon was downgraded to a tropical storm on Sunday.
Public broadcaster NHK said 14 rivers across the nation had flooded, some spilling out in more than one spot.
The Tokyo Fire Department said a woman in her 70s was accidentally dropped 131 feet to the ground while being transported into a rescue helicopter in Iwaki city in Fukushima prefecture, a northern area devastated by the typhoon.
Department officials held a news conference to apologize, bowing deeply, according to Japanese custom, and acknowledged the woman had not been strapped in properly.
The government’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency, which tends to be conservative in its counts, said late Sunday that 14 people died, 11 were missing and 187 were injured as a result of the typhoon. It said 1,283 homes were flooded, and 517 were damaged, partially or totally.
Japanese media tallies were higher. Kyodo News agency reported that 33 people died and 19 were missing.
“The major typhoon has caused immense damage far and wide in eastern Japan,” government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters.
News footage showed a rescue helicopter hovering in a flooded area in Nagano prefecture where an embankment of the Chikuma River broke, and streams of water were continuing to spread over residential areas.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Los Angeles officials said the fire in the city’s San Fernando Valley area hadn’t grown significantly since Friday, and ground crews were tamping down lingering hotspots. Evacuation orders were lifted in all of Los Angeles County and in parts of Riverside County, where a second blaze was burning.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told residents to be cautious returning home to neighborhoods where fire crews could still be operating.
In Los Angeles, one man who tried to fight the blaze died of a heart attack, and one firefighter reported a minor eye injury.
The fire’s cause is under investigation, and authorities warned that the threat of flare-ups remained.
At the site of the second blaze east of Los Angeles, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said a second body was found at a mobile home park where 74 structures were destroyed Thursday in Calimesa. Officials previously reported one death at the community east of Los Angeles.
The department said one of the Calimesa victims has been identified as 89-year-old Lois Arvikson. Her son Don Turner said she had called him to say she was evacuating, but he never heard from her again. Authorities are working to identify the other victim.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Peak winds above 50 mph drove embers hundreds of yards in front of the flames. The fire hopscotched west from Sylmar — leaping over Interstate 5 into Granada Hills and Porter Ranch, at times consuming 800 acres an hour.
More than 1,000 firefighters from multiple agencies fought the sprawling blaze night and day, deploying eight helicopters and amphibious fixed-wing “super scoopers.” Ground crews manned bulldozers to cut containment lines into nearby hillsides. At least one air tanker blanketed fire retardant across the ridges between Granada Hills and Porter Ranch.
By Friday afternoon, 7,500 acres had burned.
Mandatory evacuations were issued to roughly 23,000 homes north of state Route 118 — an area covering 100,000 residents — and officials warned that other communities near the fire need to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
Deputy Chief Jorge Rodriguez of the Los Angeles Police Department said the city sent alerts, used police public address systems and sent dozens of officers knocking on doors as the fire swept west. “A lot of people left but some didn’t,” he said. “We aren’t going to force people to leave.”
It was familiar territory, not just because of the Sayre fire in Sylmar that burned 489 homes in 2008 but also the Aliso Canyon gas leak four years ago that forced the evacuation of 11,000 people in and around Porter Ranch, and the fire that destroyed 13 homes in Porter Ranch in 1988.
With the unrelenting wind, warm temperatures and low humidity, officials said they expect it will take days to get the blaze under control.
“Nobody is going home right away,” said Los Angeles Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Gov. Gavin Newsom issued emergency declarations because of the fire. Newsom’s declaration also covers fires in Riverside County. The governor’s office said it has obtained a federal grant to help offset the firefighting costs.
One firefighter suffered a minor injury to his eye while battling the blaze, and a man in his late 50s died after suffering a heart attack while talking with firefighters early Friday, officials said.
Friday afternoon, the wind was pushing the fire west into residential neighborhoods in Porter Ranch and farther west to less-populated areas approaching Rocky Peak Park near the Ventura County line, said Capt. Branden Silverman, a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman.
Porter Ranch is “basically the hot spot right now,” Silverman said. “We’re trying to keep it boxed in above the 118 Freeway. Obviously that’s a good fire break for us, but if the winds shift to the south, then that would be into Chatsworth.”
Silverman said the wildfire is similar to the 2008 Sayre fire, which leveled the Oakridge Estates mobile home park and was one of the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles history.
The Saddleridge fire broke out about 9 p.m. Thursday on the north side of Interstate 210.
By early Friday, it was at the Oakridge community’s door again. Residents, including Jackie Herrera, were evacuated, and many waited in their cars nearby watching the flames’ destruction.
“I can’t quite pull myself away,” Herrera said. Her cat Satchel, who survived the fire 11 years ago, was in her car. “I don’t want to go through this again, and he doesn’t either,” Herrera said.
Those who left included Edwin Bernard, who said he never saw the flames arrive so quickly or come so close to his home as this time.
He watched as the fire swept down a hillside, sizzling through dry grass and igniting trees and bushes and spitting embers over his home of 30 years. He and his wife fled in their car, leaving behind medication, photo albums and their four cats.
“It was a whole curtain of fire,” Bernard said Friday. “There was fire on all sides. We had to leave.”
The region has been on high alert as notoriously powerful Santa Ana winds brought dry desert air to a desiccated landscape that only needed a spark to erupt.
The Los Angeles fire broke out hours after flaming garbage in a trash truck sparked another blaze when the driver dumped his load to keep the rig from catching fire. But the dry grass quickly ignited and powerful winds blew the flames into a mobile park in Calimesa, about 75 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. About three-quarters of the 110 homes were wiped out and one resident died, fire officials said.
The two fires burned as power was restored to most of the nearly 2 million residents in the northern part of the state who lost electricity after Pacific Gas and Electric Co. switched it off Wednesday to prevent a repeat of the past two years when its equipment sparked deadly, destructive wildfires during windy weather.
Officials had worried that gusts might topple trees on and blow other vegetation into transmission lines and start wildfires, but the move was widely criticized for targeting areas that faced no danger, and for disrupting so many lives.
In San Diego County, SDG&E temporarily turned off power to about 385 customers in inland areas to minimize the chances that its power lines would spark wildfires while the winds are blowing.
The largest local outage involves 344 customers in Live Oak Springs and Jacumba, where the power is not expected to be fully restored until 5 p.m. today. There are also outages in the Lake Wohlford-Skyline ranch area, Santa Ysabel, and communities in and around Descanso, SDG&E says.
PG&E said it was able to restore power in Northern California after workers inspected power lines to make sure it was safe. The utility said it found 30 instances of weather-related damage to its equipment during the shutdown.
By Friday evening, PG&E said only about 84,000 of the 800,000 or so homes and businesses affected by the deliberate blackout were still without power. Officials said they expected the power to be restored to 98 percent of the affected customers by today, with crews working through the night to inspect and repair lines.
PG&E faced hostility and second-guessing over the shut-offs, which prompted runs on supplies like coolers and generators and forced institutions to shut down.
Ryan Fisher, a partner in consumer goods and retail practice at global consultancy A.T. Kearney estimated $100 million in $200 million in fresh food was likely lost because of the outages along with $30 million a day in consumer spending.
PG&E cast the blackouts as a matter of public safety to prevent the kind of blazes that have killed scores of people over the past couple of years, destroyed thousands of homes, and ran up tens of billions of dollars in claims that drove the company into bankruptcy.
The cause of Friday’s fire in Los Angeles wasn’t immediately known, although arson investigators said a witness reported seeing sparks or flames coming from a power line near where the fire is believed to have started, said Peter Sanders, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department.
At least two people told Los Angeles TV stations that they saw fire near power lines around the time the blaze broke out.
Southern California Edison said it owns the transmission tower shown on KABC-TV, but a spokeswoman would not confirm that was where the fire began. The utility said it could take a long time to determine the cause and origin of the fire.
Nearby schools and colleges closed for the day and Interstate 5, the main north-to-south corridor, was shut down at the northern end of Los Angeles. Several sections of nearby freeways were also closed for much of the day.
More than 1,000 firefighters were deployed to corral the blaze. Helicopters, planes and jumbo jets swooped low over neighborhoods to drop water on flames and spread red retardant across ridges to give firefighters on the ground a chance to halt the fire’s advance amid strong winds.
“As you can imagine the embers from the wind have been traveling a significant distance which causes another fire to start,” said Terrazas, the Los Angeles Fire Department chief.
(THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, ASSOCIATED PRESS, NEW YORK TIMES)
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The Japan Meteorological Agency said early today that the typhoon was about 200 miles southwest of Hachiojima, a tiny island off the central eastern coast, with winds of about 100 mph at its center. The agency said the storm was expected to make landfall this evening.
At a news conference Friday morning, the agency warned that Hagibis could be as severe as the Kanogawa Typhoon, one of the deadliest on record, killing more than 1,200 people when it hit Shizuoka prefecture and the Tokyo region in 1958.
The agency said the southeastern Tokai region could be deluged by close to 40 inches of rain in a 24-hour period. The central region including Tokyo could receive as much as 24 inches during the period. The agency warned of flooding, mudslides and waves as high as 42 feet along the coast.
Japan Railways suspended service throughout the Tokyo region and bullet train service between Tokyo and Osaka and between Osaka and Fukuoka, on the island of Kyushu, today.
Nippon Airways canceled all its domestic and international flights from airports in the Tokyo area today, and Japan Airlines said it would cancel flights from multiple airports throughout the country, including those serving Tokyo, Osaka and Sendai.
This morning, Tokyo Electric Company reported about 5,800 households were without power.
The Disneyland and DisneySea theme parks in Tokyo were scheduled to be closed today, the first such closure for a typhoon, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said it would close attractions like Ueno Zoo and Hamarikyu Gardens. Hundreds of supermarkets and department stores across Tokyo and surrounding prefectures also closed.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The Saddleridge fire, which broke out late Thursday in Sylmar amid strong Santa Ana winds, spread rapidly overnight west into Porter Ranch and other communities, burning more than 4,700 acres at a rate of roughly 800 acres per hour, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Ralph Terrazas said early Friday.
“These weather conditions are significant,” Terrazas said. “You can imagine the embers from the wind have been traveling at significant distances, which cause other fires to start.”
Mandatory evacuations have been issued to roughly 23,000 homes making up a huge swath of neighborhoods north of the 118 Freeway from Tampa Avenue all the way to the Ventura County line — an area covering 100,000 residents.
One firefighter suffered a minor injury to his eye, and a man in his late 50s died after suffering a heart attack while talking with firefighters early Friday, Terrazas said. Authorities could not confirm reports that the man was trying to fight the fire from his home before he was stricken.
More than 1,000 firefighters from multiple agencies were attacking the blaze Friday from the air and ground. Officials deployed helicopters and amphibious firefighting aircraft known as Super Scoopers, while ground crews manned bulldozers to cut containment lines into nearby hillsides in an effort to slow the fire’s spread. At least one air tanker blanketed fire retardant across the ridges.
However, unrelenting winds gusting up to 50 mph, low humidity and rising temperatures — which can dry out brush that fuels the fire — put crews at a disadvantage. Officials said they expect it will take days to get the blaze under control.
“Nobody is going home right away,” Terrazas said.
The fire was first reported in Sylmar about 9 p.m. Thursday on the north side of the 210 Freeway, but wind-driven firebrands soared over the 210 and 5 freeways and ignited more dry brush. A 30-acre spot fire broke out west of Balboa Boulevard and pushed westward, officials said.
There are few options for firefighters against a wind-whipped fire with a lot of fuel, Los Angeles firefighter John Ferrer said.
“Because of the wind-driven factor, it creates a more defensive posture for firefighters,” Ferrer said. “We wait until the wind dies down and can deploy adequate resources to contain the flanks of the fire and an early-morning attack on the fire.”
The blaze moved so quickly that it jumped into neighborhoods overnight before firefighters and police could warn residents.
In Porter Ranch, a man stared as waves of embers crested against a two-story home abutting a hillside on Sheffield Way and flames lapped at the back of the structure.
“That’s my home,” he said. He had gotten out 15 minutes earlier.
Flames had already reached a second home on the cul-de-sac, which was choked with thick gray smoke, punctured only by the high beams of fleeing cars speeding through the small streets that crisscross the hillsides.
Kuriakose Chaz watched flames scale the side of the canyon, thinking about his Porter Ranch home of six years just a few blocks from the houses that by 2:30 a.m. were beginning to be devoured.
“If it goes,” he said, “it goes.”
Chaz, who’d gone to sleep at 10:30 p.m. Thursday, was awakened by a call around midnight from his nephew, who works for Southern California Edison and was monitoring the fire.
His nephew said, “You need to go.”
Chaz watched, dismayed, as flames charred the canyon he often enjoys hiking. Thick brush that had been watered by the winter’s plentiful rains stoked the blaze.
“I’ve watched fires on the news,” Chaz said. “But this hits home. I live here.”
Cece Merkerson first noticed an orange glow from the living room of her third-story apartment in Porter Ranch about 11:30 p.m. Thursday. She had heard a fire was raging in nearby Granada Hills but figured it was a safe distance away.
“That can’t be that fire,” she thought. “That can’t be it.”
She checked the TV news, but there wasn’t an evacuation order for Porter Ranch. To calm her nerves, Merkerson started packing anyway: medication, a small safe with important papers, a change of clothes and a couple of bananas.
Around 2 a.m., Merkerson looked through her window and saw flames. The mandatory evacuation order was issued minutes later.
“I started knocking on all my neighbors’ doors because I knew they were sleeping,” she said. “I’m banging and banging and I woke up about eight of them — and they all looked at me like I was crazy.”
Several major highways were closed because of the blaze, snarling morning traffic across the region, the California Highway Patrol said. The 210 Freeway was shut down in both directions between the 5 and 118 freeways. The 5 Freeway was closed between Roxford Street and Calgrove Boulevard. The 14 Freeway was closed at Newhall Avenue. Authorities have not said when the roads will reopen.
Evacuations have been ordered for Oakridge Estates, Glenoaks, the Foothill area and into neighborhoods in Granada Hills and Porter Ranch. Officials warned that other communities near the fire need to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
Evacuees included hundreds of teenagers incarcerated at the Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall facility in Sylmar, not far from the fire’s edge.
The facility holds 278 teenagers, most of them 15 to 18, along with dozens of facility officers and workers. They all were being relocated to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, said facility spokesman Kerri Webb. It was an hours-long process to move them all.
“It’s very methodical. We have to utilize a lot of security,” Webb said. “Right now, getting everyone out safely is our highest priority.”
About 1 a.m. Friday, several Sylmar residents stood about three miles from Oakridge Estates, which was under a mandatory evacuation order, watching the fire burn in the mountains beyond.
Iván DeGuzman, 34, said he had packed his car hours before after receiving a text message from a friend alerting him to the fire. He loaded up passports, clothes and some other items.
He recalled how the neighborhood was overwhelmed by smoke and ashes during a massive 2008 fire in Sylmar. He had evacuated then, but said it was still too early to go now.
“We’re waiting for mandatory evacuations,” he said.
Kim Thompson, who lives at the intersection of Sesnon Boulevard and Jolette Avenue in Granada Hills, said she took her dog out at 10 p.m. Thursday and immediately smelled smoke.
After reading about the fire on Twitter and realizing it was a danger,Thompson evacuated her home about midnight, taking just her dog. The flames by then were “bright orange, terrifying to look at,” she said at a strip mall downhill from her neighborhood on Balboa where other displaced residents had gathered to await news.
Later, she admitted, she doubled back to retrieve a bottle of wine. Her neighbors were less willing to leave: “Up here, we’re stubborn. My neighbors are spraying their roofs right now.”
A little after 1 a.m., Thompson heard from a friend that fire crews were allowing two homes on Jolette Avenue to burn to the ground. She thought back to the Aliso Canyon and Sayre fires, which burned to the very edge of her cul-de-sac.
“We’ve been through a lot, but we choose to live here,” she said.
“You’re on edge. You think you get used to it,” Thompson said, the wind whipping eye-stinging smoke and ash through the air, “but you can’t really get used to this.”
(Hannah Fry, Leila Miller, Matthew Ormseth, Joseph Serna, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Under the deal, all California sales of chlorpyrifos will end on Feb. 6 and farmers will have until the end of 2020 to exhaust their supplies.
The pesticide is used on numerous crops in the nation’s largest agriculture-producing state — including alfalfa, almonds, citrus, cotton, grapes and walnuts.
State regulators have said chlorpyrifos has been linked to health defects in children, including brain impairment, and to illnesses in others with compromised immune systems.
“For years, environmental justice advocates have fought to get the harmful pesticide chlorpyrifos out of our communities,” Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement after the deal was announced.
He added: ”Thanks to their tenacity and the work of countless others, this will now occur faster than originally envisioned. This is a big win for children, workers and public health in California.”
The president of the California Citrus Association, which represents about 5,000 growers, said in an interview that he believes the risks were not as great as the state made them out to be.
“We really thought the exposure assessments and risks were just inflated and it wasn’t a true characterization of the protections that were already in place,” said Casey Creamer.
Creamer added he appreciated that officials have agreed to budget $5.6 million to help pesticide manufacturers develop a safer alternative to chlorpyrifos.
”But just so you’re aware, that’s what agriculture does every day, we’re always looking for new products, safer products that are effective,” he said.
When California announced earlier this year it was moving toward banning the pesticide, the state’s environmental secretary, Jared Blumenfeld, said it was doing so because the federal government was allowing it to remain on the market.
“The swift end to the sale of chlorpyrifos protects vulnerable communities by taking a harmful pesticide off the market,” Blumenfeld said after Wednesday’s announcement.
The Obama administration announced in 2015 that it would ban chlorpyrifos after scientific studies funded in part by the federal Environmental Protection Agency showed the potential for brain damage in children. After President Donald Trump was elected, the EPA reversed that ban, questioning the studies’ validity.
Hawaii and New York are already phasing in chlorpyrifos bans.
Blumenfeld said the agreement reached with chlorpyrifos’ manufacturer, Corteva Agriscience, “avoids a protracted legal process while providing a clear timeline for California farmers as we look toward developing alternative pest management practices.”
(John Rogers, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Winter storm warnings and watches stretched from Wyoming and Montana through western Nebraska and into the Dakotas and Minnesota. The storm was expected to blast the region with strong winds and dump at least 10 inches of snow in areas. Blizzard-like conditions could persist through today, forecasters said.
Blowing and drifting snow was making travel hazardous, with wind gusts approaching 40 mph in some areas.
The National Weather Service in Bismarck, N.D., said a “potentially historic October winter storm” was in the making.
Forecasters predicted a foot of snow or more would fall in parts of the Dakotas through today and nearly that amount would fall in Nebraska.
In Fargo, N.D., the homecoming parade was canceled a day ahead of time at North Dakota State University, where its top-ranked Football Championship Subdivision team was set to play Saturday inside the warm confines of the Fargodome. Police in North Dakota’s capital city of Bismarck responded to at least 35 traffic crashes on Thursday.
Snow fell in Colorado’s mountains through Thursday afternoon, and was a welcome sight for skiers and snowboarders waiting for resorts to open for the season. It turned into an ugly commute for drivers in Denver, where about 100 crashes were reported during rush hour and where police warned people on Twitter to “keep your wits about you.”
Temperatures that reached the upper 70s in Denver on Wednesday afternoon had plummeted into the 20s on Thursday. National Weather Service forecasters predicted 1 to 3 inches of snow in the Denver area Thursday and warned that freezing temperatures would persist along the Interstate 25 corridor and the Eastern Plains through today.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized Pacific Gas & Electric and customers complained about the inconveniences caused by the unprecedented blackouts that began Wednesday, with many wondering if PG&E had gone too far in its attempt to ward off more deadly fires.
PG&E, though, suggested it was already seeing the wisdom of its decision borne out as gusts topping 77 mph raked the San Francisco Bay Area amid a bout of dry, windy weather.
“We have found multiple cases of damage or hazards” caused by heavy winds, including fallen branches that came in contact with overhead lines, said Sumeet Singh, a vice president for the utility. “If they were energized, they could’ve ignited.”
Because of the dangerous weather in the forecast, PG&E cut power Wednesday to an estimated 2 million people in an area that spanned the San Francisco Bay Area, the wine country north of San Francisco, the agricultural Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills. By Thursday evening, the weather had calmed and the number of people in the dark was down to about 510,000.
Inspections and repairs were expected to resume at daybreak and power could be restored today to many more customers, Singh said.
PG&E cast the blackouts as a matter of public safety, aimed at preventing the kind of blazes that have killed scores of people over the past couple of years, destroyed thousands of homes, and resulted in tens of billions of dollars in claims that drove the company into bankruptcy.
Newsom, however, called the mass outages “unacceptable” and the result of the bankrupt utility’s own long legacy of mistakes.
“What’s happened is unacceptable. And it’s happened because of neglect. It’s happened because of decisions that were deferred, delayed or not made by the largest investor-owned utility in the state of California and one of the largest in the nation,” he said at a news conference. “This current operation is unacceptable. The current conditions and circumstances are unacceptable.”
CEO Bill Johnson didn’t respond to Newsom’s criticisms but promised if future wind events require similar shut-offs, the utility will “do better” when it comes to communicating with customers. He acknowledged that the utility’s websites crashed, maps were inconsistent and call centers were overloaded.
“We were not adequately prepared,” he said.
On Thursday, the fire danger spread to Southern California as raging winds moved down the state. Southern California Edison shut off electricity to about 12,000 people just outside Los Angeles, with wider blackouts possible.
San Diego Gas & Electric officials said late Thursday afternoon that the number of customers affected by potential power shut-offs would be reduced from as many as 30,000 to just under 18,000.
“We’re seeing an improvement in weather conditions,” said SDG&E spokesman Wes Jones.
Jones said SDG&E would be contacting customers who could lose power throughout Thursday evening.
The Santa Ana winds whipping through parts of San Diego County were expected to pick up speed on Thursday night and early today, according to the National Weather Service. A red flag fire weather warning was in effect across the county’s inland valleys, foothills and mountains until 6 p.m. this evening.
In Calimesa, about 65 miles east of Los Angeles, a wind-whipped blaze ripped through a mobile home park Thursday afternoon, destroying dozens of residences. The fire was started when trash being hauled caught fire and the driver dumped the load by the side of a road, according to Riverside County officials.
Many of those affected by the PG&E outages, which could last as long as five days, were not so sure about the decision.
Sergio Vergara, owner of Stinson Beach Market, situated on scenic Highway 1, on the Pacific Coast just north of San Francisco, operated the store with a propane generator so his customers could have coffee, milk, meat and frozen meals.
“I’m telling you as a plain human being, there is no wind, there is no heat,” he said. “We never saw something like this where they just decide to shut off the power, but on the other side — preventing is a good thing, but it’s creating a lot of frustration.”
Faced with customer anger, PG&E put up barricades around its San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday. A customer threw eggs at a PG&E office in Oroville. And a PG&E truck was hit by a bullet, although authorities could not immediately say whether it was targeted.
Singh, PG&E’s vice president of community wildfire safety, urged people to be kind to workers out in the field, saying the employees and contractors “have families that live in your communities.”
“Let’s just ensure their safety as well, as they are doing this work in the interest of your safety,” Singh said.
The governor said PG&E was to blame for poor management and should have been working on making its power system sturdier and more weatherproof.
“It’s decisions that were not made that is leading to this moment in PG&E history,” Newsom said. “This is not from my perspective a climate change story so much as it is a story of greed and mismanagement over the course of decades.”
The power shut-offs have prompted backlash among customers, with some residents saying they create a new set of dangers as people try to keep up with news about fires.
Critics worry that communications and evacuations will be hampered when the power is out, especially if traffic signals don’t work and cellphone service is affected.
There also was concern about how those with health issues who rely on electrically powered medical equipment would cope without power.
State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, said Thursday he sent a letter to the state Public Utilities Commission asking the panel to conduct a review of how PG&E decided which areas should lose power and how the blackouts were implemented.
“Many questions remain unanswered as the state reels from the consequences of this decision by PG&E, chief among them why is PG&E alone in making this decision?” Hill wrote to the commission.
Experts say the big shut-off will yield important lessons for the next time.
Deliberate blackouts are likely to become less disruptive as PG&E gets experience managing them and rebuilds sections of the grid so that outages can be more targeted, said Michael Wara, a researcher on energy and climate policy at Stanford University.
Grids are built and operators are trained to keep the power on at all times, so the company and its employees have little experience with intentionally turning the electricity off in response to rapidly changing weather, he said.
“That’s a skill that has to be learned, and PG&E is learning it at a mass scale right now,” Wara said.
After a June shut-off in the Sierra foothills, PG&E workers reported repairing numerous areas of wind damage, including power lines hit by tree branches.
“That was worth it,” Wara said of the deliberate blackout. “That could have prevented a catastrophe.”
Pacific Gas and Electric says it will deploy a fleet of helicopters and more than 6,000 technicians to inspect the lines before they are brought back on, a process that could take up to five days.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES, LA TIMES, NEW YORK TIMES, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The reason is probably that better-off local governments have the resources to apply for and administer the programs — and that could keep many of the people who most need buyouts from getting them, according to the study Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
As climate change increases flood risks, there will be greater need to move people and property out of danger, turning the land to open space, lead researcher Katharine Mach of the University of Miami said during a press teleconference Tuesday.
“When it comes to weather and climate events we are unambiguously behind the eight-ball,” she said, noting that U.S. storm damages in 2017 alone totaled more than $300 billion. Those included Hurricanes Harvey and Maria and river floods.
The study of publicly available FEMA data identified 3,780 completed buyouts — those in which every building had been demolished and the land maintained as open space — from 1989 through 2017. The average buyout takes 5.7 years, the researchers said.
In all, more than 43,600 buildings were bought. Buyout costs weren’t part of this study because the data was patchy, Mach said in an email.
If only communities with planners and 25 percent in matching funds are using FEMA’s flood buyback programs, such grants probably aren’t going to reach people who may need it most, said researcher A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware.
FEMA doesn’t choose where to buy buildings: local and state governments decide whether and where to offer buyouts, David Maurstad, deputy associate administrator for insurance and mitigation, said in a response emailed Wednesday.
Harris County, Texas, which undergoes a major flood about every two years, has used FEMA’s buyout programs more than any other county, the researchers said. Its total of 2,190 properties is 1.5 times that for St. Charles County, Mo., the second-biggest user.
The biggest buyout year was 1993 — the year of the Great Midwest Flood — with more than 8,000 properties bought, the study said.
Congress boosted FEMA’s share of its biggest buyout program from 50 percent to 75 percent that year, said George Haddow, who teaches at Tulane University’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy and was not part of the study. Haddow, who was White House liaison to FEMA during President Bill Clinton’s two terms, said there’s never enough money to buy all the buildings people want to sell.
About one-third of all the counties, parishes, boroughs and cities in 49 states and three territories have used buyouts, the study found.
It found that FEMA buyout grants have covered fewer properties over the years, from an average of 19 per grant in 1989-98 to an average of seven by 2009-2017. That could result in patchy change without cutting overall flood risk, the researchers wrote.
“There’s a huge amount of talk about buyouts and managed retreat but the doing is a whole lot harder than the talking,” said Mark. S. Davis, director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy and the Tulane Center for Environmental Law.
Davis, who wasn’t part of the study, said its results aren’t surprising but “provide a little more rigor and some context for people trying to figure out what is working, what isn’t, and what hasn’t even been tried.”
Counties getting FEMA buyout grants have tended to use them in neighborhoods with lower income and education, the study said. It noted that the data cannot show whether planners intended to help low-income areas nor whether there’s a pattern of either white flight or relocating people of color.
FEMA’s grant programs “are not designed to discriminate or address economic inequalities,” and the agency doesn’t collect demographic data for grants, Maurstad said.
The top three states in total property damage are in the middle of the buyout pack. Florida had $98.8 billion in damage, Louisiana $85.4 billion and Mississippi $34.2 billion.
Yet Florida is 24th in the number of homes purchased, Mississippi 22nd and Louisiana 19th, with a total of just over 2,000 buyouts in the three states.
The top six buyout states — Missouri, Texas, Illinois, North Carolina, Iowa and New Jersey — all are among the top 10 in damages, the researchers said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Winter storm warnings stretch from Wyoming and Montana through western Nebraska, then eastward into the Dakotas to the U.S.-Canada border. This is ahead of the sprawling storm system, an atmospheric mixer combining a shot of wintry air with a tongue of tropical moisture.
The National Weather Service in Bismarck, N.D., is referring to the system as a “potentially historic October winter storm.”
So, what makes this storm so notable?
“I think, obviously, the magnitude of it, and it being the first storm of the season,” said Patrick Ayd, a meteorologist at the Bismarck NWS office. “It’s so early in the season. Normally we get to ease into things.”
The surface low that will bloom into the powerful winter storm is taking shape over Colorado, set to shunt northeastward as it develops beneath an invigorating disturbance approaching from the west. At the same time, a tongue of Gulf of Mexico moisture will be sucked into the developing low, providing the juice needed to produce huge snow totals.
The jet-stream pattern fueling this potential blizzard is so powerful that, by the weekend, the atmosphere could be more humid in Canada’s Hudson Bay than in parts of the southeastern United States.
Light to moderate snow was already falling across the hills and valleys of central and eastern Montana on Wednesday afternoon.
A developing area of snow was forecast to cover much of Wyoming and northern Colorado Wednesday evening before entering western Nebraska and parts of the Dakotas by predawn today.
All told, six- to eight-inch snowfalls, with localized snow of a foot or more, are likely in eastern Colorado, Wyoming and central/eastern Montana — greatest on the east slopes leading up to the higher elevations. The same is true in extreme-northwestern Nebraska.
In western and central South Dakota, and central and eastern North Dakota, 10 to 14 inches of snow is expected, with sporadic amounts topping 18 inches possible.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The National Weather Service issued the warning out of concern that the combination of the winds, high temperatures and very low humidity will broad a significant threat of wildfires throughout the region.
The winds will begin to pick up today, gusting to 52 mph at Mount Laguna, 38 at Julian, 16 at Alpine and 14 in San Diego.
Conditions will worsen Thursday as the county experiences high winds over a larger area. Forecasters say the wind will gust to 37 mph in Palomar and Julian, 36 in Mount Laguna, 35 in Alpine, 30 in Ramona, 20 in Miramar, 15 in Oceanside and 13 in San Diego.
The relative humidity also will be extremely low Thursday, falling to 5 percent in Borrego Springs, 8 percent in Ramona and Escondido, 9 percent at Palomar and Mount Laguna, 19 percent in Miramar and 24 percent in San Diego.
(Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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PG&E said it would begin turning off power to 800,000 customers in 34 counties starting after midnight today amid forecasts of windy, dry weather that creates extreme fire danger. To the south, Southern California Edison also said Tuesday that more than 106,000 of its customers in parts of eight counties could face power cuts. And San Diego Gas & Electric warned it could cut power to higher-risk areas on Thursday and Friday.
Outages are planned in more than half of California’s 58 counties, although not everyone in those counties will have their power cut.
San Francisco is the only county in the nine-county Bay Area where power will not be affected.
The utility had warned of the possibility of a widespread shut-off Monday, prompting residents to flock to stores for supplies as they prepared for dying cellphone batteries, automatic garages that won’t work and lukewarm refrigerators.
The outage will also affect portions of the agricultural Central Valley, the state’s northern and central coasts and the Sierra Nevada foothills.
In Southern California, potentially affected customers were in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
In San Diego County, SDG&E said Tuesday it might cut power Thursday or Friday to Banner Grade, Wynola, Julian, Santa Ysabel, East Ramona, Boulevard, Potrero, Viejas, Rincon, Palomar Mountain, Descandso, East Alpine, Pine Valley, Mt. Laguna, Valley Center, West Valley Center, Mesa Grande, Mesa Grande, Rancho Santa Fe and Fallbrook.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A leading industrial power that built itself on coal and colonialism, Britain is now trying to pivot away from the fossil fuels that powered the industrial age. The government has set a legally binding target to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Some of that change is already in motion: The country is fast ditching coal in favor of wind energy and gas. And this summer, for the first time in more than 130 years, it went two weeks without burning one lump of coal.
The new net-zero target, though, demands a far bigger shift that will likely change everything from the way Britons heat their homes to how they get to work to what food they grow and eat.
The good news for Britain is that climate action enjoys widespread political support in an otherwise polarized society. The governing Conservatives proposed the net zero target, while the Labour Party recently one-upped them by calling for a 2030 deadline.
Britain’s historical emissions are the fifth highest in the world, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief, a British website that covers climate science and policy.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The weekly U.S. Drought Monitor report released Thursday shows extreme drought conditions in parts of Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and the Florida panhandle. Lesser drought conditions also have expanded in parts of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Overall, nearly 20 percent of the lower 48 U.S. states is experiencing drought conditions.
The drought accelerated rapidly in September, as record heat combined with little rainfall to worsen the parched conditions, said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Nebraska.
“Typically we look at drought as being a slow onset, slow-developing type phenomenon compared to other disasters that rapidly happen, so this flash drought term came about,” Fuchs said. “The idea is that it’s more of a rapidly developing drought situation compared to what we typically see.”
Fuchs said he expects scientists to have further discussions about flash droughts, and perhaps develop parameters for what constitutes a flash drought.
Climate change is expected to make this kind of drought even hotter in the southern Great Plains, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported recently.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The storm, packing hurricane-force winds of 80 mph, has its sights set on the British Isles and is roaring northeast at a 43 mph clip. Lorenzo is no longer technically a hurricane, as it has transitioned to what’s known as a post-tropical or extratropical cyclone, but remains very powerful.
Ireland is forecast to be hit the hardest, with orange wind warnings hoisted for winds in excess of 80 mph along the coastline. The storm will bring a roughly 12-hour period of heavy weather this evening into Friday morning.
Wind warnings are up for all of Ireland, with an orange-tier warning encompassing Galway, Mayo, Clare, Cork, Kerry and Limerick.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Never mind that it has only just turned to fall. Gov. Steve Bullock declared a winter emergency as cars skidded off highways, communities lost power and farmers despaired at the damage to crops that were still in the ground.
“It’s a February storm in September,” said Jeff Mow, the superintendent of Glacier National Park in the state’s mountainous northwest. “We’re used to this kind of storm, just not this time of year.”
The snowfall totals were staggering for any time of year: 40 inches in Browning since Friday, and 38 inches in St. Mary.
Records were tumbling across the state. On Saturday, the National Weather Service recorded snow at the Missoula International Airport. There had not been a trace of snow recorded on any Sept. 28 since 1893.
Great Falls was blanketed by 9.7 inches of snow on Saturday, topping a daily snowfall record of 6.1 inches that had been set in 1954. On Sunday morning, another 4.3 inches of snow fell there.
“We have very wet and heavy snow, which has compacted down, making it look less than 14 inches,” said Thomas Pepe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Great Falls. “But we’re just getting into round two of snowfall — it’s starting to intensify again. It’s pretty bleak out there.”
Montanans are no strangers to snow, but the early arrival of this storm was a test even for those with decades of experience with harsh winters.
“In the 20 years that I’ve been here, I have never felt as much angst among my community,” said Cassie Barnett, 50, who lives near Fairfield in northwestern Montana. “The scariest thing is for our neighbors, who are farmers. The crops they had in the ground are now buried in the snow.”
The snow drifts were so high, Barnett said, that when her 6-foot-tall husband went to feed their chickens, the snow reached his chest.
“When the snow goes over my knee-high snow boots, I know to just stop trying,” she said.
For ranchers and farmers, the snowfall was much more than a nuisance, setting off a scramble to protect livestock.
“It’s rougher today than it was yesterday,” Jack Holden, who works with 600 to 800 head of cattle on his 4,000-acre ranch in Valier, said on Sunday. “It’s very tough to get around even with a four-wheel drive. We’re having to use tractors.”
Holden said that he was doing what he could to protect his cattle, and his livelihood, but that neighboring properties that relied on crops were not as fortunate. For example, farmers involved in the burgeoning hemp industry had not even harvested their crops yet, he said.
“It’s going to have a strong economic impact on the area,” Holden said.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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But not this year in Hawaii. The Aloha State likely just wrapped up its warmest summer on record, obliterating records left and right and over and over again. It’s yet another location feeling the heat in an ever-warming world.
Honolulu has seen 45 days with record highs so far this year, including 29 days between June and August. That’s the equivalent of more than two record highs every week. Beginning Aug. 10, Honolulu hit 90 degrees each of the next 37 days.
But even more impressive have been the nighttime lows. From 1950 to 2018, only 14 nights failed to drop below 80 degrees. This year has featured 19 such nights. The combination of toasty daytime highs and even steamier nighttime lows has helped 2019 claim the top spot for having the hottest calendar day on record in Honolulu — not to mention also snag second and third place in the process, while tying twice for fourth.
Honolulu also hit 95 degrees on the final day of August. That set a record for the hottest August temperature recorded in more than a century of bookkeeping, as well as tied the record for hottest year-round temperature.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The storm is currently not threatening land, but it may do so when it approaches the Azores next week as a weaker, but still formidable hurricane.
Lorenzo strengthened from a tropical storm on Tuesday into a hurricane on Wednesday, before reaching Category 4 hurricane strength by late Thursday morning.
September 2010's Hurricane Julia is the only other hurricane on record to intensify to Category 4 status farther east in the Atlantic Ocean than Lorenzo, according to Dr. Phil Klotzbach, a tropical scientist at Colorado State University.
If considering only those Category 4 hurricanes from Sept. 26 through the end of the season since the 1960s, Lorenzo is even more of an anomaly, noted Richard Dixon, a meteorologist at CatInsight and visiting research fellow at the University of Reading.
Even in the heart of hurricane season, tropical waves moving off the coast of western Africa usually take some time to mushroom into intense hurricanes.
This is often due to intrusions of dry air, known as Saharan air layers, moving off Africa's Sahara Desert. Fledgling tropical disturbances need warm, moist air to intensify, so battling these intrusions can prevent intensification or even spell doom in the eastern Atlantic Ocean.
In Lorenzo's case, that wasn't a big problem.
A lack of shearing winds, typically warm ocean water and moist air allowed Lorenzo to rapidly intensify so far east.
Lorenzo would only pose an issue for shipping lanes, if not for it's expected pass near the Azores Tuesday or Wednesday.
The National Hurricane Center mentioned Lorenzo's wind field is large, increasing the chances it may impact the group of Portuguese islands about 900 miles west of Portugal.
As meteorologist Yaakov Cantor mentioned Thursday, there have been a number of strange eastern Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms in recent years, including Leslie almost making it to Portugal as a hurricane in 2018 and a bizarre January strike from Hurricane Alex in the Azores.
(Jonathan Edman, THE WEATHER CHANNEL)
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Courmayeur mayor Stefano Miserocchi closed down a mountain road and banned access to part of the Val Ferret, a popular hiking area outside of town on the southern side of the Mont Blanc massif. Those moves came after experts warned that a 250,000-cubic-meter mass of the Planpincieux glacier was at risk of collapsing.
The glacier, which spreads 512 square miles across the mountain, has been moving nearly 20 inches a day.
“There are no models to tell us if it will fall entirely or in pieces,” the mayor told Sky TG24. “We need to keep an eye on the monitoring.”
The glacier is located in the Alps on the Grande Jorasses peak of the Mont Blanc massif, which straddles the borders of Italy, France and Switzerland and contains the highest peak in Western Europe. Officials said unusually high temperatures during August and September had accelerated ice melt at the Planpincieux, which has been monitored by the Safe Mountain Foundation since 2013.
Environment Minister Sergio Costa said the emergency shows “the necessity and urgency of strong and coordinated action for the climate, to prevent extreme events that risk dramatic consequences.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Dense white smoke filled the air across Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo, known as Kalimantan, the two areas that were hardest hit. Many of the fires were set deliberately to clear land for plantations that produce palm oil and wood pulp for making paper, authorities said.
The blazes, which tore through sensitive rainforests where dozens of endangered species live, have drawn comparisons to the wildfires in the Amazon basin that have destroyed more than 2 million acres.
By Wednesday, rain had brought some relief in reducing the number of Indonesian hot spots, from 3300 to fewer than 1800.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Rising temperatures are contributing to a drop in fish populations in many regions, and oxygen levels in the ocean are declining while acidity levels are on the rise, posing risks to important marine ecosystems, according to the report issued Wednesday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders in policymaking.
In addition, warmer ocean waters, when combined with rising sea levels, threaten to fuel ever more powerful tropical cyclones and floods, the report said, further imperiling coastal regions and worsening a phenomenon that is already contributing to storms like Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston two years ago.
“The oceans are sending us so many warning signals that we need to get emissions under control,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and a lead author of the report. “Ecosystems are changing, food webs are changing, fish stocks are changing, and this turmoil is affecting humans.”
For decades, the oceans have served as a crucial buffer against global warming, soaking up roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans emit from power plants, factories and cars, and absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped on Earth by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Without that protection, the land would be heating much more rapidly.
But the oceans themselves are becoming hotter and less oxygen-rich as a result, according to the report. If humans keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an increasing rate, the risks to human food security and coastal communities will increase sharply, particularly since marine ecosystems are already facing threats from plastic pollution, unsustainable fishing practices and other man-made stresses.
“We are an ocean world, run and regulated by a single ocean, and we are pushing that life support system to its very limits through heating, deoxygenation and acidification,” said Dan Laffoley of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading environmental group that tracks the status of plant and animal species, in response to the report.
The report, which was written by more than 100 international experts and is based on more than 7,000 studies, represents the most extensive look to date at the effects of climate change on oceans, ice sheets, mountain snowpack and permafrost.
Changes deep in the ocean or high in the mountains are not always as noticeable as some of the other hallmarks of global warming, such as heat waves on land, or wildfires and droughts. But the report makes clear that what happens in these remote regions will have ripple effects across the globe.
For instance, as ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt and push up ocean levels, the report said, extreme flooding that was once historically rare could start occurring once a year or more, on average, in many coastal regions this century. How quickly this happens depends largely on the ability of humanity to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that are heating the planet.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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With up to 30,000 survivors of Hurricane Maria still living under leaky tarps, authorities were on alert, warning that the destructive potential of Karen should not be underestimated, even at relatively lower wind speeds of about 45 mph.
“Weather conditions are going to worsen,” Gov. Wanda Vázquez cautioned as she urged Puerto Ricans to get off the roads and out of rough seas and rising rivers. Employers, she said, should let workers stay home.
Puerto Ricans’ nerves had been jangled by a magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rattled the island Monday night. The quake hit at 11:23 p.m. local time, striking 49 miles off the northwest coast, the U.S. Geological Survey said, and was followed by a series of smaller aftershocks, including at least two Tuesday night that unnerved people again.
Elmer Román, Puerto Rico’s secretary of public safety, said there were no reports of injuries or any significant damage. Local news outlets reported a water pipe broke in Mayagüez, in western Puerto Rico.
Attention soon returned to Karen, a storm that bears little resemblance to Maria, which devastated the island two years ago when it was nearly a Category 5 hurricane, with winds of 155 mph. Hurricane Dorian, this season’s only major storm so far, mostly spared the island.
Karen’s storm clouds were forecast to cover most of Puerto Rico. Eighty-two emergency shelters opened in some vulnerable communities.
The combination of Karen and the lingering effects of Hurricane Maria was already posing logistical problems.
The Puerto Rican island municipality of Vieques has been without a fully functioning hospital since Maria destroyed its public medical facility in 2017. So when a newborn on Vieques got sick Tuesday morning, the Puerto Rico National Guard had to be called on to fly the baby in a helicopter to a hospital on the big island.
A 15-year-old girl also had to be med-evaced from Vieques on Monday night, said Rafael Rodríguez Mercado, the health secretary.
“People are saying, ‘It’s just a tropical storm,’ but there’s no such thing as ‘just a tropical storm,’” said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “Tropical storms can create a lot of havoc.”
In Puerto Rico, mayors said they heeded emergency managers’ calls to clear storm drains to prepare for rain and prevent flash flooding. Several times Tuesday afternoon, flood warnings issued by the National Weather Service flashed in red on local television.
The core of Tropical Storm Karen approached southeastern Puerto Rico late Tuesday afternoon, but the worst rains would come afterward, on the back side of the storm. Isolated areas, especially in Puerto Rico’s central mountainous region, could get up to 10 inches of rain. Those conditions could create life-threatening mudslides, meteorologists warned.
“Puerto Rico is prepared,” Vázquez insisted.
Ferries to Vieques and Culebra, which are between the big island and the U.S. Virgin Islands, were suspended Monday evening. Schools will remain closed today, but government offices are scheduled to reopen. Vázquez also signed an executive order freezing fuel prices to prevent gouging.
Power still goes out — if only briefly — on a regular basis in parts of Puerto Rico, where the electrical grid remains frail. Outages blamed on lightning storms were reported in several parts of the island Tuesday afternoon. The public power utility is better prepared to respond to any possible outages than it was during Hurricane Maria in 2017, the governor said.
Once the tropical storm moves north of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, forecasters believe the storm may see “some slow but steady strengthening” but the storm’s path later in the week is still “quite uncertain.”
An average hurricane season, which lasts from June to November, has 12 named storms, a designation given to storms with winds that reach 39 mph, said Feltgen of the National Hurricane Center. Of those, an average of six become hurricanes, with winds of at least 74 mph, and three become a Category 3 or above, with winds more than 111 mph.
This year, 12 storms have been named, four have become hurricanes and one, Dorian, became a Category 5, wreaking catastrophic devastation in the Bahamas.
“We’re pretty close to an average season,” Feltgen said. “But we still have a little more than two months of the hurricane season to go.”
(Patricia Mazzei & Amy Harmon, NEW YORK TIMES)
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Officials in Harare have struggled to raise foreign currency to import water treatment chemicals; about $2.7 million is needed per month. Meanwhile, water levels in polluted reservoirs are dropping because of drought.
For residents who have seen shortages of everything from medicines to bread to petrol in recent months, the latest indignity brought weariness and disgust.
“The toilets at school are just too filthy, people continue using them yet there is no water,” said 12-year-old Dylan Kaitano, who was among many uniformed school children waiting in line at wells, some shoving in impatience. “I didn’t go to school today because I have to be here.”
Everyone living in Harare is affected, City Council spokesman Michael Chideme said, as residents turned to other options such as bottled water. He called it a dangerous situation because of the risk of water-borne diseases.
“It is a desperate situation,” Deputy Mayor Enock Mupamaonde told The Associated Press outside the closed treatment plant. And more people are affected than thought, he said, estimating that another 2 million non-residents enter the city each day to use its services and conduct business.
At the Chivero reservoir, the city’s main water supply, plastic bottles, vehicle tires and algae floated in the shallow water, which was green and emitted a choking, foul smell.
Zimbabwe’s capital now frequently records cases of diseases such as typhoid due to water shortages and dilapidated sewer infrastructure. Some residents for months have been forced to get water from shallow, unsafe wells and defecate in the open, while children pick their way across fetid yards.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The strong tremors, which struck just after 4 p.m. on Tuesday and lasted for several seconds, shook buildings and houses, causing panicked people to pour out into roads and streets. In Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, people scrambled out of buildings, many praying out loud.
“Our focus will be on the rescue operation in the next couple of days,” Lt. Gen. Muhammad Afzal, chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority, said during a news conference in Islamabad, the capital. “After that we will start the relief and repatriation efforts.”
The earthquake brought back painful memories of the magnitude 7.6 earthquake that struck the same region in October 2005 and left more than 75,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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PG&E began shutting down power in Butte, Nevada and Yuba in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The power will remain off until conditions are safer, and PG&E warned that it might expand the precautionary outages today to Sonoma, Napa and Lake counties if gusty winds and hot, dry weather continue.
Butte County is where a wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 86 people last year and virtually leveled the town of Paradise.
Meanwhile, Southern California Edison warned it might shut off power to 41,000 customers due to forecasts calling for Santa Ana winds.
The cuts could affect Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
Strong winds, low humidity and warm temperatures were forecast in the region through Wednesday, and authorities issued an extreme fire danger warning for some areas.
Gusts could reach 50 mph in the northern Sierra and foothills, and between 30 to 40 mph in the Sacramento Valley and near the Pacific coast, said Eric Kurth, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.
Some of the most destructive blazes in the state in the past two years were started by PG&E power lines.
PG&E first cut off power preemptively last October, affecting some 87,000 customers. The move prompted complaints and demands for reimbursement.
But the utility canceled plans to shut off power ahead of the Nov. 8 blaze that started near Paradise.
An investigation by Cal Fire said transmission lines owned and operated by the utility started the fire that wiped out nearly 15,000 homes.
California regulators in May approved allowing utilities to cut off electricity to avoid catastrophic wildfires.
In January, PG&E sought bankruptcy protection, saying it could not afford an estimated $30 billion in potential damages from lawsuits stemming from catastrophic wildfires.
Earlier this month, PG&E agreed to pay $11 billion to insurance companies holding 85 percent of the claims from fires that include the Paradise blaze.
The settlement, confirmed Monday, is subject to bankruptcy court approval.
(Seth Borenstein, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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As they made their pledges at the Climate Action Summit, though, they and others conceded it was not enough. And even before they spoke, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg shamed them for their inaction: “How dare you?”
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres concluded the summit by listing 77 countries that committed to carbon neutrality by 2050, 70 nations pledging to do more to fight climate change, with 100 business leaders promising to join the green economy and one-third of the global banking sector signing up to green goals.
“Action by action, the tide is turning,” he said. “But we have a long way to go.”
Businesses and charities also got in on the act, at times even going bigger than major nations. Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced Monday that his foundation, along with The World Bank and some European governments, would provide $790 million in financial help to 300 million of the world’s small farmers adapt to climate change. The Gates foundation pledged $310 million of that.
“The world can still prevent the absolute worst effects of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and developing new technologies and sources of energy,” Gates said. “But the effects of rising temperatures are already under way.”
Before world leaders made their promises in three-minute speeches, the 16-year-old Thunberg gave an emotional appeal in which she scolded the leaders with her repeated phrase, “How dare you.”
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here,” said Thunberg, who began a lone protest outside the Swedish parliament more than a year ago that culminated in Friday’s global climate strikes.
“I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and yet all you can talk about is money,” Thunberg said. “You are failing us.”
Later, she and 15 other youth activists filed a formal complaint with an arm of the U.N. that protects children, saying that governments’ lack of action on warming is violating their basic rights.
Outside experts say they heard a lot of talk Monday but not the promised action needed to keep warming to a few tenths of a degree. They say it won’t produce the dramatic changes the world requires.
“Sometimes I feel that Greta is still out in front of the Swedish parliament out on her own,” said Stanford University’s Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, which targets carbon emissions across the world.
Bill Hare, who follows national emissions and promises for Climate Action Tracker, called what was said “deeply disappointing” and not adding up to much.
“The ball they are moving forward is a ball of promises,” said economist John Reilly, co-director of MIT’s Joint Center for Global Change. “Where the ‘ball’ of actual accomplishments is, is another question.”
Of all the countries that came up short, World Resources Institute Vice President Helen Mountford said one stood out: the United States, for “not coming to the table and engaging.”
“What we’ve seen so far is not the kind of climate leadership we need from the major economies,” Mountford said. She did say, however, that businesses, as well as small- and medium-sized countries had “exciting initiatives.”
Nations such as Finland and Germany promised to ban coal within a decade. Several also mentioned goals of climate neutrality — when a country is not adding more heat-trapping carbon to the air than is being removed by plants and perhaps technology — by 2050.
President Donald Trump dropped by the summit, listened to German Chancellor Angela Merkel make detailed pledges — including going coal-free — and left without making a statement.
The United States did not ask to speak at the summit, U.N. officials said. And Guterres had told countries they couldn’t be on the agenda without making bold new proposals.
Even though there was no speech by Trump — who has called climate change a Chinese hoax and repealed U.S. carbon-reduction policies — he was talked about.
In a jibe at Trump’s plans to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said countries “must honor our commitments and follow through on the Paris Agreement.”
“The withdrawal of certain parties will not shake the collective goal of the world community,” Wang said to applause. Also Monday, Russia announced that it had ratified the Paris pact, which it had signed already.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the U.N.’s special climate envoy, thanked Trump for stopping by, adding that it might prove useful “when you formulate climate policy,” drawing laughter and applause on the General Assembly floor.
Thunberg told the U.N. that even the strictest emission cuts being talked about only give the world a 50 percent chance of limiting future warming to another 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.72 degrees Fahrenheit) from now, which is a global goal. Those odds, she said, are not good enough.
“We will not let you get away with this,” Thunberg said. “Right now is where we draw the line.”
As this all played out, scientists announced that Arctic sea ice reached its annual summer low and this year the ice shrank so much it tied for the second-lowest mark in 40 years of monitoring.
Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, said she represents “the most climate-vulnerable people on Earth.” Her tiny country has increased its emissions-cut proposals in a way that would limit warming to that tight goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.
“We are now calling on others to join us,” Heine said.
Several leaders talked about getting off coal, but Climate Action Tracker’s Hare said it wasn’t enough and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said if the world can make driverless cars, it can tackle climate change.
“There simply can be no more coal power plants after 2020 if we are serious about our future,” she said.
Speaking for small nations that are already being eaten away by sea level rise and blasted by stronger storms, Mottley said, “We refuse to be relegated to the footnotes of history and be collateral damage.”
“The nations of the world are not fighting a losing battle, but the nations of the world are losing this battle today,” Mottley said. “It’s within our battle to win it. The only question is: Will it be too late for the small nations of the world?”
Guterres opened the summit Monday by saying: “Earth is issuing a chilling cry: Stop.”
He told the more than 60 world leaders scheduled to speak that it’s not a time to negotiate but to act to make the world carbon neutral by 2050.
“Time is running out,” he said. “But it is not too late.”
(Seth Borenstein, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Only those with new, specific and bold plans can command the podium and the ever-warming world’s attention, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.
So sit down, Brazil. Sit down, Saudi Arabia. Sit down, Poland.
“People can only speak if they come with positive steps. That is kind of a ticket,” Guterres said. “For bad news, don’t come.”
As if to underscore the seriousness of the problem, the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization released a science report Sunday showing that in the last several years, warming, sea level rise and carbon pollution have all accelerated.
Brazil’s, Poland’s and Saudi Arabia’s proposals for dealing with climate change fell short, so they’re not on today’s summit schedule. The United States didn’t even bother, according to a U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The bar isn’t high: Leaders from 64 nations, the European Union, more than a dozen companies and banks, a few cities and a state will present plans at the secretary-general’s Climate Action Summit.
Guterres wants nations to be carbon-neutral by 2050 — in other words, they will not add more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the air than are removed by plants and perhaps technology each year.
On Sunday, 87 countries around the world pledged to decarbonize in a way consistent with one of the international community’s tightest temperature goals.
There is a sense of urgency, Guterres said, because “climate change is the defining issue of our time.”
“For the first time, there is a serious conflict between people and nature, between people and the planet,” Guterres said.
He wants countries to commit to no new coal power plants after 2020 and reduce carbon pollution by 45 percent in the next century. The purpose of the summit is to come up with new green proposals a year earlier than the 2020 deadline that is in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
On Sunday, the United Nations announced that it will cut its own carbon pollution 25 percent in the next six years and 45 percent by 2030.
World leaders agreed in 2009 to try to keep warming to just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. Then in 2015 they added a secondary, tougher goal, at the urging of small islands, to keep warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
The new weather agency report showed that the world has warmed already by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). So that means the goals are to limit further warming to 0.9 of a degree Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from now or even 0.4 of a degree Celsius (0.72 of a degree Fahrenheit) from now.
Efforts to reduce carbon pollution need to be tripled to keep from hitting the 2-degree Celsius mark and must increase fivefold to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, the World Meteorological Organization report said.
As bad as that sounds, it’s wrong and overly optimistic to use the mid-1880s as the benchmark, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann. Mann said that many studies, including the WMO’s, are overlooking that the world warmed 0.2 of a degree Celsius (0.36 of a degree Fahrenheit) from human causes between the mid-1700s and the 1880s.
The weather agency said the last five years were the warmest five on record and even 0.2 of a degree Celsius hotter than the first half of the decade, a significant jump in just a few years.
“There is a growing recognition that climate impacts are hitting harder and sooner than climate assessments indicated even a decade ago,” the 28-page report said.
A larger, more international report looking at climate change and oceans and ice will be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Wednesday.
(Seth Borenstein, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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At least four deaths have been linked to the remnants of Tropical Storm Imelda, which deluged parts of Texas and Louisiana and drew comparisons to Hurricane Harvey two years ago. Officials took advantage of receding floodwaters to begin assessing how many homes and cars were flooded.
Almost 16 feet of standing water was reported in Huffman, northeast of Houston, when a nearby bayou overflowed. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office deployed its marine unit to evacuate residents. Officials have warned residents they might not see high waters recede in their neighborhoods for several days.
Tuesday Martin, one of the residents in Huffman who was rescued, couldn’t help but think of Harvey when Imelda’s floodwaters rushed into her home.
“Harvey affected us. We lost the whole first floor,” Martin said. “So, it’s like two years later, we do not want to go through this again.”
East of Houston in Jefferson County, which got hit by more than 40 inches of rain, officials also began taking stock of their damage.
The heaviest rainfall had ended by Thursday night in Southeast Texas, but forecasters warned that parts of northeast Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana could see flash flooding as Imelda’s remnants shift to the north.
Officials in Harris County, which includes Houston, said there had been a combination of at least 1,700 high-water rescues following Thursday’s torrential rainfall.
Most of the Houston-area roads that became waterlogged after heavy rainfall Thursday and resulted in more than 1,650 vehicles being abandoned and later towed were mostly dry on Friday.
But parts of one of the major thoroughfares that pass through Southeast Texas — Interstate 10 — remained closed Friday due to floodwaters from torrential rain in the Beaumont area. Another freeway section, closer to Houston, was also shut down as officials assessed damage to its bridges over the San Jacinto River after they were hit by two barges that broke free of their moorings.
The National Weather Service said preliminary estimates suggested Jefferson County was hit with more than 40 inches of rain in a span of just 72 hours, which would make it the seventh-wettest tropical cyclone to hit the continental U.S.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The city of Beaumont was pummeled with nearly 25 inches of rain. In southwestern parts of the city and into Jefferson County, almost 42 inches were recorded this week, with much of it coming in the last 24 hours, the National Weather Service said Thursday.
Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster in 13 counties, including Chambers County, Beaumont’s Jefferson County and Houston’s Harris County.
More than 1,000 people were rescued in Harris County, the county judge, Lina Hidalgo, said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
In nearby Orange County, officials said at least 400 high-water rescues were made, most in the hard-hit Vidor area across the Neches River from Beaumont.
Nearly 140 people from Winnie and other Chambers County towns were staying at the American Red Cross shelter in Anahuac, Texas, after authorities and volunteers rescued them by boat, high-water rescue vehicles and, at times, a dump truck.
Vehicles were abandoned in the ditches of country roads nearby. A hospital evacuated some patients but remained open, with employees trudging barefoot across the sopping floor to treat the patients who remained.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a proposal Wednesday to increase the critical habitat designation for southern resident killer whales by more than sevenfold under the Endangered Species Act.
Just 73 orcas remain in the Pacific Northwest population, the lowest number in more than three decades. They’re struggling with a lack of chinook salmon, their preferred prey, as well as toxic contamination and vessel noise.
The NOAA proposal calls for an additional 15,626 square miles of federally protected habitat that would run from the border with Canada, down south to Point Sur, California.
The designation means federal agencies must ensure that activities they pay for, permit or carry out do not harm the habitat, but it does not generally affect approved recreational or commercial activity such as whale watching and shipping, said Lynne Barre, NOAA Fisheries’ recovery coordinator for the whales.
“It only affects federal actions, so where there is a federal permit or grant or federal decision, that’s what’s protected,” Barre said.
The orcas that return to the inland waters of Washington state every summer are genetically distinct from other killer whale populations around the world and differ from some of the others in eating primarily salmon, rather than seals or other marine mammals.
The survival of the three orca pods that make up the so-called southern resident population have been under intense scrutiny recently.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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In the Atlantic, Humberto has prompted a hurricane warning in Bermuda. The major Category 3 hurricane was expected to brush just north of the island Wednesday night, its expanding wind field set to bring 80 mph winds. Two to four inches of rainfall is anticipated on Bermuda as well. Thirty-foot-tall waves have been detected by offshore NOAA buoys.
Meanwhile, Tropical Depression Imelda, now parked over Texas, spun up suddenly Tuesday. It was declared a tropical depression at noon Tuesday and a tropical storm at 12:45 p.m.; it made landfall at 1:30 p.m. By 7 p.m., Imelda was back down to a tropical depression, but that was because of a wind-driven technicality — the system continues to bring dangerous, excessive rainfall to the Texas Gulf Coast and southwestern Louisiana. Localized amounts topping 20 inches have already been measured with more than 36 hours left to go in the prolonged event.
Yet another system — Tropical Storm Jerry — spun up well east of the Leeward Islands Wednesday. With winds of 45 mph, it’s forecast to strengthen into a Category 1 hurricane by late week. Current forecasts say it will go north of Puerto Rico, at which point it’s most likely to pass between the Bahamas and Bermuda, sparing land masses any significant impact. But forecasts can change.
A pair of disturbances east of Jerry are worth watching as well. Neither is looking overly potent — the National Hurricane Center gives them a 30 percent and 10 percent chance of developing, respectively. But either may prove mischievous, particularly the latter, in the longer-range as more favorable environmental conditions for storm development overspread the Atlantic.
In the Pacific, Kiko, Lorena, and Mario are all tropical storms with 60 to 65 mph winds. Lorena, west of the Mexican state of Colima, could “produce life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides” in the Sierra Madre mountains and foothills, says the National Hurricane Center. It’s forecast to strengthen, and a hurricane warning is active for Punta San Telmo to Cabo Corrientes. Farther south, an elongated low pressure zone near the coasts of Guatamala and El Salvador could bring heavy rainfall.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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Tropical Storm Lorena is currently 185 miles south of Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and is forecast to track northwestward in the coming days.
As of 10 p.m. CDT, the storm had maximum sustained winds of 50 mph and was moving at a speed of 15 mph to the northwest. The Mexican government has issued a tropical storm warning from the city of Zihuatanejo to Cabo Corrientes.
Locations near the coast in the states of Guerrero, Michoacan, Colima and Jalisco will endure the bouts of heaviest rainfall in the coming day.
Multiple days of heavy rainfall will raise the risk of flooding and mudslides in these communities and may also result in travel disruptions.
Total rainfall of 3 inches to 6 inches will be common with an AccuWeather Local StormMax of 12 inches.
A continued northwest track will bring Lorena near or into the coast of Mexico between Thursday and Friday.
If landfall occurs, it would likely happen in either the state of Colima or Jalisco. It's possible that Lorena could bring the risk of locally damaging winds with gusts in excess of 62 mph.
In the longer range, Lorena will continue toward the north and may bring impacts to Baja California as early as Saturday night or Sunday.
If Lorena tracks into or close to Baja California, locations from Loreto southward to Cabo San Lucas may endure a period of heavy rainfall and strong winds.
The region would be at risk for localized flooding, mudslides and power outages.
In this scenario, moisture from Lorena could cause additional flooding across northern Mexico as moisture streams toward the United States by early next week.
If Lorena turns more to the northwest, the storm could remain far enough out to sea that Baja California Sur escapes with just some enhanced showers and thunderstorms.
Lorena would then weaken as it moves into cooler waters west of Baja California next week with no additional impacts to land.
Just hours after Lorena developed, Tropical Storm Mario took shape. Mario is located west of Lorena and is not expected to have any direct impact to land.
(Eric Leister, UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL)
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A black-and-blue necktie floated in a pool of water. Nearby, a ruptured set of drums lay toppled on its side. Bone-white seashells were nestled in tufts of grass, flung there by the surging floodwaters that had carried Saunders for 200 yards until he managed to grab hold of a large pine tree branch, where he spent two days after Hurricane Dorian crashed ashore.
“I spoke to the water: ‘Peace, be still.’ It never listened,” he said with a wide smile. But then he grew serious as he focused on the daunting cleanup facing the tens of thousands who live on Grand Bahama and Abaco, the two northern islands that were devastated by the Category 5 storm.
It will be a slow process that some are tackling in very small steps. Saunders picked out two hammers, five screwdrivers and three treasured Bibles.
In contrast, 67-year-old Mary Glinton in the nearby fishing village of McLean’s Town wasted no time getting rid of all her ruined possessions. She created three piles of clothes stiffened by mud and set them on fire. A once-white lace curtain, a muddied pink wind-breaker and a pair of black pants all went into the flames. She most lamented that all her church clothes were ruined.
“I love blue, and most of my dresses are blue,” she said standing near the fire in green flip-flops, her legs caked with mud. She also mourned the loss of her 1-year-old pet hog, Princess.
A preliminary report estimates Dorian caused some $7 billion in damage, but the government has not yet offered any figures. Crews have started to remove some debris on the islands, but they are moving slowly to avoid accidentally disturbing any bodies lying in the rubble. The official death toll stands at 50, and Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said he expects the number to significantly increase.
About 2,500 people are listed as missing in the hurricane’s aftermath, although the government has cautioned that it still needs to check names against the rosters of people evacuated from the devastated islands or staying in shelters.
On Thursday, a cluster of heavy thunderstorms heading to the Bahamas threatened to further drench those trying to salvage belongings or living in tents in hard-hit communities. Late in the day, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said the system was expected to become a tropical storm within 36 hours and would hit parts of the northwestern Bahamas with tropical storm-force winds and heavy rains.
USAID officials, meanwhile, said they would distribute plastic sheeting ahead of the storm.
As the cleanup continued, the first hints of normalcy could be seen in Freeport, a city on Grand Bahama that is operated by a private company, which provides utilities and charges residents without any government involvement. Lights began to flicker on in some neighborhoods, and crews were seen repairing transformers in other areas.
Among those celebrating the return of electricity was Clifton Williams, who was driving home from work on Wednesday when he saw an illuminated streetlight for the first time since the hurricane.
“I didn’t expect that so quickly,” he said. “First thing I do, I cut on the fan and cool off myself,” he added, saying he slept well for the first time in more than a week thanks to the fan.
(Danica Coto, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The plan would allow oil leasing on 1.56 million acres of the 19 million-acre refuge. The proposal — which would open the entire coastal plain to the energy industry — was seen as the most extreme of three options considered by the Interior Department.
Supporters have argued it will result in a windfall for the federal Treasury and revive Alaska’s struggling economy. But opponents have said that opening the refuge to oil leasing could do irreversible damage to a region already destabilized by warming temperatures and other effects of climate change. The refuge is home to large numbers of polar bears, caribou, wolves and migratory birds.
“Unfortunately, this sham environmental impact statement ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence that demonstrates the unprecedented risks to wildlife that would result from drilling in the Coastal Plain,” said Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, a conservation group. “Alaskans, tribes and conservationists all agree that this is the wrong approach.”
The plan is expected to face legal challenges from environmentalists.
Opening the refuge to oil leasing has been a long-held dream of Republicans in Congress, in particular Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has argued that drilling is key to U.S. energy independence. Until President Donald Trump’s election, Democrats and environmentalists successfully fought off these efforts.
But in 2017, Murkowski added a provision to the GOP tax cut bill that required the Interior Department to allow oil and gas leasing on 1.5 million acres within the refuge’s coastal plain. It also mandated that the agency hold at least two lease sales by 2025.
Murkowski on Thursday called the Interior Department’s final plan a “major step forward.” She said she was “hopeful we can now move to a lease sale in the very near future, just as Congress intended.”
The administration originally predicted that oil lease sales within the refuge would generate $1.8 billion for the federal government by 2027. But since then, the projections have fallen considerably. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office published in June estimated the government would net about $900 million — half the amount the White House had said.
There has also been debate about how much oil sits beneath the refuge, which is thought to be the largest untapped trove of onshore oil in the U.S., and whether it’s even profitable to extract it.
House Democrats have been working to repeal the congressional mandate for oil and gas leasing in the refuge. On Thursday, the House passed a bill that would remove the language from the tax law that required lease sales, though it was a largely symbolic gesture since the Senate is unlikely to follow suit.
“The Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act reflects a very simple proposition: There are some places too wild, too important, too unique to be spoiled by oil and gas development,” said the bill’s author, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Eureka. “The Arctic Refuge’s Coastal Plain is one of those special places.”
Murkowski and other members of the Alaska congressional delegation criticized the House bill, saying that it would be unfair to Alaskans to leave potential revenue from oil exploration on the table.
“We understand that Alaska has earned an almost mythological place in the minds of many Americans,” they wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “But we cannot be treated like a snow globe, to be placed on the shelf for viewing pleasure only.”
(Anna M. Phillips, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past 21/2 years. Those efforts have focused heavily on eliminating restrictions on fossil fuel pollution, including coal-fired power plants, automobile tailpipes, and oil and gas leaks, but have also touched on asbestos and pesticides.
An immediate effect of the repeal is that polluters will no longer need a permit to discharge potentially harmful substances into many streams and wetlands. But the measure, which is expected to take effect in a matter of weeks, has implications far beyond the pollution that will now be allowed to flow freely into waterways.
The Obama administration implemented the rule in response to a Supreme Court ruling that opened the door to a more expansive legal definition of “waters of the United States” under the 1972 Clean Water Act. With Thursday’s announcement, the Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to drastically narrow that definition, a move that could be difficult for future administrations to undo.
Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont, said that, for conservative states and leaders who hold the view that the Clean Water Act has been burdensome for farmers and industry, “this is an opportunity to really drive a stake through the heart of federal water protection.”
Overhauling the rule had been a central campaign pledge for President Donald Trump, who characterized it as federal overreach that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their properties as they see fit. Trump signed an executive order in the early days of his administration directing federal agencies to begin the work of repealing and replacing it.
“Today’s final rule puts an end to an egregious power-grab,” Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the EPA, said Thursday in a news conference to announce the repeal.
Wheeler said the rollback would mean “farmers, property owners and businesses will spend less time and money determining whether they need a federal permit and more time building infrastructure.”
Agricultural groups, an important political constituency for Trump, praised the repeal. Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the water rule had sparked outrage from thousands of farmers and ranchers across the country and led to the largest effort to kill a regulation in his organization’s history.
“When you take private property rights from a man who’s worked all his life,” Duvall said, “that is very intrusive to him and it’s something he just can’t stand for.”
But environmentalists assailed the move. “With many of our cities and towns living with unsafe drinking water, now is not the time to cut back on clean water enforcement,” said Laura Rubin, director of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.
The Obama rule was designed to limit pollution in about 60 percent of the nation’s bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about one-third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as tributaries, streams and wetlands.
Under the rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and from planting certain crops, and would have been required to obtain EPA permits to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those bodies of water. Those restrictions will now be lifted.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, which had worked together to write the original Obama rule, are expected to issue a new, looser replacement rule by the end of this year. It is expected that the new rule, still being developed, will retain federal protections for larger bodies of water, the rivers that drain into them and wetlands that are directly adjacent to those bodies of water.
But it will quite likely strip away protections of so-called ephemeral streams, in which water runs only during or after rainfalls, and of wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water or connected to such bodies of water by a surface channel of water. Those changes would represent a victory for farmers and rural landowners who lobbied the Trump administration aggressively to make them.
(Coral Davenport & Lisa Friedman, NEW YORK TIMES)
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Two research groups announced this week that they’ve found water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet 110 light-years away in the constellation Leo. This so-called Super Earth is just the right distance from its star to conceivably harbor life.
It’s the only exoplanet known so far to have both water and temperatures needed for life, the University College London team reported in the journal Nature Astronomy on Wednesday. But lead author Angelos Tsiaras stressed, “This is definitely not a second Earth.”
Its star and atmosphere are so different than ours, “Earth-like conditions are not possible,” Tsiaras told reporters. “The only question that we’re trying to ask here, and we’re pushing forward, is the question of habitability.”
A Canadian-led team announced similar findings Tuesday.
In a paper just submitted to the Astronomical Journal for publication, these scientists suggest it might even be raining there.
“This represents the biggest step yet taken toward our ultimate goal of finding life on other planets, of proving that we are not alone,” the study’s lead astronomer, Bjorn Benneke of the University of Montreal, said in a statement.
Discovered in 2015, the planet known as K2-18b is twice the size of Earth with eight times the mass. While it’s thought to be rocky, no one knows if water’s flowing on the surface. Its star, a red dwarf, is considerably smaller and cooler than our sun, a yellow dwarf, and its atmosphere is also different than ours.
Nonetheless, Tsiaras said K2-18b could help determine, “Is the Earth unique?”
The results are doubly exciting, Tsiaras noted, given this is not only the first Super Earth with water detected in its atmosphere but the planet also resides within the habitable zone of its star.
The research teams used archived data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other spacecraft to analyze the planet’s atmosphere. Further observations are needed to determine whether the planet is indeed a true water world, using next-generation observatories like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Ariel, both due to launch in the 2020s.
Future telescopes on Earth and in space should help uncover more Super Earths orbiting red dwarf stars — believed to be the most common planets and stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Super Earths are defined as having a mass greater than Earth but less than gas giants like Uranus and Neptune; more than 1,260 have been confirmed to date.
While water already has been identified in the atmospheres of hot gas giants circling other stars, the latest findings represent the first detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of another type of exoplanet, Tsiaras said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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That led White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to call Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to tell him to fix the issue, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the issue. Trump had complained for several days that forecasters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration contradicted his Sept. 1 Alabama tweet, the officials said.
Mulvaney then called Ross, who was traveling in Greece, and told him that the agency needed to fix things immediately, the officials said. Mulvaney did not instruct Ross to threaten any firings or offer punitive actions. But Ross then called NOAA acting administrator Neil Jacobs, the officials said. That led to an unusual, unsigned statement from NOAA released on Sept. 6 that backed Trump’s false claim about Alabama and admonished the National Weather Service’s Birmingham, Ala., division for speaking “in absolute terms” that there would not be “any” impacts from Dorian in the state. The Weather Service is an arm of NOAA, which is an agency within the Commerce Department. The New York Times first reported some elements of the White House involvement.
Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon that he did not direct NOAA to issue such a statement. “No, I never did that,” he said. “I never did that. It’s a hoax by the media. That’s just fake news.”
But the apparent political pressure on a group of scientists who are supposed to be independent led House Democrats on Tuesday to launch an investigation into the Commerce Department’s involvement in NOAA’s unusual decision to side with Trump over its scientists.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., chairwoman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee, sent a letter to Ross requesting information related to the department’s dealings with NOAA and Dorian.
The Science Committee, which has jurisdiction over NOAA, is requesting a briefing with Commerce Department staff who may have been involved in issuing instructions to NOAA that led to several directives being sent to Weather Service staff and culminated in the Sept. 6 unsigned statement.
The imbroglio began Sept. 1, when Trump tweeted that a number of states, including Alabama, were at risk from Dorian. Trump falsely asserted that the state would “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by the powerful hurricane. A short time later, the Weather Service’s Birmingham office tweeted: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.”
Jacobs has since said that the forecasters were not aware of the Trump tweet and were responding to a flood of calls from concerned residents.
“We are deeply disturbed by the politicization of NOAA’s weather forecast activities for the purpose of supporting incorrect statements by the president,” Johnson and Sherrill wrote to Ross. The House members want to know who ordered and helped draft the Sept. 6 statement and whether Commerce Department or White House staff members were involved in threatening NOAA leadership.
“We are committed to supporting the activities of the NWS and its dedicated staff. During your Senate confirmation hearing, you committed to allowing federal scientists to ‘be free to communicate data clearly and concisely’ and that you would ‘not interfere with the release of factual scientific data,’” Johnson and Sherrill wrote.
NOAA acting chief scientist Craig McLean wrote an email Sunday, saying he would open an investigation into whether the agency’s Sept. 6 statement, as well as previous emails to Weather Service staff, violated the agency’s scientific integrity policy.
“The content of this news release is very concerning as it compromises the ability of NOAA to convey lifesaving information necessary to avoid substantial and specific danger to public health and safety,” he wrote. “If the public cannot trust our information, or we debase our forecaster’s warnings and products, that specific danger arises.”
(Andrew Freedman & Josh Dawsey, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The number of confirmed dead from the storm remained at 50 on Wednesday, a figure that government officials say is certain to rise. The Bahamas Defense Forces began posting pictures on social media this week of soldiers in hazardous material suits collecting muddied corpses and dropping them into pickup trucks.
Dorian, a Category 5 hurricane, toppled thousands of homes on the Abacos Islands last week and flooded more on Grand Bahama, leaving large swaths of both nearly uninhabitable.
“No living Bahamian has ever seen anything like this in their lifetime,” Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said in a televised address Wednesday night, “but as horrible and vicious as Hurricane Dorian was, the bravery and resilience of the Bahamian people is even more powerful.”
Still, Minnis acknowledged public frustration with recovery efforts, and said his government was “aggressively shredding the red tape” to improve its response.
The Bahamian government’s efforts to quantify the number of missing have been hampered by the many directions in which people fled.
Some 2,048 people are in government-run shelters in Nassau. At least 4,000 Bahamians left the islands and had entered the United States by Monday, American immigration authorities said.
A database with the names of the missing, those sheltered and those who evacuated is being built to make for more effective cross-checking, said Carl Smith, a spokesman for the Bahamian National Emergency Management Agency.
“As we are able to cross reference our data sets, we will be able to inform family members and reunite survivors with loved ones,” Smith said.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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As government officials gave assurances at a news conference that more shelters would be opened as needed, Julie Green and her family gathered outside the headquarters of the island’s emergency management agency, seeking help.
“We need a shelter desperately,” the 35-year-old former waitress from Great Abaco said as she cradled one of her 7-month-old twins on her hip, his little face furrowed. Nearby, her husband held the other twin boy as their four other children wandered listlessly nearby. One kept crying despite receiving comforting hugs.
Hurricane Dorian devastated the Abaco and Grand Bahama islands in the northern part of the archipelago a week ago, leaving at least 50 dead, with the toll certain to rise as the search for bodies goes on.
Nearly 5,000 people have arrived in Nassau by plane and by boat, and many were struggling to start new lives, unclear of how or where to begin. More than 2,000 of them were staying in shelters, according to government figures.
Green said that shelter officials told her they couldn’t accept such young children, and that the family has slept in the home of a different person every night since arriving Friday in New Providence, the island where Nassau is situated.
“We’re just exhausted,” she said. “We’re just walking up and down, asking people if they know where we can stay.”
Erick Noel, a 37-year-old landscaper from Abaco with a wife and four children, found himself in the same situation. They will have to leave a friend’s house by today and had not yet found a shelter where they could stay.
“They are full, full, full,” he said. “I keep looking for a place to go.”
He said he found one small home for his family in Nassau but could not afford the $900 monthly rent. Undeterred, Noel said he would keep searching.
Meanwhile, government officials said they were helping all evacuees and considering building temporary housing, perhaps tent or container cities.
“We are dealing with a disaster,” said Carl Smith, spokesman for the Bahamas’ National Emergency Management Agency. “It takes time to move through the chaos. We are responding to the needs.”
The government has estimated that up to 10,000 people from the Abacos alone will need food, water and temporary housing.
Getting back to Abaco is the dream of Betty Edmond, a 43-year-old cook who picked at some fries with her son and husband in a restaurant at a Nassau hotel, where her nephew is paying for their stay.
They arrived in Nassau on Saturday night after a six-hour boat trip from Abaco and plan to fly to Florida today, thanks to plane tickets bought by friends who will provide them a temporary home until they can find jobs. But the goal is to return, Edmond said.
“Home will always be home,” she said. “Every day you wish you could go back.”
“You try to keep your hopes up, but,” she added, her voice trailing off as she shook her head.
Also flying to Florida was 41-year-old Shaneka Russell, who owned Smacky’s Takeaway, a takeout restaurant known for its cracked conch. The restaurant, named after the noises her son made as a baby, was destroyed by Dorian.
Russell said good Samaritans had taken her and a group of people into their home over the weekend and found them a hotel room in Nassau for a couple of days.
“To know that we were going to a hotel, with electricity and air conditioning and a proper shower, I cried,” she said.
(Danica Coto, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Along the Sunshine Coast, the upscale Peregian Beach and Marcus Beach communities were urged to evacuate by the Queensland Rural Fire Service. “A fast-moving fire is traveling in a north-easterly direction from Emu Mountain Road towards Peregian Beach and Marcus Beach,” read an official bulletin issued tonight local time.
One of Queensland’s largest fires, located near the Blackbraes National Park, looks to be affecting an area that covers 78 square miles. That’s roughly 50,000 acres, or a little larger than Washington. This figure comes from data collected by the Japanese weather satellite Himawari 8, which uses 3.9 micrometer wavelengths to detect “hot spots” associated with wildfires.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Nearly 900 firefighters have been assigned to the Tenaja fire in Riverside County, which erupted Wednesday afternoon near Tenaja and Clinton Keith roads on a day marked by thunderstorms in the region, officials said.
The decision to reduce evacuation orders to warnings comes after firefighters — aided by lower temperatures and increased humidity — made significant progress on the blaze overnight. The wildfire was 20 percent contained as of Friday morning, said Capt. Fernando Herrera, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Evacuation orders had been in place since Thursday for homes along Montanya, Botanica and Belcara places and Lone Oak Way in Murrieta. A day earlier, officials ordered evacuations of houses along the Trails Circle in La Cresta and Copper Canyon, as well as the Santa Rosa Plateau visitor center on Clinton Keith Road.
Campuses in the Murrieta Valley Unified, Perris Union, Romoland and Menifee school districts were closed Friday because of the fire and poor air quality in the region.
The blaze erupted toward the end of a remarkably calm summer in terms of wildfires.
After two years of devastating wildfires that burned more than 1.8 million acres in 2018 and 1.2 million acres in 2017, as of Aug. 18, only 51,079 acres had burned this year across state and federal lands in California.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Medics and other rescuers rushed to Ocracoke Island — accessible only by boat or air — to reach those who made the mistake of defying mandatory evacuation orders along the 200-mile ribbon of low-lying islands.
“We are flooding like crazy,” Ocracoke Island bookshop owner Leslie Lanier texted. “I have been here 32 years and not seen this.”
Its winds down to 90 mph, Dorian howled over the Outer Banks as a far weaker storm than the brute that wreaked havoc on the Bahamas at the start of the week. Just when it looked as if its run up the Southeast coast was coming to a relatively quiet end, the Category 1 hurricane sent seawater surging over neighborhoods, flooding the first floors of many homes, even ones on stilts.
The Coast Guard began landing local law enforcement officers on the island via helicopter and airlifting out the sick, the elderly or others in distress, Hyde County authorities said. National Guard helicopters also flew supplies and a rescue team in. Residents were told to get to the highest point in their homes in the meantime.
By evening, Gov. Roy Cooper said that officials were aware of no serious injuries on the Outer Banks from the storm.
Around mid-morning, the eye of the storm came ashore at Cape Hatteras, Dorian’s first landfall in the continental U.S. By late afternoon, Dorian had peeled off the coastline and was finally making its exit out to sea. It is expected to remain a hurricane as it sweeps up the Eastern Seaboard through today, veering far enough offshore that its hurricane-force winds are unlikely to pose any threat to land in the U.S.
Dorian slammed the Bahamas at the start of the week with 185 mph winds, killing at least 30 people and obliterating countless homes. With time running out to save stranded survivors, Bahamian and U.S. rescue crews combed through rubble in the hardest-hit areas Friday and braced for the death toll to rise.
Five days after the storm made landfall in the Bahamas as a Category 5 hurricane, authorities said it was unclear how many people were in need of assistance and how many had died. Officials and aid organizations struggled to reach remote towns in the sprawling island nation, with logistical issues preventing the deployment of rescue boats and aircraft.
Marsh Harbour, the largest town in the Abaco Islands, was devastated by the storm, as were surrounding areas. Teams in hazmat suits are searching for survivors and bodies amid storm debris, storing remains in a refrigerated container in the back of a health clinic.
Already, the United States is expanding its response, amid signs that the scope of the effort so far has not been not enough. More than 30 people have been confirmed dead, but the number was expected to rise. Rescue workers said thousands of people are missing and tens of thousands need urgent help.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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A monsoonal flow out of the south and southeast has ushered in warm, humid air. That led to thunderstorms in the mountains and desert, with a few storms drifting to the coast Wednesday, plus the uncomfortably sticking days.
Meanwhile, the ocean temperatures off the immediate coast have jumped to record highs for September, and that has helped make it warmer and harder to sleep at night.
The National Weather Service expects relief starting Saturday. A trough of low pressure moving into the West Coast should make the monsoon swoon, bring down the daytime temperatures and return the humidity levels back to bearable. The thunderstorms should shut down after today.
The marine layer, wiped out by the monsoon, should return. Saturday is expected be a few degrees cooler than today, and by Sunday and into the first half of next week, both the coast and the inland valleys should be a couple of degrees lower than normal.
Those high ocean temperatures? That’s a little more uncertain. They could stay elevated for awhile, which might mean reduced cooling at night.
Remember “the warm blob” from five years ago? It was an unprecedented huge mass of warm water in the northern Pacific, more than a thousand miles in diameter, that damaged marine life, disrupted weather patterns and may have contributed to California’s long-term drought.
Well, the blob is back, and it could play at least a minor role in local weather during the fall.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, said the blob is bigger and warmer now than it was at the same stage in 2014. In recent weeks, the warm waters, which extend from near Hawaii to the Gulf of Alaska, have reached eastward all the way to the California shore for the first time. That has raised sea-surface temperatures along the immediate coast in Northern and Central California, which had not been unusually warm before.
Swain said geography limits the blob’s effect along the Southern California coast, but he believes that mass of warm water might have also played a role in an ocean temperature spike seen along the San Diego County coast this week.
Scripps Pier topped 77 degrees earlier this week, setting a record for September. The ocean temperature in Oceanside on Thursday afternoon was 78.3.
“I expect the warm ocean temperatures to persist for the near future,” Swain said. That, in part, should help keep the temperatures inland above normal for the next few weeks, he said.
When the San Diego County coast gets its nearly daily sea breeze, the temperature of that breeze is affected by the temperature of the water. The cooler the water, the cooler that breeze will be. With elevated sea-surface temperatures, the breeze provides less relief from the heat.
Art Miller, a research oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, is less certain the warm blob played a role in the elevated ocean temperatures off the county coast. He said recent local weather patterns — including the departing monsoon — probably played a bigger role in the high water temperatures.
The monsoon, besides ushering in hot air that settled over and warmed the waters, also wiped out the cooling marine layer, Miller said. The monsoon might also have shifted wind patterns that reduced upwelling of colder waters from the ocean floor.
In the short term, the National Weather Service expects the nighttime lows, which didn’t drop below 73 in San Diego Tuesday through Thursday, to start returning to normal. By Sunday, the low in San Diego is projected to fall to 66, normal for the date.
(Robert Krier, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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More than 500 firefighters have been assigned to the Tenaja fire in Riverside County, which broke out about 4 p.m. Wednesday near Tenaja and Clinton Keith roads on a day marked by thunderstorms in the region.
The fire burned all the way down to the Copper Canyon neighborhood in Murrieta overnight, but crews were able to stop the flames before any homes were damaged, said Capt. Fernando Herrera, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
“The fire probably came within a couple thousand feet of homes,” he said.
No structures have been damaged, and no injuries have been reported. The cause of the fire has not been determined.
Humid conditions and water drops from helicopters allowed firefighters to gain the upper hand overnight. While helicopters fought the fire from the sky, crews cut fire breaks ahead of blaze in an effort to slow its movement.
“That gave us a huge advantage,” Herrera said of the helicopter’s efforts overnight. “We were successful in at least knocking down the heavy flames and heat. The fire is laying down right now.”
Firefighters had boosted containment of the inferno to 7 percent by early Thursday.
But then on Thursday afternoon, gusting winds pushed the fire across the breaks and sent it racing down the ridge. The flames burned up to a creek area at the base of the Copper Canyon development and again threatened homes, but firefighters were able to beat them back, Herrera said.
Shortly after 2 p.m., officials issued new evacuation orders for homes along Montanya, Botanica and Belcara places, and Lone Oak Way in Murietta. Officials had previously ordered evacuations of houses along the Trails Circle in La Cresta and Copper Canyon, as well as the Santa Rosa Plateau Visitor Center on Clinton Keith Road. Evacuations are still in place for more than 400 homes in the area.
Flames also surrounded a Murietta Fire Department station in the Copper Canyon area. Crews mounted a structure defense and used a bulldozer to cut a line in the vegetation around the station. They were able to save the building and the department’s equipment, Herrera said.
By about 2:30 p.m., the flames along the fire’s southeastern flank had died down, Herrera said.
“It’s consumed most of the dry field in its path,” he said of the fire. “So right now, the conditions on this side are extremely smoky. There’s a lot of overhaul to do, but most of the fuel has been consumed.”
Firefighters, however, were faced with erratic winds gusting up to 30 mph and temperatures reaching into the 90s. The heat could further dry out dense grass and brush in the region, priming the fuel for burning, said Jimmy Taeger, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego.
Showers and thunderstorms in the mountain areas also raised the possibility of dry lightning strikes Thursday afternoon and evening, Herrera said.
Officials hoped that winds would blow upslope overnight and continue to push the fire back toward vegetation that had already burned. But Herrera cautioned that the volatility of the weather conditions made the fire’s behavior hard to predict.
“As long as that weather pattern remains it means there’s potential for the fire to blow up again and gather some speed,” he said.
(Hannah Fry & Jaclyn Cosgrove, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The center of the storm, which weakened to a Category 2 on Thursday, crept northward just offshore for most of the day, sticking largely to its forecasted track. It delivered heavy rain and hurricane-force wind gusts to Charleston and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina.
In the Bahamas, officials said the death toll has reached 30 and is expected to climb as crews reach the stricken islands.
Hurricane Dorian spawned damaging tornadoes and flooded low-lying communities in the Carolinas on Thursday, in what officials hope will be the closing chapter of a storm that devastated the Bahamas and has panicked East Coast residents for the past 10 days.
The center of the storm, which weakened to a Category 2 on Thursday, crept northward just offshore for most of Thursday, sticking largely to its forecasted track, as it delivered heavy rain and hurricane-force wind gusts to Charleston and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Ocean water poured over sand dunes in some communities, but officials cautioned it could take until today to assess the damage.
As it whipped up the coast, Dorian’s final blow was still aiming for North Carolina, and forecasters warned it could make landfall today near the Outer Banks. The trajectory was expected to produce what the National Hurricane Center called life-threatening storm surge in the Outer Banks, where 4 to 7 feet of water could wash across the barrier island from two directions.
“This will not be a brush by,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, warned residents on Thursday. “Whether it comes to shore or not, the eye of the storm will be close enough to cause extensive damage to North Carolina.”
Even as officials warily eyed the possible effects of Dorian in the United States, federal officials announced Thursday that they are marshaling additional resources for the Bahamas, where the death toll has reached 30 and is expected to climb. The victims are from Abaco and Grand Bahama islands and include some who had been injured and flown to New Providence island.
The U.S. Agency for International Development announced it will send “shelter materials” for 35,000 people.
In the Carolinas, state and local officials said they hoped residents had heeded days of warnings about Dorian’s expected arrival as high winds snapped tree branches and several feet of water flooded many streets in the historic district of Charleston, S.C., on Thursday.
The center of the storm passed the city before high tide, allowing the winds to change direction in time to avoid the kind of devastating flooding that had been feared. According to the National Weather Service, the waters in Charleston Harbor peaked early Thursday at 7.5 feet, about three feet lower than initial projections.
But in Myrtle Beach, the storm brought frequent alerts about possible flash floods and tornadoes. At least two tornadoes touched down in the North Myrtle Beach area, and strong winds felled trees and knocked out signs. Thousands along South Carolina’s Grand Strand lost power.
Statewide, nearly 150,000 South Carolina residents were without power on Thursday, including 100,000 customers in Charleston, according to Dominion Energy.
“It’s worse than I thought it’d be,” said Peter McGlaughlin, who fled his beachside residence days ago. “This one is much closer to us than any I’ve ever seen. It appears to be making a beeline for Myrtle Beach.”
The area received more rain than expected, said Mark Kruea, public information officer for Myrtle Beach, which could lead to more flooding, especially when paired with the storm surge, which was pushing the Waccamaw and Little Pee Dee rivers over their banks.
But the severity of the flooding will be “nothing to compare with” Hurricane Florence, Kruea said, which flooded parts of North and South Carolina last year. Florence moved ashore from the east and brought rain bands that stalled over eastern North Carolina for several days.
With vivid memories of that storm on residents’ minds, people in New Bern, N.C., put sandbags around homes and businesses and moved vehicles to higher ground in preparation for Dorian’s arrival. In some low-lying communities, residents are still living in trailers after Florence damaged or destroyed their homes.
Long before the main effects of Dorian arrived, residents in eastern North Carolina were dealing with tornadoes. It’s common for hurricanes to spin up weak tornadoes, but Dorian appeared to produce especially large and violent twisters — some of which started as waterspouts that were pushed ashore during gripping television news coverage of the storm.
In Emerald Isle, N.C., several buildings and businesses were ripped apart as a tornado briefly slashed across a small water park and a park where people stored mobile homes, sending debris flying across the highway. No injuries were reported.
Carol Hodge, 52, stood over what remained of her recreational vehicle, the smoke detector beeping from inside the rubble. She hoped it would be the first home she could call her own after living in her parents’ house and with friends.
She wasn’t worried at first when she heard about the tornado, figuring it must have been closer to the water. Then she saw the footage on local television and recognized her “little, ugly” green couch lying in the middle of the street. She rushed to the island.
“This was going to be the first time I ever lived in my own place, but maybe it wasn’t meant to be,” said Hodge, a lifelong North Carolinian who planned to ride out the storm in a mobile home community in nearby Swansboro. “I don’t know what I’ll be able to do now.”
(Reis Thebault, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The university’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography claims that the surge may reflect the boom in plastics production that occurred worldwide after the war, largely for use in consumer products, ranging from bottles to clothing.
Much of the so-called microplastic was carried into the ocean by storm runoff or in the flow from wastewater treatment plants, and became embedded in seafloor sediment, said Jennifer Brandon, a Scripps biologist who specializes in plastics.
Brandon and her colleagues examined layers of sediment that covered the period from 1834 to 2010, and published their findings Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“We barely found trace amounts of microplastics in layers from the 1940s,” Brandon told the Union-Tribune. “But you can easily see the plastics in the more recent layers. There’s been an exponential increase.”
Scripps took core samples a few miles from shore, in 1,900 feet of water, at a spot where the physical makeup of the ocean helps to preserve layers of sediment. Most of the plastic fragments are smaller than a piece of lint.
“We’re using more and more of plastic and it’s showing up as a footprint on the seafloor,” Brandon said. “It begs the question: Is this what our civilization is going to be remembered for?”
Not all plastic descends to the seafloor. Much of it floats at or near the surface. Scripps scientists helped clarify this point in 2009 when they conducted a landmark study of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an immense area of debris roughly 1,000 miles off San Diego.
More recently, Scripps researchers discovered microplastics in water up to 3,300 feet off Monterey. And explorer Victor Vescovo found plastic waste at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, the deepest spot on Earth.
Scientists have so far produced only broad estimates of the amount of plastics in the ocean. And there’s no clear consensus of how it’s affecting marine life. Brandon called it “the great unknown.”
(Gary Robbins, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE)
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In a White House video released Wednesday, Trump displays a modified National Hurricane Center “Cone of Uncertainty” forecast, dated 11 a.m. on Thursday, indicating Alabama would be in the path. The graphic appears to have been altered with a Sharpie-type marker to indicate a risk that the storm would move into Alabama from Florida.
“We had actually, our original chart was that it was going to be hit, hitting Florida directly,” Trump said as he displayed the graphic from Thursday, which now includes an added appendage extending the cone into Alabama. “That was the original chart,” Trump said. “It could’ve, uh, was going towards the Gulf,” Trump explained in the video.
Asked about the altered hurricane forecast chart during a White House event on opioids Wednesday afternoon, Trump said his briefings included a “95 percent chance probability” that Alabama would be hit. Asked whether the chart had been drawn on, Trump said: “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Trump’s tweet on Sunday came as Dorian was hitting the Bahamas as a high-end Category 5 hurricane, and it sparked enough public alarm that it prompted the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, Ala., to bluntly tweet 20 minutes later: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”
Photos posted on the White House’s Flickr site reveal that Trump did receive the correct briefing on Thursday from acting NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs, in which the National Hurricane Center’s forecast called for Dorian to hit Florida. Alabama was never included in any National Hurricane Center forecast cone for Dorian.
It is not clear whether Trump was responsible for altering the forecast chart, but the modified photo appeared to show Alabama in Dorian’s eventual path. The National Hurricane Center’s text bulletin at that time included Florida in its discussion five times, but it did not mention Alabama. Instead, the office urged caution from residents in “the Bahamas, Florida, and elsewhere in the southeastern United States.”
When Trump tweeted his original warning to Alabama, the concurrent National Hurricane Center forecast called for Dorian to pass off the Georgia coast, with the center of Dorian’s expected track passing 300 miles east of the Alabama border. The far western extent of the cone was located more than 150 miles east of the Alabama border.
NOAA did not immediately return request for statement surrounding the altered forecast map, which carries the agency’s official logo.
Altering official government weather forecasts isn’t just a cause for concern — it’s actually illegal. Per 18 U.S. Code 2074, which addresses false weather reports, “Whoever knowingly issues or publishes any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both.”
That law applies to what is now known as NOAA’s National Weather Service, which contains the National Hurricane Center.
Separately, Trump on Wednesday denied ever telling Vice President Mike Pence or Attorney General William Barr to use his family-owned properties, but defended him for choosing “the best.”
The president was responding to questions about Pence’s decision to stay at Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg, Ireland, while meeting with Irish leaders in Dublin this week, a more than 180-mile commute.
“I had no involvement, other than it’s a great place,” Trump said. “It wasn’t my idea for Mike to go there.”
On Tuesday, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, said it was Trump who suggested Pence stay at his hotel after he heard that Pence planned to visit family in Doonbeg.
“I don’t suggest anything, nor did I speak to the attorney general about using my hotel,” Trump said, referring to Barr’s plans to host a holiday party at the Trump International Hotel, which is blocks from the White House.
“I have a lot of hotels all over the place, and people, they use them because they’re the best,” he said.
(Matthew Cappucci & Andrew Freedman, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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About 300 firefighters in Riverside County responded to the Tenaja fire, which sent up an eerie and massive plume of smoke at dusk and by nightfall set the hillside aglow. It was 5 percent contained by 8 p.m. in hot and windy conditions on a day marked by thunderstorms in the region. The mandatory evacuation orders included all homes along The Trails Circle in La Cresta, and the Santa Rosa Plateau Visitor Center along Clinton Keith Road. As night fell, residents of Copper Canyon and Bear Creeks were also urged to evacuate.
The fire took hold in heavy brush and was reported about 4 p.m. near Tenaja Road and Clinton Keith Road, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.
Six air tankers and three helicopters were busy throughout the evening dropping water and retardant on the growing blaze.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Dorian had crashed into the island nation as its strongest hurricane on record leaving widespread devastation and at least 20 people dead. But it weakened substantially in the days since, dropping from a Category 5 to a Category 2 storm before increasing again late Wednesday. Dorian still boasted dangerously high winds of 115 mph as it churned north toward the Carolinas while pushing crashing ocean waves onshore.
More than 1,500 people sought refuge in 28 shelters in South Carolina, where sheets of rain began falling late Wednesday in the historic port city of Charleston, located on a peninsula prone to flooding. As Dorian crept dangerously closer, winds picked up sending rain sheets sideways, thunder boomed in the night sky and power flickered on and off in places.
Though weakened, Dorian remained a force to be reckoned with, its swirling circle of winds and rain wrapped around a large, gaping eye visible on photos taken from space. Late Wednesday night, the distinct eye of the hurricane churned about 105 miles south of Charleston, moving north at 7 mph off the coast.
In Charleston’s downtown, stores and restaurants were boarded up with wood and corrugated metal and about 830,000 people were under mandatory evacuation orders on the South Carolina coast.
Hundreds of thousands also were ordered off the Georgia coast. A flood chart posted by the National Weather Service projected a combined high tide and storm surge around Charleston Harbor of 10.3 feet; the record, 12.5 feet, was set by Hugo in 1989.
Georgia’s coastal islands were also at risk, Gov. Brian Kemp said Wednesday, adding “We are very worried, especially about the barrier islands getting cut off.”
The approach of Dorian has left the cobblestone streets of Savannah, Georgia’s downtown historic district largely deserted. But there were still places to find a hurricane party. More than 30 people gathered at Pinkie Master’s Lounge on Wednesday evening, as wind gusts from the offshore hurricane bent tree tops in Savannah — nearly 20 miles inland.
In North Carolina, where authorities said an 85-year-old man died after falling from a ladder while getting ready for Dorian, Gov. Roy Cooper warned of the threat of storm surge and flash flooding from heavy rains. The Outer Banks barrier islands were particularly exposed.
Duke Energy said Dorian could cause more than 700,000 power outages in easternmost parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, and Georgia Power said about 2,800 homes and businesses were already without electricity.
The Navy ordered ships at its huge base in Norfolk, Va., to head to sea for safety, and warplanes at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., were being moved inland. The commander of the Navy Region Mid-Atlantic issued an emergency evacuation order for military personnel and their dependents in five North Carolina counties.
The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Peter Gaynor, said 4,000 federal responders; 6,000 National Guard members; and 40,000 utility workers were on standby.
“We are ready to go,” Gaynor said. “We’ll follow Dorian up the coast until it is not a threat.”
In Florida, initially projected to take a direct hit from Dorian, there was widespread relief Wednesday after the storm passed the state from a relatively safe distance offshore. Orlando, Florida’s international airport reopened, as did Walt Disney World and Universal. But one Florida resident had died while preparing for the storm, a 56-year-old man who was knocked to the ground from a tree Monday evening as he trimmed limbs with a chainsaw in an Orlando suburb.
The hurricane pounded the Bahamas with winds up to 185 mph and torrential rains, swamping neighborhoods in brown floodwaters and destroying or severely damaging, by one estimate, nearly half the homes in Abaco and Grand Bahama islands, which have 70,000 residents.
The Bahamian government sent hundreds of police and marines into the stricken islands, along with doctors, nurses and other health care workers. The U.S. Coast Guard, Britain’s Royal Navy and relief organizations including the United Nations and the Red Cross joined the burgeoning effort to rush food and medicine to survivors and lift the most desperate people to safety by helicopter.
In a late evening news conference, Prime Minister Hubert Minnis tried to strike a hopeful note, saying that aid efforts were getting under way and that “more help is on the way.” He said additional security would be deployed to protect homes and businesses.
Meanwhile, families picked through the ruins of their homes, many of them too overwhelmed to fathom next steps.
Some residents just wanted to know the fate of loved ones.
Antonia Nixon, 19, stood at a private terminal where relief missions were concentrated in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, hoping that relatives would be among the passengers brought in on helicopter evacuation flights Wednesday morning.
They live in northern Abaco, she said, where there has been a practical communications blackout since the storm hit.
“My house is gone, and I’m in Nassau and I have no clue what my family is doing,” she said, breaking into sobs. “I just want help.”
Long lists of the missing circulated on social media groups, where families logged updates in real time.
“Mr. Atkinson contacted his son to let them know they are all alive,” read one entry for a family on Grand Bahama. Others were more worrying: “Have you seen or heard from my son Raynor?” wrote his mother, Sheron Johnson.
The montage of grief and fear was matched in its intensity by the wreckage left behind. From the air, the scene in the islands was a grim study in contrasts.
In Marsh Harbour, the largest city in Abaco, residences lay in ruins, while the estates at Baker’s Bay appeared unscathed.
On Grand Bahama, the water had receded, revealing in its wake widespread decimation. Parts of Freetown were in shambles, and communications were spotty, leaving many to wonder about the fate of relatives and loved ones.
Rashema Ingraham, a resident of Freeport and the executive director of Save the Bays, a Bahamian environmental organization, struggled to grasp the extent of the damage.
“We’re just trying to wrap our minds around the recovery efforts,” she said. “Everybody is pretty much shellshocked.”
(Meg Kinnard, ASSOCIATED PRESS; THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The National Hurricane Center warned Tuesday night that within the next 36 hours, most of the Southeast coast, from Jupiter in central Florida all the way to Surf City, N.C., faced “a danger of life-threatening inundation, from rising water moving inland from the coastline.” Storm surge warnings were posted for that whole region.
“Water levels could begin to rise well in advance of the arrival of strong winds,” the center warned, adding that the surge would be accompanied by large and destructive waves. In some places on the coast, seawater could rise to 7 feet above normal tidal levels.
Dorian’s fury as it stalled over the northwestern Bahamas left shocking scenes of destruction and fears of a massive loss of life. Authorities said Tuesday that nearly three out of every four homes on Grand Bahama are underwater, and recovery from the catastrophic damage will cost billions of dollars.
An even grimmer spectacle lies to the east, where the first aerial images of the island of Great Abaco since the storm’s retreat showed a pulverized landscape that is little more than a debris field.
Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, with houses turned to rubble. Cars and huge metal shipping containers have been scattered by a storm surge that meteorologists report might have reached 23 feet on islands and cays that are modestly above sea level. The ocean became, in effect, a bulldozer.
Winds that gusted to 220 mph lifted boats from their moorings and tossed them onto what used to be dry land. Roads and airports in the northwestern Bahamas remain impassably flooded, and large portions of the islands have become, for now, little more than extensions of the Atlantic.
Dorian Tuesday night was moving at 6 mph, toward the northwest, and it was expected to keep up that speed or gain a little more overnight, the hurricane center said. Its maximum sustained winds remained steady at 110 mph. By late tonight, the storm was expected to turn to a more northerly track.
With the center of the storm about 100 miles east of Melbourne, Fla., Dorian was whipping Florida on Tuesday evening with tropical-storm-force winds, which extended out about 175 miles from the center. A tornado or two near the coast of Florida was possible, the center said. The storm’s stronger hurricane-force winds, which extended about 60 miles from the center, remained some hours away from reaching the mainland but were likely to do so overnight.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard sent seven helicopters to the Bahamas to help with rescue efforts, but the continued severe weather was making it difficult for them to reach the hardest-hit islands, Rear Adm. Todd Sokalzuk said Tuesday.
Sokalzuk, the deputy commander of the Coast Guard’s Atlantic Area, said that about 35 people had been evacuated by helicopter from Marsh Harbour, the main town in the Abaco Islands. Some had been injured by the storm; others were patients hospitalized at a local clinic that was damaged.
Low visibility and high turbulence have thwarted helicopters from getting to Grand Bahama Island despite two days of trying, the admiral said. “At this point we have only been getting somewhat west of the Abacos,” the admiral said. “We are very anxious for the weather to clear to get into Grand Bahama.”
The admiral said airports on both Grand Bahama and Great Abaco were still awash with seawater, and roads had been washed out. “Based on the devastation we have seen in the Abacos, we think it will probably be worse in Grand Bahama,” he added. “Because the storm sat there for so long, there is probably increased damage. There are potentially more people that need assistance.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection also sent a helicopter and, at the request of the Bahamian government, is helping to ferry Royal Bahamian Police Force officers to the affected islands and then evacuate injured people on the return trip, the admiral said.
Sokalzuk said the Coast Guard was being bombarded with calls asking the agency to check on the welfare of loved ones in the islands, hampering the agency’s efforts. He said all such requests from private American citizens should be sent to the State Department instead, by emailing CA-CCM-Dorian@state.gov. Americans overseas who need assistance can call the State Department at 1 (202) 501-4444.
Hurricane Dorian, now a Category 2 storm, is finally inching away from the Bahamas, where rescue missions were hampered Tuesday because so many police and government vehicles are submerged in seawater that is only just beginning to recede.
The storm, which hit the northern Bahamas as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, has pummeled the islands for more than two days with unrelenting rain and wind, and has killed at least seven people there. It is highly unusual for a storm of Dorian’s magnitude to halt and hover over land, as it did in the Bahamas.
By Tuesday evening, its center had moved nearly 100 miles north of Grand Bahama Island and was creeping northwest. But tropical storm conditions were not expected to end in the Grand Bahama area for several more hours, said Kevin Harris, director general of the Bahamas Information Center.
Emergency offices received at least 200 frantic calls from people stranded on their rooftops or attics. Responders were trying to help after the eye passed over the island, but “some of the bigger vehicles, dump trucks and fire engines are trying to get through the water,” Harris said.
There was so much water that government offices, including the government radio station, had to move out of the lower floors of buildings. A government minister who was stuck in his flooded home was rescued, Harris said.
“Some folks were in more of a desperate situation than others,” he said. “We are seeing unprecedented levels of water.”
He said there was deep concern for the Abaco Islands, which took the full brunt of the hurricane, because many Haitian migrants live there in two shantytowns, known as the Mud and Pigeon Peas. Videos showed stunned residents of the island looking at crumpled cars, smashed homes, piles of debris and contorted trees.
“We are already hearing from residents that whole towns have been wiped out and devastated,” Harris said. “This is going to be a big search-and-rescue and rebuilding effort. I don’t think we have seen anything as bad as this. This one is for the history books.”
Forecasters said the hurricane would move “dangerously close” to the Florida coast, beginning late Tuesday night and continuing through this evening. Then it is expected to move northward to affect the Georgia and South Carolina coasts beginning late today. By the end of the week it is expected to be shadowing the coasts of North Carolina and Virginia.
Even if the hurricane’s center does not cross the coastline, powerful winds and rain are all but certain to disrupt life in the region. The storm has grown in size as it has weakened in strength, and its hurricane-force winds were extending outward as far as 60 miles from its center Tuesday, up from 45 miles Sunday. Winds of tropical-storm force extended as far as 175 miles from the center.
Much of Florida’s eastern coast is also likely to be hit with dangerous storm surges.
A spokesman for Florida Power & Light, the state’s giant utility, said it had restored electricity for some 70,000 customers through 4 p.m. Tuesday. Most of the disruptions had been caused by windblown trees and vegetation falling on lines and equipment, the utility said.
(Patricia Mazzei & Frances Robles, THE NEW YORK TIMES; THE WASHINGTON POST)
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With the storm expected to churn a menacing path toward the United States, forecasters warned that it could inflict serious damage from Florida to southeastern Virginia and possibly beyond. Forecasters moved the storm’s much-watched “cone of uncertainty” slightly eastward Monday, but they emphasized that even a minor change could bring the storm onto the U.S. coast.
The island of Grand Bahama was subjected to a particularly brutal pummeling as the hurricane came to a near-standstill for most of the day, spewing sustained winds as high as 180 mph during the day.
“We are in the midst of a historic tragedy in parts of the northern Bahamas,” Prime Minister Hubert A. Minnis said at a news conference late Monday afternoon. “Our mission and focus now is search, rescue and recovery. I ask for your prayers for those in affected areas and for our first responders.”
On the Abaco Islands, to the east of Grand Bahama, thousands of homes were believed to be damaged or destroyed. The prime minister said the five deaths happened on those islands, which were mauled by Dorian over the weekend and were still being lashed by the storm’s outer bands Monday.
Officials said it was too early to fully assess the damage because wind and rain were making it difficult to reach many of the smaller islands. The U.S. Coast Guard deployed helicopters and by Monday afternoon had landed in Marsh Harbour, Abaco’s main town, to conduct rescues, a spokesman said.
Dorian hit Grand Bahama late Sunday as a Category 5 hurricane and then was downgraded Monday morning by the National Hurricane Center in Miami to Category 4. Forecasters described it as “extremely dangerous.”
Dorian’s menace lay in the slowness of the its passage: Its heavy rains had more time to produce flooding, its winds more time to batter and weaken structures. As it traveled west, it slowed to just 1 mph and then slowed further, pummeling the islands from a near standstill.
Caribbean disaster response managers said that they might not be able to send teams to Abaco and Grand Bahama until Wednesday, when the hurricane conditions were forecast to ease.
“It will delay any ability to get into these two islands and to collect specific information on the level of impact,” Ronald Jackson, executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, said at a news conference.
With phone, Internet and power lines down in many places, communication with the islands was difficult and firsthand accounts from eyewitnesses rare.
But even so, “it is clear that Hurricane Dorian has had a catastrophic impact,” said Sune Bulow, head of the emergency operation center of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Bulow said his group anticipated widespread demand for shelter, economic support, clean water and health care.
The International Red Cross said Monday that as many as 13,000 houses may have been severely damaged or destroyed and that flooding on the Abaco Islands is believed to have contaminated wells with saltwater.
Michael Scott, chairman of the government-owned Grand Lucayan Resort and Casino on Grand Bahama, called the storm “apocalyptic” and “a truly cataclysmic event.”
His beachfront hotel, he reported, was operating as a refuge because many of the structures that were originally designated as shelters in Freeport, the island’s main city, were damaged.
Throughout the day Monday, rescue teams brought in families seeking sanctuary in the hotel’s ballrooms, convention center and guest rooms.
“It’s catastrophic and horrible,” Scott said, “and we’re trying to ensure that people are able to exist with some degree of comfort.”
One resident of Great Abaco island posted a harrowing video Monday showing water gushing along a roadway and extensive damage inside apartments. She said the storm had pried the roof off her building.
“Please pray for us,” she said. “We’re stuck right here. My baby’s only 4 months old.”
Another video that circulated widely on social media captured the storm surge heaving against the windows of the flooded home of the Bahama’s agriculture and marine resources minister, Michael Pintard.
“That’s the water hitting my front-room window, which is extremely high,” Pintard narrates as the camera pans around his home. “That’s my kitchen window: That water is hitting and that has to be a minimum of about 20 feet off the ground.”
In a telephone interview, Pintard said that he, his wife and his daughter were trapped in the attic, looking out over the roof-high waters that had swept over their neighborhood. A couple of rescue attempts had failed to reach him, he said. But he was more concerned about his neighbors in single-story houses.
“I know that it was dire for them,” he said.
Relatives and friends of people who had remained on the islands scoured social media and news sites, trying to sift through rumors in search of solid information.
“Checking on Capt. Plug and Debbie and family? Any news?” wrote Sean Fletcher to the Facebook page of a volunteer fire and rescue unit in Hope Town, a settlement on Elbow Cay, an islet in the Abaco Islands.
“I’m trying to reach my brother, Pherrol Duncombe, the chef at the Harbour Lodge,” wrote Ohemaa Tamara. “If you have any information please let me know.”
There were nuggets of good news amid the fear and worry.
“PRAISE GOD!” exclaimed Karen Huff-Lowe in a post to the Facebook page of the Hope Town Bulletin Group. “I just got confirmation my family, Robert, Mercedes, Bessie and Maity are all OK. They think everyone else on the island is too but communication limited.”
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The Category 5 storm next threatens to bring hurricane-force winds, coastal flooding and heavy rain to the east coast of Florida and the southeastern U.S.
The storm is generating “catastrophic” winds and storm surge in the northern Bahamas, where up to 30 inches of rain could fall.
As the storm closes in on Florida’s east coast, the National Hurricane Center has posted hurricane and storm surge warnings for some areas. The storm surge warning spans from near West Palm Beach to Titusville. In some areas the surge could reach 4 to 7 feet, the Hurricane Center projects.
These warnings are focused on the period from tonight through early Wednesday. Tropical-storm-force winds could begin in South Florida as soon as today.
Beyond Florida, Dorian will take aim at coastal Georgia and the Carolinas from Wednesday through Friday. “There is an increasing likelihood of strong winds and dangerous storm surge along the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina later this week,” the Hurricane Center wrote. “Residents in these areas should continue to monitor the progress of Dorian and listen to advice given by local emergency officials.”
While Florida and areas farther north await effects from the monster storm, a “catastrophic” scenario is unfolding in the northwestern Bahamas, where the storm’s eyewall, the ring of destructive winds around the center, struck Sunday. On Great Abaco, the Hurricane Center warned of a “life-threatening situation.”
On Sunday night, as the storm’s eyewall pushed west “with all its fury toward Grand Bahama,” according to the Hurricane Center, the storm was predicted to unleash wind gusts over 220 mph, along with storm surge flooding of 18 to 23 feet above normal tide levels.
“These hazards will cause extreme destruction in the affected areas and will continue for several hours,” the Hurricane Center stated.
The storm’s core of devastating wind and torrential rain, totaling up to 30 inches, may sit for at least 24 hours over the northern Bahamas as steering currents in the atmosphere collapse, causing Dorian to meander slowly, if not stall outright, for a time.
The storm — depending on its exact track over the northern Bahamas, particularly Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands — could reshape these locations for decades.
As of 10 p.m., the storm was 60 miles east of Freeport on Grand Bahama Island and was crawling west at 5 mph. The storm’s peak winds are 185 mph, and Dorian has maintained Category 4 and now Category 5 intensity for an unusually long period.
Storms this powerful typically tend to undergo cycles that weaken their high-end winds for a time, but Dorian has avoided this dynamic.
After models run early Saturday projected the storm track to go offshore Florida, some that were run late Saturday into Sunday forecast it closer to the Florida coast.
Dorian has grown, which may have implications for the Florida forecast. Hurricane-force winds now extend outward, up to 45 miles from the center, and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 140 miles. The latest forecast from the Hurricane Center calls for Dorian to remain a Category 5 storm for 24 hours before slowly weakening, but remaining a formidable hurricane, as it moves close to Florida and northward to the Carolinas.
Because the storm is predicted to be a slow mover, effects from wind, rain and storm surge could be prolonged, lingering through the middle of the week on Florida’s east coast.
Irrespective of the storm’s ultimate course near Florida’s east coast to the North Carolina Outer Banks — or even inland — significant coastal flooding is likely because of the force of Dorian’s winds and astronomically high or king tides.
The risk of a direct strike on Florida is less than it was a few days ago but has not been eliminated. Much depends on the strength of the high-pressure area that has been pushing Dorian west, toward the northern Bahamas and Florida.
Most models show steering currents collapsing as Dorian nears Florida, before it gets scooped up by a dip in the jet stream approaching the East Coast and starts turning north.
However, this collapse in steering currents is so close to Florida that some models continue to track the storm close enough for damage in parts of the state.
However, a few models do bring it inland or come perilously close. And there is time for the models to shift further — either closer to Florida and the Carolinas or farther out to sea.
The latest storm surge forecast for Florida shows that if the peak surge occurs at the time of high tide, parts of the state could see up to 7 feet of water above ground.
Farther north into coastal Georgia and the Carolinas, the forecast is also a nail-biter. Just small differences in where the storm starts to turn north and, eventually, northeast and the shape of the turn will determine where and whether Dorian makes landfall.
Scenarios involving a direct hit, a graze and a near miss appear equally likely based on available forecasts.
The shape of the coastline from northern Florida through the Carolinas means there is a risk of significant storm-surge flooding there even if the storm’s center remains just offshore.
However, unlike with notorious recent storms such as Matthew and Florence, it’s unlikely that the Carolinas will experience devastating rainfall amounts from Hurricane Dorian, as the storm will pick up forward speed on nearing the Carolinas.
Dorian is tied for the second-strongest storm (as judged by its maximum sustained winds) ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, behind Hurricane Allen of 1980, and, after striking the northern Bahamas, tied with the 1935 Labor Day hurricane for the title of the strongest Atlantic hurricane at landfall.
Dorian is the second Category 5 hurricane to make landfall in the Bahamas since 1983, according to Phil Klotzbach, a researcher at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science. The only other is Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The international hurricane database goes back to 1983.
The storm’s peak sustained winds rank as the strongest so far north in the Atlantic Ocean east of Florida on record. Its pressure, which bottomed out at 910 millibars, is significantly lower than Hurricane Andrew’s when it made landfall in South Florida in 1992 (the lower the pressure, the stronger the storm).
With Dorian attaining Category 5 strength, this is the first time since the start of the satellite era in the 1960s that Category 5 storms have developed in the tropical Atlantic in four consecutive years, according to tropical weather expert Brian McNoldy.
(Andrew Freedman & Jason Samenow, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The storm’s winds rose to 130 mph and then, hours later, to a howling 140 mph as Dorian gained strength while crossing warm Atlantic waters. The hurricane could wallop the state with even higher winds and torrential rains late Monday or early Tuesday, with millions of people in the crosshairs, along with Walt Disney World and President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Though Dorian is growing in intensity, some of the more reliable computer models predicted a late turn northward that would have Dorian hug the coast, the National Hurricane Center said.
“There is hope,” Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters said.
The faint hope came on a day in which Dorian seemed to get scarier with each forecast update, growing from a dangerous Category 3 hurricane to an even more menacing Category 4 storm. And there were fears it could prove to be the most powerful hurricane to hit Florida’s east coast in nearly 30 years.
Late Friday, the National Hurricane Center’s projected new track showed Dorian hitting near Fort Pierce, some 70 miles north of Mar-a-Lago, then running along the coastline as it moved north. But forecasters cautioned that the storm’s track was still highly uncertain and even a small deviation could put Dorian offshore or well inland.
Trump declared a state of emergency in Florida and authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster-relief efforts.
“This is big and is growing, and it still has some time to get worse,” Julio Vasquez said at a Miami fast-food joint next to a gas station that had run out of fuel. “No one knows what can really happen. This is serious.”
As Dorian closed in, it upended people’s Labor Day weekend plans. Major airlines began allowing travelers to change their reservations without a fee. The big cruise lines began rerouting their ships.
Homeowners and businesses rushed to cover their windows with plywood. Supermarkets ran out of bottled water, and long lines formed at gas stations, with fuel shortages reported in places. The governor said the Florida Highway Patrol would begin escorting fuel trucks to help them get past the lines of waiting motorists and replenish gas stations.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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State Water Resources Control Board said some areas of at least 10 lakes and reservoirs have a “danger” level of algal toxin, which can make people sick and kill animals.
The board released a map of the lakes and reservoirs with a dangerous level of toxic algae, which includes Big Bear Lake, Lake Elsinore, Lake Isabella, San Luis Reservoir and Almaden Lake.
Officials are recommending people and their pets and livestock stay out of the water and avoid drinking it until further notice.
Algae blooms that produce toxins and can sicken swimmers and harm fish are becoming an increasing concern nationwide, causing water warnings this year throughout the country.
In North Carolina, dog owner Melissa Martin said three of her dogs died earlier this month following a swim in a pond in Wilmington that contained blue-green algae.
Martin said she took her west highland white terriers to the pond on Aug. 8 and they began seizing when they returned home. They were taken to an animal emergency room but died the next day.
Commonly known as blue-green algae, cyanobacteria produce toxins that on humans can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, irritated eyes, seizures and breathing problems.
Cyanobacteria occur naturally in many freshwater systems and can proliferate rapidly under the right conditions of shallow water, warm weather, plentiful sunshine and still, nutrient-rich water.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Leaving lighter-than-expected damage in its wake in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, the second hurricane of the 2019 season swirled toward the U.S., with forecasters warning it will draw energy from the warm, open waters as it closes in.
The National Hurricane Center said the Category 1 storm is expected to strengthen into a potentially catastrophic Category 4 with winds of 130 mph and slam into the U.S. on Monday somewhere between the Florida Keys and southern Georgia — a 500-mile stretch that reflected the high degree of uncertainty this far out.
“If it makes landfall as a Category 3 or 4 hurricane, that’s a big deal,” said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. “A lot of people are going to be affected. A lot of insurance claims.”
President Donald Trump canceled his weekend trip to Poland and warned Florida residents to be prepared.
“All indications are it’s going to hit very hard and it’s going to be very big,” Trump said in a video he tweeted Thursday evening, comparing Dorian to Hurricane Andrew, which devastated South Florida in 1992.
With the storm’s track still unclear, no immediate mass evacuations were ordered.
Along Florida’s east coast, local governments began distributing sandbags, shoppers rushed to stock up on food, plywood and other emergency supplies at supermarkets and hardware stores, and motorists topped off their tanks and filled gasoline cans. Some fuel shortages were reported in the Cape Canaveral area.
Josefine Larrauri, a retired translator, went to a Publix supermarket in Miami only to find empty shelves in the water section and store employees unsure of when more cases would arrive.
“I feel helpless because the whole coast is threatened,” she said. “What’s the use of going all the way to Georgia if it can land there?”
Tiffany Miranda of Miami Springs waited well over 30 minutes in line at BJ’s Wholesale Club in Hialeah to buy hurricane supplies. Some 50 vehicles were bumper-to-bumper, waiting to fill up at the store’s 12 gas pumps.
“You never know with these hurricanes. It could be good, it could be bad. You just have to be prepared,” she said.
As of Thursday evening, Dorian was centered about 330 miles east of the Bahamas, its winds blowing at 85 mph as it moved northwest at 13 mph.
Forecasters said coastal areas of the Southeast could get 5 to 10 inches of rain, with 15 inches in some places, triggering life-threatening flash floods.
Also imperiled were the Bahamas, with Dorian’s expected track running just to the north of Great Abaco and Grand Bahama islands.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Dorian has been unpredictable, frustrating forecasters and paralyzing Puerto Ricans for days as they watched the storm track shift toward the island. At one point, it looked as if Dorian would cut an eerily parallel path to Maria’s destruction, albeit with far less intensity. Puerto Ricans lined up outside big-box stores to stock up on supplies and swamped a mental health hotline to get help with their anxiety.
“So many people are hysterical, and it’s because Maria was strong,” said Carmen Vargas, 54, a resident of rural Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, near San Juan, the capital, as she vividly recalled the 2017 storm. “Even though we know it’s not the same, the memories come back, and the wounds reopen.”
By Wednesday morning, the eye of the storm had veered toward the Virgin Islands, where Dorian’s drenching rain and whipping winds surprised residents who felt unprepared to face the Category 1 hurricane. By Wednesday evening, the storm was 90 miles north of San Juan and growing in strength. It is expected to strengthen into a Category 3 hurricane that could begin battering the east coast of Florida as early as the weekend.
The period between mid-August through mid-October is the most active time of the Atlantic hurricane season.
“We’ve done this before,” said Mayor Lenny Curry of Jacksonville, Fla., a city that sustained heavy damage from flooding two years ago during Hurricane Irma. “We’ve been through this together. This is no time to panic.”
Officials in Puerto Rico, home to some 3.2 million people, felt relief that Dorian, which swiped the island municipality of Culebra, mostly spared the main island. Stronger winds would have further tested Puerto Rico’s revamped electrical grid, which collapsed after Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 left the entire island without power.
“The electrical grid is held together with tape,” said Mayor María Meléndez of Ponce, on the south side of the island.
The grid remains fragile and prone to power losses. Some 30,000 people still have blue tarps, which were supposed to be temporary, as roofs. Hurricane Maria has been blamed for the deaths of an estimated 2,975 people.
On Wednesday, a man died in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, said Elmer Román, Puerto Rico’s secretary of public safety. The man, who was 80, fell from a ladder as he tried to reach his roof to clear drains ahead of the storm, El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s largest newspaper, reported.
As Puerto Ricans worried about the storm, President Donald Trump continued his long-running verbal war with the island’s leaders. On Tuesday, Trump approved Puerto Rico’s request for an emergency declaration, authorizing federal coordination of relief efforts and assistance. But in a series of Twitter posts Wednesday, Trump assailed Puerto Rico as “one of the most corrupt places on earth.”
“Their political system is broken and their politicians are either Incompetent or Corrupt,” he wrote.
He singled out Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan, with whom he sparred repeatedly after Hurricane Maria. She responded with a tweet of her own: “Maybe Trump will understand this time around THIS IS NOT ABOUT HIM; THIS IS NOT ABOUT POLITICS; THIS IS ABOUT SAVING LIVES.”
Dorian proved to be maddeningly difficult to forecast, as often happens with compact, disorganized storms.
Mountains in the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia broke up the storm’s center Tuesday, and when it formed again, it had moved 30 miles north. Dorian’s path had shifted from the west side of Puerto Rico to just off the eastern coast, said Mike Brennan, branch chief of the Hurricane Specialist Unit at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
“That changed the whole trajectory of the track,” Brennan said.
Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. of the U.S. Virgin Islands issued a territory-wide curfew for its 105,000 residents until this morning, and Trump declared an emergency there, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide equipment and resources for relief efforts.
Electricity went out throughout the islands, where nearly 3,000 homes were still in need of repair after the 2017 hurricanes, said Stacey Plaskett, the Virgin Islands’ delegate to Congress.
The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority said Wednesday evening that crews were assessing the electrical grid to see if Dorian had caused damage. The agency said service in much of the territory remained on during the storm, and that power was already being restored in parts of St. Thomas that experienced outages.
“Although this is not a large hurricane, we’re in such a compromised position as it is,” Plaskett said from Christiansted, on St. Croix, where she described seeing swaying trees, dark skies and rain. She said many people had stayed inside since the morning. They recalled what they were doing around this time two years ago, amid the devastation from Irma and Maria.
The islands’ two largest hospitals — on St. Thomas and St. Croix — were operating with half of their buildings damaged, Plaskett said. On St. Croix, she said, only one operating room was open.
“We’re in a very fragile kind of state,” she said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida declared an emergency Wednesday afternoon for counties in the storm’s path even though landfall was not expected until Monday morning. The lack of clarity on Dorian’s route forced precaution along Florida’s East Coast everywhere from Miami to Jacksonville.
“Because of the uncertainty in the track of this storm, every resident along the East Coast needs to be ready,” Jared Moskowitz, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said in a statement.
(Patricia Mazzei & Mitch Smith, THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it up to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the “roadless rule” that has survived a decades-long legal assault.
Trump has taken a personal interest in “forest management,” a term he told a group of lawmakers last year he has “redefined” since taking office.
Politicians have tussled for years over the fate of the Tongass, a massive stretch of southeastern Alaska replete with old-growth spruce, hemlock and cedar, rivers running with salmon, and dramatic fjords. President Bill Clinton put more than half of it off limits to logging just days before leaving office in 2001, when he barred the construction of roads in 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest across the country. President George W. Bush sought to reverse that policy, holding a handful of timber sales in the Tongass before a federal judge reinstated the Clinton rule.
Trump’s decision to weigh in, at a time when Forest Service officials had planned much more modest changes to managing the agency’s single largest holding, revives a battle that the previous administration had aimed to settle.
In 2016, the agency finalized a plan to phase out old-growth logging in the Tongass within a decade. Congress has designated more than 5.7 million acres of the forest as wilderness, which must remain undeveloped under any circumstances.
Timber provides a small fraction of southeast Alaska’s jobs — just under 1 percent, according to the regional development organization Southeast Conference, compared with seafood processing’s 8 percent and tourism’s 17 percent.
But Alaskans, including Republican Gov. Michael Dunleavy and GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski have pressed Trump to exempt their state from the roadless rule, which does not allow roads except when the Forest Service approves specific projects. It bars commercial logging.
It is unclear how much logging would take place in the Tongass if federal restrictions were lifted, since the Forest Service would have to amend its existing management plan to hold a new timber sale. The 2016 plan identified 962,000 acres as suitable for commercial timber and suggested no more than 568,000 acres of that should be logged.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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At least 38,793 fires were burning across the country as of the weekend, and a total of 3,700 square miles had been burned so far this year, according to Cliver Rocha, director of the national Forests and Lands Authority.
While some of the fires were burning in Bolivia’s share of the Amazon, the largest blazes were in the Chiquitania region of southeastern Bolivia, a zone of dry forest, farmland and open prairies that has seen an expansion of farming and ranching in recent years.
The College of Biologists in the capital, La Paz, has estimated that the fires have destroyed $1.1 billion worth of timber.
Yanine Rubi Montero said the fires burned away the lemon trees her family depended on near the rural town of Robore. They were left without water as well because the blaze destroyed a plastic pipe that ran to a well. One neighbor fled with just the clothes on her back, Montero said.
“The smoke is making us sick and the lack of water is really affecting us,” she said.
President Evo Morales, who has been under criticism for an allegedly slow response to the fires, was in the region on Tuesday overseeing firefighting efforts involving more than 3,500 people, including soldiers, police and volunteers.
The government last week contracted the world’s largest firefighting tanker plane from the United States, and officials say it has helped control expansion of the fires, but hot, dry and windy conditions have kept the blazes burning. Peru on Tuesday contributed to the effort by sending two helicopter tankers.
The Bolivian Friends of Nature Foundation has complained that the government ignored fire precautions needed at a time when the area — unlike the Amazon further north — is suffering drought conditions.
Morales in July issued a decree allowing controlled burns and clearing of lands. While people are supposed to obtain prior permission, authorities say most of the fires have been started illegally.
Morales also granted an amnesty for people caught burning fields illegally last year.
Despite a campaign by environmentalists to have the measures overturned, Environment Minister Carlos Ortuno said the government didn’t believe that was necessary.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Hardest-hit was Arganda del Rey, a neighborhood about 10 miles southeast of downtown Madrid, the capital.
A hailstorm reportedly lasted about 20 minutes, and nearly 10,000 lightning strikes were reported in a six-hour window, according to El Pais, amid storms that ground two metro lines in the city to a halt.
Exceptionally heavy rainfall turned Calle Juan de la Cierva, a historic one-lane street in Arganda del Rey’s Gran Habitat district, into a raging river. Videos show cars and furniture carried by the rapids, the swiftly moving current sweeping away any objects in its path.
Meanwhile, tornadoes spun up in Campillos, a town in the municipality of Malaga in southern Spain.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The move comes amid an intensifying battle between Democrats and President Donald Trump over the administration’s response to the flow of migrants and asylum seekers from Central America into the United States.
It also comes as a hurricane watch has been issued for Puerto Rico ahead of Tropical Storm Dorian, which could force the Federal Emergency Management Agency to tap the relief funds.
Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Commerce, chairwoman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security, said the move was indicative of “a growing disconnect between the will of Congress” and the implementation of immigration enforcement operations.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, called the administration’s action “stunningly reckless,” adding that “to pick the pockets of disaster relief funding in order to fund an appalling, inhumane family incarceration plan is staggering.” And Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the move “backwards and cruel.”
“Taking these critical funds from disaster preparedness and recovery efforts threatens lives and weakens the government’s ability to help Americans in the wake of natural disasters,” he said.
On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security said that it has notified Congress that it would “reprogram” and transfer $271 million from some agencies to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DHS agency that detains and deports immigrants.
DHS said it would spend $116 million of the transferred funds on adult detention beds and transportation costs. An additional $155 million will fund temporary hearing facilities on the southwest border for migrants enrolled in the Migrant Protection Protocol program, which has required thousands of asylum seekers from Central America, the Caribbean and elsewhere to remain in Mexico until their immigration court dates.
Officials said they transferred the funds in part because Congress didn’t provide them with funding for adult detention beds in the emergency supplemental budget that Trump signed in July.
“Given the rise of single adults crossing the border, ICE has already had to increase the number of detention beds above what Congress funded,” Homeland Security said in a statement. Without extra money, officials said, “ICE will not be able to support the influx of migrants” at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The shifting of funds also comes as Trump, eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election, has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.
He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.
Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of “Finish the Wall!” at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed about 60 miles of “replacement” barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.
The president has told senior aides that a failure to deliver on the signature promise of his 2016 campaign would be a letdown to his supporters and an embarrassing defeat. With the election 14 months away and hundreds of miles of fencing plans still in blueprint form, Trump has held regular White House meetings for progress updates and to hasten the pace, according to several people involved in the discussions.
When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.
“Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” he has told officials in meetings about the wall.
“He said people expected him to build a wall, and it had to be done by the election,” one former official said.
Asked for comment, a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Trump is joking when he makes such statements about pardons.
Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said Tuesday that the president is protecting the country with the addition of new border barriers.
“Donald Trump promised to secure our border with sane, rational immigration policies to make American communities safer, and that’s happening everywhere the wall is being built,” Gidley said.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper is expected to approve a White House request to divert $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to the barrier project in coming weeks, money that Trump sought after lawmakers refused to allocate $5 billion. The funds will be pulled from Defense Department projects in 26 states, according to administration officials who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the matter.
Charanya Krishnaswami, Amnesty International USA advocacy director for the Americas, called the transfers “an outrageous misuse of resources.”
“At the start of hurricane season, DHS is robbing hundreds of millions of dollars from disaster relief to fund a disaster of its own making,” Krishnaswami said in a statement. “It is using vital funds to further some of its cruelest policies — putting asylum-seekers in harm’s way and detaining families and children in search of safety.”
ICE is holding more than 54,000 migrants in immigration jails, and almost all are adults, according to its count as of Saturday. Most detainees are recent arrivals taken into custody at the border, and have not been convicted of a crime, according to ICE statistics online.
In a letter to acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, Roybal-Allard said she has “significant concerns” about the intended use of funds as well as about the “trade-offs between that use and the activities that would otherwise be funded from the source accounts.”
The DHS has not provided “any analysis to demonstrate that the movement of funds is justified,” she said in the letter, which was sent last Friday.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, also criticized the move, warning that “taking money away from TSA and from FEMA in the middle of hurricane season could have deadly consequences.”
“Once again this Administration is flouting the law and Congressional intent to fund its extremist indefinite detention immigration policies,” he said in a statement Tuesday. “This is reckless and the Administration is playing with fire — all in the name of locking up families and children and playing to the President’s base leading up to an election year.”
It is not uncommon for unassigned funds to be transferred between agencies under the same department as the fiscal year ends. Last year around the same time, about $200 million was transferred, including $10 million from FEMA that prompted major criticism from Democrats.
(Felicia Sonmez & Maria Sacchetti, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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Prime Minister Mia Mottley closed schools and government offices across Barbados as she warned people to remain indoors.
“When you’re dead, you’re dead,” she said in a televised address late Sunday. “Stay inside and get some rest.”
The U.S. National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane watch for St. Lucia and a tropical storm warning for Barbados, Martinique, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It also issued a tropical storm watch for Dominica, Grenada, Saba and St. Eustatius. The storm was expected to dump between 3 and 8 inches of rain in Barbados and nearby islands, with isolated amounts of 10 inches.
In St. Lucia, Prime Minister Allen Chastanet announced that everything on the island of nearly 179,000 people has been shut down.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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In Arizona, the annual number of deaths attributed to heat exposure more than tripled, to 235 in 2017 from 76 in 2014, according to figures obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heat-related deaths in Nevada rose almost fivefold during the same period, to 139 from 29.
Most of those deaths were in the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas, according to state records.
The long-term health effects of rising temperatures and heat waves are expected to be one of the most dangerous consequences of climate change, causing “tens of thousands of additional premature deaths per year across the United States by the end of this century,” according to the federal government’s Global Change Research Program. The effect could be even more severe in other parts of the world, potentially making parts of North Africa and the Middle East “uninhabitable.”
Still, the fact that deaths have already increased so rapidly in Nevada and Arizona is surprising, according to David Hondula, a professor at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. He said heat deaths have generally been declining in the United States, thanks to changes like better health care, more air-conditioning and improved weather forecasting.
The latest data, which the CDC has compiled for all 50 states, suggests that climate change could be starting to outweigh those advances in the Southwest, at least for some parts of the population. Other states haven’t yet shown such significant spikes, but Hondula warned they might eventually see more deaths as temperatures keep rising.
“Phoenix and other cities of the Southwest are the canary in the coal mine,” Hondula said. “We really need to figure out what piece or pieces of the system are lacking.”
Afternoon highs in Phoenix last summer averaged 106 degrees Fahrenheit, almost 3 degrees hotter than the average for the second half of the 20th century, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Las Vegas recorded its hottest summer to date, with average daily highs reaching 105 degrees, more than 5 degrees above the 1950-2000 mean.
Nighttime lows have warmed up, too, giving residents less chance to recover from the heat.
“There’s only so much our bodies can take,” said Rupa Basu, chief of the air and climate epidemiological section for the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment in California.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Three proposals covering the international trade of 18 types of mako sharks, wedgefishes and guitarfishes each passed with a needed two-thirds majority in a committee of the World Wildlife Conference known as CITES on Sunday.
“Today we are one step closer to protecting the fastest shark in the ocean, as well as the most threatened,” said Jen Sawada, who directs The Pew Charitable Trusts’ shark conservation work. The measures don’t ban fishing these sharks and rays, but any trade must be sustainable.
The move isn’t final but is a key sign before an official decision at its plenary this coming week.
Conservationists applauded and exchanged hugs after the tallies. Opponents variously included China, Iceland, Japan, Malaysia and New Zealand. The U.S. voted against the mako shark measure, but supported the other two.
Critics variously argued that the measures distanced CITES from its initial mandate to protect endangered land animals and plants, not marine life, and insisted the science didn’t back up the call to increase protections. They also noted that that millions of Mako sharks exist, and even the CITES secretariat advised against the protections.
But proponents countered that stocks of sharks are in a deep dive, with tens of millions killed each year, and that measures need to be taken now — with what they call some of the most significant rules ever adopted for trade in shark parts.
Rima Jabado, a shark expert and lead scientist of the Gulf Elasmo project, said many of the species included in the CITES proposals are classified as “critically endangered.” Jabado said there has been an 80 percent decline in the number of wedgefishes, based on available data. Like giant guitarfishes, the enigmatic wedgefish has an elongated, triangle-shaped head and can be found in oceans in Southeast Asia, the Arabian Sea and East Africa.
Makos are the world’s fastest sharks, reaching speeds of up to 80 mph. But they often get caught up in the nets of fishing trawlers hunting for tuna.
Several countries with large fishing fleets, including Japan, opposed the measure to protect mako sharks.
“Japan has been highly dependent on (live) marine resources from the ancient times,” said Hideki Moronuki, director of fisheries negotiations at the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. “It’s very, very important for us in Japan to sustainably use all those marine riches,” he said. He was among those who noted that even the CITES secretariat had recommended rejecting the mako shark proposal.
Scientists warn that although warming oceans and climate change are also hurting sharks, it is the demand for shark fin soup that is threatening to drive some species to extinction. The Pew Trust estimates that between 63 million and 273 million sharks are killed every year, mostly to feed the shark fin trade centered in Hong Kong.
(Maria Cheng & Jamey Keaten, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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French President Emmanuel Macron said the summit leaders were nearing an agreement on how to support Brazil and said the agreement would involve technical and financial mechanisms “so that we can help them in the most effective way possible.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country and others will talk with Brazil about reforestation in the Amazon once fires there have been extinguished.
“Of course (this is) Brazilian territory, but we have a question here of the rainforests that is really a global question,” she said.
“The lung of our whole Earth is affected, and so we must find common solutions.”
Pope Francis also added his voice to the chorus of concern over the fires in Brazil, which borders his homeland of Argentina, and urged people to pray so that “they are controlled as quickly as possible.”
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Brazilian forces will deploy starting today to border areas, indigenous territories and other affected regions in the Amazon to assist in putting out fires for a month, according to a presidential decree.
The armed forces will collaborate with public security and environmental protection agencies, the decree says. Bolsonaro’s office confirmed that he had signed it.
Bolsonaro has previously described rainforest protections as an obstacle to economic development, sparring with critics who note that the Amazon produces vast amounts of oxygen and is considered crucial in efforts to contain global warming.
Fires are common in Brazil in the annual dry season, but they are much more widespread this year. Brazilian state experts reported nearly 77,000 wildfires across the country this year, up 85 percent over the same period in 2018.
Just over half of those fires have occurred in the Amazon region. Brazil contains about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest.
In escalating tension over the fires, France accused Bolsonaro of having lied to French leader Emmanuel Macron and threatened to block a European Union trade deal with several South American states, including Brazil. Ireland joined in the threat.
The specter of possible economic repercussions for Brazil and its South American neighbors show how the Amazon is becoming a battleground between Bolsonaro and Western governments alarmed that vast swathes of the region are going up in smoke on his watch.
Ahead of a Group of Seven summit in France this weekend, Macron’s office questioned Bolsonaro’s trustworthiness.
Brazilian statements and decisions indicate Bolsonaro “has decided to not respect his commitments on the climate, nor to involve himself on the issue of biodiversity,” Macron’s office said.
It added that France opposes an EU trade deal “in its current state” with the Mercosur bloc of South American nations that includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The data released this week did not say how many people who lost their insurance were able to purchase it elsewhere or how much more it cost. It also showed total new and renewed insurance policies increased in fire risk areas during the same period.
Loss of home insurance or spiking policy prices are one consequence of California’s deadly and destructive wildfires in recent years. The state did not collect the same data before 2015, making it difficult to get a wide view of changes in the state’s home insurance market.
Still, lawmakers, regulators and homeowners alike say they’re concerned about the effect of devastating wildfires on homeowners.
But the insurance industry noted the number of non-renewed policies remained fairly steady year-over-year and said many insurers are still offering policies in high-risk fire areas.
The data also show 33,000 policies were not renewed by insurers in ZIP codes affected by wildfires in Calaveras and Lake counties in 2015, in Santa Rosa in 2017, and mudslides in Southern California in early 2018.
The data does not include non-renewals resulting from destructive fires in Redding and Paradise last year, leading regulators to warn non-renewals could climb even more next year.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, a federal agency monitoring deforestation and wildfires, said the country has seen a record number of wildfires this year, counting 74,155 as of Tuesday, an 84 percent increase compared with the same period last year. Bolsonaro took office on Jan. 1.
“Maybe — I am not affirming it — these (NGO people) are carrying out some criminal actions to draw attention against me, against the government of Brazil,” Bolsonaro said in a video posted on his Facebook account. “This is the war we are facing.”
When asked by reporters if he had evidence, the president did not provide any.
The states that have been most affected by fires this year are Mato Grosso, Para and Amazonas — all in the Amazon region — accounting for 41.7 percent of all fires.
“It is very difficult to have natural fires in the Amazon; it happens but the majority come from the hand of humans,” said Paulo Moutinho, co-founder of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute.
Moutinho, who has been working in the Amazon forests for nearly 30 years, said fires are mostly used to clean up vast areas of land for farming or logging.
The fires can easily get out of control, especially now during the Amazon’s dry season, and spread to densely forested protected areas.
This year, the Amazon has not suffered from serious dryness, Moutinho said. “We’re lucky. If we had had droughts like in the past four years, this would be even worse.”
Bolsonaro, who once threatened to leave the Paris climate accord, has repeatedly attacked environmental nonprofits, seen as obstacles in his quest to develop the country’s full economic potential, including in protected areas.
Bolsonaro and Environment Minister Ricardo Salles are both close to the powerful rural caucus in Congress and have been urging more development and economic opportunities in the Amazon region, which they consider overly protected by current legislation.
The government is also facing international pressure to protect the vast rainforest from illegal logging or mining activities. The Amazon is often referred to as the lungs of the planet because it is a major absorber of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Typically by this point in the summer, fire officials are dealing with multiple blazes across California, including ones that brush up against this area of the Sequoias. But so far things have been remarkably calm — giving firefighters time to prepare with prescribed burns and offering a respite, however brief.
After two years of devastating wildfires that burned more than 1.8 million acres in 2018 and 1.2 million acres in 2017, as of Sunday only 51,079 acres have burned this year across state and federal lands.
Late spring rains, cooler summer temperatures and fewer extreme wind events, among other factors, have combined to help keep the state from burning uncontrollably, experts say.
But wary fire officials know that can change at any moment — all it takes is an intense wind event or prolonged heat wave and a spark. A year ago at this time, California was on fire.
The largest blaze in state history — the Mendocino Complex fire — was roaring through Lake County. A monster fire was taking aim at Lake Elsinore. And in Redding, hundreds of residential lots were in rubble from a blaze that made a deadly march into city subdivisions, with a “fire tornado” adding to the the destruction.
Conditions this summer have been much more tame.
In Redding, there have been 30 days where the temperatures have hit or exceeded 100 degrees. Last year it was 43, the National Weather Service said.
In Ukiah, site of the Mendocino Complex fire, there have been nine days of temperatures reaching or exceeding 100 degrees. Last year it as 22.
At the same time, all three of the state’s biggest utilities say they have seen fewer extreme wind conditions that would trigger a preventative shutdown of their power lines this year compared with 2018. Winds are the biggest wild card with fires: Major red-flag events are a key factor in fires raging out of control.
California has seen exceptionally quiet fire years before, all of them before the seven-year drought that officially ended in March. In 2010, about 110,000 acres of California burned statewide, followed by 126,000 the year after.
In 2017, it was generally quiet until late into the fire season. Then wine country fires that October destroyed thousands of homes and killed dozens of people, followed in December by the devastating Thomas fire in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and the Lilac fire in North County.
“First responders are preparing, and the public needs to do that too,” said Mike Mohler, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “We don’t want to cry wolf, but we want people to be on heightened alert.… We have not let our guard down.”
Firefighters say they are using the quiet time to prepare.
Following two years of unprecedented destruction, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Natural Resources Agency fast-tracked dozens of projects for 2019 to bulldoze, dig and chop fuel breaks surrounding communities and escape routes considered at high risk for wildfire.
Thinner vegetation means a less-intense fire, which gives firefighters the chance to make a defensive stand.
In 2015, the Rough fire spread to Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks but was stopped in its tracks when it hit a section of Giant Forest where for decades park officials had conducted prescribed burns.
Setting fires in order to clear the forest floor can be done only when the resulting smoke won’t pose a health hazard, the winds won’t push the flames too fast and the fuels aren’t too dry or too moist — allowing the fire to move at a steady, predictable pace.
Once the floor is cleared and the fire has opened up space in the canopy for light to break through, tiny sequoia cones no bigger than the palm of a hand will dry out from the flames’ heat and burst open. The expectation is that some of those seeds will fall onto open, fertile soil and germinate, establishing the next generation of 3,000-year-old behemoths.
For more than two years, however, poor weather conditions forced the cancellation of more prescribed burns in that area.
But in early July the conditions were just right — to the delight of park officials, firefighters and the public.
Over four days, firefighters set ablaze 238 acres in the western Sierra, a cathedral of giant sequoias that includes the world’s biggest tree, the General Sherman.
While the park swelled with tourists, hikers, bikers and climbers, dozens of firefighters meticulously worked nearby — torching trees, duff covering the soil and jackpots of fuel made up of logs, dead leaves and brush.
“It’s kind of cool to be able to do this in July, it’s different,” federal firefighter Ed Fulton said as he fed foot after foot of hose to a colleague monitoring his section of the fire.
When done effectively, a forest fire gives sequoias a leg up over some other trees vying for space.
At a certain age, sequoias are resilient enough to survive a moderate fire. They have thick, hollow bark that provides a layer of protection, small seed cones that release their payload under extreme heat and branches high from the forest floor so that flames have no ladder to climb to the top.
But until that point, trees like the white fir have the advantage, said National Park Service fire ecologist Tony Caprio. White fir trees can grow in the shade and even faster in sunlight, giving them an early chance to elbow out young sequoias, which desperately need the light to thrive.
During the burn’s first day on July 8, while dozens of firefighters hiked through the grove above Generals Highway — hidden in a smokey veil — Fulton was on the highway shoulder next to his rig, looking for burning timber that could roll onto the highway and stop traffic.
“If anything does roll out, we can cool it down and mop it up so it’s not a threat,” Fulton said.
Prescribed burns also have been taking place in other parts of the state, along with efforts to thin dense shrublands and reinforce fuel breaks.
“What we could consider fall- and spring-months projects we’ve been able to do through July, which for every agency is a benefit toward the forest’s health,” said Mohler of Cal Fire.
But the danger looms, experts warn.
In its wildfire seasonal outlook released Aug. 1, the National Interagency Fire Center said the grass sprouted from this past winter had produced an “abundant crop” of fuel to burn when Santa Ana and Diablo winds return to the state in the fall and winter.
If rainfall is scarce come October when all that grass has cured, the lower half of the state will be vulnerable, the agency warned. For the northern half of California, a massive snowpack has left much of the state at average risk of fire.
(Joseph Serna, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The blaze — described by the local fire department as “a monster” — was racing across parched woodlands into Tamadaba Natural Park, regarded as one of the jewels on Gran Canaria, a mountainous volcanic island in the Atlantic Ocean archipelago off northwest Africa.
Famous for its beaches and mountains, Gran Canaria and its capital, Las Palmas, are popular European vacation destinations but the blaze was in a rugged inland area known as the central highlands. Some tourists had to leave rural hotels as a precaution and were moved to other holiday accommodations, the island’s government said.
Tourists on the coast could see billowing clouds of gray smoke being blown out to sea. Las Palmas international airport was working normally, authorities said.
Canary Islands President Angel Victor Torres said 1,100 firefighters were being deployed in shifts along with 16 water-dropping aircraft to battle the blaze that started Saturday afternoon. The local government said around 14,800 acres had been charred in just 48 hours, villages were evacuated and two dozen roads were closed.
Emergency workers faced huge flames and gusting winds that blew embers into the air, starting secondary fires, local fire officials said. Summer temperatures Monday were expected to hit nearly 97 degrees Fahrenheit and climb to 100 degrees later this week.
The Spanish caretaker government’s farm minister, Luis Planas, told a news conference in Las Palmas that Madrid sent a “cutting-edge” drone to the island that can livestream images of the fire at night. One aircraft on Gran Canaria also coordinated aviation movements to prevent an accident in the busy skies, he said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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More than 700 firefighters supported by 11 helicopters and five aeroplanes are struggling to contain the fire, which began on Saturday near the town of Tejeda and is advancing on several fronts, propelled by a combination of high temperatures, strong winds and low humidity.
The head of the Canary Islands government, Ángel Víctor Torres, described the blaze as voracious and an environmental disaster, and said it had been “neither contained nor controlled”.
The head of the local emergency services, Federico Grillo, said the fire’s main front was “impossible to extinguish” and that firefighting efforts were concentrated on containing the right-hand flank, where there are a large number of homes. The left-hand side had been stabilised, he said.
He said the front was vast and that “whatever we do in the west, depends on the east, which could send the flames back and reignite what we have extinguished”.
The fire has so far affected the central part of the island rather than coastal areas busy with tourists in the summer months. The area is mainly mountainous and criss-crossed by ravines, making much of it inaccessible.
Grillo said the flames had reached heights of 50 metres (164ft) as the fire devoured swaths of Tamadaba natural park, where he said it had “an open road”. He said the fire had made the only land access to the park impassable and that trying to fight it on the ground would be suicide.
“We’re not going to be able to do anything in that area, where the situation is really bad,” Grillo said. High temperatures, strong winds and low humidity were forecast for the rest of the day.
About 40 people are trapped in a cultural centre in Artenara, which has been cut off by the fire, authorities said. Nine municipalities were evacuated on Sunday night.
Local officials have asked central government and the Red Cross for as many as 600 beds to accommodate people displaced from their homes. Those remaining at home have been told to stay away from their windows as the heat may cause the glass to explode.
There have been no reports of injuries, but Grillo said a large number of homes had been affected and many destroyed.
The head of Gran Canaria’s authorities, Antonio Morales, said he believed the fire had been started intentionally, but the cause has not been conclusively established. The blaze comes barely a week after another that began near Artenara destroyed 3,700 acres.
Spain’s acting agriculture minister, Luis Planas, flew to the island to review the situation. Torres said the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and King Felipe had also called to express their concern.
(THE GUARDIAN)
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The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday that July was 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average of 60.4 degrees for the month.
Because July is generally the warmest month on the calendar, meteorologists say this means it also set a new all-time monthly record for the past 140 years.
Last month’s temperatures narrowly topped the previous July record, set in 2016, by 0.05 degrees.
The results had been expected after several European countries including France, Belgium and Germany reported that July smashed previous national temperature records. The Swedish hamlet of Markusvinsa recorded a sizzling 94.6 degrees, the highest temperature measured north of the Arctic Circle.
According to NOAA’s records, 9 of the 10 hottest Julys on record have occurred since 2005 and last month was the 43rd consecutive July above the 20th century average.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The researchers examined snow collected from sites in the Arctic, northern Germany, the Bavarian and Swiss Alps and the North Sea island of Helgoland with a process designed to analyze their samples in a lab.
“While we did expect to find microplastics, the enormous concentrations surprised us,” Melanie Bergmann, a researcher at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, said.
Their findings were published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
Previous studies have found microplastics — which are created when man-made materials break apart and defined as pieces smaller than 5 millimeters — in the air of Paris, Tehran and Dongguan, China.
The research demonstrated the fragments may become airborne in a way similar to dust, pollen and fine particulate matter from vehicle exhausts.
While there’s growing concern about the impact of microplastics, scientists have yet to determine what effect, if any, the minute particles have on humans or wildlife.
Bergmann, who co-authored the study, said the highest concentrations of microplastics were found in the Bavarian Alps, with one sample having more than 150,000 particles per liter.
Although the Arctic samples were less contaminated, the third-highest concentration in the samples the researchers analyzed — 14,000 particles per liter — came from an ice floe in the Fram Strait off Greenland, she said.
On average, the researchers found 1,800 particles per liter in the samples taken from that region.
Martin Wagner, a biologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who wasn’t involved with the study, said the extremely high concentrations could be partly attributed to the methods the researchers used, which allowed them to identify microplastics as small as 11 micrometers, or 0.011 millimeters — less than the width of a human hair.
“This is significant because most studies so far looked at much larger microplastics,” he said. “Based on that, I would conclude that we very much underestimate the actual microplastics levels in the environment.”
(Frank Jordans, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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For months now, a massive volume of water has been pushing against the levees keeping a city mostly below sea level from being inundated.
The Mississippi River ran past New Orleans at more than 11 feet above sea level for a record 292 days, dropping below that height only Monday.
“The big threat is water getting through or underneath,” said Nicholas Pinter, an expert on river dynamics and flood risks who’s studied levee breaches across the nation. “The longer the duration, the greater the threat.”
Locals walked up levees from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to see the river for themselves as Tropical Storm Barry briefly menaced Louisiana last month, but the real damage runs underneath, experts say: All that rushing floodwater can scour levees along their foundations, causing damage in places that can’t easily be seen.
“That ultimately could undermine the levee as well and cause a breach or a failure,” said Cassandra Rutherford, assistant professor of geotechnical engineering at Iowa State University.
The federal agency that maintains the levees is aware of the risks. But Ricky Boyett, spokesman for the New Orleans office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said the corps is confident that South Louisiana river levees are in great condition, with improvements made since 2011.
“If there’s a silver lining going into hurricane season with the river this high for this long, we’re entering the hurricane season having done 200 inspections of the levee since February,” Boyett said.
Inspectors were looking for parked barges, stuck debris or other potential trouble, such as tire ruts or damage from feral hogs on grassy surfaces.
They also looked for water seeping through, and for sand boils — spots where water tunneling below a levee seems to bubble out of the ground.
Concrete mats armor underwater areas likely to be eaten away by the river’s current, Boyett said. Sand boils get ringed with sandbags until the water pressure on both sides equalizes, stopping the flow.
And because some permanent repairs can’t be made during high water, dangerous seepage gets stopgap coverage: About 63,000 large sandbags have been used since March on one 300-foot-long seepage area upriver of Baton Rouge, he said.
(Jeff Martin & Janet McConnaughey, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The base was so badly damaged that officials are suggesting several buildings be demolished and replaced. The cost of returning the facilities to normal could top $5 billion, according to Navy documents.
The recommendations still have to be approved by Congress and President Donald Trump, according to Lee Saunders, a spokesman for the Southwest division of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command.
The China Lake naval station is less than 10 miles from the epicenters of the Ridgecrest quakes that rocked the region on July 4 and July 5. The base was open only to essential personnel after the first earthquake, a magnitude 6.4. But following the larger 7.1 temblor, the facility was evacuated.
Two weeks after the quakes, the base told personnel in a Facebook post that building use remained limited and many services had been relocated. Information about damage to the base has been sparse since.
“A degree of normalcy has outwardly returned to the Western Mojave Desert,” the social media post said. “Nevertheless, restoration and repair of infrastructure and facilities diligently continues throughout the installation.”
Naval engineers have worked to repair facilities on the base so employees and their families could return, but according to a report this week in the Navy Times, the base has still not been deemed “fully mission capable.”
The latest report shows that officials assessed all buildings, utilities and facilities — 3,598 structures in all — for 13 days after the earthquakes and found damage totaled $5.2 billion. Replacing buildings alone would cost $2.2 billion, but officials also must replace or repair specialized equipment, furniture, machine tools, telecommunication assets and other facilities, the document shows.
Capt. Mark Edelson, a commanding officer for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command’s Southwest division, could not immediately be reached for comment, but he told the Navy Times this week that more than half of the base’s damaged buildings were built before 1980 and did not meet seismic standards.
The base’s Hangar 3, which holds advanced weaponry and aircraft, suffered structural cracking. The Michelson Laboratory, which houses a unit that tests advanced weapons technology, was declared unsafe after major cracks and other signs of “stress” were found in its foundation, columns and beams, the Navy Times reported.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Urgent new warnings from federal environmental officials about contamination in drinking water from aging lead pipes spread anxiety and fear across much of Newark, but the municipal government’s makeshift efforts to set up distribution centers to hand out bottled water were hampered by confusion and frustration.
State and local officials said they were making free water available to 15,000 of the city’s 95,000 households, and hundreds of people waited in long lines in the summer heat to pick up cases of water.
The intensifying worry about the safety of Newark’s drinking water has raised comparisons to Flint, Mich., where dangerous levels of lead led to criminal indictments against state and local officials and forced residents to rely on bottled water.
The lead crisis in Newark, a city of 285,000 people, had been brewing for years, but escalated sharply over the weekend after federal officials issued a scathing letter warning about the safety of the drinking water and urging city officials to take more aggressive steps.
Elevated lead levels have been recorded in an expanding zone of the city and now includes all of the West and South wards and parts of the Central and the North wards.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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Now, as still more Asian nations prepare to follow China’s lead, California’s recycling industry is struggling, posing hard choices for a state that prides itself on its image as an environmental beacon. A big hit came this month when RePlanet, California’s largest operator of recycling redemption centers, shut down and laid off 750 employees.
Consumers and industry alike are bracing for changes.
“The Chinese ban and everything else in the last couple of years made us realize we are living in a pretend world of ‘wishcycling,’” said Roland Geyer, an industrial ecology professor at UC Santa Barbara. “What we’ve tried hasn’t worked.”
To go beyond “wishcycling” — the assumption that everything in the blue bin gets recycled — consumers will need to change their purchase practices, avoiding single-use containers and packaging that have no recycling value, experts say. Industries that produce these products will need to be held responsible for their life-cycle impacts, possibly in the form of legislative mandates.
“We’ve always recognized that, for many materials, we’re going to have to have producer responsibility,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, a Sacramento conservation group. “That idea is not new.”
China started banning certain scrap imports partly because of complaints that the United States was shipping “contaminated” and poorly sorted recyclables, and also because of internal changes in the Chinese economy and waste management systems.
The shift has prompted increased investment in U.S. recycling plants to fill the void. Nonetheless, scrap waste is piling up in warehouses and parking lots. Some is ending up in waterways, oceans, landfills and incinerators. In nearly all cases, waste disposal is more expensive.
“It’s had a significant impact,” said Navnit Padival, senior engineer at the Los Angeles County Sanitation District. “The United States and the world over have been affected by China’s ban.”
The result: Companies that once turned a profit selling used yogurt containers and water bottles now have accumulating piles of garbage and no place to sell it. In some cases, recyclers are sending plastics in bulk to landfills for burial.
A collapsed market also translates to higher rates for residents — because the trash haulers who pick up blue bins at the curb rely on profits to operate. Without that revenue, haulers are having to raise their prices. Republic Services, which provides hauling services nationally and in San Diego County, has begun raising its average $4-$6 weekly rate by as much as $1.50 a week in some places.
Some see the current crisis as a wake-up call about the realities — and limitations — of recycling.
Even during the days when China absorbed the bulk of American recyclables, much of what it purchased wasn’t actually recycled. After more desirable materials were gleaned, some of it was burned or sent to landfills, said David Colgan, director of communications at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
Even when a product is recycled, said Geyer, the UC Santa Barbara professor, its eventual destination is still a landfill. In the heyday of recycling, millions of tons of garbage still went to the landfill, and the production of virgin plastics increased at a steady rate alongside recycled products. Between 2010 and 2018, 36 landfills in California expanded and a new one opened.
At the same time, the number of CRV recycling centers — where the public can recycle bottles and cans in exchange for a refund — has been steadily declining statewide, with 996 closing since 2015, said Lance Klug, a spokesman for CalRecycle, a state agency.
The environmental cost comes in the form of methane gasses emitted by landfills and the plastics and waste that end up in waterways, oceans and wildlands, often harming fish and wildlife.
“Plastic is already everywhere in the environment by now, and it will get more and more pervasive in higher concentrations and higher levels,” Geyer said.
Despite imminent gridlock, some say the situation calls for reform, not abandonment, of the recycling industry. But researchers and environmental advocates emphasize that simple changes to recycling habits won’t be enough. The recycling industry itself leaves a footprint resulting from its industrial processes, and even at its most efficient, it doesn’t outweigh the waste produced.
“We need to stop looking at recycling as a primary solution to our waste problem,” said Colgan, of UCLA.
A focus on recycling also shifts the burden to consumers, he said, while ignoring other avenues of sustainability, such as production and reuse.
In California, multiple reform bills are moving through the legislative process, including Assembly Bill 792, which would target beverage container producers by enforcing minimum requirements for recycled materials in production, and AB 1080, known as the California Circular Economy and Plastic Pollution Reduction Act, which would require that all single-use plastic products and packaging products in California are recyclable or compostable by January 2030.
Industry lobbyists have fended off previous legislative attempts to regulate single-use containers statewide and may do so again.
“The transformational question before policymakers is ‘Who should be responsible?’” said Murray, adding that manufacturers want to maintain the status quo because they profit from continuing to buy cheap virgin materials with no disposal obligations.
In the recycling industry, strong markets remain for many goods, such as paper, cardboard and aluminum. But there’s a growing volume of plastics and mixed plastics — things like plastic-coated cartons or potato chip bags — that no longer have a recycling value or never had one in the first place.
The path forward is uncertain.
“The U.S. is having a come-to-Jesus moment,” said Kreigh Hampel, a recycling center coordinator in Burbank.
“Recycling is not going to undo the damage done by consumption.”
(Piper McDaniel, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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As the entire Southeast baked amid heat warnings and advisories that reached from central Texas to coastal Georgia, construction workers toiled under a blazing sun in Louisiana. Alabama’s largest city opened its auditorium as a refuge for anyone needing to cool down.
Some schools and coaches limited football practice for players getting ready for the upcoming season, and social media was dotted with photos showing automobile thermometers with triple-digit readings.
Forecasters said a cold front and storms could lead to a slight midweek cool down, but for the meantime it was just too hot.
The National Weather Service said the afternoon heat index, a combination of temperature and humidity, climbed to 120 degrees in Clarksdale, Miss., nearly hitting the 121 degrees it felt like Monday. Readings were nearly as high in cities including Dyersburg, Tenn., and West Memphis, Ark.
It was just as sizzling along the Gulf Coast in south Alabama and along the Florida Panhandle. The heat index hit 117 before noon Tuesday in the Mobile, Ala., area. Pensacola saw a heat index of 115, also before noon.
In Texas, managers of the state’s main electric grid declared an energy conservation emergency and asked its customers to dial back their thermostats between 3 and 7 p.m. Tuesday because of the extreme heat.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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With temperatures around 100 degrees at midday and “feels like” temperatures soaring even higher, parts of 13 states were under heat advisories, from Texas, Louisiana and Florida in the South to Missouri and Illinois in the Midwest, the National Weather Service reported.
“It feels like hell is what it feels like,” said Junae Brooks, who runs Junae’s Grocery in Holly Bluff, Miss. Around her, many of her customers kept cool with wet rags around their necks or by wearing straw hats.
Some of the most oppressive conditions were in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
The heat index rose to 119 degrees by late afternoon in West Memphis, Ark.; and to 118 degrees in Clarksdale, Miss., the weather service reported. Similar readings were expected in eastern Oklahoma.
In Alabama, the temperature hit 100 degrees with a heat index of 106 degrees by mid-afternoon in Birmingham, the state’s largest city.
Heat exhaustion and heat stroke were the leading threats.
“You are more likely to develop a heat illness quicker in this type of weather, when it’s really humid and hot,” said Gary Chatelain, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Shreveport, La., where a wet summer contributed to high humidity.
More of the same is in store today.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Over 1,000 local residents have been evacuated and taken to shelters and municipal centers while emergency crews battle the blaze.
“You could see the flames getting closer little by little,” said one of the locals who was evacuated. According to another resident, the Civil Guard ordered people to leave their homes at 4 am on Sunday, and “woke up elderly people, some with severe mobility issues, so they would go.”
Although a control line has been created around the fire, the national weather service is forecasting winds that could gust up to 70 km/h on Monday evening. Around 230 firefighters will remain stationed in the area to try to prevent the flames from jumping the barrier and spreading further.
The wildfire broke out around noon on Saturday in Artenara, a hamlet of 1,000 residents located in the northwest portion of the island. Two more municipalities, Tejeda (1,921 residents) and Gáldar (24,000) have also been affected by the flames. A total of 1,000 hectares of land have been burnt, according to the latest reports.
A 55-year-old man who had been working in the area with a welding machine has been arrested by the Civil Guard, who suspect that he accidentally started the fire in a property near Cruce de las Peñas.
José Ángel, who owns a farm 200 meters away from Cruce de las Peñas, was evacuated to the municipality Acusa Seca, where “the smoke made it difficult to breathe.” He described the fire as a “disaster, more than my trees and my farm, it pains me to see so many burned pine trees.”
Emergency workers now fear that the wind could push the flames towards Aldea de San Nicolás and La Degollada de Tejeda, although no new evacuations have been ordered for now.
Crews are working within a 23-kilometer perimeter, digging ditches and applying water to create control lines that will keep the fire within the established boundaries.
“The fire is contained, but has not been put out and could develop further,” said Torres, who thanked the 500 to 600 individuals working since Saturday to snuff out the blaze. Ten helicopters and an airplane are being used in the effort.
(EL PAIS)
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Nearly 5 million people in Zhejiang province have been affected by the storm, Typhoon Lekima, which made landfall early Saturday, according to the reports. Many of the deaths occurred in Yongjia County, near the city of Wenzhou, when the collapse of a natural dam set off a flash flood that swept away several people, said CCTV, the state-run broadcaster.
The typhoon, which packed winds of up to 116 mph, caused major travel disruptions across the region, including in Shanghai, with thousands of flights canceled and train operations suspended.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Authorities had pronounced the fire “under control” Saturday night but said the flames picked back up when the wind did. Greece’s Fire Service said 121 firefighters, six airplanes and five helicopters battled the fire before it was brought back under control Sunday night.
Elafonisos, a 7 square mile island known for its sandy beaches, has a population of about 350 but draws over 3,000 visitors daily during the summer.
Several thousand tourists left the island on scheduled ferries Sunday, a day after authorities cleared a campground for “precautionary reasons.”
Strong winds and high temperatures have helped stoke dozens of wildfires across Greece.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Beachgoers are routinely warned not to recreate under or walk atop bluffs, from Del Mar to San Francisco. As rising seas threaten to increase wave erosion on the state’s coastal cliffs, runoff from urban areas can weaken the often unstable rock formations from above.
Cities, such as Encinitas, direct people to keep a safe distance of between 25 to 40 feet from bluffs.
While scientists are increasingly studying coastal erosion in the context of the worsening climate crisis, even experts don’t know when the next collapse will strike.
However, there are a number of signs that a failure is more likely to occur at a particular location and that the effects of such a collapse could be disastrous.
Adam Young, a researcher at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who has been tracking cliff erosion around the state, recently sat down with The San Diego Union-Tribune to discuss warning signs that beachgoers can be aware of:
The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released today in summary form in Geneva found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.
Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world’s population remains undernourished, and some authors of the report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.
A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major reevaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior. Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.
“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Rosenzweig said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
The summary was released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists convened by the United Nations that pulls together a wide range of existing research to help governments understand climate change and make policy decisions. The IPCC is writing a series of climate reports, including one last year on the disastrous consequences if the planet’s temperature rises just 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial levels, as well as an upcoming report on the state of the world’s oceans.
Some authors also suggested that food shortages are likely to affect poorer parts of the world far more than richer ones. That could increase a flow of immigration that is already redefining politics in North America, Europe and other parts of the world.
“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”
Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change.
Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.
Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a greenhouse gas put there mainly by the burning of fossil fuels — will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock.
Those changes threaten to exceed the ability of the agriculture industry to adapt.
In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas, among other things.
Overall, if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.
“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,” said Aditi Sen, a senior policy adviser on climate change at Oxfam America, an anti-poverty advocacy organization.
(Christopher Flavelle, NEW YORK TIMES)
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More than 146,000 dengue cases were reported in the first seven months of the year, almost twice as many as in the same period last year, according to the country’s health department.
“This is really staggering,” said Francisco Duque, the health secretary. He said the declaration of an epidemic was needed so local governments in badly hit places could use “quick response funds” to fight the disease.
Officials said the Western Visayas region of the Philippines had the most cases, at more than 23,000, followed by the suburbs south of Manila, the capital, which had more than 16,500 cases. Parts of the southern island of Mindanao also reported a high number of infections.
The Philippine government has struggled to address dengue since December 2017, when it stopped using a vaccine called Dengvaxia that was found to pose health risks to people who had not previously had the disease.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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RePlanet closed all 284 of its centers, and company president David Lawrence said the decision was driven by increased business costs and falling prices of recycled aluminum and PET plastic, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
The move came three years after RePlanet closed 191 of its recycling centers and laid off 278 workers.
Now many residents have few or no options for redeeming their recyclables, which is especially concerning for those who live in poverty or experience homelessness and rely on recycling for income.
Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit that studies issues in California’s recycling industry, estimated that more than 40 percent of all redemption centers have closed in the last five years. The closures result in consumers getting back only about half of their nickel and dime bottle and can deposits, according to a recent report from the nonprofit.
The closures also mean that more bottles made of aluminum and polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, will end up in landfills. People will either throw their recyclables directly into the garbage, or place them in curbside recycling bins, which are often filled with contaminated material that must be discarded. China, which has bought much of the U.S.’ recyclable material, has become stricter about what kinds of material it will accept.
Advocates are urging the state to reform how it subsidizes recycling centers to account for rising operating costs in the wake of continuously low aluminum and plastic prices.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The region, famous for its rainfall, has long escaped major burns even as global warming has driven an increase in the size and number of wildfires elsewhere in the American West.
But according to experts, previously too-wet-to-burn parts of the Pacific Northwest face an increasing risk of significant wildfires due to changes in its climate driven by the same phenomenon: Global warming is bringing higher temperatures, lower humidity and longer stretches of drought.
And the region is uniquely exposed to the threat, with property owners who are often less prepared for fire than those in drier places and more homes tucked along forests than any other western state.
In Issaquah and towns like it across the region, that takes a shape familiar from recent destructive California wildfires: heavy vegetation that spills into backyards, often pressing against houses in neighborhoods built along mountains, with strong seasonal winds and few roads leading out.
“The only thing that’s keeping it from going off like a nuclear bomb is the weather,” said Chris Dicus, a professor at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo and head of the Association for Fire Ecology, a national group that studies wildfire and includes experts from the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey.
With historically short summers, the swath of densely forested coastal territory stretching from British Columbia into northwestern Oregon has long been cloaked in a protective veil of moisture, making even medium-sized fires relatively rare. So-called “megafires” — enveloping hundreds of thousands of acres and even generating their own weather — have occurred only at century-plus intervals.
But global warming is changing the region’s seasons. A national climate assessment prepared by 13 federal agencies and released in 2018 said the Pacific Northwest had warmed nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900 and that trend would continue into the century, leading to warmer winters and less mountain snowpack.
Experts say these long-term changes create a special risk in Pacific Northwest forests, where past wet weather has created ample fuel for fires.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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But when a pair of strong earthquakes struck the region last month, the hospital couldn’t use it.
Structurally, the building was OK. But some broken pipes flooded a room of mechanical and electrical equipment, and water leaked into operating rooms and elevator shafts. The hospital in Ridgecrest, about 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles, had to evacuate the building as a precaution.
Now, Ridgecrest Regional is joining hospitals across the state in questioning standards designed to keep hospitals open after earthquakes. The rules are set to take effect in 2030.
Most hospitals in earthquake-prone California have met regulations designed to keep buildings from collapsing in an earthquake. But administrators say the standards for keeping the doors open after quakes are pricey and will force some hospitals to raise health care costs, cut services or close.
“Just having a building is a very narrow thing of what it takes to have health care,” Ridgecrest Regional CEO Jim Suver said. “That’s why I think it makes some sense, personally, for us to look at the 2030 standards. It’s not that they are bad, (but) they are tremendously expensive.”
In the case of Ridgecrest Regional, the standards didn’t help, he said.
Suver said he had assumed the expensive building would be the hospital’s lifeline after an earthquake. But the only way the hospital could stay open was to rely on its undamaged 1960s-era buildings — buildings it had planned to retrofit or replace in the next decade.
Labor unions, meanwhile, are defending the standards, pointing out hospitals have had nearly three decades to comply. Changing them now would be a “multibillion bailout on seismic safety standards,” according to Stephanie Roberson, director of government relations for the California Nurses Association.
“This thing has been on the books since 1974, and they have abdicated their responsibility ever since. The more you delay, the more things cost,” she said.
California has required new hospital buildings to meet earthquake standards since 1974, following a 1971 magnitude 6.5 earthquake in the San Fernando Valley that killed 64 people and collapsed buildings at the Olive View Medical Center and a veterans hospital.
In 1994, after a magnitude 6.7 earthquake near Los Angeles damaged 11 hospitals and forced eight to evacuate, state lawmakers required hospitals to either upgrade their existing buildings to withstand an earthquake or replace them. The original deadline was 2008, but is has been extended to 2020 with some exceptions.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The National Weather Service says the daytime high in Ramona will hit 100 degrees on Saturday, 101 on Sunday and 103 on Monday, when the heat peaks.
“The hottest area will be from Valley Center down to Ramona, Alpine and Campo,” said Dan Gregoria, a weather service forecaster.
Desert areas will be even more oppressive. Forecasters say Borrego Springs will reach 115 on Saturday and 116 on Sunday and Monday.
“This upper ridge of high pressure is going to make the marine layer very thin at the coast, where temperatures will get into the upper 70s,” Gregoria said. “If you go inland to I-5 they’ll be in the 80s and in the 90s and above east of I-15.
Humidity levels also are expected to be tolerable as monsoonal moisture stays east of San Diego County.
“The cumulative effects of several days of hot weather may cause heat exhaustion for those not prepared for excessive heat or for those who are active outdoors during the day,” according to the weather service heat advisory, which expires at 8 p.m. on Monday.
(Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The funds are part of $16 billion that the Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded in 2018 to help states and territories prepare for future disasters. It was the first time that it had issued funds specifically for mitigation efforts, which it described as “actions taken to protect communities from the predictable damage from future events.”
Puerto Rico was awarded $8.3 billion, and the Virgin Islands $770 million. The rest went to the nine states: California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina and West Virginia.
An announcement by Ben Carson, the housing secretary, said that the money would be released in two batches, with the second including only Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
The department did not provide a specific time frame for when the money would be distributed. Officials said that the states would soon be able to apply for it but that stricter oversight and financial controls were still being developed for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
“Recovery efforts in jurisdictions prepared to do their part should not be held back due to alleged corruption, fiscal irregularities and financial mismanagement occurring in Puerto Rico and capacity issues in the U.S. Virgin Islands,” Carson said in a statement.
The housing agency also announced Friday that it would appoint a federal financial monitor to oversee the disbursement of disaster relief money in Puerto Rico and to “ensure recovery funds get to the people who need them most.”
Housing department officials said they would issue rules in the coming weeks that would allow the states to apply for the money, but they could not say when rules for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands would be released.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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A little before 3 p.m., a 30-by-25-foot chunk of heavy sandstone cliff broke loose from the cliff just north of a mobile lifeguard tower and the wooden stairs leading down to the beach from Neptune Avenue, authorities said.
One woman died at the scene, according to Encinitas lifeguard Capt. Larry Giles and sheriff’s officials. Her name and age were not immediately released.
One critically injured victim was airlifted to Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, and the second critically injured person was rushed by ambulance to Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas, authorities said. City officials confirmed their deaths in a statement Friday night.
Two other victims had minor injuries; one was taken to a hospital by ambulance, and one was evaluated at the scene.
Authorities gave no details about the victims, except to say none were children.
Encinitas Fire Chief Mike Stein said during an evening press briefing that there had been conflicting reports on the beach about whether anyone remained missing, so cadaver dogs were at the scene searching for more victims. The collapse happened near a popular surf spot known as Grandview, just north of the wooden stairs leading to the sand from a small public parking lot where Neptune Avenue dead ends. The sandy beach area changes with the tides, but is generally very narrow.
A massive, hot tub-size chunk of sandstone was among the debris that fell onto the sand below. Next to the detritus, beach chairs, towels and umbrellas were abandoned where the victims had set up on a warm, partly cloudy day.
Jim Pepperdine, who lives on Neptune Avenue just south of the Grandview Stairs, said he was working at home when he became alarmed by the sirens and trucks he heard outside around 3 p.m., so he went to take a look.
“I saw first responders, and I saw lifeguards frantically digging people out of the debris,” he said, adding it looked like the victims had been together.
“They were clearly distraught,” Pepperdine said. “It was a normal beach day gone awry.”
Pepperdine said he saw people trying to resuscitate a woman before her body was covered with a tarp.
Brian Ketterer, southern field division chief with California State Parks, said the material in the collapse was dense Torrey and Del Mar sandstone.
“This material is very, very heavy,” he said. “Crews are going to come in and will slowly and meticulously break it apart to see if we have anybody still buried under there.”
Stein, the fire chief, said emergency crews were unable to search portions of the debris because of the instability of the cliff. And complicating matters, the incoming tide Friday evening was expected to be among the highest of the year, Giles said.
Lifeguards closed the beach from Ponto in the north, to several hundred yards south of Grandview, because crews were bringing in heavy equipment to search the rubble. A lifeguard reported hearing the collapse and noticed several people were involved, Stein said. Rescue workers were on the scene in about four minutes.
Stein said the collapse sent about 15 to 20 cubic yards of sandstone crashing down, and city engineers who inspected the site were concerned about a potential secondary collapse directly behind the first.
But Stein said homes above the bluffs, which are set back several dozen feet from the edge of the cliff, were not in any danger.
Authorities said bluff collapses like the one Friday happen several times a year and are natural occurring events along the constantly eroding and changing coastline.
A portion of the marine safety page on Encinitas’ website is dedicated to the dangers of the city’s oceanfront cliffs.
“Because of frequent bluff failures, a great deal of consideration has been given to ensuring the safety of those who visit our beaches,” the city says on its website. “Please be aware that in most areas hiking near or directly on top of the bluffs is prohibited. It is also important for visitors to avoid standing or sitting directly underneath unstable bluffs, since they may collapse.”
City officials have placed warning signs at several locations that are unsafe and should be avoided, according to the website. It was not clear if the section of bluff that collapsed Friday afternoon was one that city officials previously considered unsafe.
Encinitas resident Rebecca Kowalczyk, 30, died near the same area Jan. 16, 2000, when a 110-yard-wide chunk of bluff fell on top of her and buried her. Kowalczyk was on the Leucadia beach watching her husband surf when the tragedy struck.
The last fatal bluff-collapse in San Diego County happened more than a decade ago, when 57-year-old Nevada tourist Robert Mellone was crushed by a shower of sand and boulders from a section of bluff above Torrey Pines State Beach.
On July 17, 2002, a 39-year-old man, James Franklin, died when the cave he used for shelter at South Carlsbad State Beach collapsed on him.
Two tourists, Timothy Silcox, 33, and David Shulin, 35, were killed Jan. 22, 1995, when a sea bluff collapsed on them at Torrey Pines State Reserve. Merrell Davis, 52, of Mission Hills, was buried up to his chest and suffered a leg fracture in that collapse.
On Friday, Yorba Linda resident Mike Bassett said he didn’t witness the landslide, but had visited the same area late Thursday night during a high tide that pummeled the cliff.
“We were there last night around 11:30. There was no beach at all,” Bassett said. “There was probably two feet of water around the lifeguard station. It was weird to see the waves pounding on the bluff.”
It was unclear what caused the bluff to collapse Friday. Adam Young, a researcher with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, headed to the site immediately after learning of the incident, but was unable to get close enough to view the area.
He wouldn’t speculate on what caused the collapse, but said factors including wave action, rainfall and others contribute to cliff erosion over time.
“It’s usually a combination of processes that could be going on for years,” Young said.
It was also unknown which agency, if any, is responsible for monitoring and stabilization of bluffs in Encinitas. North County Transit District spokeswoman Kim Wall said the agency has projects to stabilize Del Mar bluffs in order to protect rail lines, but said rail lines in Encinitas are inland — away from the coast.
“The area where this happened is not near our tracks, so this wouldn’t be an area we are reinforcing,” she said.
As news stations scrambled for footage of the event, the Sheriff’s Department warned news helicopters to maintain a safe elevation above the collapse site, stating that the aircraft were impairing rescue and recovery efforts. “For TV stations flying a helicopter over the bluff collapse in (Encinitas), you are flying too low,” the Sheriff’s Department stated in a tweet. “The vibrations of your aircraft are affecting safety operations for first responders and could cause further instability at the scene. Please fly higher.”
(Alex Riggins & Gary Warth, with Deborah Sullivan Brennan, Merrie Monteagudo, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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WHALEY BRIDGE, England - British authorities have ordered 6,500 people in northwest England to evacuate a town over concerns that the dam wall of a reservoir could burst following days of heavy rain.
Derbyshire police said residents of Whaley Bridge should leave the town after Britain's Environment Agency said the incident "currently poses a significant threat to life."
The Environment Agency has issued a severe flood warning for the area, saying levels in the River Goyt, which runs through the town, could rise rapidly.
Police have advised residents to gather at a nearby school or stay with family and friends, and to take pets and enough medication for a number of days.
"We understand that there will be some concern around not being able to return home. However, our priority is to ensure people are kept safe and well and are not taking unnecessary risks," Derbyshire police said.
"This is not a decision that has been taken lightly and we appreciate that there is significant impact on this community, however, this is an unprecedented, fast-moving, emergency situation."
The 19th-century [SIC] dam wall of the Toddbrook Reservoir above the town has been damaged by several days of rain this week following a heat wave that struck large parts of Europe.
Mohammad Heidarzadeh, an engineering expert from Brunel University in London said the dam's damaged spillway could be "fully broken" within hours.
"Due to heavy rainfall in Whaley Bridge area, the spillway is now broken and a big chunk of its concrete structure is damaged," he said. "If the spillway is fully gone, the embankment dam will be washed away very rapidly, which could cause a massive flood."
Heidarzadeh also lamented the lack of investment in old infrastructure, endangering lives. In a tweet he said: "The concrete Spillway was built around 50 years ago and was almost at the end of its lifetime. This incident highlights the need for rehabilitation of old infrastructure! We need more investment for safety of our people!"
additional excerpts from Reuters:
A British military helicopter dropped sacks of ballast onto the outer slope of a reservoir dam in central England on Friday in an effort to prevent it from collapsing and flooding the town below.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the area on Friday evening, meeting affected residents and emergency services. “I flew over the dam and it looks pretty scary,” he said.
Officials said the dam, holding back 300 million gallons of water, was in danger of failing, putting lives at risk.
Engineers have been pumping water out of the reservoir to get the level down, reduce pressure on the wall and allow repairs to begin.
Police said the level had fallen by 0.5 meters (20 inches) but still needed to drop by several more meters until it was below the damage - an operation that could take several days.
A Royal Air Force Chinook helicopter was shifting 400 tonnes of aggregate - a mixture of sand, gravel and stone - onto the reservoir wall to reinforce it.
Heavy rain this week led to flash floods in areas across northern England causing bridges to collapse and road closures. Britain’s Met Office said on Wednesday downpours had led to 50 mm (2 inches) of rain falling in just one hour.
(DEUTSCHE WELLE, REUTERS)
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President Vladimir Putin ordered the mobilization after a dense shroud of smoke covered industrial cities in eastern Russia, prompting complaints from residents. Greenpeace labeled the blazes over 11,800 square miles an “ecological catastrophe.”
Environmental activists in Russia have called this year’s wildfires, which have consumed an area the size of Belgium, the worst in the history of observations. The situation has been exacerbated by the sheer distances involved, and many blazes are raging in remote Arctic areas that are difficult to reach.
The Russian agency for aerial forest protection, Avialesokhrana, acknowledged Thursday that it was letting most of the fires burn themselves out. It said in a statement that about 2,850 firefighters and 21 airplanes were working to extinguish the blazes across an area of nearly 450 square miles, less than 4 percent of the total territory currently in flames.
The agency said that the remaining fires “do not threaten human settlements or economic facilities.”
“The projected costs of putting them out exceed the damage that can be inflicted by them,” the agency said.
The agency said in another statement that it was working on seeding clouds to induce rainfall in the area of wildfires. Siberian shamans said they would join in trying to summon rain, Interfax, a Russian news agency, reported Thursday.
No injuries or evacuations have been reported so far from the fires.
Late Wednesday, President Donald Trump called Putin to offer American help in battling the infernos. Putin said that he would accept the offer if it became necessary, but that Russian agencies are now working hard to handle the crisis. Putin was criticized last week after he offered Greece help in fighting wildfires.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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It was around dinnertime on July 23 at Alaska’s oldest hunting lodge, nestled in the wilderness more than 100 miles northwest of Anchorage. What began as a quiet evening at the Rainy Pass Lodge soon turned frantic as Alaska’s latest wildfire spread fast.
The Alaska National Guard soon evacuated 26 people and two dogs by helicopter from the lodge, which serves as a checkpoint for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
In the days that followed, Perrins and his family housed and fed dozens of federal and state firefighters who rushed to contain the blaze — one of many raging across Alaska.
America’s 49th state is warming faster than any other, having heated up more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century — double the global average. And parts of the state, including its far northern reaches, have warmed even more rapidly in recent decades. This trend, driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, is transforming America’s only Arctic state. Scientists around the world, including in the U.S. government, predict the warming will continue unless countries drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in coming years.
Temperatures have been above average across Alaska every day since April 25. None of the state’s nearly 300 weather stations have recorded a temperature below freezing since June 28 — the longest such streak in at least 100 years.
More than 2 million acres have gone up in flames across the state as thousands of firefighters have worked to contain wildfires. Stores have sold out of fans and ice. Moose have been spotted seeking respite in garden sprinklers.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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Officials with Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service said the fire started in rural northeastern California on Sunday afternoon off California Highway 139 and Tucker Butte Road, about six miles southwest of Clear Lake Reservoir. The fire, which is believed to have been caused unintentionally by humans, grew 10,000 acres in one day. The latest reported acreage of the blaze is 12,973, making it the biggest active fire currently burning in the state and the largest in California so far in 2019.
No homes are threatened and no evacuations had been ordered as of Tuesday afternoon.
The U.S. Forest Service said in an update that fire crews have worked on fire-line construction and providing point protection for infrastructure in the fire area while aiming to protect the Clear Lake National Wildlife Refuge and local wildlife habitats.
Ken Sandusky, a public information officer with the U.S. Forest Service, said that wildfires in the Modoc National Forest are at their most challenging when flames reach areas that have not been treated with fire-fuel reduction efforts, including juniper reduction.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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But suddenly, across more than 100,000 acres of Nebraska and Wyoming, there is no water to be found. The dirt is cracking. The beans are turning a sickly yellow. And the corn, which looked so promising just two weeks ago, is straining for fluid through long, scorching days.
The countryside is suddenly parched because a century-old tunnel that carries irrigation water across more than 100 miles, from Wyoming to Nebraska, collapsed this month. The cause of the collapse was not yet clear, but the effect has been immediate: A large expanse of farmland is parched. And hundreds of farmers, already reeling from years of low grain prices, are without water at the most critical point of the growing cycle.
“Could you survive working with no salary for a year?” said Kendall Busch, who grows sugar beets, beans and corn near Mitchell, Neb. “That’s what we’re doing.”
Across much of the Great Plains, this growing season seemed cursed even before the irrigation crisis.
First came trade wars that threw the grain markets into chaos.
Then floods covered cornfields with ice chunks the size of golf carts.
An abnormally wet spring delayed planting by weeks or months.
Finally, just when conditions were looking more stable, the irrigation canal split open, and water stopped flowing.
Not every problem hit every farmer, but few in Midwestern agriculture will make it to harvest unscathed.
“It’s just been event after event after event,” said Dave Kaufman, who canceled the purchase of a new Ford F-150 truck to save money after much of his farmland outside Gering, Neb., went dry. “And you would think that the last shoe had dropped, but it hasn’t.”
In the semiarid hills of the Nebraska Panhandle and eastern Wyoming, where summer rains are rare, farmers depend on irrigation water diverted from rivers through a network of canals and tunnels. A portion of that canal system had for generations nourished corn, sugar beets, pinto beans and other crops with water siphoned from the North Platte River.
That all changed July 17, when a roughly half-mile tunnel that carried water through a large hill had collapsed in the night. In Nebraska alone, around $50 million in crops is at stake.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Much less, a quake that will be registered in the fault of the Rose Canyon.
For the past five years, researchers and authorities on both sides of the border have been preparing a seismic and damage scenario for the San Diego-Tijuana region, the findings of which are expected by next March.
The purpose is to know what would happen if there is an earthquake of 6.9 magnitude along the fault that passes through the center of the city of San Diego and is projected to Tijuana.
And though much has been said about the much larger San Andreas fault, seismologists in the region fear a major earthquake in Rose Canyon because the effects could be devastating. They say that because of its proximity, no seismic alarm would be able to warn of such a shock.
In San Diego, there are concerns about old buildings that were built before safety regulations were implemented. In Tijuana, there is concern about landslides due to the type of soil, topography and urban growth, according to seismic and geological microzoning studies conducted by the Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education (CICESE).
There are other factors as well.
Given the current conditions in both cities, it is believed that Tijuana could be the most affected in terms of victims, while San Diego would see its repercussions on the economic side, due to its infrastructure and businesses that would suspend operations.
That’s what Dr. Jorge Meneses, a member of the state Seismic Safety Commission, sees.
“The idea of setting the scenario is to identify what our biggest problems are and be prepared to respond,” said Meneses, who also is president of the San Diego section of the Seismic Research Institute (EERI), the agency that heads this project.
This binational seismic scenario would be an update of the one developed in 1990 by the geological division of the California Department of Conservation, which collaborated with the then County Office of Disaster Preparedness and CICESE in Mexico, among others.
It is developed by engineers, scientists, researchers, architects, geologists, seismologists, economists and emergency service authorities from both sides of the border.
The EERI, the California Geological Survey, the Association of Structural Engineers of San Diego and the School of Engineering of the University of California San Diego, as well as the Autonomous University of Baja California and CICESE, serve as scientific and technical coordinator in Mexico, according to the scenario portal.
The report seeks answers to all kinds of concerns.
How prepared are we as a region? What would be the social and economic impacts? How can we improve seismic safety? Could there be a coordination to exchange resources from one country to another?
And what would happen at one of the busiest international crossings?
“If there’s an earthquake, there’s going to be an impact on that. Not only in the functioning of the border, but also in the trade that exists between San Diego and Tijuana,” said Meneses.
The San Ysidro Port of Entry is about to complete a 10-year upgrading, so no damage is expected. However, the damage could occur in the surrounding accesses, mainly on Interstate 5 because of its proximity to the coast, Meneses said.
“The highway that accesses the border is likely to be affected by liquefaction problems on both sides,” said Meneses, who pointed out that authorities from the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection have attended the seismic scenario workshops.
Once the report is ready, it will be given to authorities in both countries.
“They are basically recommendations,” Meneses said. “We as entities do not have the capacity to implement the necessary measures.
“We can’t go to the owner of a building and tell him that he has a year to reinforce it or tell those who operate the water supply system that the structure has to be replaced,” he said.
On the possibility of exchanging resources in the midst of the contingency, it would be viable but complicated at least within the first few hours.
“There are things that are beyond our reach because they are at the level of chancelleries and diplomatic relations,” said Mario Rodriguez, deputy director of Civil Protection in Baja California, which participates in the seismic scenario workshops.
This type of collaboration agreement already works in cases of forest fires, and is attended with only a phone call. “We are both good neighbors, there are many aspects of collaboration both in emergency response and trying to standardize communications,” Rodriguez said.
But when it comes to earthquakes, the situation could be different.
“The damage would be disastrous and it would be very difficult for them to come to help us and for us to be able to help, at least immediately,” Rodriguez said.
However, the knowledge acquired by this scenario will offer changes that reduce potential consequences. In Tijuana, it is estimated that 70 percent of the housing infrastructure lacks formality. One of those changes would be in the building codes.
In both cities, an earthquake on the Rose Canyon fault would bring problems with water supply, interruption of electrical power, damage to water pipes Meneses said.
The scenario will also consider how long it will take for cities to recover and adapt to a “new normality,” Meneses said. “New conditions will be generated.”
The County Office of Emergency Services is reviewing the results of the study for comments prior to its release, a spokeswoman for the agency confirmed.
In the same way, Helen Lopez from the California Office of Emergency Services said representatives have attended the scenario workshops, and will consider all recommendations.
The findings will be released in March at a conference in San Diego, Meneses said.
(Alexandra Mendoza, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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In addition, travelers at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports faced delays because air traffic controllers grounded flights over a technical problem.
It marked the second day of travel disruptions in European capitals after one of the hottest days in memory, when many places in Western Europe saw temperatures soar beyond 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Compounding that, the weekend is a big travel time across Europe as families head off for their summer holidays.
After several hours of flight restrictions over U.K. airspace Friday, the national air traffic controller NATS said it had fixed the technical issue and would be able to safely increase traffic flow.
“Weather is continuing to cause significant unrelated disruption across the country and more widely across Europe, which has further complicated today’s operation,” NATS said in a statement.
In France, suffocating heat turned into slippery storms Friday — including a hailstorm on the Tour de France route in the Alps that was so sudden and violent that organizers ordered a stop to the world’s premier cycling event.
As riders careened down hairpin turns after mounting a 9,000-foot peak, a storm lashed the valley below. A snowplow worked desperately to clear the route of slush, but organizers deemed it too dangerous to continue.
Weather almost never stops the three-week race, and the decision came on a day of high-drama in which race leader Julian Alaphilippe lost his top spot and accompanying yellow jersey just ahead of Sunday’s finale.
British rail commuters were also facing delays after the heat wave prompted Network Rail to impose speed restrictions in case the tracks buckled.
“With the railway being made of metal and moving parts, the sustained high temperatures took their toll in places,” said Phil James of Network Rail. “Everything was done to keep trains moving where possible, and last night hundreds of staff were out fixing the damage and repairing the railway ready for today.”
Passengers using Eurostar services to and from Paris were also facing “severe disruption” due to overhead power line problems in the French capital, which on Thursday recorded its hottest day ever with the temperature rising to 42.6 C (108.7 F).
Authorities across Europe were looking to address the consequences of Thursday’s soaring temperatures, as records that had stood — in some cases for decades — fell.
Europeans and tourists alike jumped into fountains, lakes, rivers or the sea to escape a suffocating heat wave rising up from the Sahara. Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands — all places where air conditioning is not typically installed in homes, cafes or stores — strained under the heat.
France faced a spike in fires in forests and farm fields that left a dozen firefighters injured, and a rise in drownings. Interior Minister Christophe Castaner linked the country’s 60 drowning deaths so far this month indirectly to the current heat wave, noting a rise in people drowning in unguarded bodies of water as they seek relief from high temperatures, some of whom suffer thermal shock when they jump from hot air into cold water.
(Natasha Livingstone, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The fires in Portugal received international news coverage thanks to the sheer size of the blaze and the number of personnel involved, while a dense “cloud” of smoke also formed over the Extremadura area of Spain thanks to the burning in Portugal.
The largest of the fires began in central Portugal in the Castelo Branco district early in the afternoon of 20 July. Two of the fires originated in Sertã and one in Vila de Rei, with the latter spreading on Saturday to the municipality of Mação, Santarém district, while in the Algarve over 200 firefighters and personnel tackled a blaze that began near Vale da Telha on 19 July but was under control the following day.
The fire in Vila de Rei and Mação has burnt more than 9,500 hectares of forest, about half of this year’s burned area, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). At the time of going to press the fire was considered to be “in resolution” but there were still more than 700 personnel involved in the operation and five aircraft.
According to Paula Neto of the National Institute of Emergency Medical, the fire in central Portugal resulted in 41 people being assisted by the authorities, 17 of whom were considered to be injured, with one in a serious condition.
Investigations into the cause of the fires in Castelo Branco are already underway by PJ police who, according to Lusa, have already begun to collect evidence of a criminal nature regarding the fires, including artefacts that may have been at the source of the fire found in the area.
The outbreak of three fires in such close proximity around the same time have been seen by police as suspicious.
A spokesman from the Bombeiros told newspaper Expresso: “The fires all came at the same time and in the same area. This geographical continuity is a strange coincidence”
Setting fire to forest areas on purpose is not a new phenomenon in Portugal and this was highlighted by the arrest of a 55 year old man on 21 July in the Castelo Branco area on suspicion of arson.
A police statement said: “The suspect set a fire in a forest area with a direct flame, which would have caused serious problems if it hadn’t been for the quick intervention of the Castelo Branco firefighters”.
While the authorities investigate the possibility of arson relating to the fires, experts have come forward to lament the “imposing position” of the government when it comes to enforcing land clearance laws to help prevent fires.
Luciano Lourenço, from the research centre of forest fires of the University of Coimbra, told Lusa that the state has placed itself in an “enforceable position”, producing legislation and enforcing it “rather than working with citizens” who do not normally participate in the drafting of laws relating to them but suffer the consequences of the fires.
In addition, citizens “often end up unable to understand their own legislation,” warned Luciano Lourenço, advocating awareness among the populations through the work of municipalities.
“Forest fires are essentially a social problem, they are a social risk and that is where they have to be attacked. Until they are addressed in this way, we will most likely continue to have forest fires and large forest fires, because without the involvement of populations, forest owners and forest agents we will not be able to find a way to manage forests against fires”, said the researcher who added that technological solutions are important but insufficient to solve the problem.
Fire ecology expert Joaquim Sande Silva has also called for a “revolution” in fighting fires in Portugal. He stressed that there is no short-term information regarding last weekend’s fire in Vila de Rei and that a report into the incident still needs to be concluded to ascertain the reasons why the fire progressed as it did.
However, he highlighted the fact that the firefighting system has not changed significantly since 2017, so different results cannot be expected.
“The system has not really undergone a revolution,” he said, underlining that “the protagonists of fire fighting remain the same”, with “the same competencies, same attitude, the same discipline and the same organisation.”
Sande Silva stressed that the creation of a more professional body was a proposal made in 2005, following the 2003 fires, “and was rejected”.
“I think that sooner or later we have to evolve. The Spaniards have evolved their approach a long time ago and other countries have evolved accordingly, ” he said.
Meanwhile, David Thomas President of Safe Communities Portugal stated: “The fires demonstrated to me the new tactic of a “muscular” approach by using aerial means at the earliest stages has had an impact in extinguishing most of the fires at the earliest stages. The Government decision to increase the number of GIPS (Mountain Support Team) to over a 1,000 and increase the availability of aircraft and helicopters is therefore bearing some fruit.
“However, should this not be successful, the fires can spread as we saw at an alarming speed, depending on wind, humidity and temperatures, not to mention the topography in the area concerned. In two days the Vale de Rei fire spread 25 kilometres from its originating point; that’s just over 10 seconds a metre”.
He added: “During our monitoring of the situation the subject was raised that sometimes people do not see fire fighters and are left to their own devices. In one case doubts over the official statistics were raised concerning the number of firefighters actually deployed according to ANEPC figures. It is important to bear in mind that these figures include: those who are taking much needed rest breaks; those withdrawn from the fire fronts as it is too dangerous, those rotating between shifts and those carrying out logistical support duties like drivers. In addition these figures include Civil Protection, GNR, INEM and other emergency personnel”.
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Civil Protection recommends that people adapt their behaviours and attitudes towards the dangers of rural fires by adopting necessary preventative and precautionary measures while also being aware about the possibility of rural fires developing locally.
David stated “Because fire-fighting personnel cannot be everywhere, it is vitally important that people are aware of the self-protection measures namely the Safe Village – Safe People programme. There are many elderly people who have no access to the internet, so I would ask those in remote areas who have internet access, to print the details in Portuguese and the other languages available and share with them.“
Continued high temperatures and low humidity levels have led to Portuguese Civil Protection to issue a warning to all citizens regarding the “worsening risk of fire” across the country. While current weather forecasts show a drop in temperature over the weekend in many parts of the country, temperatures are set to rise again by the beginning of the week.
(PORTUGAL NEWS)
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The same was true of Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, as temperatures rose and records tumbled one by one across Western Europe, scorching the continent and sending residents scrambling to seek relief from a dangerous heat wave.
In Paris, the temperature soared to 42.6 degrees Celsius (108.7 Fahrenheit), breaking a record set in 1947, 40.4 degrees Celsius, according to the French national weather service, which said the temperatures could rise further. Some 20 million people in northern France were expected to be affected by the heat.
In the Netherlands, temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), shattering the record high set only a day earlier, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute said. In Germany, the northwestern town of Lingen hit 42.6 Celsius (108.7 Fahrenheit), a new national record, Germany’s National Meteorological Service said.
And for the second time this week, Belgium measured its hottest day, with a temperature of 40.6 Celsius in Kleine Brogel (105 Fahrenheit) on Thursday, passing the mark set a day earlier, 40.2 Celsius. Authorities issued a code red alert for the first time since the weather warning system was put in place 20 years ago.
“It’s really shocking to have this heat in Brussels,” said Francesca Van Daele, a student of political science at the Free University of Brussels-VUB. “Our urban planning is not really made for heat waves like this.”
The hottest summers in Europe in the past 500 years have all come in the past 17 years, scientists say. Several heat waves have been linked to human-caused climate change. In the years ahead, they say, many more are likely to scorch temperate zones like northern Europe.
The British national weather service, the Met Office, had warned that temperatures were expected to break the national record, 38.5 degrees Celsius (101.3 Fahrenheit).
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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About 970,000 gallons have leaked from the ground at an oilfield west of Bakersfield over the last couple of months; about one third of it is oil and the other two-thirds water.
“I’m seeing progress,” Newsom said on a visit to the site, where the oil and water are contained in a dry desert creek bed. The leaks are known as surface expressions, which can be caused by injecting steam into the ground.
Chevron uses steam injection to extract oil in the Cymric Oil Field about 35 miles west of Bakersfield. The steam softens the thick crude so it can flow more readily. It is a different process from fracking, which breaks up underground layers of rock.
The company has said the initial leak began May 10 after its crews tried to seal off a damaged and abandoned well.
The spill is the largest in California since 1990, when a tanker spilled more than 400,000 gallons of crude oil off the coast of Huntington Beach.
(NB: This was part of an article about drinking water in California, written by Adam Beam for the ASSOCIATED PRESS; the first part of this article can be found at the LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Belgium and Germany registered their highest-ever temperatures, while the Netherlands saw its hottest day in 75 years.
And the mercury is expected to rise even further.
Paris and other parts of France could see temperatures exceeding 104 Fahrenheit today along with Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
The heat is putting pressure on authorities to help protect the elderly and the sick. Air conditioning is not common at homes, offices, schools or hospitals in European cities.
The weather is also aggravating droughts since it hasn’t rained much in many parts of Europe this summer. The combination of heat, wind and possible lightning from thunderstorms also increases the risk of wildfires.
The second likely-to-be-record-breaking heat wave in two months in Europe includes some of the same ingredients of the first — hot dry air coming from northern Africa. That hot air is trapped between cold stormy systems in the Atlantic and eastern Europe and forms “a little heat dome,” said Ryan Maue, a private meteorologist in the U.S.
This heat wave is a relatively short event where the heat comes with a southerly wind — and dust — from Africa’s Sahara Desert, in contrast to the big European heat waves of 2003 and 2010 which lasted much longer and were sustained by a stationary high pressure system with little wind, experts say.
At the end of June, several countries reported record temperatures, and France hit its all-time heat record: 114.8 F in the small southern town of Verargues.
Temperatures in France especially are likely to be 27 F higher than normal, with Paris likely to break its all-time hottest record mark of 40.4 degrees C or 104.7 F. Surrounding areas around Paris may hit 106 to 108 F, weather experts said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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West of the mountains, the days should turn humid and a little warmer, but very little rain is expected. Just before 2 p.m. Monday, the National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning for an area north of Julian. The forecasters said the towering storm, with clouds that reached as high 45,000 feet, was capable of winds in excess of 55 mph, penny-sized hail and rain rates of 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch in an hour.
“We are watching it very closely,” said Matt Moreland, the meteorologist in charge at the weather service’s office in Rancho Bernardo.
A separate storm to the north also soaked Oak Grove near the Riverside County border. The severe thunderstorm warning was canceled before 3:30 p.m., but more than 75 lightning strikes were recorded in the San Diego County.
Additional storms formed in Imperial County and near the Mexican border later in the afternoon. A separate storm prompted a flash-flood warning near Twentynine Palms in San Bernardino County.
The influx of warm, very moist air from northern Mexico, steered over Southern California by a powerful ridge of high pressure over the Four Corners region, will continue each afternoon through Thursday, Moreland said.
Forecasters expect increased chances of rain the mountains today, Wednesday and Thursday. “There’s the potential for localized flooding,” Moreland said. “That’s typical with this pattern.”
The coast and valleys should see cloud cover and some sprinkles, especially this morning, but little more is expected, Moreland said. The inland valleys should see highs creep up into the high 80s and low 90s.
“That’s not unusual for July, but it will seem stark because it will be humid and we haven’t seen much heat this summer,” Moreland said.
San Diego is projected to reach 79 degrees today and Wednesday. The city hasn’t reached 80 degrees since April 8, a stretch of 105 days.
“It’s such a change from last year,” Moreland said, when San Diego had one of its warmest Julys on record. The mountains and desert should dry out over the weekend when the ridge of high pressure shifts west, shutting off the flow of moisture from the south.
(Robert Krier, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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About 30,000 customers in Brooklyn were taken off power Sunday so the utility could make repairs and prevent a bigger outage, de Blasio had said earlier.
On Monday, he offered a blistering assessment of that decision.
“This should not have happened,” he told reporters, “and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
De Blasio said the private company is “not accountable to the public in a way a public agency would be.”
“Con Ed is very haughty about this,” the mayor said. “They don’t give real answers, and they don’t feel they have to.”
The company defended its decision, saying in a statement that it was “necessary to prevent longer outages to the impacted customers that would have occurred as a result of additional equipment damage.”
“We are completely focused on getting customers back in service, and we regret the distress they are under,” spokesman Allan Drury wrote in an email.
De Blasio’s remarks came as Con Ed was working to restore power to about 19,000 customers, many of them in southeast Brooklyn.
The utility said in an emailed statement that it was working to restore power to everyone by the afternoon, but as of 5 p.m. Monday, about 10,800 customers remained without power, mostly in Brooklyn.
Like much of the East Coast, New York City experienced temperatures in the high 90s over the weekend — and it felt much hotter with the humidity. Temperatures were starting to fall Monday, and city emergency management officials warned of thunderstorms.
“It’s still hot and people have a right to be frustrated. We’re pushing Con Ed to get power back as fast as possible,” De Blasio tweeted.
De Blasio said that New York City emergency management was adding personnel on the ground in southeast Brooklyn, including at nursing homes and adult care facilities, to respond to emergencies and keep people safe.
De Blasio told reporters the city still does not have answers in the wake of outages a week ago that crippled the heart of Manhattan, knocking out power to businesses and residents for more than three hours along a 30-block stretch.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he deployed 200 state troopers, 100 generators and 50 light towers to Brooklyn, as well as personnel and command vehicles from the state Office of Emergency Management. He urged New Yorkers to check on their neighbors, especially the elderly.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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“Sunday has been canceled,” the NYPD jokingly tweeted. “Stay indoors, nothing to see here. Really, we got this.”
The central part of the country, meanwhile, enjoyed some relief as a cold front moved steadily southward and eastward across the country, bringing down the temperatures. But the cooler weather settling in today and Tuesday is also bringing severe storms packed with powerful winds and heavy rains that have already caused damage in the Midwest. The National Weather Service warned that flash flooding might be possible in some areas.
From the Carolinas to Maine, daytime highs reached the upper 90s Sunday. Coupled with high humidity, temperatures felt as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit in places.
“There’s no point being out,” Washington, D.C., bus driver Ramieka Darby remarked while taking a quick break amid temperatures of nearly 100 degrees.
In New York City, where all eyes were on the power grid even before the hot weather following a Manhattan blackout last weekend, electricity company Con Ed reported roughly 50,000 customers were without power as of 10 p.m. Sunday because of scattered outages, the vast majority in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
Con Ed said it reduced voltage by 8 percent in those areas to maintain service as repairs are made and asked those customers to turn off non-essential appliances to conserve power.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that the “accumulated heat and strain from the past few days has built up in the electrical equipment.” He said Con Ed would start bringing power back to customers 500 at a time starting at about midnight.
In Boston, Sunday’s heat prompted cancellation of the annual Jimmy Fund 5K cancer benefit race as well as a popular Sunday market in the city’s South End. City officials also again opened up city pools free to residents as the temperature topped 90 degrees for the third consecutive day.
Meanwhile, parts of the Midwest are dealing with the effects of damaging winds and rain that swooped in with the cold front that’s breaking up the heat wave.
In Milwaukee, utility crews restored power to more than 48,000 customers in the eastern part of the state. But around 56,000 customers were still without power Sunday after more than 700 wires, 50 power poles and 600 trees or branches were taken down in thunderstorms, officials said.
In Michigan, where roughly 500,000 customers were without electricity, power might not be restored for everyone until Tuesday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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“This is still a regional emergency and by no way a global threat,” said Robert Steffen of the University of Zurich, chairman of the WHO emergency committee that recommended the declaration.
But the panel was persuaded by several factors that have made combating the epidemic more urgent in recent weeks: The disease reached Goma, a city of nearly 2 million people; the outbreak has raged for a year; the virus has flared again in spots where it had once been contained; and the epidemic hot zone has geographically expanded in northeastern Congo near Rwanda and into Uganda.
Officials are also dismayed by the persistence of the epidemic even with the extensive use of a successful vaccine.
This was the fourth time the WHO had considered whether to declare a global health emergency in the Congo outbreak. It stopped short the first three times, even though some aid agencies and public health officials had called on the organization to do so in hopes such an order would elicit more funds and recruit more health workers to the region.
But government officials have repeatedly expressed competing concerns about interrupting trade or restricting travel, which Steffen emphasized should not result from the emergency status issued Wednesday.
Emergency declarations are issued sparingly. Only four such declarations have been made in the past.
The Congo outbreak began a year ago, with the first cases confirmed in August. As of Monday, the disease had infected 2,512 people and killed 1,676 of them.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Communities are preparing by offering buildings as cooling centers and asking residents to check in on relatives and neighbors. Officials also are concerned about smog, which is exacerbated by the heat and makes it more difficult for certain people to breathe, including the very young, the elderly and people with asthma or lung diseases.
More than 100 local heat records are expected to fall Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. Most won’t be record-daily highs but record-high nighttime lows, and that lack of cooling can be dangerous, meteorologists say. Temperatures in parts of the East won’t drop below the mid- to upper-70s or even 80 degrees at night.
The heat wave will likely be “short and searing,” said Greg Carbin, forecast branch chief for the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center.
A high pressure system stretching over much of the country is keeping the heat turned on. The heat and humidity are made to feel worse by the large amount of moisture in the air coming from the Gulf of Mexico, much of it left over from Hurricane Barry.
The heat index, which is what the temperature feels like, should hit 110 in Washington, D.C., on Saturday and 109 in Chicago and Detroit on Friday, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of Weather Underground. Wednesday marked Washington’s seventh straight day with temperatures of at least 90 degrees, and that streak was expected to last for another five days.
An experimental weather service forecast projects that nearly 100 local records will be broken today and Friday in Texas, Oklahoma, parts of the Midwest and a large swath of the East Coast. On Saturday, 101 records could fall in an area stretching from Texas to Iowa and east to Maine and Florida, according to projections.
Such heat can be deadly. Over three days in July 1995, more than 700 people died during a heat wave in Chicago as temperatures rose above 97 degrees. Many of the dead were poor, elderly and lived alone.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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In San Diego County, residents could see the average number of days in a year that feel hotter than 105 degrees increase from about two currently to 13 by midcentury to 26 by the year 2100.
In California about 627,000 people already experience seven or more days a year with a heat index above 105 degrees. However, that number is expected to increase to more than 11.7 million if nothing is done to address the climate crisis.
That’s according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Communications.
According to the findings, if humanity doesn’t dramatically rein in greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury, more than 6 million people from California to Louisiana to Kansas could regularly experience what experts call “off the charts” heat.
“It’s really terrifying,” said Kristina Dahl, a climate scientists with the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the study. “These are conditions that we don’t really have a way to describe what they feel like to the human body.
The report used the National Weather Service’s heat index, a combination of temperature and humidity. What is often referred to as a “feels like” temperature is considered off the charts when readings exceed 127 to 137 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the combination of humidity to heat.
Today, only about 2,000 people experience seven or more days a year of scorching off-the-charts heat, with conditions largely limited to parts of Arizona, Nevada and California.
However, by the end of the century, more than 118 million people as far north as Minnesota could be suffering these lethal heat waves, according to the report, titled Killer Heat in the United States.
“It’s a huge increase,” Dahl said. “Historically, those conditions have only occurred in our country in the Sonoran Desert.”
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1999 and 2010, there were about 7,400 heat-related deaths, more than 600 a year. More than 80 percent of those fatalities happened in urban areas with Arizona, Texas and California leading the country.
Beyond heat-related illnesses and deaths, rising temperatures are predicted to exacerbate drought conditions and increase the spread of wildfire.
To establish the findings, the scientists used more than a dozen existing climate models focused on the continental United States. The researchers then extrapolated projected heat indexes through 2099 down to the state, county and city levels.
If current global emissions continue through midcentury, the average number of days in a year with a heat index above 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the continental U.S. will quadruple, according to the research.
At the same time, the number of people exposed to 30 or more days a year of 105 degree weather would jump from about 900,000 to about 90 million.
The report found that if warming is capped at 2 degree Celsius above preindustrial levels, in accord with international goals, impacts could be significantly reduced. So far, the planet has sustained about 1 degree Celsius of warming. Under this scenario, the number of people who experience off-the-charts heat could be kept to about 4.6 million by 2100.
It’s still unknown whether an onslaught of heat waves will shift how seriously people take global warming,” said Peter Howe, a professor at Utah State University who studies public opinion around climate change.
“Social science research shows that people are able to notice these changes in their local areas, and hot weather can make people more concerned about climate change in the short term,” he said. “But the science still isn’t clear on whether events like heat waves cause people to change their opinions about climate change over the long term.”
(Joshua Emerson Smith, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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A magnitude 4.2 earthquake Monday morning struck about 25 miles northwest of the July 5 magnitude 7.1 quake.
There have been more than 70 earthquakes of magnitude 4 and greater since July 4, when a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck on Independence Day; a day later, a much larger magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit.
The earthquake at 1:38 a.m. Monday occurred in the northwestern section of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.
The closest towns nearest to the earthquake, Ridgecrest and Trona, both about 30 miles southeast of the epicenter, were calculated by the U.S. Geological Survey to have felt shaking on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale of between 1 and 2 — either so faint it wasn’t felt, or “weak” shaking that it might have only been felt by a few people, even those sitting still.
The town of Lone Pine is about 40 miles northwest of the epicenter. The shaking at the remote epicenter, just northwest of Sugarloaf Mountain within the borders of the naval air weapons station, was moderate, or intensity level 5.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The hardest-hit country appeared to be Nepal, where police said Monday that 67 people had died as a result of the monsoonal rains that began last Thursday night and set off widespread flooding, particularly in the country’s southern plains along the Indian border.
Officials said that at least 68 others had been injured in landslides and flooding and that an additional 30 people were still missing.
Nine major highways in Nepal had been blocked by floods and mudslides, 3,366 people had been rescued and 16,520 households had been temporarily displaced as of Monday, the National Emergency Operation Center said. No estimates on property or infrastructure damage were available.
“We are trying to provide dry foods — rice, noodles and biscuits — to flood victims, but it’s not easy to access affected people as whole villages are inundated and roads connecting to those villages are damaged,” Ajay Gupta, the mayor of Gaur, a town along Nepal’s southern border with India, said by telephone Monday afternoon.
In India, at least 25 people have died so far from the rains and floods, Mohamad Farukh, the chief executive of Rapid Response, a nongovernmental charity focusing on disaster relief, said in a text message Sunday. Indian officials said a day earlier that about 750 people from the worst-affected states, Assam and Bihar, had been rescued over the preceding three or four days.
In the northern Indian town of Solan, which lies in a hilly border region hit by heavy rains, seven soldiers and one civilian died after a three-story building suddenly collapsed, officials told The Associated Press on Monday.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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In Nepal, the areas affected worst by the deluge were in the west of the country, Bed Nidi Kfanal, the head of the country’s national emergency operation center, said in a phone interview Sunday.
The number of dead could rise in the coming days, he said, adding that at least 29 people were missing and 28 others injured. Security forces have had to stage numerous rescues.
Every year, from June to September, monsoon season brings heavy rains that pummel South Asia, regularly provoking deadly flooding. July is often the wettest month.
Though floods are common in Nepal during the rains, the levels of inundation this year have been higher than usual. With the rainfall finally beginning to ease, Kfanal expressed hope that the flooding would recede. For now, authorities were doing the best they could, he said.
Neighboring countries, particularly India but also Bangladesh and Myanmar, have also been affected.
Mohamad Farukh, chief executive of Rapid Response, a nongovernmental charity focusing on disaster relief, said that at least 25 people had died so far in India, adding that this number could increase significantly in the coming days.
Around 1 million have been displaced from their homes, he said in a text message Sunday.
“It’s in the beginning stage,” he said of the flooding, which he called more intense than normal. “It is getting worse day by day because of continuous rains and overflowing rivers,” he added.
In India, the worst-affected areas were in the states of Assam and Bihar, in the northeast, according to government officials. Around 750 people from the two states have been rescued by the country’s disaster response unit, the government said in a news release Saturday.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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One of the most serious concerns as Sunday dawned was the possibility that heavy runoff from the storm would swell the Amite and Comite rivers over their banks. The overflowing of those two rivers in 2016 contributed to a deluge that swamped thousands of homes. But Barry failed to deliver on the worst-case rainfall predictions, and many flood warnings were canceled later in the day.
It was a break met with joy in an area where some people had only just finished repairing houses damaged in the 2016 flood, and where others were still not back in their old homes.
The possibility of repeat flooding was “extremely emotionally stressful,” said Layton Ricks, president of Livingston Parish, just east of Baton Rouge.
The storm came ashore on Louisiana’s southwest coast as a Category 1 hurricane Saturday, with sustained 75 mph winds, but it soon weakened to a tropical storm and then, late in the day, to a tropical depression as the winds slowed. It continued to rake the region all day with bands of heavy rainfall.
New Orleans was hit by slashing rain in the early afternoon Sunday, but it seemed increasingly likely that the storm would not stress the city’s floodwater pumping system the way a garden-variety rainstorm had when it sat over the city Wednesday, turning some streets into shallow rivers.
Many New Orleanians’ relief was mixed with frustration over what they saw as overblown reporting before the storm from national media outlets who were excited by the possibility of a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Alexandra Dunn, head of the EPA office that oversees pesticides, said the agency was “thrilled” to be able to approve new uses and lift past restrictions on sulfoxaflor, which she called a “highly effective” tool for growers around the country — but which the agency itself considers “very highly toxic” to bees. The decision will allow the chemical to be applied to a wide range of crops, including citrus and corn, soybeans and strawberries, pineapples and pumpkins.
“EPA is providing long-term certainty for U.S. growers to use an important tool to protect crops and avoid potentially significant economic losses, while maintaining strong protection for pollinators,” Dunn said.
The agency’s critics, some of whom successfully sued the EPA in federal court during the Obama administration to restrict use of the pesticide, were anything but thrilled with Friday’s announcement.
“At a time when honeybees and other pollinators are dying in greater numbers than ever before, EPA’s decision to remove restrictions on yet another bee-killing pesticide is nothing short of reckless,” Greg Loarie, an attorney for the environmental advocacy group, Earthjustice, said.
The news comes during a time that commercial honeybee colonies have been declining at a startling rate. The annual loss rate for honeybees during the year ending in April rose to 40.7 percent, up slightly over the annual average of 38.7 percent, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit group associated with the University of Maryland.
In deciding to grant broad approval to sulfoxaflor, Dunn said the agency relied on a host of new, industry-backed studies that showed the insecticide dissipates in the environment more quickly than widely used alternatives, thereby lowering the risk to bees. In addition, the agency said sulfoxaflor often requires fewer applications than other insecticides, resulting in reduced risks to wildlife.
She added that farmers must still abide by numerous restrictions when using the pesticide. For instance, it can be applied to certain tree fruits, berries and other crops only after they have bloomed. Restrictions also exist to prevent drifting of the pesticide in windy conditions.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake occurred at 6:11 a.m. Friday and was centered about 5 miles northeast of the Mojave Desert city of Ridgecrest.
The quake was felt very lightly in the Los Angeles area.
There have been thousands of aftershocks of the magnitude 6.4 earthquake on July 4 and the 7.1 quake that occurred the next day.
The aftershocks have been dying off but are expected to continue for some time.
Seismologist Lucy Jones tweeted that the 4.9 quake is normal and is having its own aftershocks. No new damage was reported Friday.
Authorities have estimated the damage to Ridgecrest and Trona, the communities closest to the temblors, at about $100 million, although that could go up as buildings continue to be evaluated.
California Seismic Safety Commission member Kit Miyamoto said Thursday that as inspectors entered some buildings they discovered serious damage to ceilings and other areas that they couldn’t see from the outside.
“Three buildings from the exterior appeared to be fine and probably safe for entry, but upon further investigation the roofs had actually collapsed,” he said, adding inspectors may find others in that condition.
The two desert communities may have sustained as little damage as they did because they have no tall buildings and many of the homes in one are fairly new and were built to stricter earthquake standards, authorities say.
Meanwhile, two earthquakes shook the Puget Sound region in Washington state early Friday morning, with the temblors felt into British Columbia and across the Cascade Mountains into the eastern part of the state.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
The U.S. Geological Survey reports that a 4.6 magnitude earthquake rattled the Three Lakes area, about 40 miles northeast of Seattle. That was followed minutes later by a 3.5 magnitude aftershock near the city of Monroe, some 30 miles northeast of Seattle.
The initial jolt was recorded at 2:51 a.m. Friday.
The USGS said it received reports of people feeling the shaking from Vancouver to near Wenatchee, Wash.
The Northwest is especially prone to earthquakes. The most recent large one to shake the Seattle area occurred in 2001, when a 6.8 magnitude quake happened just north of Olympia, Wash. That quake caused some injuries and widespread damage, including to the air traffic control tower at SEA-TAC Airport.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Yet the fire is still burning on the island, according to Maui County Mayor Michael Victorino.
"This fire is still an active threat to our community and residents are urged to remain vigilant of changing conditions," Victorino said.
Firefighting helicopters, which worked most of Thursday, will return to the site of the fire on Friday in hopes of fully quelling the burn.
Officials said thousands of residents were evacuated, with more than 600 heading to shelters, but all have been told conditions are safe enough now to return to their homes. Shelters will remain on standby in case the blaze flares up again on Friday.
County officials in Maui first responded to the brush fire around 10:42 a.m. local time Thursday near the Kuihelani Highway. Fire officials said winds blowing 20 mph and higher fanned flames across fallow fields. The blaze swept through parts of nearby Maui Veterans Highway, leaving it charred.
Officials did not say what may have caused the blaze. No deaths, injuries or structure damage was immediately reported.
"The fire came very close to some structures in South Maui, including the Maalaea Power Plant, but firefighters were able to prevent damages," Victorino said.
The Maui Humane Society was also evacuated. Officials and volunteers moved animals in crates and kennels to shelter.
The fire in Maui, the second-largest Hawaiian island in area, drew fire engines, tankers and battalion chiefs to the scene.
Oprah Winfrey, who owns a home in Maui, told a local resident on Twitter that she has given emergency responders access to one of her private homes. "Hoping for the safety of all," she tweeted.
"A big mahalo to @Oprah for giving @mauicounty access to your private road for use to assist in the #Mauifire," tweeted Hawaii Gov. David Ige.
According to Hawaii's Department of Transportation, flights had been diverted from Kahului Airport, which was operating briefly on a power generator as a result of the fire, but power has been restored and flights have resumed, transportation officials said.
Still, as the blaze continues, Hawaii tourism officials are advising visitors planning trips to or from the Kahului Airport to contact their airlines to check the status of the flights.
Maui Police Lt. Gregg Okamoto said at a news conference that as fire-related concerns have been growing, the island has been experiencing disruptions with people trying to call 911 to report emergencies.
"I encourage the public, if you need to call 911, keep calling in and you'll get through eventually," he said.
(NPR)
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National Guard troops and rescue crews in high-water vehicles took up positions around the state as Louisiana braced for the arrival of the storm tonight or early Saturday.
Barry could have winds of about 75 mph, just barely over the 74 mph threshold for a hurricane, when it comes ashore, making it a Category 1 storm, forecasters said.
But it is expected to bring more than a foot and a half of rain in potentially ruinous downpours that could go on for hours as the storm passes through the metropolitan area of nearly 1.3 million people and pushes slowly inland.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, who declared an emergency earlier in the week as the storm brewed in the Gulf of Mexico, warned that the storm’s blow could form a dangerous combination with the already-high Mississippi River, which has been swelled by heavy rain and snowmelt upriver this spring.
“There are three ways that Louisiana can flood: storm surge, high rivers and rain,” Edwards said. “We’re going to have all three.”
President Donald Trump issued a federal emergency declaration for Louisiana late Thursday, authorizing the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster relief efforts.
As of Thursday evening, Barry was about 90 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi, with winds around 45 mph. A hurricane warning was posted for a 100-mile stretch of Louisiana coastline just below Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Southeast of New Orleans, authorities handed out sandbags and people piled into cars with their pets and began clearing out. Plaquemines Parish, at Louisiana’s low-lying southeastern tip, ordered the mandatory evacuation of as many as 10,000 people, and by mid-afternoon the area was largely empty.
Justice of the Peace David McGaha waited with his mother, his wife and their 15-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter for a ferry so they could evacuate to his mother’s house in Alabama.
“If the river wasn’t so high, we’d probably stay. You have to worry about the water that’ll be pushing against those levees,” he said. “They made a lot of improvements to the levee, but they haven’t completed all the projects.”
The National Hurricane Center said as much as 20 inches of rain could fall in parts of eastern Louisiana, including Baton Rouge, and the entire region could get as much as 10 inches. The New Orleans area could get 10 to 15 inches through Sunday, forecasters said.
Meteorologist Benjamin Schott said the chief concern is not the wind: “Rainfall and flooding is going to be the No. 1 threat with this storm.”
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said that the pumping system that drains the city’s streets is working as designed but that Barry could dump water faster than the pumps can move it.
“We cannot pump our way out of the water levels that are expected to hit the city of New Orleans,” she warned.
However, the city did not plan to order evacuations because Barry was so close and because it was not expected to grow into a major hurricane. Officials instead advised people to keep at least three days of supplies on hand and to keep their neighborhood storm drains clear so water can move quickly.
Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans in 2005 and was blamed altogether for more than 1,800 deaths in Louisiana and other states, by some estimates.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The storm was associated with an atmospheric disturbance in the Gulf that forecasters said was on track to strengthen into a hurricane by the weekend. The National Hurricane Center expected the system to become a tropical depression by this morning, a tropical storm by tonight and a hurricane on Friday.
Lines of thunderstorms ranged far out into the Gulf and battered New Orleans, where as much as 8 inches of rain fell over a three-hour period Wednesday morning, officials said.
Mississippi and Texas were also at risk of torrential rains.
In New Orleans, streets turned into small, swift rivers that overturned garbage cans and picked up pieces of floating wood. Water was up to the doors of many cars. Other vehicles were abandoned. Kayakers paddled their way down some streets.
Chandris Rethmeyer lost her car to the flood and had to wade through water about 4 feet deep to get to safety. She was on her way home after working an overnight shift when she got stuck behind an accident in an underpass and the water started rising.
“I was going to sit in my car and let the storm pass,” she said. “But I reached back to get my son’s iPad and put my hand into a puddle of water.”
Valerie R. Burton woke up Wednesday to what looked like a lake outside her door.
“There was about 3 to 4 feet of water in the street, pouring onto the sidewalks and at my door. So I went to my neighbors to alert them and tell them to move their cars,” she said.
Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency and said National Guard troops and high-water vehicles would be positioned all over the state in advance of more heavy rain.
Forecasters said Louisiana could see up to 12 inches of rain by Monday, with isolated areas receiving as much as 18 inches.
The additional rain could push the already swollen Mississippi River precariously close to the tops of levees that protect New Orleans, officials said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Authorities said the deaths occurred late on Wednesday in three separate incidents in the Halkidiki region, a popular tourist destination during the summer months that is dotted with seaside resorts.
The victims included a 54-year-old woman and an eight-year-old boy, both of whom were from Romania, who were fatally wounded after a roof collapsed on a restaurant in Nea Plagia. A Czech couple also died when strong winds blew their caravan away in Sozopoli, while a Russian man and his son were killed by a falling tree in Nea Potidea, police said.
"Six tourists were killed and at least 30 people were injured during this cyclone," Charalambos Steriadis, head of civil protection in northern Greece, said.
The freak storm only lasted about 20 minutes, according to witnesses interviewed by state television ERT.
Streets in towns in the area were dotted with uprooted pine trees and overturned motorcycles, local media reported.
Authorities declared Halkidiki in a state of emergency, and Greece's newly appointed citizens' protection minister visited early on Thursday. At least 140 firefighters were operating in the area.
"It is the first time in my 25-year career that I have lived through something like this," Athansios Kaltsas, director of the Nea Moudania Medical Centre, where many of the injured were treated for fractures, told Greek television.
"It was so abrupt, and so sudden," he said.
Kaltsas said patients taken to the clinic ranged in age from eight months to over 70 years old. Some suffered head injuries from trees and other falling objects.
At least 140 rescue workers were involved in the operation, emergency chief Vassilis Varthakoyannis said.
Such severe weather is unusual in Greece, where summers are typically hot and dry. Meteorologist Klearxos Marousakis described conditions as "extremely unusual" for this time of year.
Meteorologists forecast it would continue to rain in the area until about 9 am (06:00 GMT) on Thursday.
The storms came after temperatures in Greece soared to 37 degrees Celsius over the past two days.
(AL JAZEERA)
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The National Weather Service said Monday that a flash flood warning was in effect for the District of Columbia, after more than 3 inches of rain had fallen on Reagan National Airport in one hour earlier in the day.
“Widespread flash flooding has occurred this morning across the D.C. metro area,” the National Weather Service said in a statement. “Much of this flooding is subsiding, and the heavy rain is over. Some of the larger streams are still rising, however, so flooding and road closures will continue through the afternoon.”
The National Weather Service advised people to turn around if they encountered flooded roads and said most drowning deaths during a flash flood happen inside vehicles.
The Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department said it had responded to 55 swift water rescue calls Monday morning, including the evacuation of people from a block of mobile homes. There were no reported injuries, but thousands were without power.
In Washington, floodwaters stranded motorists on the roofs of their cars in Northwest D.C. The D.C. Fire and EMS Department said it had rescued 15 people across the city who had been stranded atop their cars in high waters.
Rising waters on Constitution Avenue swallowed sidewalk curbs, making part of the city center look like a vast, shallow lake. Passing cars and bicycles sent waves ripping across its surface.
The rain also wreaked havoc on the capital’s mass transit network. Water cascaded down escalators and elevators into underground Metro stations and burst through station roofs, sending waterfalls onto the tracks. Amtrak said its service in and around the city had been briefly suspended Monday, with delays expected after it had resumed.
The damage appeared to be most severe in suburban areas of Virginia and Maryland, where local news footage and social media video from residents showed water cascading through normally tidy neighborhoods and parks.
Media in Potomac, Md., reported that rain waters had flooded homes and damaged roads, opening a sinkhole that had led to the partial collapse of one street.
Hope Hedge Seck, editor of a website for military service members, shared a video of floodwaters surging through her front yard in Arlington, a densely populated Virginia county directly across the Potomac River from Washington.
“We used to have a creek and a yard,” she wrote. “Now just a creek I guess.”
Elsewhere in Arlington, floods turned normally busy streets into shallow, fast-moving rivers. Water rushed past cars, trapping motorists inside their vehicles and turning commonplace curbside items into suburban flotsam and jetsam.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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About 1 million of California’s nearly 40 million residents don’t have access to clean drinking water because of pollution from humans or natural causes, a fact state lawmakers have called an embarrassment for a state with the fifth-largest economy in the world. The problem is statewide, but it is concentrated in the Central Valley — the capital of the state’s $20 billion agriculture industry.
State lawmakers, wary of approving a new tax in a year when they had an estimated $21.5 billion surplus, approved a bill that would authorize spending up to $130 million from a fund aimed at fighting climate change.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The ShakeAlert system is substantially built in California and overall is about 55 percent complete, with much of the remaining installation of seismic sensor stations to be done in the Pacific Northwest, said Robert de Groot of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Areas that have the appropriate number of sensors include Southern California, San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle-Tacoma region, de Groot said.
The system does not predict earthquakes. Rather, it detects that an earthquake is occurring, rapidly calculates expected intensity levels and sends out alerts that may give warnings ranging from several seconds to perhaps a minute before potentially damaging shaking hits locations away from the epicenter.
Depending on the distance, that could be enough time to automatically slow trains, stop industrial machines, start generators, pull a surgical knife away from a patient or tell students to put the “drop, cover and hold” drill into action.
For alerts to be useful, delivery has to be timely, and that’s a problem with current cellphone technology. For cellphone delivery, the USGS ultimately intends to use the same system that delivers Amber Alerts, sending signals to everyone in reach of cellphone towers in defined areas where damaging shaking is expected.
Pilot programs involving select users have been under way for several years. In October, the USGS announced the system was ready to be used broadly by businesses, utilities, schools and other entities following a software update that reduced problems such as false alerts typically caused by a big quake somewhere in the world being misidentified as a local quake.
Currently, the only mass public notification is possible through a mobile app developed for the city of Los Angeles and functional only within Los Angeles County.
The ShakeAlertLA app did not send alerts for last week’s two big quakes, but officials said it functioned as designed because the expected level of shaking in the LA area — more than 100 miles from the epicenters— was below a trigger threshold.
Thresholds for alerting are important because California has daily earthquakes.
“Imagine getting 10 ShakeAlerts on your phone for really small earthquakes that may not affect you,” de Groot said. “If people get saturated with these messages it’s going to make people not care as much.”
In the Mojave Desert on Monday, rattled residents cleaned up and officials assessed damage in the aftermath of Thursday’s magnitude 6.4 earthquake and Friday’s magnitude 7.1 quake centered near Ridgecrest.
It could be several more days before water service is restored to the small town of Trona, where officials trucked in portable toilets and showers, said San Bernardino County spokesman David Wert.
Ten residences in Trona were red-tagged as uninhabitable and officials expect that number to increase as inspectors complete surveys.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Gray whales have been washing ashore with alarming regularity, particularly in the San Francisco area and the Los Angeles and Long Beach Harbors, but also at some beaches in San Diego.
On March 29, San Diego lifeguards found a 30-foot-long dead whale off the shore near Mission Beach, just a day after another whale carcass was towed away from the coast off Torrey Pines.
As of June 27, a total of 171 whales have stranded on West Coast beaches off North America, with 85 of those turning up on the U.S. coastline and 37 beaching in California alone. Since most whales that die either sink or float out to sea, the beached whales represent just about 10 percent of total mortalities.
Gray whale deaths hit a peak in May and continued through June. With whale carcasses drifting on shore, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on May 31 declared an “unusual mortality event,” which triggers heightened investigation and response to the strandings.
“The unusual mortality event this year has exceeded the stranding levels for the past number of years,” said Dave Weller, a cetacean researcher with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “It’s exceeded a threshold that is cause for concern. We’ve seen this happen in the past.”
Those stranding deaths come on top of an escalating number of whale entanglements. On Monday, NOAA reported that the number of whales entangled in fishing gear last year was far above its average for the previous decades. In 2018, the report stated, 46 whales were entangled in fishing gear off the U.S. West Coast. Those animals included a mix of gray, blue, humpback and other whales.
The 2018 numbers fell below the peaks in 2015 and 2016, when more than 50 of the animals became snarled in fishing gear, but much higher than the average of 10 entanglements per year between 2000 and 2014, according to the NOAA report. Out of the 46 incidents last year, 39 entangled whales were alive, and seven were dead. The animals were ensnared in Dungeness crab and spot prawn gear, as well as gill nets.
The stranded gray whales pose a puzzle, because they didn’t show a consistent cause of death, said Justin Viezbicke, California Stranding Network Coordinator. Some but not all appeared emaciated. Others showed injuries consistent with ship strikes, such as bruises, gashes or broken bones.
“There isn’t a single common thread that all of the strandings have had, so it’s probably a combination of factors,” he said.
Researchers have taken samples of the stranded whales to learn more about any injuries, diseases or malnutrition they may have suffered. But it will take weeks or months to analyze the samples, and they weren’t able to do full necropsies on all the animals.
And even the damage that they’ve observed is hard to square with ocean conditions. For instance, maritime regulators imposed speed restrictions on ship lanes to reduce whale strikes in 2012, which should help keep the animals out of harm’s way.
“The hardest part about the vessel collisions is that we almost never know exactly where they occurred,” Viezbicke said. “It’s hard to verify if those slowdown lanes are effective in these situations. We don’t know where these are occurring, whether they’re inside the lanes and outside the lanes.”
And though climate change is altering the Arctic areas where gray whales feed before their migration, melting sea ice could open up feeding grounds to the creatures, Weller said.
“That temporary physical barrier is not there, so it allows the gray whales early access to their feeding ground,” he said. “And that may be beneficial for the whales. But it may reach a maximum. The carrying capacity (for gray whale populations) can change over years.”
Eastern Pacific gray whales now number 27,000, the highest abundance since researchers have been collecting data, Weller said. There have also been robust calf births in recent years, signaling that the mothers are healthy and well-nourished.
However, that may be the most that the environment can support at this time, Weller said. With a higher population, some whales may venture out of their tried-and-true feeding grounds and migration routes, into less productive or more dangerous territory.
While the deaths are distressing, they don’t necessarily portend bad news for the species. Instead, they could represent cyclical changes in the population and ocean conditions.
“These types of events have been recorded in the past, and there is one we’re watching very closely,” Weller said. “But what it doesn’t mean is doom and gloom for the population as a whole. There’s a good chance, based on what we’ve seen in the past, that the population can recover. If we saw things continue year after year in the future, that concern would probably (become) alarm. But what we need to do is track it over time.”
Officials said to maintain a wide berth if you encounter whales in the water, and report stranded or injured marine mammals to the West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network, at (866)767-6114.
“These are wild animals, and it’s best for them to stay as wild as possible,” Viezbicke said. “Any type of interaction with us is not a good thing for any type of wildlife.”
(Deborah Sullivan Brennan, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Ridgecrest and neighboring Trona were hit hard by the magnitude 7.1 quake that rocked the remote Mojave Desert towns Friday.
Roads in Ridgecrest were in good shape, electricity was back on and the water system was working, said Jed McLaughlin, chief of police for the town of 28,000. Buses planned to run again today.
But many in nearby Trona, a gateway for Death Valley, didn’t have water, and crews were still patching up cracked roads in the town of fewer than 2,000 people.
Residents lined up for free water that National Guard soldiers handed out at Trona High School.
“I just picked up a couple cases for me and my dog,” said Jeb Haleman, adding that his home of 40 years otherwise escaped unscathed.
Friday’s quake sparked several house fires, shut off power, snapped gas lines, cracked buildings and flooded some homes when water lines broke. Officials were still reviewing the damage to buildings.
It came a day after a magnitude 6.4 temblor hit the same patch of the desert Thursday. Officials have voiced concerns about the possibility of major aftershocks in the days and even months to come, though the chances have dwindled.
The U.S. Geological Survey said Sunday there was just a 1 percent chance of another magnitude 7 or higher earthquake in the next week, and a rising possibility of no magnitude 6 quakes.
No fatalities or major injuries were reported after the larger quake, which jolted an area from Sacramento to Mexico and prompted the evacuation of the Navy’s largest single landholding, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. The jolt was centered 11 miles from Ridgecrest, a town of 28,000 people.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Saturday that governments must strengthen alert systems and building codes and that residents should ensure they know how to protect themselves during an earthquake.
“It is a wake-up call for the rest of the state and other parts of the nation, frankly,” Newsom told reporters.
(ASSOCIATE PRESS)
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“It’s a weather story and it is an ongoing changing environment story as well as these kinds of extreme weather events become much more likely in a warming world,” said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.
Anchorage on Thursday afternoon climbed to 90 degrees for the first time at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, the officials monitoring station.
The previous high for Anchorage was 85 degrees on June 14, 1969, said National Weather Service meteorologist Bob Clay.
Kenai and King Salmon also reached new high temperatures of 89 degrees. Palmer matched its record at 88 degrees.
A high pressure ridge over much of south-central Alaska is strengthening and responsible for the record temperatures, Clay said.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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It’s just a matter of time before a heavily populated area is shaken as badly as the San Fernando Valley was in 1994 when the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake hit, killing at least 57 people and damaging or destroying more than 80,000 structures. An earthquake along the 800-mile-long San Andreas Fault — which separates the north-pushing Pacific Plate and the south-pushing North American Plate and bisects California — could be apocalyptic. Geologists say there’s a 50% chance (check link at KPCC) that a quake that’s at least 100 times stronger than the Northridge temblor will hit within 30 years.
That’s scary. And it is why authorities say Southern California households should have at least a two-week supply of food, water and medicine for humans and pets alike — and a plan. Cash, phone chargers, first-aid kits, transistor radios and flashlights are necessities. The Centers for Disease Control has a helpful earthquake preparedness checklist at cdc.gov/disasters/earthquakes/supplies.html.
Don’t assume the government will quickly come to the rescue if the Big One hits. Instead, be ready.
(S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The project, part of a statewide initiative to reduce fuels in wildfire-prone areas, aims to create a 200-foot-wide fuel break covering about 60 acres. A similar project covering 128 acres in Guatay is also under way in San Diego County.
Dressed in heavy yellow firefighting jackets and pants, dozens of seasonal firefighters with Cal Fire were cutting down everything from pepper and willow trees to chaparral species, such as buck wheat, sage and chamise.
“Going into an area where a fire’s threatening a community but where we have an established fuel break, we have a much higher comfort level, knowing that we have a safe area to fall back on if things go wrong,” said Brian Castellini, 42, fire captain with Cal Fire San Diego Unit, who was helping to oversee efforts last week.
In the wake of deadly wildfires that claimed more than 100 lives since 2017, California leaders have focused on preparing backcountry residents for the next big blaze.
In April, Cal Fire recommended cutting back flammable vegetation in 35 locations from San Diego to Redding, saying the fuel breaks would improve the safety of more than 200 communities.
The bulk of Cal Fire’s vegetation removal efforts are aimed at Northern and Central California.
Gov. Gavin Newsom expedited the projects, allocating $35 million and exempting efforts from environmental review.
Specifically, he waived the California Environmental Quality Act, which would have required Cal Fire to conduct a potentially lengthy review of the fuel management projects and then mitigate the impacts. The projects will be paid for with forest management funds in the 2018-19 state budget.
Some wildfire experts have been critical of more remote vegetation-clearing projects, arguing that removing large trees far away from homes does little to stop the spread of wildfire.
“Places like Idyllwild that are mountain towns, they’re actually doing really good vegetation management,” said Char Miller, a wildfire policy expert and professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College. “It’s the wholesale mulching chaparral and cutting of trees deeper into the wilderness that does not make any sense.”
At the same time, some specialists have been skeptical that the efforts, even those closer to communities, will do much to slow down the larger blazes that have ravaged the state in recent years.
“The only time that a fire actually stops at a fuel break is if there’s actually a firefighter there doing some kind of defense,” said Alexandra Syphard, chief scientist for the La Jolla-based Sage Underwriters, a new wildfire insurance company for homeowners.
Cal Fire authorities said that the projects in San Diego County are largely aimed at protecting homes during smaller blazes.
“People envision the big Santa Ana fires, but 80 percent of the fires are not those fires,” said Eric Just, unit forester for Cal Fire San Diego. “Those separators can provide a big benefit for firefighters, not to mention the homeowners.
“Gavin Newsom was looking for projects in the wildland urban interface with some level of vulnerability to fire. Both of these communities are vulnerable because of that isolation factor,” he added, referring to Crest and Guatay.
Authorities said that fuel breaks can allow firefighters to run hoses from trucks parked on the street down to where crews can meet the flames before they get to people and property.
The fuel break in Crest, Castellini said last week, “gives us a safe buffer to go into an offensive mode to engage the fire directly and protect these homes, versus being in a defensive mode where we don’t have a safe area to set up operations.”
These big blazes, he added, “look like a river of fire running up over the brush. In some areas, the convective heat is moving in front of the flaming front, igniting vegetation ahead of it. It’s explosive.”
(Joshua Emerson Smith, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Seismologists said there is a 5 percent chance that an even larger quake could occur over the next couple of days.
Friday's quake was widely felt throughout Southern California, including in downtown San Diego, about 200 miles to the south, seismologists said. The temblor, which broke on Naval Air Station China Lake, 11 miles north-northeast of Ridgecrest, also was felt in Las Vegas and Tijuana.
Caltech seismologist Lucy Jones said that Thursday's 6.4 event is now considered to be a foreshock to Friday's temblor, which at the time was the largest temblor to hit Southern California in years.
"This is and earthquake sequence. It will be ongoing," Jones said. "we could have more large earthquakes.”
Friday’s quake was the largest with an epicenter in Southern California since the magnitude 7.1 Hector Mine quake struck the Mojave Desert in 1999.
The region’s last earthquake felt as widely was the magnitude 7.2 earthquake on Easter Sunday 2010 that had an epicenter across the border in Baja California.
Friday’s main shock was followed by a 5.5 aftershock at 8:47 p.m.
The quake might have happened on the Airport Lake fault, a significant system northwest of where Thursday’s quake started, said Tom Rockwell, a San Diego State University seismologist.
“There was only a 1 in 400 chance that we would have a bigger quake today, so this is a surprise,” Rockwell said. “The 7.1 quake means that we could have a 6.0 or larger aftershock There definitely could be more earthquakes to come.”
The USGS said that a 5.0 foreshock occurred three minutes before the 7.1 temblor.
Since then, there have been five quakes in the 4.4 to 4.7 range.
Seismologists said the Southern California residents should be prepared to drop, cover and hold on if more shaking continues. That means people should drop to the floor, try to get under a desk or some other sturdy object, and hold on to it during the shaking. People should not stand in a doorway or run outside.
Oceanside police Sgt. Michael Provence said that as of 8:45 p.m., his department had not received any reports of damage, and that he “can’t imagine we would” based on the shaking — or mostly lack thereof — in Oceanside.
A Sheriff’s Department watch commander said that as of 8:43 p.m., they had received no reports of damage.
El Cajon resident Jim Eskridge said he was lying on the couch when he and his wife, who was getting ready for bed, began to feel a “pretty good roll.”
Eskridge, who lives in the Fletcher Hills area, said he felt the rolling for about 15 seconds.
Alan Schenk, who lives near the University of San Diego in Linda Vista, was likewise on his couch when it felt like it began to vibrate, he said. He felt the shaking for about 10 seconds.
Both Eskridge and Schenk said nothing fell and there was no damage at their homes.
(Gary Robbins, Alex Riggins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE; LOS ANGELES TIMES )
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The flows appear to be intermittent, often being captured by a diversion system in the river during the day but overwhelming the pumps at night.
The spill is reportedly coming from a ruptured collector pipe, known as Colector Poniente, which utility workers have been working on for months. (see 12/12/2018 news article in the S.D. UNION TRIBUNE).
“Our lifeguards and the county are monitoring the situation,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina. “We’re concerned.
“All they have to do is ask us for help, but they don’t really release any information,” he added, referring to State Public Service Commission in Tijuana, known as CESPT.
Imperial Beach’s southern shoreline, known as the Tijuana Sloughs shoreline, has been closed to swimmers since November, other than a few days in late June, as a result of the sewage pollution and toxic runoff. [see Beach & Bay water quality program for current beach closures.]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency laid out a blueprint in June for improving Tijuana’s sewage system to dramatically reduce the number days beaches are closed in San Diego. (see 06/10/2019 news article in the S.D. UNION TRIBUNE.
The EPA plan outlined more than $200 million in prospective projects, including beefing up the capacity of Mexico’s diversion system in the Tijuana River. The network of pumps and pipes intercepts flows and sends them to the Pacific Ocean before they cross into the San Diego region, but it’s routinely overwhelmed by sewage spills and even light rain.
Since a rainstorm in 2017 cracked a collector pipe in the Tijuana River and flooded South Bay San Diego with untold millions of gallons of raw sewage, there has been a sustained outcry for action.
Imperial Beach, Chula Vista, San Diego City and the Port of San Diego have filed lawsuits again the federal government alleging the cross-border pollution amounted to a violation of the Clean Water Act.
(Joshua Smith, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Striking at 10:33 a.m., the magnitude 6.4 quake was centered near Ridgecrest, a small desert city about 125 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Authorities said there were no immediate reports of deaths, serious injuries or major infrastructure damage.
Emergency responders were still inspecting areas around Ridgecrest, a community of about 29,000 people known to many skiers as a pit stop on the way to Mammoth.
Patients at Ridgecrest Regional Hospital were evacuated “out of an abundance of caution,” hospital Chief Executive James Suver said.
About 20 patients were transferred to other facilities while seismic engineers inspected broken pipes in the facility.
“For true emergencies, we will stabilize them and then get them to the right level of care,” he said.
The quake, estimated to have been felt by some 15 million people, was the largest with an epicenter in Southern California since the magnitude 7.1 Hector Mine quake struck the Mojave Desert in 1999.
The region’s last earthquake felt as widely as Thursday’s was the magnitude 7.2 earthquake on Easter Sunday 2010 that had an epicenter across the border in Baja California and shook San Diego County.
Thursday’s quake generated seismic energy that quickly reached such local communities as Oceanside, Fallbrook, Del Mar, San Diego, Alpine, Borrego Springs, Santee, El Cajon, Coronado, San Marcos, Vista, Bonsall, Encinitas, Carlsbad and Spring Valley, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
“The shaking felt like the building was slightly moving in the wind,” said Aaron Grund, the manager of the Starbucks kiosk at Pavilions in the Carmel Valley Plaza shopping center. “It lasted about 10 seconds.”
Before Thursday, it had been almost five years since the state experienced an earthquake of magnitude 6 or stronger. Experts had said the period of calm was sure to end, and when it did it would likely bring destruction.
The sparsely populated Searles Valley location of the earthquake appeared to mitigate the damage. An event of similar magnitude in the Los Angeles Basin, such as 1994’s magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake, would have undoubtedly meant many deaths and severe property damage.
The rocking in Searles Valley began with two foreshocks: an initial quake of magnitude 4 at 10:02 a.m., followed seven minutes later by a 2.5. About 24 minutes later, the mainshock began 7 miles underground, lasting five seconds.
In rural Inyokern, about 10 miles from Ridgecrest, 72-year-old Virginia Henry was reading in her bedroom when it began. She lost power in her home but was able to drive to Ridgecrest to check on her toy and game store.
“Everything is fine. A lot of businesses are open,” she said.
In Los Angeles, the shaking felt longer, with a rolling quality that lasted long enough for many to pull out cellphones and document swinging chandeliers and sloshing swimming pools. One scientist in Pasadena estimated she felt 10 seconds of shaking; others thought it was longer.
Cynthia Alvarez, who was at work at a hotel in El Segundo, said the swaying made her dizzy.
“It wouldn’t stop. It just kept feeling like you were in a boat,” Alvarez said.
By midafternoon, more than 200 aftershocks had been recorded, including 10 of magnitude 4 or greater.
Caltech seismologist Lucy Jones, California’s foremost earthquake expert, said that aftershocks will continue to rumble through Kern County, and there is a small chance that the quake was a “foreshock” of an even greater quake to come.
The Searles Valley earthquake, like almost all others, was a product of randomness that comes with California straddling a major tectonic boundary, with a part of the state sliding past another.
California’s location on the border between the North American and Pacific plates is a central reason for what has made the state attractive in its recorded history — from its reserves of oil to its mountains — but also comes with the fraught reality of quakes that can come at any time, without any predictive pattern.
“This is an area that normally has lots and lots of earthquakes,” Jones said.
Responding to reporters at a news conference asking whether there might be any explanation for the earthquake — perhaps something related to nearby geothermal energy production, which has been going on for many decades — Jones said there wasn’t any reason to believe that it was anything but nature doing its job.
“We are afraid of randomness and we try to make patterns,” Jones said, but “fundamentally, it’s a random distribution.”
The faults that moved Thursday were nowhere near California’s most feared fault — they are about 100 miles northeast of the San Andreas, said Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson.
Although the area east of the state’s grandest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, is far from the San Andreas, it is a seismically active area.
In 1872, an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.2 hit the Owens Valley, killing 27 people in Lone Pine.
Mammoth has recorded dozens of magnitude 6 earthquakes.
Although Thursday’s earthquake was the first of magnitude 6 or greater since the Napa earthquake of 2014 killed two, injured 300 and damaged more than 2,000 structures, it was too early to say that California’s so-called earthquake drought was over.
“It takes a year or so of data to decide if the rate has changed. It’s like trying to say the stock exchange has gone up because it went up for one day,” Hauksson said.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES; Gary Robbins, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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However, it was significantly less powerful than earlier temblors such as the 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994 and the 7.1 Hector Mine quake in the Mojave Desert in 1999.
Caltech officials believe it was the most widely felt quake in the region since the 7.2 Mexicali temblor in 2010.
A primer on how quakes are measured:
How magnitude works
For each whole number increase in magnitude, the seismic energy released increases by about 32 times. That means a magnitude 7 produces 32 times more energy — or is 32 times stronger — than a magnitude 6.
A magnitude 8 releases 1,000 times more energy than a magnitude 6, but it releases that energy over a larger area and for a longer time, according to seismologist Lucy Jones of Caltech.
Originally, the definition of magnitude related to seismograms, in which machines used an ink stylus to record rapid motions on a rolling drum of paper that would measure shaking. Magnitude was about how big the waves were on a seismogram at a particular distance from the epicenter. On the Richter scale, a magnitude 8 on a seismogram was 10 times bigger than a magnitude 7.
The Richter scale was scrapped in favor of the moment magnitude scale, which measures the movement of rock along the fault and accurately measures larger earthquakes.
On Thursday, communities near the epicenter saw damage. But closer to L.A., there was shaking but no damage.
The size was one reason. Another was the distance. The epicenter Thursday was 100 miles from Los Angeles. Northridge’s epicenter was right under the San Fernando Valley.
Intensity scale
Here is a U.S. Geological Survey explanation of another way to measure the force of a quake:
Los Angeles residents were asking that question after Thursday’s quake that was felt throughout Southern California, when they didn’t get an early warning from the ShakeAlertLA app , released by the city of Los Angeles earlier this year.
Did it fail? Not quite.
The ShakeAlertLA smartphone app was only designed to alert users of cellphones physically in Los Angeles County if there were at least “light shaking,” or level 4 on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale, expected for Los Angeles County.
What was actually felt Thursday in Los Angeles County, while seemingly scary, was actually not that bad — either level 2 or level 3 shaking, or “weak shaking.”
“It didn’t meet the threshold for the L.A. area,” said Doug Given, the U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake early warning coordinator.
“ShakeAlertLA is not designed to detect earthquakes that far away,” said Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson.
ShakeAlertLA is a mobile phone app developed by the city that transmits earthquake early warnings based off a separate, but similarly named, system called ShakeAlert and run by the USGS.
The USGS system relies on hundreds of earthquake sensors scattered throughout the West Coast. There is no public smartphone app yet available that sends earthquake early warnings throughout all of California, and eventually Oregon and Washington.
However, scientists are continuing to test, refine and perfect the USGS ShakeAlert system that aims to provide earthquake early warnings throughout California.
That ShakeAlert system worked — it’s just that the public does not yet have access to that information as scientists continue to refine its public delivery system. The system issued an alert about 6.9 seconds after the shaking began, Given said.
Had there been a public warning system in place for Kern County, the USGS ShakeAlert system would not have been fast enough to issue an early warning for Ridgecrest — at 10 miles away from the epicenter too close to get a warning, but far enough to give some warning to California City, about 50 miles southwest of the epicenter.
The intensity of shaking was worse closer to the epicenter, maxing out at intensity level 7, or very strong shaking, but that occurred in a much more remote area.
Ridgecrest endured intensity level 6, or “very strong” shaking, a level with the potential to result in broken chimneys and considerable damage in poorly built or badly designed buildings, but negligible damage in buildings of good design and construction.
(Rong-gong Lin II, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Twenty-four people have lost their lives, according to local media reports. The government of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, declared a public holiday Tuesday and requested the city’s 20 million residents stay indoors.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Measurements collected by the European Union’s Copernicus satellite program revealed Europe’s average temperature in June was more than 2 degrees Celsius higher than during the 30-year reference period from 1981 to 2010.
The intense heat toward the end of June also beat the previous Europe-wide record for the month set in 1999 by 1 degree Celsius. France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Spain all registered new national highs for June, with the southern French town of Gallargues-le-Montueux recording a blistering 114.6 Fahrenheit on Friday.
In a separate study published Tuesday, an international group of experts who examine the possible link between extreme weather events and climate change warned that Europe faces more frequent and intense heat waves.
After analyzing temperatures in the French city of Toulouse between June 26 and 28 the World Weather Attribution group concluded that every heat wave occurring in Europe today “is made more likely and more intense by human-induced climate change.”
They found the extreme conditions measured during that three-day period, when a blast of hot air swept up from the Sahara Desert, are at least five times more likely now than they were around 1900, before greenhouse gas emissions from industry had a major effect on the atmosphere.
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a researcher at the Dutch meteorological institute KNMI and one of the report’s authors, said factors other than climate change may be further affecting the frequency and extent of extreme temperature events.
The World Weather Attribution study hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, but the group uses methods that are widely considered valid in the scientific community.
Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who wasn’t involved in the study, said its findings were consistent with other measurements showing European summers getting hotter since the start of the 20th century.
With the heat wave moving toward eastern Europe, temperatures soared to 102.2 Fahrenheit in Serbia on Tuesday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Tourists from around the world gathered to witness the cosmic spectacle, which began at 10:24 a.m. local time, crossing over a tiny atoll in the South Pacific. Chile and Argentina were the only inhabited places where the total eclipse could be seen.
The eclipse made its first landfall in Chile at 3:22 p.m. in La Serena, a city of some 200,000 people where the arrival of more than 300,000 visitors forced the local water company to increase output and service gas stations to store extra fuel. Police and health services were also reinforced.
Thousands jumped, shouted and screamed as the eclipse arrived.
In the Argentine town of Chascomus, dozens braved near-freezing temperatures and strong winds and claimed a spot at a pier in a lagoon, hoping to catch a glimpse of the eclipse.
“I’ve been looking at the sky since my youth. My first telescope when I was a kid was made out of cardboard,” said Ricardo Rumie, a 68-year-old veteran eclipse-watcher, who set up his camera with a tripod and a telescope with a sun filter along the banks of the lagoon.
“I’ve seen other eclipses but never like this one. I just couldn’t miss it. For me it’s something supreme.”
Yoga teacher Cecilia Magnicaballi searched for the best spot to watch the eclipse with a green mat under her arm.
“This is about taking out the darkness, letting the sun, the light come in,” she said.
Some rushed to buy the cardboard-framed protective eyeglasses at the last minute.
“This is something that they say won’t repeat itself for like 300 years, so we wanted to bring our son,” said Maximiliano Giannobile, who arrived at the pier with 18-month-old Vitto wrapped in a puffy jacket and several layers of clothes.
The Earth’s next total solar eclipse will be Dec. 14, 2020, and it also will cross Chile and Argentina, though on a different path.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Floating ice off the southern continent steadily increased from 1979 and hit a record high in 2014. But three years later, the annual average extent of Antarctic sea ice hit its lowest mark, wiping out 3 1/2 decades of gains — and then some, a NASA study of satellite data shows.
In recent years, “things have been crazy,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. In an email, he called the plummeting ice levels “a white-knuckle ride.”
Serreze and other outside experts said they don’t know if this is a natural blip that will go away or more long-term global warming that is finally catching up with the South Pole. Antarctica hasn’t showed as much consistent warming as its northern Arctic cousin.
“But the fact that a change this big can happen in such a short time should be viewed as an indication that the Earth has the potential for significant and rapid change,” University of Colorado ice scientist Waleed Abdalati said in an email.
Around Antarctica, sea ice averaged 4.9 million square miles in 2014. By 2017, it was a record low of 4.1 million square miles, according to the study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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It wasn’t only monthly records that shattered. On Friday, a town in the south of France felt like Death Valley in August: According to the French national weather agency, Gallargues-le-Montueux was 45.9 degrees Celsius, or 115 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country.
It is part of an unmistakable trend: The hottest summers in Europe in the past 500 years have all come in the past 17 years. Several of those heat waves bear the fingerprints of human-caused climate change. In years to come, scientists say, many more are likely to batter what is naturally one of the world’s temperate zones.
“It is quite clear one has to treat it as an emergency,” said Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist doing postdoctoral research at the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York.
It is also unsurprising. As rising greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet (average global temperatures have gone up by around 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the dawn of the industrial age) more and more heat records are broken all over the world.
“It is premature to attribute the heat wave to climate change, but this is consistent with climate scenarios which predict more frequent, drawn out and intense heat events as greenhouse gas concentrations lead to a rise in global temperatures,” the World Meteorological Organization said Monday in a statement.
Worldwide, 2019 is on track to be among the hottest years on record, and Europe is on the front line. Its wealth and social safety net have kept it from being ravaged. Hospitals work. Paramedics respond. Farmers have crop insurance.
The number of heat waves in France has doubled in the past 34 years and is expected to double again by 2050, while their intensity is also expected to increase, according to the national weather service, Météo-France.
“This is a war, a battle on two fronts, on the front of causes and effects. We’ve got so much to do,” the French environment minister, François de Rugy, said on television Monday. “Unfortunately we’ve got to understand that these exceptional situations risk becoming more frequent.”
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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Mariners on a 140-foot cargo sailboat outfitted with a crane voyaged from Hawaii to the heart of the Pacific Ocean, where they retrieved the haul of mostly plastic fishing nets as part of an effort to rid the waters of the nets that entangle whales, turtles and fish and damage coral reefs.
The volunteers with the California-based nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute fished out the derelict nets from a marine vortex location where ocean currents converge between Hawaii and California during their 25-day expedition, the group’s founder, Mary Crowley, announced Friday.
The group is among a handful of nonprofits working to collect plastic trash from the open ocean, an endeavor that can be dangerous, time consuming and expensive.
“Our success should herald the way for us to do larger cleanups and to inspire cleanups all throughout the Pacific Ocean and throughout the world. It’s not something that we need to wait to do,” Crowley said.
The cargo ship returned June 18 to Honolulu, where 2 tons of plastic trash were separated from the haul of fishing nets and donated to local artists to transform it into artwork to educate people about ocean plastic pollution. The rest of the refuse was turned over to a zero emissions energy plant that will incinerate it and turn it into energy, she said.
A year before they went to pick up the nets, the Sausalito-based group gave sailors going from California to Hawaii buoyant GPS trackers the size of bowling balls to attach to the nets they encountered during their voyage so they could be tracked.
The group then sailed to collect the nets entangled with plastic chairs, bottles and other trash in an effort that cost $300,000. The group plans to deploy dozens more GPS trackers and next year embark on a three-month trash collection expedition, Crowley said.
It is estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 metric tons of fishing gear is abandoned or lost during storms each year in the oceans, said Nick Mallos, director of the Trash Free Seas Program at Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group.
Another 9 million tons of plastic waste, including plastic bottles, bags, toys and other items, flow annually into the ocean from beaches, rivers and creeks, according to experts.
The Ocean Voyages Institute is one of dozens of groups around the world trying to tackle the problem. Most focus on cleaning up beaches, ridding shores of abandoned fishing nets, traps and other gear and pushing for a reduction on single-use plastic containers.
(Olga R. Rodriguez, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Several people have died around the continent in incidents that authorities are linking to the weather. A major wildfire raged Friday in Spain, sparked when a pile of chicken manure spontaneously combusted in the heat.
Several countries have reported record temperatures this week, and France hit its all-time heat record Friday: 45.9 Celsius (114.6 Fahrenheit) in the small southern town of Gallargues-le-Montueux, according to French media.
The French national weather service activated its highest-level heat danger alert for the first time, putting four regions around Marseille and Montpellier in the south of the country under special watch Friday.
About 4,000 schools were closed because they couldn’t ensure safe conditions.
City halls were also sending volunteers to visit elderly people at home to ensure they had fans and water.
In Issy-Les-Moulineaux, a southwest Paris suburb, Jean-Jacques Emerjian, 87, and his wife, Marie-France, 80 were relieved to see the Red Cross volunteers.
Marie-France Emerjian said “with my handicapped husband I am worried because I don’t have someone who can come right away (to help). He fell the other night and I couldn’t get him up, and I was scared. He had a malaise, he fainted.”
In the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, the Salvation Army day center, which allows migrants living in the streets to take showers, also provided them with lots of bottled water.
Paris city hall estimates that about 1,000 to 2,000 migrants live in makeshift camps, which are particularly exposed to the heat.
Some criticized the government for going overboard, but Prime Minister Edouard Philippe defended the efforts after 15,000 people died in a heat wave in 2003 that woke up France to the risks.
Italy put 16 cities under alerts for high temperatures, and civil security services distributed water to tourists visiting famed sites around Rome under a scorching sun.
Heat was blamed for the deaths of two people in Spain, private news agency Europa Press reported Friday.
In Berlin, a police unit turned water cannons — usually used against rioters — on city trees, to cool them down.
The World Meteorological Organization said Friday that temperature records for this time of year have been broken in Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and Austria.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Meteo France raised the hazardous weather warning to “red,” the highest level, for the Marseille and Montpellier areas in southeastern France, forecasting hazardous temperatures for today of 107-113 Fahrenheit.
It was the first red alert Meteo France activated since a four-level weather “vigilance” system was introduced following an estimated 15,000 heat-related deaths in France during a 2003 summer heat wave.
“A heat wave of this amplitude so early in the year, in June, is exceptional,” Meteo France meteorologist France Christelle Robert said. “We should expect more intense and frequent heat waves with climate change, because it will accentuate the extremes.”
The Italian Health Ministry said seven cities, including Florence, Rome and Turin, already were at Italy’s highest heat warning level Thursday. Today, 16 cities will be under alerts for high temperatures.
Italian authorities instructed people to avoid being outside during the hottest hours of the day and to stay away from areas with a lot of vehicle traffic to prevent ozone exposure.
Amid the blistering weather in Europe, hundreds of firefighters struggled to contain a wildfire in northeastern Spain that forced the evacuation of 53 residents.
Firefighters said temperatures over 86 Fahrenheit, low humidity and high winds fanned the flames.
In the Czech Republic, where a new June temperature record was set this week, were set this week, gorillas and polar bears at Prague’s zoo kept cool by eating their own version of sorbet.
Zookeepers have presented the animals with big blocks of frozen water in a form that suits them, and with ingredients to suit their tastes.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(Teri Figueroa, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Authorities warned that temperatures could top 104 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the continent over the coming days, the effect of hot air moving northward from Africa.
French Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said more than half of France is on alert for high temperatures today and the hot weather is expected to last until the end of the week.
“Heat waves are going to happen again, we know it, and maybe intensify in the next years and decades because of the climate change,” she told reporters following the government’s weekly Cabinet meeting.
France is still haunted by the experience of a 2003 heat wave that killed an estimated 15,000 elderly in the country. The government has since put in place numerous prevention measures including having local city halls contact fragile people and possibly visit them to make sure they’re coping.
Meanwhile, public service announcements on TV and in the Metro urged people to drink water and keep an eye out for isolated older neighbors.
The message was echoed by the Red Cross federation’s regional health coordinator for Europe.
“The coming days will be challenging for a lot of people, but especially older people, young children, and people with underlying illnesses or limited mobility,” said Dr. Davron Mukhamadiev.
“Our message this week is simple: look after yourself, your family and your neighbors,” he said. “A phone call or a knock on the door could save a life.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo predicted heat waves like the one now sizzling Paris, expected to last about a week, “could last one, two, three months” if global warming continues unchecked.
Authorities in Switzerland raised the heat warning to the second-highest level for areas along the southern and northern borders with Italy and Germany, warning people to avoid strenuous activity and stay hydrated.
Germany’s meteorological agency DWD said it’s possible the current June record of 101.3 degrees could be topped today. Helicopters were deployed to battle wildfires in the country’s eastern state of Brandenburg, where forests have seen little rain.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Meteorologists placed more than half of France, including around the capital, on alert for high temperatures Monday as a heatwave was expected to spread across continental Europe this week.
National weather agency Meteo France predicted the hot weather could produce temperatures of up to 104 degrees across the country just as the summer tourist season shifts into high gear.
The French weather agency set the heat warning level at orange — the second-highest intensity on its four-level categorization system for potentially dangerous conditions requiring public “vigilance.”
In Paris, charity organizations patrolled the streets to provide homeless people with water, while local authorities organized air-conditioned public places where people could seek shelter from the heat.
French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, deciding it was too hot to study, ordered national exams taken by students heading to high school postponed from Thursday and Friday to next week.
France introduced a heat watch warning system after a long, deadly heatwave in August 2003. The highest temperatures in more than half a century eventually were estimated to have caused 15,000 heat-related deaths, many of older people left in city apartments and retirement homes without air conditioning.
Meteorologists said hot winds from the Sahara Desert brought the scorching weather to Europe. Similar heat is expected in Belgium, Switzerland and Germany.
In Germany, temperatures above 104 degrees are possible in some places on Wednesday, topping the country’s previous June record of nearly 101 degrees set in Frankfurt in 1947.
This early heat wave is the latest in a number of historic episodes of heat in recent years. Just last summer the continent saw relentless record temperatures coupled with unusually dry conditions. As a result, drought and wildfires were rampant.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Climate change became a daily reality long ago in Miami, where both rich and poor have been forced to grapple with the compounding effects of warmer temperatures and higher sea levels. The evidence is everywhere in a city under siege by the rising sea.
“Climate change is really the issue that sits on all other issues,” said Rachel Silverstein, executive director of Miami Waterkeeper, an environmental research and activist group. “It affects security. It affects drinking water. It affects tourism. It affects public health. Property values. It’s a part of the discussion of almost any topic that might come up.”
So imminent is the prospect of a warming climate in Florida that the state’s new Republican leadership has acknowledged it and taken some action, even as President Donald Trump and his administration have refused to join international climate treaties and attacked climate science.
No question is of more critical importance to Florida’s future, or to the Democrats’ chance to take the state in next year’s presidential election. It is so important that some activists had hoped that climate change would be the sole focus when 20 Democrats take the debate stage for the first time in this campaign Wednesday and Thursday in downtown Miami.
Climate change is now among the top three 2020 election issues cited by Florida Democrats, according to a new statewide survey.
Some 71 percent of Florida voters, including 85 percent of Democrats, support government action to address climate change, according to the survey by Climate Nexus in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, which polled 1,558 registered Florida voters online this month.
“I don’t think the base is going to be satisfied with candidates simply saying, ‘I think climate change is happening; I think it’s because of humans; I’m going to get us back into the Paris agreement,’” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program. “Now people increasingly want to know, ‘What is your actual plan?’ ”
Not many people have yet connected climate change to their jobs and health care, Leiserowitz said, but the urgency of the climate issue is beginning to take hold in Florida. That is especially true in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, where 49 percent of respondents, compared to 30 percent elsewhere in the state, said they have made physical changes to their homes in the past year to protect against sea-level rise, flooding or extreme weather.
The latest daily heat record in Miami was broken Sunday, only the third day of summer, when the temperature reached 95 degrees. The high Monday, 98 degrees, tied the existing record.
“There’s no spring anymore — it’s straight summer and winter,” lamented Michael Clarkson, a retired landscaper.
On Thursday, local activists plan to stage a rally near the Democrats’ debate venue to demand climate action.
A report published last week by Resilient Analytics and the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy group, estimated that Florida could have to build $76 billion worth of sea walls by 2040.
Only one of the candidates, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, has made climate change the focus of his campaign, though the issue has so far drawn more interest than his candidacy. Half a dozen other candidates have released climate change plans, trying to balance sounding the alarm with expressing optimism about possible solutions.
Thinking past the primary might be impossible for the Democratic contenders now. But the eventual nominee will have to run in Florida, an important presidential battleground state, at a time when more Republicans are campaigning on the environment.
The new Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has appointed a University of Florida biologist as the state’s first chief science officer and is hiring a chief resilience officer, whose job description includes preparing Florida “for the environmental, physical and economic impacts of climate change, especially sea-level rise.”
(Patricia Mazzei, NEW YORK TIMES)
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The draft guidance, issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, would change the way the U.S. government evaluates activities ranging from coal mining to gas pipelines and oil drilling by limiting the extent to which agencies can calculate their greenhouse gas emissions. In April 2016, CEQ finalized a directive that agencies quantify to what extent they will contribute to climate change, a move that threw approval of those projects into doubt.
Now, according to the new directive, agencies conducting reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) only have to calculate an action’s greenhouse gas emissions when “a sufficiently close causal relationship exists” between a project and greater carbon emissions. It also tells agencies that they can opt not to assess a project’s climate impact if they decide it “would be overly speculative,” and they can put any projected emissions in the context of the local, regional or national carbon output.
Mary Neumayr, who chairs the Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement that the proposal would speed the construction of major infrastructure projects in the United States.
“The administration is working to make the environmental review process for major infrastructure projects more efficient, timely and effective,” Neumayr said. “CEQ’s draft guidance is intended to assist agencies in meeting their obligations under NEPA and to improve the timeliness of permitting decisions for projects to modernize our nation’s infrastructure.”
The question of to what extent federal decisions are fueling climate change has emerged as a major legal and political issue under the Trump administration. Federal judges have halted oil and gas leasing on multiple occasions on the grounds that the federal government failed to properly calculate a project’s carbon output, including in March when a judge blocked leasing on 300,000 acres in Wyoming.
Critics faulted the new language, while also suggesting federal agencies will still have to think about climate change before doing something or risk being refuted by courts.
According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, the Trump administration has lost a dozen court cases over agencies’ failure to adequately consider climate issues as part of NEPA reviews. In April, for example, a court held that the Interior Department violated NEPA by not considering climate issues when it lifted a federal moratorium on new coal leasing.
“This proposed replacement for the 2016 guidance is softer and may allow for less quantification, but it doesn’t change the underlying statutory requirement” to analyze how government projects are affecting the climate, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
Because prior court cases have required agencies to take climate change into account, the new guidance is trying to finesse that and require them not to do very much, said Mark Templeton, who directs the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago.
“The guidance provides a blueprint for agencies seeking to minimize the costs of greenhouse gas emissions by counseling them to present emissions as an inevitably minuscule percentage of total global emissions,” Templeton said in an email.
(Juliet Eilperin, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The movement of the first batch of two orcas and six belugas was first broadcast during Putin’s annual call-in show Thursday, highlighting his role as a modern, televised czar, ready to solve any issue, big or small.
The first eight animals were moved from the watery pens where they were forced to spend almost eight months to water reservoirs installed in trucks. They will spend six days traversing more than 1,100 miles to reach the Shantar Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk, the area where they were caught last year.
The whales were initially captured by four private companies linked to one man. The companies used loopholes in Russian law to obtain permits to catch animals and then sell them to China, where they would spend their lives performing in theme parks.
(U-T NEWS SERIVCES)
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June gloom will get gloomier. A trough of low pressure moving over the West Coast is expected to beef up the marine layer today through Saturday.
The coast should see little or no clearing on Friday, and light rain or drizzle is possible during the morning from the beaches to the mountains. Strong winds are expected in the mountains and desert, where gusts could reach 50 mph this afternoon and Friday afternoon.
Highs at the coast should be in the upper 60s today and Friday, which is a couple of degrees blow normal. The inland valleys should also be cooler than usual, with highs in the mid-70s today and around 70 on Friday.
Next week is expected to be similar.
(Robert Krier, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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As miners in hard hats and coal-country lawmakers applauded, Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler signed a measure that scraps one of President Barack Obama’s key initiatives to rein in fossil fuel emissions. The replacement rule gives states more leeway in deciding whether to require plants to make limited efficiency upgrades.
Wheeler said he expects more coal plants to open as a result. But one state, New York, immediately said it would go to court to challenge the action, and more lawsuits are likely.
The EPA move follows pledges by candidate and then President Donald Trump to rescue the U.S. coal industry, which saw near-record numbers of plant closings last year in the face of competition from cheaper natural gas and renewables. It’s the latest and one of the biggest of dozens of environmental regulatory rollbacks by his administration.
It came despite scientists’ cautions that the world must cut fossil fuel emissions to stave off the worst of global warming and the EPA’s own analysis that the new rule would result in the deaths of an extra 300 to 1,500 people each year by 2030, owing to additional air pollution from the power grid.
“Americans want reliable energy that they can afford,” Wheeler declared at the signing ceremony, with White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney alongside to underscore Trump’s approval.
There’s no denying “fossil fuels will continue to be an important part of the mix,” Wheeler said.
Lawmakers and industry representatives from coal states blamed federal regulation, not the market, for the decades-long trend of declining U.S. coal use, and said Wednesday’s act would stave off more coal plant closings.
“We’re not ready for renewable energy so we need coal,” declared Rep. David McKinley, a West Virginia Republican.
But rather than a sensible economic move, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the change as a “dirty power scam” and “a stunning giveaway to big polluters.” She called climate change “the existential threat of our time” and said the administration was ignoring scientific studies and yielding to special interests.
The Obama plan aimed at encouraging what already had been market-driven changes in the nation’s electrical grid, pushing coal-fired power plants out and prodding utilities to rely more on natural gas, solar, wind and other lower- or no-carbon fuels.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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And that’s just a “minimum down payment for short-term defense against rising seas in California,” says the study released today by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Climate Integrity and the environmental engineering firm Resilient Analytics.
Titled “High Tide Tax; The Price to Protect Coastal Communities from Rising Seas,” the study illustrates the expense of coastal protection by calculating the cost of sea wall construction in areas threatened by inundation. For San Diego County, that could total $984 million. The city of San Diego, the report estimates, faces a $357 million price tag for those defenses, the highest for any city in California. Imperial Beach would need $212 million to armor its coastline, leaving the city of 27,000 people with the eighth-largest potential bill in the state.
In California, where sea walls have been the subject of contentious public policy debate, the analysis may not represent the likely course of climate adaptation. However, the report offers the estimate as a starting point for discussing costs of contending with sea level rise.
“We use sea walls as basically a proxy cost measure, as a low cost baseline for all of the areas in need of protection,” said Richard Wiles, executive director for the Center for Climate Integrity.
The $22 billion statewide estimate, the report states, represents just about 10 percent to 15 percent of the total cost of addressing chronic flooding and seawater inundation. Other measures could range from re-engineering infrastructure to moving roads and rail lines inland, but the center didn’t calculate those costs.
“Sea walls, bulkheads and revetments allowed us to generate a cost measure for literally every coastal mile of shoreline that needs to be protected,” Wiles said. “They won’t be appropriate defense in any case, and in some cases won’t be used at all. But in almost every place, the alternative will be more expensive.”
Moreover, the report states, its model considered only modest sea-level rise projections, rather than the worst-case scenario. And it looked only at the flooding potential of annual storms, not the catastrophic effects of so-called “100-year” or “500-year storms,” which are expected to become more frequent as climate change intensifies storm patterns.
“This conservative approach is by design, and is intended to shine a light on near-term costs and choices that cannot be avoided,” the report stated.
Global mean sea level has risen 8 inches since 1900, the report stated, with the increase accelerating during the late 20th century. That’s due to expansion of warming ocean water, and also to melting glaciers and ice sheets. And it’s just the beginning.
The study defers to the most conservative model featured in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, which estimates sea level will rise 11 to 24 inches by the end of the century, and its moderate scenario predicting an increase of 14 to 28 inches.
It doesn’t consider the panel’s more extreme projections, which assume little or no action to reduce climate emissions, and forecast increases of up to 39 inches. Nor does it include newer research, which concludes that melting ice sheets could raise sea levels by 6 feet by 2100, displacing millions of coastal residents.
Instead, the study started with modest sea level rise projections and examined detailed grids of shoreline across the entire United States, running models to predict flooding patterns. It then calculated the need for sea walls in all areas with infrastructure, and tallied the cost by city, county, state and congressional districts.
By 2040, the report concluded, the U.S. will need to construct 50,145 miles of sea walls, at a total cost of $416 billion. By 2100, it states, that could climb to 60,213 miles and $518 billion. Although California’s bill for those structures could reach $22 billion by 2040, our total pales in comparison to Florida, which faces potential sticker shock of $75 billion.
That’s not to say that all of those areas would or should construct sea walls. In some cases, the costs may be prohibitive, and in others, the environmental damage too great. In California, the Coastal Commission has rejected permits to build new sea walls, or even repair existing ones, arguing that the structures themselves hasten erosion by preventing the normal wear and tear of bluffs needed to sustain beaches.
In 2017, two Encinitas homeowners lost their fight against expiration dates on their sea walls, when the California Supreme Court ruled that they forfeited their right to challenge those limitations when they accepted permits to repair the structures.
Lee Andelin, an attorney whose firm represented the Encinitas homeowners, including Tom Frick, said sea walls aren’t necessary in every situation; in some locations, stable bluffs provide natural defenses, and in others, stacks of stones known as rip-rap provide more cost-effective shoreline protection.
In other places, he maintained sea walls are needed for property protection and public safety. The study affirms the monetary value of sea walls to the communities that they front, he said, arguing that homeowners who make those repairs are protecting more than their own property.
“If you’re on a private property on a bluff that’s eroding, and you put a sea wall that stops the bluff erosion, the sea wall is not only protecting the home but also the road that’s behind it, and behind that are other homes and structures,” he said. “The homeowner is assuming all the costs of protecting the community against the ocean. Instead of subsidizing those costs, (state regulators) make it very difficult to build sea walls, and on top of that they impose large mitigation fees.”
Even the Coastal Commission, which has held a hard line against sea wall expansion, said the study provides a useful perspective by attaching a price tag to coastal defense.
“In general, we’re supportive of this kind of information, because it’s critical to the kind of planning efforts that California has to grapple with,” said Sarah Christie, a spokeswoman for the commission. “It’s an interesting data point. If anything, those kinds of numbers might be good information to encourage states to start looking at other kinds of responses, other than just sea walls, which ultimately are a temporary solution.”
The report’s authors agree that sea walls are just the first line of defense. Other adaptations will include shoring up treatment plants, protecting drinking water sources and installing pumps to remove sea water from structures, Wiles said.
“In many places, you’ll have to re-engineer the entire stormwater drainage system,” he said. “The electric grid in many coastal locations will have to be defended or moved around.”
Some coastal infrastructure could be indefensible, or too expensive to maintain, he said. And indirect costs may include damage to coastal economies, said Adam Young, an associate project scientist in the Integrative Oceanography Division and Center for Coastal Studies at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
“Additional costs in California could be significant from bluff/cliff retreat and tourism revenue loss if our beaches become submerged,” he said.
Those are some of the looming debts that the study’s authors wish to account for, Wiles said.
“Climate change will require a transformation of the economy and society at a scale never before contemplated,” he said. “And yet no one has come up with a cost for what even one slice of that massive job will entail. So we decided to do this analysis to throw down a marker for this basic level of defense against climate change.”
(Deborah Sullivan Brennan, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE)
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One of the scorching marks came from the Middle East, the other from South Asia.
It hit 129 degrees in Mitribah, Kuwait, on July 21, 2016, and 128.7 degrees in Turbat, Pakistan, on May 28, 2017.
“The Mitribah, Kuwait temperature is now accepted by the WMO as the highest temperature ever recorded for the continental region of Asia,” the organization wrote in a statement. It continued, “The two observations are the third (tied within uncertainty limits) and fourth highest WMO-recognized temperature extremes.”
These are the highest recognized temperatures in 76 years.
Notably, the WMO list of highest global temperatures does not include a 129.2 degree temperature recorded in Furnace Creek at Death Valley on June 30, 2013. But there is a reason.
That location was even hotter in 1913 when it reportedly hit 134 degrees. This temperature is recognized as the hottest recorded on Earth. But some experts question its validity. It was recently described as “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective” in a detailed analysis.
It is a similar story for the planet’s second-highest recognized temperature, which is 131 degrees from Kebili, Tunisia, set July 7, 1931, which also is Africa’s hottest temperature. This record has “serious credibility issues,” according to Christopher Burt, an expert on extreme weather data.
We asked Randall Cerveny, chief rapporteur of the WMO committee for evaluating climate and weather extremes, why the Death Valley reading in 2013 is not officially considered among the hottest recorded temperatures. Even if you consider the 1913 Death Valley and 1931 Tunisia readings legitimate, the 2013 Death Valley reading should still rank third hottest.
“The WMO does not verify a record through its extreme evaluation process unless it is a new global, hemispheric or continental extreme record,” Cerveny responded in an email.
“... the Death Valley 2013 temperature was not proposed to the WMO as an extreme at any of those categories,” given it was not as high as the 1913 record at that same location.
Considering the questions that swirl around two hottest recorded temperatures (Death Valley in 1913 and Tunisia in 1931), the Death Valley (2013) and Kuwait (2016) temperatures could in fact be the highest reliably measured on record. Since it is unclear whether the 2013 Death Valley reading will ever be formally recognized and/or the 1913 reading invalidated, we may never know for sure.
(Ian Livingston, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The stunning decision comes more than three years — and millions of dollars — after authorities began examining the roots of a scandal that left Flint’s water system tainted with lead. Michigan Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud, who took control of the investigation in January after the election of a new attorney general, said “all available evidence was not pursued” by a previous team of prosecutors.
“This week, we completed the transfer into our possession millions of documents and hundreds of new electronic devices, significantly expanding the scope of our investigation,” Hammoud and Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement.
“Our team’s efforts have produced the most comprehensive body of evidence to date related to the Flint water crisis. We are now in the best possible position to find the answers the citizens of Flint deserve and hold all responsible parties accountable,” they said.
Hammoud’s team recently used search warrants to get state-owned mobile devices of former Gov. Rick Snyder and 66 other people from storage.
Among those who had charges dismissed: Michigan’s former health director, Nick Lyon, who was accused of involuntary manslaughter for allegedly failing to timely alert the public about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease when Flint was drawing improperly treated water from the Flint River in 2014-15.
Lyon’s attorney, Chip Chamberlain, said they “feel fantastic and vindicated.”
Although prosecutors cautioned that Lyon and others could be charged again, Chamberlain said he’s not worried.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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India’s heat waves have grown particularly intense in the past decade, as climate change has intensified around the world, killing thousands of people and affecting an increasing number of states. This year, the extreme temperatures have struck large parts of northern and central India, with Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra among the worst-hit states.
Anup Kumar Srivastava, an expert at India’s National Disaster Management Authority, said the number of Indian states hit by heat waves had grown to 19 in 2018 from nine in 2015 and was expected to reach 23 this year.
“This year, the number of heat wave days have also increased — and it’s not just day temperature; night temperatures have also been high,” he said.
Srivastava said that imminent storms would bring down temperatures in some areas, but that heat waves might pick up again until the monsoon rains arrive.
Twice in the past week, the temperature in the Churu area of Rajasthan, in northern India, reached 123 degrees Fahrenheit. India’s Meteorological Department warns that heat that extreme brings a “very high likelihood of developing heat illness and heat stroke in all ages.” Several other parts of the state have recorded temperatures surpassing 118 degrees.
Medical authorities have canceled leaves for doctors at hospitals in Churu as the number of patients has shot up. In Madhya Pradesh, in central India, schools have remained closed.
Prolonged temperatures of at least 113 degrees are considered a heat wave, while prolonged temperatures of 117 degrees or higher are considered a severe heat wave.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Six Flags Magic Mountain and Hurricane Harbor announced the evacuation shortly after noon, citing concern for the safety of park visitors and employees. About a half-hour later, the park said on its Twitter account that fire officials asked guests to shelter in place due to nearby road closures.
Park visitors were asked to move to the back of the 260-acre property, away from firefighting activity near the entrance, said Rachel Gallat, who was visiting a friend who works at the park.
“I was getting iced coffee, and when I walked outside, ash was raining down on me,” Gallat said. “There was a big cloud of smoke. I saw people around me panicking; they didn't know where they were supposed to go.”
A Los Angeles County Fire Department dispatcher told the Los Angeles Times the park voluntarily evacuated visitors.
“We did not tell them to do this,” Melanie Flores said.
Los Angeles County fire officials said nine people were taken to the hospital due to smoke exposure. The blaze, which consumed 40 acres, was fully contained by late afternoon.
Shalane Gonzales, 34, said she saw people running out of the park in bathing suits.
“It was pretty scary. We saw trucks packing people,” Gonzales said. “They were just telling people to load up on their truck beds.”
She said when she tried to drive to the entrance to pick up her partner and their two young sons, police told her to return to the parking lot.
“The fire was feet away from where we were,” she said.
The park later announced it was closed for the day after police reopened the roads, allowing everyone to leave in their cars.
Firefighters battled the 40-acre blaze in hot, dry and windy conditions during the first day of a heat wave baking the region in nearly 100-degree heat.
The National Weather Service said temperatures reached 96 degrees at Magic Mountain, with humidity dipping to 10 percent and winds gusting to 25 mph.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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It was a hot day. The rancher in the Northern California town of Potter Valley walked into a bed of waist-high cured grassland, driving a stake into the ground. That created a spark that grew into the largest wildfire in state history.
The blaze grew larger by the second, and the man’s attempts to smother it with dirt were futile. Authorities this week released their findings on the cause of the Ranch fire, the largest of the two blazes in the massive Mendocino Complex that began last summer and was not contained until January. In all, 459,123 acres and more than 280 structures were burned. One firefighter was killed and three injured.
Investigators released a harrowing narrative of how the giant fire happened, which experts say underscores how easy it is for fires to explode during hot, dry conditions in California.
“In the middle of summer, when we see rolling hills golden, which the gold is dry grass, it can look picturesque,” said Seth Brown, battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s Fresno and Kings County division. “But what firefighters are thinking is, ‘That’s fuel.’”
While utility malfunctions have been the cause of some of California’s most destructive fires in recent years — including in Paradise and the wine country — officials say human causes like the rancher’s stake are by far the most common.
“What we’ve seen in the past is people wait too long to call because they think they can extinguish it themselves. And instead of being a 10-by-20-foot fire, it’s an acre. Then fast forward ... and now it’s five acres,” Brown said. “We don’t expect the person who doesn’t have experience to fully understand the potential. But we’re always trying to educate.”
Cal Fire investigators did not name the Potter Valley rancher, and he is not expected to face any charges because the blaze was ruled an accident.
Officials said that once the fire started, he shuffled through the waist-high grass and grabbed a trampoline and a rug, then threw those onto the flames, hoping they’d extinguish the blaze.
Instead, the trampoline caught fire and the flames spread to a 60-by-12-foot shade cloth on the ground, igniting the bed of grass it was on. The flames wrapped around a water tank and moved 25 feet downhill toward Highway 20.
The rancher turned to a black polyurethane tube connected to the water tank, but the fire burned it until it kinked, cutting off the connection.
In desperation, he broke off a PVC line also connected to the water tank and tried to squeeze the flow toward the flames, but the PVC hole was too wide, his thumb too small and the fire was too far away for the water to reach it.
So the rancher tried one last thing — he disconnected the trailer from his four-wheel-drive truck, then drove to the front of the fire, which was now racing uphill toward his second water tank, and hit the gas so his tires would kick up dirt to knock down the flames.
His tires lost traction, though, and he lost control of the vehicle. The rancher bailed out before the truck rolled down into an embankment.
Out of options and his cellphone lost somewhere in the field, the rancher sprinted 200 yards back down to his home and called 911.
In the weeks that followed, the fire vanquished every attempt to stop it. In its first 12 days, it jumped at least four creeks, a major road and a bulldozer-cut firebreak, all of which traditionally serve as defensive fronts in firefighting.
But feeding on tinder-dry vegetation and driven by winds that produced flames up to 300 feet high, the fire’s heat created paths all around it, preheating grass and shrubs so they burned a moment later. The fire spread in all directions and reached into four counties before it was out. Repeated fires without enough years in between to recover can also lead to native plants being replaced by invasive species, which are even worse in fire.
Many of the country’s biggest fires start off as grass fires. According to the National Interagency Fire Center based in Idaho, two of the three largest “mega fires” in history were grass fires — the East Amarillo Complex fire in Texas in 2006 that torched 907,245 acres and the Northwest Oklahoma Complex fire in 2017 that charred 779,292 acres.
Recent human-caused fires in California include the Carr fire, which killed eight people last year and was started by a trailer creating sparks on a highway, and the Wildomar fire, which burned almost 900 acres in the Cleveland National Forest in 2017 and was started by a dirt biker crashing into a tree.
Other common causes are lawnmower blades or metal weed whackers striking rocks, creating sparks, experts say.
Grass is the fastest-burning fuel type in the state. Brown estimated that grass — which is even more plentiful this year after one of the wettest winters in a decade — can burn across 20 feet in a second in light winds.
“California was just one of those places that was designed to burn,” said Thomas Welle, who manages the National Fire Protection Association’s field office in Denver, on the rim of the Great Plains.
Welle said that based on his experiences with grass fires, the rancher in Potter Valley didn’t have much of a chance to stop the Ranch fire before it was uncontrollable.
In 2002, Welle was part of a prescribed fire in Colorado. He used a drip-torch to ignite a patch of grass, about the size of two 50-cent pieces side by side, then stomped it out. A moment later, the grass reignited.
“It took me about six times before I finally got that small patch of grass out where that resilient heat in the clump of grass wouldn’t reignite,” he said.
(Joseph Serna, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Almost 4 inches of rain per hour caused widespread street flooding in the Tulsa area on Thursday, leading to multiple stalled vehicles and high-water rescues.
The same storm system dumped to 1.5 inches of rain in 30 minutes in Oklahoma City. Firefighters reported rescuing stranded motorists in at least a dozen different spots there.
No injuries were reported after the Thursday afternoon storm.
The torrents came after the flooded Arkansas River had receded from its record high levels. Keystone Lake, upstream from Tulsa, had fallen more than 4 feet from its high levels before the rains arrived.
Most of the flooding was concentrated around midtown and northern Tulsa. Forecasters don’t expect the rain to raise water levels higher than where they crested.
This latest band of storms follows bouts of severe weather that killed at least six people in Oklahoma, including two when a tornado ripped through a mobile home park in El Reno.
In the South, rush hour flash flooding and possible tornadoes hit the Baton Rouge area Thursday morning.
There was one death — a man who died after being rescued from a car on a flooded street — as well as numerous closed roads, stalled vehicles and a delay in the start of the final day of Louisiana’s 2019 legislative session.
Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome said some areas of East Baton Rouge Parish received 5 inches of rain early Thursday. And roughly 3.5 inches fell in less than an hour during rush hour.
She opened a morning news conference with a moment of silence for an unidentified victim whose death was attributed to the weather. Fire Chief Ed Smith said emergency medical workers were unable to save the life of the man after he was removed from a car in a flooded area. No other details were immediately available.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The official, Mark Lowcock, undersecretary general and emergency relief coordinator at the United Nations, said that he had allocated $45 million from its emergency relief fund to help purchase food and other assistance for people of the region, and that many of them could face a serious food crisis by September. He called the allocation one of the biggest ever made from the fund.
Somalia and parts of neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya have suffered from repeated seasons of failed rains that have shriveled crops, depleted livestock and left people’s food and water supplies increasingly insecure.
“Communities that were already vulnerable due to past droughts are again facing severe hunger and water scarcity and are at risk from deadly communicable diseases,” Lowcock said in a statement announcing the emergency allocation. He said aid agencies in Somalia in particular were “overstretched and grappling with a severe lack of funding.”
Speaking to reporters in New York before the announcement, Lowcock said that the poor rains were partly related to weather patterns associated with the deadly cyclone that ravaged Mozambique a few months ago, and that the rains in Somalia especially had been “among the poorest on record.”
The bulk of the $45 million, he said, will be allocated for Somalia, where 2.2 million people could face acute food insecurity by September, a 40 percent increase from January. A further 3.2 million people, he said, will need assistance by year’s end.
Somalia has suffered more than half a dozen periods of food insecurity in the nearly four decades of strife and anarchy that have roiled the country. The most recent were the 2010-12 famine, a food crisis in 2014 and a near famine in 2016-17.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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At least 4 to 8 inches is expected to fall in a widespread fashion around Houston, mostly during Wednesday night. Some locations will top 10 inches in the days ahead.
From southeast Texas, heavy rain will shift east along the northern Gulf Coast and into the Southeast. Heavy rain and a risk for flooding with this slow-moving weather conglomeration is likely to persist through the weekend.
The remnants of a tropical disturbance, which made landfall Tuesday, is heavily responsible for the tropical influx to the Texas Gulf Coast.
Although this tropical system wannabe never gained a name, staying below tropical depression status through its life over water, it was still able to gather substantial moisture on its trek northward. That moisture is now falling in the form of rain in parts of Texas.
Wednesday night there was a “high risk,” or level four of four, of excessive rainfall and resultant flooding in coastal southeast Texas and southern Louisiana.
As of midday Wednesday, flood watches stretched from about 75 miles southeast of Houston, across southern Louisiana and into southern Mississippi. Along this swath, at least three to 4 inches of rain were forecast. Up to a foot is forecast around the shoreline of Southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana.
Several flash flood warnings already have been issued in parts of Texas, including the southwest Houston suburbs.
Rain is falling on already saturated soil. Rainfall surpluses for 2019 to-date are on the order of several inches, with even wetter conditions compared to normal over the past few months.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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Pine Bluff Mayor Shirley Washington said federal and state aid will be crucial to help the town of about 42,000 clean up and rebuild after the record-breaking flooding.
The river isn’t expected to crest at its high of 51 feet until about 1 a.m. Thursday in the city, which is about 40 miles southeast of Little Rock. The Arkansas River has been flooding for almost two weeks, after intense rainfall in Oklahoma and Kansas forced officials to release water from a strained dam northwest of Tulsa.
Last week, an evacuation order was issued for about 550 homes within the levee system, said Karen Blevins, the county’s director of emergency management. Because many of the flooded homes are within the levee system, it’s possible that homeowners have flood insurance, though it’s unclear how many actually do.
This weekend, Washington went door to door in some neighborhoods to warn people about a National Weather Service-issued flash flood warning.
Laurie Driver, spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said there’s concern throughout the state about the strength of the levees, which are being strained with more water for longer periods of time than ever before.
In 1927, a massive flood swallowed areas of downtown Pine Bluff, after which the community and the Corps constructed levees and a navigation system across the region. If the levees fail in Pine Bluff, that would be devastating for the city, which has its share of difficulties even in dry weather.
According to government data, the unemployment rate in Pine Bluff peaked at almost 12 percent in January 2011, and hovered around 10 percent until mid-2014, though now it’s around 5 percent. The median household income between 2013 and 2017 was about $32,000, about $11,000 below the state average.
But even with the threat of catastrophic flooding and the institutional economic disadvantages, city officials said Pine Bluff can still recover and rebuild.
Washington is overseeing a downtown revitalization plan, which includes a new aquatic center scheduled to open at the end of June, a new library and upgrades to parks and recreation areas.
“The city is on the rise,” Washington said of the city whose fates rose on the expansion of post-World War II manufacturing but suffered as the region de-industrialized.
At the First United Methodist Church, Pastor Michael Morey said the city has just recovered from a tornado that injured several people and damaged two apartment complexes in early May.
Now, he said, the community is turning its recovery efforts to the flood, which he said he doesn’t think will have a long-term impact “on whether Pine Bluff becomes a vital thriving community again.”
When the floods recede, Washington anticipates much of the cleanup to be focused around the city’s riverfront park, which has already flooded.
Officials are relying heavily on the prospect of state and federal funding, which will come if President Donald Trump declares a major disaster, as he’s done in some counties in Oklahoma.
(Hannah Grabenstein, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Missouri Gov. Mike Parson was touring flooded areas Monday in the northeast part of the state, where there have been around a dozen water rescues. Statewide, nearly 400 roads are closed, including part of U.S. 136.
Locks and dams upstream of St. Louis are shut down as the Mississippi River crests at the second-highest level on record in some communities. Midwestern rivers have flooded periodically since March, causing billions of dollars of damage to farmland, homes and businesses from Oklahoma and Arkansas and up to Michigan.
Near the 1,400-person town of Winfield, Mo., a Mississippi River levee breached Sunday, forcing evacuations in a rural area, said Sue Casseau, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. On Saturday, sandbags were intentionally removed from a farm levee along the Mississippi River near Ste. Genevieve, Mo., to allow water through and remove pressure downstream. The Illinois River also overtopped levees that protect a combined 1,500 acres in western Illinois, she said.
“If water is over the field, no one is planting,” Casseau said. “The full economic impact won’t be known until the end of this planting and harvest season.”
Floodgates also have been closed in St. Louis in advance of the Mississippi River cresting there Thursday.
In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency Monday for Tuscola County.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Lawmakers gave the measure final congressional approval by 354-58 in the House’s first significant action after returning from a 10-day recess. It was backed by all 222 voting Democrats and 132 Republicans, including the GOP’s top leaders and many of its legislators from areas hit by hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and fires. Fifty-eight Republicans, including Rep. Duncan Hunter of Alpine, voted “no.”
Conservative Republicans held up the bill during the break, objecting on three occasions to efforts by Democratic leaders to pass the bill by a voice vote requiring unanimity. They said the legislation, which reflects an increasingly permissive attitude in Washington on spending to address disasters that sooner or later hit every region of the country, shouldn’t be rushed through without a recorded vote.
Along the way, House and Senate old-timers seemed to outmaneuver the White House, though Trump personally prevailed upon Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., to drop a bid to free up billions of dollars for dredging and other harbor projects. The Senate passed the bill by a sweeping 85-8 vote on its way out of Washington May 23, a margin that reflected a consensus that the bill is long overdue.
The measure was initially held up over a fight between Trump and Democrats over aid to Puerto Rico that seems settled.
“Some in our government refused to assist our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico who are still recovering from a 2017 hurricane. I’m pleased we’ve moved past that,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y. “Because when disaster strikes, we shouldn’t let a ZIP code dictate our response.”
The measure also faced delays amid failed talks on Trump’s $4 billion-plus request to care for thousands of mostly Central American migrants being held at the southern border. The sides narrowed their differences but couldn’t reach agreement in the rush to go on recess, but everyone agrees that another bill will be needed almost immediately to refill nearly empty agency accounts to care for migrants.
“We must work together quickly to pass a bill that addresses the surge of unaccompanied children crossing the border and provides law enforcement agencies with the funding they need,” said top Appropriations Committee Republican Kay Granger of Texas. “The stakes are high. There are serious — life or death — repercussions if the Congress does not act.”
The measure is largely the same as a version that passed the House last month. Republicans opposed it for leaving out the border funding.
As the measure languished, disasters kept coming — with failed levees in Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri and tornadoes across Ohio just the most recent examples. The measure was supported by the bipartisan party leadership in the House and Senate.
The legislation was also being driven by Florida and Georgia lawmakers steaming with frustration over delays in delivering help to farmers, towns and military bases slammed by hurricanes last fall. Flooding in Iowa and Nebraska this spring added to the coalition behind the measure, which delivers much of its help to regions where Trump supporters dominate.
(Andrew Taylor, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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As of Thursday, the snowpack measured 202 percent of average after a barrage of storms throughout winter and spring, according to the Department of Water Resources.
The wet weather has slowed but not stopped, with predictions of thunderstorms this weekend in the central and southern parts of the state.
At this time last year, the snowpack measured 6 percent of average — making this year 33 times bigger than 2018, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
In 2017, the snowpack measured 190 percent of average.
The snowpack supplies about 30 percent of state water needs.
In the Tahoe Basin, Squaw Valley ski resort has seen so much snow it plans to keep its slopes open until least July 5. In May alone, Squaw recorded 37 inches.
This year’s April 1 reading put the snowpack at 176 percent of average, making it the fifth-largest on that date.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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In the Tulsa suburb of Sand Springs — among the first communities inundated when the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers started releasing more water from a dam upriver to control more severe flooding elsewhere — soggy couches and recliners and trash bins full of carpet, drywall and insulation lined residential streets covered in silt deposited by floodwaters.
Jamie Casto was helping clean up the house where her 65-year-old uncle has lived for 14 years.
Though Casto, 35, said her uncle didn’t have flood insurance because he was told he lived in a 500-year floodplain, a rust-colored line 4 feet from the concrete floor of the garage clearly marked how high water had gotten before they were able to get into the house.
Casto is trying to help her uncle fill out paperwork to apply for emergency loans to help get the house back in order.
She gave Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke a tour of the home while he was in historically red Oklahoma to see damage firsthand. The former Texas congressman said that if he is elected, his plan would include federal grants to invest in communities before disasters strike because the planet is warming and fires, storms and floods are expected to get worse.
“We know there’s going to be more of this — more severe, more devastating,” O’Rourke said. “We need to invest in communities now.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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North Texas remained under a tornado watch, while the National Weather Service issued a flash-flood warning along the Oklahoma-Arkansas line as strong thunderstorms brought a new round of rain to eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas, where the Arkansas River is expected to crest at historic levels.
In the east, multiple tornado warnings were issued for New Jersey and Pennsylvania. At least three tornadoes were confirmed in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
In Kansas, the National Weather Service was still assessing the strength of a twister that injured at least 15 people Tuesday, three of them seriously, and damaged homes, trees and power lines in Douglas and Leavenworth counties in eastern Kansas.
“I’m just glad I found my two dogs alive,” said Mark Duffin, of Linwood, Kansas. “Wife’s alive, family’s alive, I’m alive. So, that’s it.”
Duffin, 48, learned from his wife and a television report that the large tornado was headed toward his home about 30 miles west of Kansas City.
The next thing he knew, the walls of his house were coming down, he told the Kansas City Star.
In Ohio, tens of thousands of Ohio residents were without power or water Wednesday in the aftermath of at least eight tornadoes that spun across the state Monday. One person was killed and more than 140 injured.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey also were under tornado warnings hours after a swarm of tightly packed twisters swept through Indiana and Ohio overnight, smashing homes, blowing out windows and ending the school year early for some students because of damage to buildings. One person was killed and at least 130 were injured.
The storms in Kansas City Tuesday were the 12th straight day that at least eight tornadoes were reported to the National Weather Service.
After several quiet years, the past couple of weeks have seen an explosion of tornado activity with no end to the pattern in sight.
A large and dangerous tornado touched down on the western edge of Kansas City, Kan., late Tuesday, the National Weather Service office reported. At least a dozen people were admitted to the hospital in Lawrence, 40 miles west of downtown Kansas City, Mo., and home to the University of Kansas, hospital spokesman Janice Early said. Damage also was reported in the towns of Bonner Springs, Linwood and Pleasant Grove in Kansas.
But the Kansas City metropolitan area of about 2.1 million people appeared to have been spared the direct hit that was feared earlier in the evening when the weather service announced a tornado emergency.
Mark Duffin, 48, learned from his wife and a television report that the large tornado was headed toward his home in Linwood, about 30 miles west of Kansas City.
The next thing he knew, the walls of his house were coming down.
Duffin told the Kansas City Star that he grabbed a mattress, followed his 13-year-old to the basement and protected the two of them with the mattress as the home crashed down around them.
“I’m just glad I found my two dogs alive,” he said. “Wife’s alive, family’s alive, I’m alive. So, that’s it.”
Some of the heaviest damage was reported just outside Dayton, Ohio.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine declared a state of emergency in three hard-hit counties, allowing the state to suspend normal purchasing procedures and quickly provide supplies like water and generators.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The first tornado touched down in El Reno, about 25 miles west of Oklahoma City, late Saturday night. It crossed an interstate and walloped the American Budget Value Inn before ripping through the Skyview Estates trailer park, flipping and leveling homes, Mayor Matt White said at a news conference.
“It’s a tragic scene out there,” White said, adding later that “people have absolutely lost everything.” He said the city established a GoFundMe site, the City of El Reno Tornado Relief Fund, for affected families. Several other businesses were also damaged, though not to the same extent as the motel.
The two people who were killed were in the mobile home park, White said. He did not provide additional details about them. The 29 people who were injured were taken to hospitals, where some were undergoing surgery. Some of the injuries were deemed critical, he said.
The National Weather Service gave the tornado an EF3 rating, meaning it had wind speeds of 136-165 mph. Personnel who investigated the damage said the tornado began around 10:28 p.m. Saturday and lasted for four minutes. The tornado was about 75 yards wide at its widest point and was on the ground for 2.2 miles.
The tornado was spawned by a powerful storm system that rolled through the state — the latest in a week of violent storms to hit the flood-weary Plains and Midwest that have been blamed for at least 11 deaths, including the two killed in El Reno.
Early Sunday, another tornado destroyed several buildings and downed trees and power lines in the Tulsa suburb of Sapulpa, which is 110 miles northeast of El Reno. Pete Snyder, a hydrometeorological technician with the weather service in Tulsa, said crews were assessing damage to determine the tornado’s rating. The area also experienced damage from strong straight-line winds, he said.
The Sapulpa Police Department said on its Facebook page that it hadn’t heard of any deaths and that only a few minor injuries had been reported.
Residents wandered around after sunrise to survey the damage, carefully avoiding fallen utility poles that blocked some streets. Among the buildings that were destroyed was a historic railroad building built in the early 1900s that the Farmers Feed Store had been using for storage. A furniture store’s warehouse was also destroyed.
The storm is the latest to hit the flood-weary central U.S. and dumped yet more rain in the region’s already bloated waterways. In Tulsa, authorities advised residents of some neighborhoods on Sunday to consider leaving for higher ground because the Arkansas River is stressing the city’s old levee system.
Downriver and about 100 miles southeast of Tulsa in Arkansas’ second-largest city, Fort Smith, residents were preparing for what meteorologists are predicting will be the worst flooding in recorded history.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The quake struck at 2:41 a.m. and was centered in a vast nature preserve 57 miles east of the small town of Yurimaguas. Helping limit damage was the earthquake’s depth, at 70 miles below the surface, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Earthquakes that are close to the surface generally cause more destruction.
President Martin Vizcarra called for calm before traveling to the zone with members of his cabinet to survey the damage. He said first reports indicate a bridge had collapsed and several homes and roads had been affected.
“It’s a quake that was felt throughout the Peruvian jungle,” said Vizcarra, who was scheduled to host a regional summit Sunday in the capital with the presidents of Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador.
Ricardo Seijas, chief of the National Emergency Operations Center, said one person died when a rock fell on a house in the Huarango district.
A preliminary survey by authorities found that six people were injured and 27 homes damaged across seven provinces. Three schools, three hospitals and two churches were also affected
In Yurimaguas, a bridge and several old houses collapsed, and the electricity was cut, according to the National Emergency Operations Center.
Images circulating on social media showed residents in several parts of the country panicked as the quake shook buildings.
The quake also awoke people in Lima, who ran out of their homes in fear.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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John Reinhardt, 20, and Caitlin Frangel, 19, both of Hazelwood, Mo., were reported missing May 15. Their bodies were found around 4 a.m. on a flooded rural road that runs along the river at Portage Des Sioux, about 40 miles north of St. Louis.
Missouri State Highway Patrol Trooper Dallas Thompson said an autopsy determined they both drowned.
“We believe they went into it in the dark, not knowing the roadway was flooded, and they were unable to get out,” Thompson said.
On Friday, floodwaters from the Missouri River topped a levee at Jefferson City and prompted some streets around the state Capitol to be shut down, as residents worked to clean up from one of the twisters, which cut a 3-mile-long path through the city earlier this week.
Heavy rain in recent weeks has spurred major flooding in several states. Flooding along the Arkansas River will threaten communities from Tulsa into western Arkansas through at least the holiday weekend, officials said Friday, as water released from an Oklahoma dam combines with additional rain in the forecast.
To control flooding in Tulsa, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Friday began increasing the amount of water being released into the river from the Keystone Dam northwest of the city of about 400,000 people.
“The dam is doing what it is supposed to do. It has maintained the flood to a manageable level,” said Oklahoma U.S. Sen. James Lankford, following an aerial tour of the region.
The river in Tulsa was just above 22 feet Friday, four feet above flood stage, and was expected to remain at that level through Tuesday. Riverside residents were urged to leave their homes and at least one oil refinery suspended operations.
“The most disturbing thing that I’ve heard in the last 24 hours from our first responders are reports of parents letting their kids play in the river,” said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum. “If you’re a parent that’s letting your kid play in this river right now, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Arkansas officials braced for record flooding as the water moves downstream.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson declared a state of emergency Friday to lift hurdles in what state agencies can do to assist flooded areas along the Arkansas River. The proclamation came after he ordered the state’s National Guard to station high-water rescue teams in the western part of the state by Saturday and the Corps of Engineers warned residents to stay off the river throughout the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
“We hope people are getting to safer areas now,” said Aric Mitchell with the Fort Smith, Ark., Police Department.
The Arkansas River is expected to reach 41 feet by Sunday near Fort Smith, which is the state’s second-largest city with nearly 89,000 residents. That’s nearly 20 feet above flood stage and 3 feet above the record of 38.1 feet set in 1945.
“Nearby businesses, residences could be flooded. It’s going to be a mess,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Pete Snyder. “We’ve not seen it get this high before. It’s a different situation than we’ve ever seen.”
The concerns in Oklahoma and Arkansas follow days of severe storms that exacerbated spring flooding throughout the Midwest and spawned dozens of tornadoes.
More rain is likely through the weekend from western Texas through Illinois, according to the weather service.
(Ken Miller, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The National Weather Service confirmed that a large and destructive twister moved over Jefferson City shortly before midnight Wednesday.
The tornado cut a path about 3 miles long and a mile wide from the south end of Jefferson City north toward the Missouri River, said police Lt. David Williams. Emergency workers reported about two dozen injuries, Williams said, and around 100 people went to shelters. Hospitals reported treating injuries such as cuts and bruises.
There were no immediate reports of any deaths or missing people in the capital city of about 40,000, and it appeared everyone was accounted for after door-to-door checks that were nearly complete Thursday evening, police Lt. David Williams said.
Many in Jefferson City considered themselves fortunate to survive.
David Surprenant watched the storm approach then rushed to join his family in the basement. By then, the windows had started shattering and the pressure dropped.
“It was just the eeriest sound ever, and it felt like it was taking your breath right out of you,” Surprenant, 34, said. He and his family were unharmed.
Kevin Riley operates a car dealership next to Surprenant’s home, where he sells Chevys and Toyotas. He estimated that 98 percent of the approximately 750 vehicles on the lot were damaged.
Lincoln University President Jerald Woolfolk rode out the tornado in the basement of his official residence, and it may have saved his life. University spokeswoman Misty Young told the Jefferson City News-Tribune that the home, built 103 years ago, was so badly damaged it appeared to be uninhabitable.
Weather forecasters had been tracking the storm before it arrived, and sirens first sounded in Jefferson City at 11:10 p.m. — about 30 minutes before the first property damage. Gov. Mike Parson credited the warning system for saving lives.
The three deaths happened more than 150 miles away near Golden City in Missouri’s southwestern corner.
Kenneth Harris, 86, and his 83-year-old wife, Opal, were found dead about 200 yards from their home, and Betty Berg, 56, was killed and her husband, Mark, seriously injured when their mobile home was destroyed, authorities said.
The National Weather Service said preliminary information indicates the tornado at Jefferson City was an EF-3, which typically carries winds up to 160 mph.
The severe weather moved in from Oklahoma, where rescuers struggled to pull people from high water. This week has seen several days of twisters and torrential rains in the Southern Plains and Midwest.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A federal judge overseeing PG&E’s bankruptcy case approved the utility’s wildfire assistance program to provide relief for people who lost property during the huge fires in 2017 and 2018.
Lawyers for wildfire victims argued that PG&E could pay up to $250 million to adequately help their clients and pointed out that the utility sought last month to pay $235 million in bonuses for its employees.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali said he couldn’t under the law impose a larger amount, and said the fund, created voluntarily by PG&E, was an “appropriate remedy.” He said he wanted to see the fund up and running as quickly as possible and wanted both sides to name an independent third party in five days to administer the program.
“We are ready, willing and anxious to fund the $105 million,” Stephen Karotkin, an attorney for PG&E, told Montali.
The fund is intended to help victims who are uninsured, still need help with housing costs or have other urgent needs. Victims “most in need, including those who are currently without adequate shelter,” would be prioritized, the utility said.
The fund’s administration expenses will be capped at $5 million. PG&E said it will draw the entire $105 million from its cash reserves.
PG&E said it will not seek any rate increases to pay for the fund.
The company filed for bankruptcy protection in January, saying that under California law, it faced up to $30 billion in wildfire liabilities.
State fire investigators have determined that PG&E equipment caused 18 wildfires in 2017. Last week, state fire officials announced PG&E power lines sparked the Nov. 8 fire that killed 85 people and nearly destroyed the town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Montali on Wednesday gave PG&E four more months to file a plan to emerge from bankruptcy. The company had wanted six months, but Gov. Gavin Newsom urged the court to make the company move faster. He said the utility’s request continues to show it lacks an urgent focus on improving safety.
In a court filing, Newsom’s administration said the extension would encompass the entirety of the upcoming wildfire season, thereby exposing PG&E to the risk of claims arising from the 2019 wildfires.
“Allowing PG&E to continue a business-as-usual approach without any accountability would only encourage PG&E’s distressed investors to leverage the (bankruptcy) cases to their benefit and to the detriment of existing and future wildfire victims.”
PG&E said in a statement that the additional months “will help increase our chances of formulating and negotiating a plan that is feasible and agreeable to stakeholders.”
(Daisy Nguyen, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Authorities urged residents of several small towns in Oklahoma and Kansas to leave their homes as rivers and streams rose. The Arkansas River was approaching historic highs, while the already high Missouri and Mississippi rivers were again rising after a multi-day stretch of storms that produced dozens of tornadoes. Forecasters predicted parts of Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas would see more severe weather overnight into today.
“The biggest concern is more rain,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said during a news conference following an aerial tour with Tulsa Mayor G.W. Bynum and other officials Wednesday morning.
Officials encouraged residents in the Tulsa suburbs of Sand Springs and Bixby; in Fort Gibson, about 50 miles southwest of Tulsa; and in Webbers Falls, some 70 miles southeast of Tulsa, to leave. All four communities are along the Arkansas River.
Near Crescent, about 34 miles north of Oklahoma City, erosion left several homes hanging over the swollen Cimarron River. One unoccupied home rolled into the river Tuesday, and authorities say others could collapse.
In Kansas, residents in parts of the city of Iola, along the Neosho River, were being urged to evacuate and officials had set up on emergency shelter at a community college, said Corey Schinstock, assistant city administrator. If the river reaches its predicted crest of 27.8 feet today, it would be the second-worst flood ever for the town of about 5,400 residents.
The National Weather Service issued flood warnings for northeastern Oklahoma through the weekend and in southeastern Kansas and southwestern Missouri through this afternoon.
The deluge inundated roadways, closing highways in 22 Oklahoma counties and 17 Kansas counties, along with more than 330 Missouri roads. Amtrak suspended train service Wednesday and today along a route between St. Louis and Kansas City because of congestion and flood-related delays.
More than 9 inches of rain has fallen since Sunday in parts of Oklahoma after an already rainy spring.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The biggest surge came last week when nearly 57 million gallons of sewage-tainted water gushed into the United States through the Tijuana River, according to the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission. The flows consisted mainly of rainwater but also carried sewage and other pollution.
“We’ve had a couple wet winters that have stressed the stormwater system in Tijuana, which is at breaking point,” said Dave Gibson, executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We see a deteriorating sewer system that’s going to be overwhelmed with more water as more residents pour into the city.”
The IBWC’s Mexican counterpart, the Comision Internacional de Limites y Aguas, or CILA, constructed a sandbag berm in the main channel of the Tijuana River earlier this month to prevent flows from crossing into the San Diego region. However, the berm, as well as the agency’s pumping and diversion systems at the border, have been overwhelmed by the recent rainfall.
Banned pesticides and industrial chemicals have also been found in recent months in water flowing through canyons along the border. A report compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection identified the pesticide DDT, hexavalent chromium and other known carcinogens in the water.
San Diego is at the end of large watershed that starts in the mountains in and around Tijuana. When it rains, water rushes across the city, picking up trash and other pollution as it flows north, eventually into the Pacific Ocean. Compounding the issue, makeshift communities built in the canyons just south of the border have grown in recent years, with residents emptying their trash and wastewater directly into flood-control channels that carry water to the canyons at the border.
“For millions of years, the land was excavated by the force of water, creating this pretty large canyon, and the entire city of Tijuana sits in the banks of that canyon,” said Oscar Romo, a professor of urban studies and planning at UC San Diego who has studied water pollution in the region for decades. “There’s no neighborhood that escapes the river.”
IBWC has a collection system to divert flows in the river valley’s major canyons, such as Goat Canyon and Smuggler’s Gulch. Much of the polluted flows are sent to the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment plant. However, the system is routinely overwhelmed in wet weather.
Imperial Beach, Chula Vista, the Port of San Diego and the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board have sued the federal government for allowing the situation to persist. The plaintiffs would like to see a beefed-up diversion system and funding for sewage infrastructure in Tijuana.
“The nonstop spills of sewage into the Tijuana River over the past weeks highlight the reasons why Imperial Beach, San Diego, Chula Vista, the Port of San Diego, California and the Surfrider Foundation have sued the Trump Administration,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina. “This is an environmental and public health disaster.”
Lawyers for the defense argue the government isn’t legally responsible for the renegade flows that escape their collection systems, pointing out that the situation would be significantly worse without its network of pumps and capture basins.
Tijuana’s aging and limited sewer system has in recent years struggled to serve the region’s growing population. Experts and government officials agree that hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure funding are needed to keep water pollution from spilling over the border.
(Joshua Emerson Smith, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The U.S. Forest Service, in turn, is accusing the local fire departments in the state of overbilling the federal government as part of a federal-state partnership, the California Fire Assistance Agreement, that was inked in 2015 and expires in 2020.
The disagreement between state and federal fire officials threatens to upend negotiations to extend that agreement, which state Fire and Rescue Chief Brian Marshall said is essential to combat not just fires, but other natural disasters in California.
“Local government fire departments respond across jurisdictional boundaries every day,” said Marshall. “We cannot afford for this agreement to expire, that would have a devastating effect on the California wildfire system.”
As California braces for what is expected to be another extreme fire year, the rising tensions have so alarmed Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that she sent a letter this week calling for a truce.
“Around 60 percent of forested land in California is owned by the federal government. Wildfires don’t stop at jurisdictional boundaries, so a unified federal-state approach is the only way to properly protect lives and property,” Feinstein wrote in a May 14 letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and U.S. Forest Service Chief Vicky Christensen.
“Given that California is facing another year of significant wildfire risk, I ask that you delay implementation of any recommended reimbursement changes and that you work with the State to address any issues as part of the renegotiation of the existing CFAA,” she continued.
The Forest Service insists it is moving ahead with its new demands after completing an audit of the fire assistance agreement in January.
“The Forest Service is ultimately accountable to American taxpayers and has the responsibility to practice due diligence in review of all fire-related claims made by local governments,” the agency said in a statement. “The audit found several areas where the CFAA is not being managed to ensure mutual benefit between the Forest Service and the State of California.”
Specifically, the Forest Service alleges that the state submitted inaccurate invoices in his request for federal reimbursement, “resulting in potential overpayments.”
According to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, the Forest Service still owes local fire departments $9.3 million in reimbursements for costs incurred during the 2018 fire season, out of $72 million total that state firefighters billed to the federal agency.
“Local government fire departments are out this money and they’re getting ready to close their books,” said Marshall. If the Forest Service decides not to repay some portion of what’s owed, it could put a major dent in their budgets, he said.
Reimbursement rates are only part of the California government’s concerns, however.
In an April 24 letter to Randy Moore, the regional forester for the Pacific Southwest Division of the Department of Agriculture, Marshall warned that new reimbursement requirements that the Forest Service plans to enforce, “would be cumbersome and would severely impact California’s ability to respond to fires.”
In particular, the new requirements “will have a significant impact on volunteer fire agencies,” Marshall wrote, because those agencies have to be reimbursed before they can pay their firefighters. Volunteer firefighters make up one-third of the local fire departments that respond to federal and state requests for help fighting fires, he wrote.
(MCCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE)
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Two deaths, both in Missouri, were blamed on the severe weather that started in the Southern Plains Monday night and moved to the northeast. Missouri and parts of Illinois and Arkansas were in the crosshairs Tuesday. By today, the storm will move into Great Lakes region, where it will weaken. But another storm system was gathering steam for later this week, potentially covering an area from Texas to Chicago, according to the National Weather Service.
The skies grew dark over St. Louis before nightfall Tuesday and a tornado warning was issued for the city and surrounding suburbs, but the storm passed overhead without producing the rotation that often spawns tornadoes and the city was mostly spared except for heavy rain.
A tornado early Tuesday near Tulsa International Airport injured one person and damaged about a dozen homes. The airport was unscathed, but passengers were moved into shelters for about 30 minutes.
In Arkansas, crews were working Tuesday to free a woman trapped under a tree topped by strong winds. Arkansas Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Melody Daniel said the woman was alert and talking.
Storms Monday evening flipped campers at Lucas Oil Speedway in Hickory County, Mo., injuring seven people, four of whom were taken to hospitals. The speedway’s grandstand also was destroyed, forcing cancellation of racing this weekend.
Another twister Tuesday afternoon hit a wild animal park in southern Missouri. All of the animals were accounted for.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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No injuries were reported.
Late Monday, the National Weather Service reduced the severe threat of violent storms to a small area of southern Oklahoma and northern Texas. But it kept an area stretching from Tulsa, Okla., to Wichita Falls, Texas, under tornado watch until this morning.
The biggest threat overnight appeared to be flash flooding from torrential rains that accompanied the storms, forecasters said.
The National Weather Service had warned that Monday evening could bring perilous weather to a large swath of western Texas, most of Oklahoma and southern Kansas. The storm was expected to move into western Arkansas.
As predicted, more than a dozen sightings of tornadoes were reported in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Missouri early Monday evening, although they were in sparsely populated areas. Oklahoma residents were particularly nervous Monday because it was the sixth anniversary of a massive tornado in Moore, south of Oklahoma City, that killed 24 people.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The Vale mining company said the dam in Barao de Cocais was already at the maximum risk level and people living nearby were evacuated as a precaution in February. A Vale-operated dam in Minas Gerais failed Jan. 25, unleashing a wave of mud that killed more than 200 people.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The Corps said Thursday it has changed the risk characterization of Prado Dam from moderate urgency to high urgency.
Prado Dam is on the Santa Ana River in Corona.
The 96-mile river begins in the San Bernardino Mountains and runs through inland Southern California and Orange County to the ocean. It typically has little water flow except during winter when storms can turn it into a raging torrent that historically caused serious floods.
The dam was designed in the 1930s and constructed in 1941. It has never experienced a storm large enough to cause water to flow over the spillway, the Corps said.
The new evaluation was conducted this month.
“Risk factors identified indicate the potential for poor spillway performance, which could have adverse impacts to the downstream population,” the Corps said in a press release.
Downstream from the dam are 29 cities, with more than $61 billion worth of property, it said.
Work to improve the dam has been under way since 2002 to increase the amount of floodwaters and sediment it can store. The Corps said it is working on measures to reduce the spillway risks and modification of the spillway is expected to begin in 2021.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The Vale mining company said the dam in Barao de Cocais was already at the maximum risk level and people living nearby were evacuated as a precaution in February. A Vale-operated dam in Minas Gerais failed Jan. 25, unleashing a wave of mud that killed more than 200 people.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Both lower schools and universities were closed for the pollution alert and Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said they would remain closed today.
“We don’t expect this situation to change until the weekend,” Sheinbaum said.
She said a light, localized rain overnight had done little to cut the pollution, which remained at about 1 1/2 times acceptable limits.
The city also declared a partial driving ban, but activists of the Citizen Observatory on Air Quality called Thursday for officials to limit polluting activities like truck transportation and construction sites.
The activists said the city should include extremely small particles as a cause for imposing emergency measures. Such particles are frequently found in smoke, diesel exhaust and dust. Emergency measures are currently imposed mainly for ozone levels.
The group said “forest fires are unfortunately going to be an ever more frequent problem as a result of global warming.”
Sheinbaum said officials would announce changes to the rules for declaring pollution emergencies next week.
Experts said seasonal rains — which usually start around this time of year — could help wash particles out of the air and tamp down fires.
But social media users mocked authorities for waiting for Tlaloc — the Aztec rain God — to end the pollution crisis.
Federal authorities have also faced criticism after the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador cut the budget for the National Forestry Commission, reportedly by about one-third.
Federal Environment Secretary Josefa Gonzalez acknowledged there had been cuts in the budget for the commission, known as Conafor, which coordinates federal, state and municipal firefighting efforts.
“It is not just the cuts to Conafor, it is also the heat and the location” of the fires that has made them hard to fight, she said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Authorities rescued four hikers caught in the weather on the far north’s Redwood Coast and two people trapped on a tiny island in the suddenly fast-flowing Los Angeles River.
Mammoth Mountain, a popular ski area in the Sierra, reported a foot of new snow on its peak, boosting the season total at the summit to nearly 58 feet. The resort already announced it had enough snow to allow skiing and boarding through the Fourth of July.
Jason Elrick eagerly followed the storm’s progress from his desk at a staffing office in Chino, east of Los Angeles. As the snow piled up at Mammoth, he vowed to make the five-hour drive to the resort late Thursday and hit the slopes in the morning.
“I have a bit of flexibility at work so I can say, ‘Boss, it’s snowing. I have to go,’” Elrick said. “The conditions are prime. It’s like the middle of winter up there.”
Elrick, 37, said he expects today to be a “bluebird day” — skier slang for sunny conditions following a major snow dump.
The wettest winter in years nearly eliminated drought conditions in California. While frequently disrupting travel, a long series of storms stoked a big part of the state’s water supply — the Sierra snowpack that melts and runs off into reservoirs during spring and summer.
More snow was expected, and winter storm warnings would remain in effect until early today for the southern Sierra from Yosemite south to Kern County, the weather service said.
“Looks like a Winter Wonderland in mid-May!” the Sacramento National Weather Service tweeted, showing traffic camera images of snowy Interstate 80 north of Lake Tahoe.
The unusually cold and wet late-season storm not only put a gray, wintry cast on the Golden State, it posed a problem for travelers and outdoor enthusiasts who normally find moderate conditions by late spring.
The California Department of Transportation closed state Route 89 over Monitor Pass. Yosemite National Park earlier announced the closure of a popular road because of the storm.
(Christopher Weber, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Cal Fire said transmission lines owned and operated by the San Francisco-based utility started the Nov. 8 fire that nearly destroyed the town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The fire wiped out nearly 15,000 homes. Many of those killed were elderly or disabled. The oldest was 99.
“Investigators determined there were violations of law,” Cal Fire deputy director Mike Mohler said. He said he hadn’t read the report and didn’t know the nature of the violations.
Cal Fire did not release its full investigative report, saying it had been forwarded to the Butte County district attorney’s office, which is considering criminal charges against the utility.
The investigation also identified a second nearby ignition site involving PG&E’s electrical distribution lines that had come into contact with vegetation.
The second fire was quickly consumed by the initial fire.
The disclosures came on the same day the utility’s new chief executive was testifying before a legislative committee in Sacramento. Bill Johnson told the state Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee he had expected the utility would be blamed for the fire.
“I have made the assumption when I got here that PG&E equipment caused the fire,” he said, noting the utility had said that was probable in recent filings. “It’s a disappointment that this happened. Let’s not do it again.”
Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey said in a statement that he is still weighing possible criminal charges against the utility, a decision that could take months.
State fire investigators have determined that PG&E caused 18 wildfires in 2017. They referred 12 for possible criminal prosecution.
(Janie Har, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Weather conditions at the end of Mexico’s dry season combined with dozens of brush fires burning in and around the city have produced a blanket of smoky haze.
The federal Environment Department said Wednesday that 3,800 firefighters are combating an average of about 100 fires a day in brush, scrub, agricultural and forest land throughout the country. Fire risk is highest in the spring for much of Mexico, because the summer rainy season has not yet started.
Officials have warned that it could be harmful to at-risk people, especially due to high levels of tiny particles in the air. It triggered a pollution alert this week in Mexico City.
City environmental officials announced the closure today of a park and zoo on the south side of the city as well as children’s playgrounds in the sprawling Chapultepec Park.
The conditions also led to the postponement of professional soccer and baseball games in Mexico City this week as well as the imposition of driving limits due to high ozone levels.
On Wednesday, the soccer league announced that a semifinal match between America and Leon that had already been postponed due to air quality would be moved out of the city and played in Queretaro today.
Mexico is facing an extremely heavy season of brush and forest fires, with 4,425 blazes recorded so far this year. About 378,000 acres have been burned, officials say.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The magnitude 7.5 quake struck around 11 p.m. Tuesday at a relatively shallow depth of 6 miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was offshore about 28 miles northeast of Kokopo, which has about 26,000 people.
Chris McKee, the acting director of geohazards management, said there was some damage in Kokopo as items were shaken from shelves and the power had been cut. He said a small tsunami was generated, but the late-night darkness made an assessment difficult.
A spokesman said a disaster coordinator was on the ground assessing the situation in and around Kokopo but they hadn’t yet gotten an update on the extent of the damage.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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New Orleans residents awoke to flooded streets Sunday and the Mississippi Highway Patrol closed part of a highway due to heavy rains that also may have contributed to a freight train derailment.
A flash flood warning was extended for New Orleans and surrounding parishes until 1 p.m. Sunday as strong storms with heavy rain moved through the area. Photos published in Nola.com|The Times-Picayune showed partially submerged vehicles and people wading through ankle-deep water.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant tweeted on Sunday that he had signed a state of emergency declaration for all areas affected by the storms.
The Sun-Herald reported that first responders worked overnight from Saturday into Sunday, sometimes using boats, to rescue people in northern Harrison County in Mississippi.
County Fire Chief Pat Sullivan told the newspaper that one man was clinging to a tree after floodwaters swept his car off a road and another man and his 4-year-old child were rescued from the roof of their submerged pickup truck.
Sullivan, like authorities in other affected states, urged people to use caution and not to drive through floodwaters.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Panamanian authorities said at least two people had been injured in a village but gave no details. Sigifredo Perez, head of operations for Costa Rica’s National Commission of Emergencies, said no major damage or injuries had been reported in his country.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a 6.1 preliminary magnitude and was centered 4 miles southeast of the town of Plaza de Caisan. The quake occurred at a depth of about 22 miles.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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And the heavy rain threat is not over.
Houston is under a flash flood watch through tonight given the potential for at least one to three additional inches of rain on top of the two to five inches that fell Thursday night and two to three inches Tuesday.
“Soils remain saturated from recent rainfall and many bayous, creeks and rivers remain high so any additional rainfall should run off quickly and cause flooding,” the National Weather Service office serving Houston wrote.
Houston is in a slight risk zone for excessive rainfall today.
Additional rainfall is not predicted to be as intense as Thursday night’s deluge, but the Weather Service urged residents to “stay put” if extreme rainfall returns: “Do not attempt to travel,” it warned. “Underpasses and low-water crossings will be life-threatening. If caught in a sinking vehicle, get OUT. Bayous will likely exceed banks and structure flooding could be possible.”
By all accounts, Thursday night’s storms in Houston, which have left the region susceptible to more flooding, were wild. “This is probably the most hellacious rain I’ve ever heard in my life,” tweeted Matt Lanza, meteorologist for the Houston weather website SpaceCityWeather.com.
The storms left “at least three bayous flowing over the top of their banks, nearly 90,000 residents without power and dozens reportedly trapped for a time in floodwater on Interstate 10,” The Washington Post’s Timothy Bella reported.
As much as five inches of rain reportedly fell in one hour in east Houston’s Greens Bayou.
On Friday morning, parts of downtown Houston were “impassable after the heavy rains caused the Buffalo Bayou to overflow,” according to Click2Houston. That’s just one of several locations that were inundated, per SpaceCityWeather.com reporting.
Flooding caused numerous school districts, businesses, and area events to be cancelled Friday, including the Houston public school district.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The severe weather moved eastward after forcing people from their homes in Kansas, soaking Houston once again, and straining levees along the surging Mississippi River.
Flooding has caused billions of dollars of damage to farmland, homes and businesses across the Midwest, with some rivers above flood stage for more than six weeks now. The National Weather Service issued flood warnings as more than 5 inches of rain fell in parts of Mississippi.
And in Minnesota, the snow machine keeps on churning, dropping a record snowfall on the northeastern part of the state Wednesday night into Thursday morning. As lawns that had just started greening up were buried under the largest May snowfall in Duluth in 117 years, falling trees and power lines left thousands in the dark and were making for difficult driving, the weather service reported.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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It was the first time since its formation in 1996 that the council had been unable to issue a joint declaration spelling out its priorities. As an international organization made up of eight Arctic countries and representatives of indigenous groups in the region, its stated mission is cooperation on Arctic issues, particularly the protection of the region’s fragile environment.
According to diplomats involved in the negotiations, at issue was the United States’ insistence not to mention the latest science on climate change or the Paris Agreement aimed at averting its worst effects. The omission is especially notable because scientists have warned that the Arctic is heating up far faster than the world average because of rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Foreign Minister Timo Soini of Finland, the council’s outgoing chairman, made it clear, without naming names, that resistance to climate action was a minority opinion.
“A majority of us regarded climate change as a fundamental challenge facing the Arctic and acknowledged the urgent need to take mitigation and adaptation actions and to strengthen resilience,” Soini said in his 10-page statement.
The isolation of the United States could not be laid out more starkly, and that, too, in a forum made up mostly of staunch allies like Canada and Denmark.
That statement detailed the council’s work on a variety of topics, including marine pollution and helping Arctic communities adapt to the thawing of permafrost.
The statement also said most council members had welcomed the Paris Agreement and “noted with concern” the findings of a United Nations scientific panel that warned of worsening food shortages as soon as 2040 without a drastic transformation of the world economy.
Negotiations over competing versions of a declaration that every country could agree to have taken weeks. Arctic Council statements are issued on the basis of consensus and an objection from any member country can scuttle adoption.
The statement, along with the chairman’s more detailed report, was finalized at 8 a.m. Tuesday, only two hours before council members gathered for a group photograph.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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Tens of millions of people were in the cyclone’s path. India and Bangladesh each evacuated more than 1 million people from coastal areas. Large sections of coastal India and Bangladesh were threatened by storm surges, and heavy rains could cause rivers to breach. The fast-moving storm struck the coast with the force of a major hurricane. Several hours after it made landfall, the cyclone was downgraded to a “very severe” storm from an “extremely severe” storm.
The cyclone may be packing extra force because of climate change, which has been linked to intensified storms in warm wet areas as well as severe drought in drier regions.
By Friday night, the full impact of the storm was still being assessed according to local officials. India’s coast guard said on Twitter that emergency workers had started providing aid within the first hour of the storm making landfall.
But some relief efforts were hampered by extensive damage. Many large trees were uprooted and toppled onto roads in Puri district, according to a government spokesman, but road restoration work had already begun by Friday night.
Phone lines, Internet and electricity were all down in the city, but the government vowed to have services running again soon. At least 160 people were injured by the storm, the government spokesman said.
The military conducted aerial surveys Friday evening to assess the damage, and at least four ships with aid supplies were stationed in affected areas, the Indian navy said on Twitter.
A relief official for Odisha state, where the cyclone made landfall, said Friday afternoon that there had been unverified reports of deaths. The official, Pravat Ranjan Mohapatra, said the situation would be clearer today.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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The National Weather Service issued flood warnings Friday along a large swath of the Mississippi River, as well as flash flood watches for parts of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas after recent rounds of heavy rain.
In southwest Missouri, authorities were searching Friday for a paddler whose kayak overturned in a flooded creek, one day after finding the body of his friend, 23-year-old Alex Ekern. Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Jason Pace said the two were among three men who began paddling Wednesday afternoon on Bull Creek near the small town of Walnut Shade. They had been on the water about 45 minutes when they were swept over a low-water bridge and were caught in what is called a hydraulic, which creates a washing-machine effect that is hard to escape. Pace said one of the kayakers was eventually swept downstream, climbed a steep bank and sought help.
Flooding also claimed the life of a camper who was found Wednesday after he was caught in waters from an overflowed creek near the town of Ava, also in southwest Missouri. And in northern Indiana, a 2-year-old was killed when his mother drove onto a flooded road.
In Davenport, Iowa, concerns were that even after the Mississippi River reached a record height, the worst was far from over.
The crest inched above the 1993 record on Thursday, and forecasters are calling for up to 4 inches of additional rain next week, meaning the high water will likely stick around and potentially get even higher.
Several blocks of downtown Davenport were flooded this week when a flood barrier succumbed to the onslaught of water. The river at the Quad Cities has been at major flood stage or higher for 41 consecutive days.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds visited Davenport Friday.
Historic flooding was happening elsewhere along the river, too. The National Weather Service is now projecting flood levels to reach the second- or third-highest ever at several Mississippi River towns in northeast Missouri — Hannibal, Louisiana, Clarksville and Winfield — and western Illinois towns such as Quincy, Alton and Grafton.
Grafton Mayor Rick Eberlin said in a conference call that included the leaders of other river towns that roads are closing around the town and that it’s working to get businesses to move out as waters rise. The town, which is 40 miles north of St. Louis, has no flood walls or levees. He said water is beginning to encroach upon city hall.
“We are at our wits’ end,” Eberlin said. “We are totally unprotected.”
Kimmswick, Mo., Mayor Phil Stang said the community is building atop a permanent levee in hopes of holding back the water. “We’ve closed off the city completely. As soon as it rains, we are a bathtub.”
(Jim Salter&Heather Hollingsworth, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Cyclone Fani, classified by meteorologists as the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane, was expected to hit the coast today after churning through the bay, which has produced many of the world’s deadliest tropical cyclones.
By late Thursday in India, Cyclone Fani had sustained winds of about 155 mph, nearly in the range of a Category 5 hurricane, said Derrick Herndon, an associate researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. The World Meteorological Organization said the storm was “one of the most intense” in 20 years in the region.
“It’s remarkable in terms of its wind speed,” Herndon said. “The sustained winds are really near the top range of the winds we see in this part of the world.”
Tens of millions of people are potentially in the path of what the India Meteorological Department called an “extremely severe cyclonic storm.” Not long after 11:30 p.m. in Puri, India, satellite data from the department showed outer bands of the storm battering the Indian coastline as the storm’s eye moved north.
In the beach village of Chandrabhaga, police helped residents move from thatched-roof homes to a nearby storm shelter Thursday afternoon. They sat on the floor of the shelter or in plastic chairs awaiting the arrival of the storm. By evening, the sea had turned rough and strong winds were lashing buildings along the coast.
The meteorological department warned of the “total destruction” of thatched huts in some districts, major damage to roads, the uprooting of power poles and potential danger from flying objects.
Officials said the storm could be the most powerful to strike India since 1999, when a cyclone killed more than 10,000 people in the same region of eastern India. But authorities in the region have significantly improved disaster preparation and response capabilities in the years since, and subsequent major storms have resulted in far fewer deaths.
Cyclone Fani is forecast to drop as much as 8 inches of rain on northern parts of the state of Andhra Pradesh and on the state of Odisha. The storm is expected to continue north, hitting Bangladesh and Bhutan.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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On Tuesday, those barriers broke, sending murky river water rushing into businesses and forcing residents to scramble to safety. About 30 people who did not make it out in time were rescued by firefighters.
“The whole city had a very frantic feel about it,” said Rebecca Nicke, a co-owner of Abernathy’s, a vintage store located about half a block from the barrier, who said she ran for her vehicle and drove toward a hill when she heard the water coming.
“You start shaking,” said Nicke, who salvaged much of her inventory but does not expect to be able to return to her building for weeks. “And everything around me was like a blur.”
The flooding in Davenport, the third-largest city in Iowa, came amid a record-setting year of floods that have devastated cropland, small towns, infrastructure and Native American reservations across a large area of the Midwest. The damage in Davenport was more limited in scope than recent months have brought to parts of Nebraska, Missouri and western Iowa, but it was a reminder of the ongoing risks to the region as rivers rise and rainfall compounds the problems.
In the region around Davenport, the Mississippi has been above major flood stage for 39 days, a record. More rain is in the forecast with few signs of relief ahead.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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Over the weekend, a dike was breached in Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac, Quebec, a suburb west of Montreal, sending 5,000 residents fleeing to higher ground, some frantically scooping up their small children, pets and valuables as water came as high as their waists.
Video footage showed a man in a life jacket in a small boat paddling down a street submerged in water. The breach startled residents, many of whom were sitting down for dinner.
No one has been seriously injured in the flooding, and the urban centers in Ottawa and Montreal are largely free from danger.
Speaking from the area over the weekend, the Quebec premier, François Legault, pledged $1 million to the Red Cross to help victims of the flood and praised the “solidarity” of local residents, whose quick mobilization helped prevent injuries or worse.
Speaking in Ottawa on Sunday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government needed to ensure that infrastructure spending was being invested in the right projects to “protect our communities.”
Much of the flooding in Ontario and Quebec came from an unusually large amount of snow melting into the Ottawa River combined with heavy rainfall.
“What we thought was one-in-100-year floods are now happening every five years, in this case, every two years,” said Catherine McKenna, the environment minister.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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“Help us, we are losing everything!” residents in Pemba city shouted at passing cars as the rushing waters poured into doorways. Women and girls with buckets and pots tried to scoop away the torrent, in vain. Some houses collapsed, the United Nations said.
“It’s an awful sense of deja vu,” said Nicholas Finney, response team leader with the aid group Save the Children. Kenneth arrived just six weeks after Cyclone Idai ripped into central Mozambique and killed more than 600 people with flooding.
This was the first time in recorded history that the southern African nation has been hit by two cyclones in one season, again raising concerns about climate change.
The new storm’s remnants could dump twice as much rain as Idai, the U.N. World Program has said. Up to 4 inches were forecast in the next 24 hours for some parts of the region, according to Mozambique’s meteorological institute.
“I have never seen such rains in my life,” said one Pemba resident, 35-year-old Michael Fernando.
Residents mourned one death in the Nitate neighborhood after a brick wall fell on a woman and the waters swept her against another building, said community leader Estenacio Pilale.
Other residents tried to pile up tires and sand-filled sacks as barricades. Cars began to slip under the waters.
“We will keep moving until we get somewhere safe,” one man said, as people fled carrying belongings in plastic bags. Others showed flashes of impatience. “Will this water ever give us a break?” Abdul Carimo asked. “The moment we try to do anything with our lives, it starts again.”
Authorities earlier said at least five people died after Kenneth roared in Thursday evening with the force of a Category 4 hurricane, stunning residents of a region where such a storm had not been recorded in the modern era.
The government said more than 160,000 people have been affected in the largely rural region, many now exposed and hungry. More than 35,000 homes in parts of Mozambique’s northernmost Cabo Delgado were partially or fully destroyed by the storm. More than 23,000 people were in shelters, the government said.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The storm, Cyclone Kenneth, destroyed scores of homes and killed at least one person in Cabo Delgado, the northern province where it made landfall Thursday evening. More than 700,000 people live in the cyclone’s path, according to the United Nations, and the government has already evacuated more than 30,000.
Citing preliminary information, UNICEF reported Friday afternoon that more than 16,000 people had been affected by the storm, and that nearly 3,000 houses were damaged and 450 “totally destroyed.”
The maximum wind speed of the cyclone weakened rapidly overnight after landing and slackened from 140 mph to 85 mph, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, as it moved north of Pemba, the provincial capital, into more sparsely populated districts.
Still, forecasters warned of an elevated risk of flooding because the cyclone was moving unusually slowly. The cyclone was the first of its magnitude to hit Cabo Delgado in modern history.
Enrique Alvarez, the head of the World Food Program’s office in Pemba, said that the city had suffered less flooding than expected, although some parts were inundated, prompting the authorities to move affected people to shelters.
He praised government officials, saying they appeared to be better prepared than they had been when Cyclone Idai hit the Beira region in central Mozambique last month, killing more than 1,000 people there and in Zimbabwe and Malawi.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
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“Devastation is the way it looks,” said Ruston Mayor Ronny Walker after flying over the city in a helicopter to assess the damage. “The number of houses with trees completely through them was incredible.”
The tornado was part of a thunderstorm that left a trail of damage from eastern Texas into northern Louisiana but Ruston — a city of about 24,000 people — appeared to get the worst of it.
A mother and son were killed when a tree fell on their home in Ruston overnight, officials said. During a news conference, Gov. John Bel Edwards identified the victims as Kendra Butler, 35, and Remington Butler, 14, who was a high school freshman.
Edwards declared a state of emergency as he toured the region and met with officials. Edwards, who’s led the state through multiple natural disasters, said the damage he saw Thursday was remarkable in the way it spared and devastated areas so close together.
“You see one side of the street seems perfectly normal and everything on the other side of the street severely damaged,” he said.
Walker said that immediately after the tornado swept through Ruston, about three-quarters of the area was without power.
The tornado was part of a severe weather system that pounded Texas with rain Wednesday, killing a woman and two children caught in a flash flood, before moving into Mississippi Thursday.
National Weather Service hydrologist C. S. Ross said the tornado hit Ruston at 1:50 a.m. It was part of a line of “continuous damage” that stretched about 150 miles from Texas into Louisiana, he said. Officials would be using satellite data to determine whether it was a single tornado that ripped through the entire area, although Ross said that does not appear likely.
The National Weather Service said on Twitter that the tornado that hit Ruston was an EF3, meaning it had winds of at least 136 mph. They said an EF1 tornado hit near Mooringsport, La., while an EF2 tornado hit near San Augustine, Texas.
At Louisiana Tech University, classes were canceled Thursday and today, the university said. The university said no students were reported injured, but trees and power lines were down in several places on campus. They also warned worried parents trying to reach their children that it might be hard to reach students because of the high volume of calls.
The university’s sports facilities got hit the hardest, officials said.
“Our softball and our soccer facilities are completely demolished. Our baseball facility is severely damaged,” said Malcolm Butler, the university’s associate athletics director. “We’re still assessing how bad it is. All three of those facilities will probably have to be rebuilt to some extent if not totally.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The incident happened about 6 a.m. Wednesday at what’s usually a small creek just outside Dublin, Texas, about 75 miles southwest of Fort Worth.
Crews launched a high-water rescue effort only to find the woman’s husband clinging to a tree, Erath County Sheriff Matt Coates told the Stephenville Empire-Tribune. He was taken to a hospital. The mother’s body was later recovered from the swamped car. Their 7-year-old son was found 400 yards farther downstream, and their 3-year-old girl was found 3 miles downstream.
It was not clear immediately exactly how the accident happened, Coates said. An investigation is ongoing.
Damaging winds later Wednesday destroyed a warehouse near Bryan in Central Texas.
The National Weather Service reports about 3 1/2 inches of rain had fallen overnight at the Stephenville Municipal Airport, 26 miles northeast of the accident site.
Heavy rains moved across much of Texas and brought flash-flood warnings and high-water rescues. More rain was expected in North and Central Texas as a flash-flood watch the National Weather Service had issued remained in effect.
Overnight torrents also submerged dozens of vehicles parked in an underground garage outside the terminal at Dallas Love Field Airport.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Local officials said it’s time to take action and protect the communities most affected.
San Diego County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher and officials from the American Lung Association and local environmental groups held a press conference at Cesar Chavez Park in Barrio Logan to discuss the annual air quality report, which estimates more than 40 percent of Americans live with unhealthy air quality.
“More people die from air-related issues than they do from breast cancer,” Fletcher said. “I think this should serve as a sobering reminder but also a wake-up call for our policy makers that we have to do more.”
According to the report, two types of air pollution dominate in the U.S. — ozone and particle pollution.
Ozone is the main ingredient of smog, making it one of the most widespread causes of air pollution and associated health threats in California. It’s created when pollutants from trucks, cars, factories and farms chemically react in the presence of sunlight. When inhaled, it can cause a “sunburn of the lungs,” the report said, causing inflammation, shortness of breath, coughing, asthma attacks and a shortened life.
California cities topping the list of the most ozone-polluted is Los Angeles, which has held the No. 1 spot for all but one of the group’s 20 annual reports. It was followed by Visalia, Bakersfield, the Fresno-Madera-Hanford area, Sacramento and Roseville.
San Diego, Chula Vista and Carlsbad are lumped together in the report at No. 6.
The other kind of pollution, short-term particle pollution, has gone down in San Diego County, the report said, giving the region its best grade ever — a B — in 2019.
The rankings are based on the number of “unhealthy air days” recorded from 2015 through 2017, the hottest time-frame recorded in global history, and the Air Quality Index, which was created and later adopted with the 2015 ozone national air quality standard.
Among the 25 cities with the worst ozone pollution, San Diego and 15 others had higher averages of unhealthy days than they did in last year’s report. Those cities include some of the largest, such as New York, Chicago, Denver, Phoenix and Houston.
San Diego has seen a dramatic rise in dangerous ozone pollution. The number of unhealthy ozone days grew by 42 percent since 2015, averaging 45 unhealthy days a year, the report said.
“We have to stop the damage and stop the bleeding,” Fletcher said, “and then we have to take decisive action to make it better. And that includes commitment to getting cars off the road. We need to invest in transit. We need to invest in livable, walk-able, bike-able communities.”
State research shows ozone levels are typically highest on hot days and in the afternoon. Children are the most sensitive to ozone exposure, but it can also affect the elderly and people who spend a lot of time outdoors.
The Clean Air Act, a federal law aimed at controlling air pollution, has decreased ozone and particle pollutants, but more than 141 million Americans still live in counties showing unhealthy levels of one or both types of pollution.
Sandy Naranjo, California organizing manager for Mothers Out Front, a nonprofit climate-action group, said she knows first-hand the effects of toxic air pollution. She was diagnosed with severe asthma at age 3, when her family was living in National City, which has some of the most pollution-burdened neighborhoods in the county, according to state data.
“Thirty years since my diagnosis, children in Barrio Logan and other San Diego communities continue to be rushed to the hospital screaming that they can’t breathe,” Naranjo said at the press conference. “The communities and the residents who are most affected by the impacts of air quality and climate change are those residents who are least responsible for causing the pollution in the first place.”
Fletcher said his office is working on several initiatives to reduce ozone pollution, particularly in communities most affected by poor air quality, such as Barrio Logan, though he did not disclose any information about the initiatives. He said he expects to announce the proposals over the next six months.
Nationwide, the report found that the the number of people living with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution has grown 5 percent since the last report, or an additional 7.2 million Americans.
Air quality is getting worse, in part, because of wildfires and weather patterns fueled by climate change, despite efforts to reduce pollution, said American Lung Association president and CEO Harold Wimmer.
“There is no clearer sign that we are facing new challenges than air pollution levels that have broken records tracked for the past 20 years, and the fact that we had more days than ever before when monitored air quality reached hazardous levels for anyone to breathe,” Wimmer said in a statement.
The report takes aim at President Donald Trump’s proposed federal budget, which it says would greatly reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect public health. The report says the administration’s efforts to roll back limits on emissions from oil and gas operations also will force more people to breathe cancer-causing emissions and other toxic gases that worsen ozone pollution and climate change.
“Cleaning up air pollution requires a strong, coordinated effort on the part of our federal, state, tribal and local leaders,” the report said. “Stopping or retreating cannot be an option.”
The report also ranks the cities with the cleanest air in the country. Anchorage, Alaska, ranks No. 1, followed by Bangor, Maine, and Bellingham, Wash.
(Lauryn Schroeder, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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“It started Saturday night, but most of it occurred Sunday morning,” Del Mar Public Works Director Joe Bride said Tuesday. The slide covered about 100 feet of sidewalk, bike lane and road with brush, dirt and debris, reaching the travel lane east of the Camino Del Mar intersection.
“Pending further review by geotechnical engineers, northbound Jimmy Durante Boulevard north of the Camino Del Mar merge remains closed to through traffic,” states an announcement on the city website. The engineers’ report will help determine what needs to be done and how long it will take.
“They are looking at it right now,” Bride said.
He advised people to stay away from the area because it’s unsafe, and he declined to say when the road might reopen.
Northbound vehicles and cyclists on Camino Del Mar, also known as Highway 101, are being detoured around the area onto Via de la Valle and southbound Jimmy Durante Boulevard, which remains open.
Del Mar, like much of coastal North County, is built atop coastal bluffs subject to erosion. The steepest, most fragile bluffs are at the edge of the beach south of Powerhouse Community Park.
The past winter was wetter than normal, leaving soils saturated throughout the region.
Also, a new home being built on a street above the area of the slide may have contributed to the instability, observers said.
(Phil Diehl, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The bodies of four victims were pulled from Chuzon Supermarket, and three other villagers died due to collapsed house walls, said Mayor Condralito dela Cruz of Porac town in Pampanga province, north of Manila.
An Associated Press photographer saw seven people, including at least one dead, being pulled out by rescuers from the pile of concrete, twisted metal and wood overnight. Red Cross volunteers, army troops, police and villagers used four cranes, crow bars and sniffer dogs to look for survivors, some of whom were still yelling for help from beneath the rubble Monday night.
Authorities inserted a large orange tube into the rubble to blow in oxygen in the hope of helping people still pinned there to breathe. This morning, rescuers pulled out a man alive, sparking cheers and applause.
“We’re all very happy, many clapped their hands in relief because we’re still finding survivors after several hours,” Porac Councilor Maynard Lapid told The Associated Press by telephone from the scene, adding another victim was expected to be pulled out alive soon.
Pampanga Gov. Lilia Pineda said at least 10 people died in her province, including those who perished in hard-hit Porac town. The 6.1-magnitude quake damaged many houses, concrete roads, bridges, Roman Catholic churches and an international airport terminal at Clark Freeport, a former American air base, in Pampanga. Another child died in nearby Zambales province, officials said.
At least 24 people remained missing in the rice-growing agricultural region, mostly in the rubble of the collapsed supermarket in Porac, while 81 others were injured, according to the government’s disaster-response agency.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A tree fell onto a house in Woodville, Fla., south of Tallahassee, killing the girl and injuring a 12-year-old boy, according to the Leon County Sheriff’s Office. The office said in a statement that the girl died at a hospital while the boy suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Their names weren’t immediately released.
The same storm system was blamed for the deaths a day earlier of three people in Mississippi and a woman in Alabama.
The threat on Friday shifted farther east, where tornado warnings covered parts of northeast Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia.
The national Storm Prediction Center said 9.7 million people in the Carolinas and Virginia were at a moderate risk of severe weather. The region includes the Charlotte, N.C., metro area.
Torrential downpours, large hail and a few tornadoes were among the hazards, the National Weather Service in Raleigh, N.C., warned.
Radar readings appeared to show a tornado formed in western Virginia’s Franklin County south of Roanoke, though damage on the ground still must be assessed, said National Weather Service Meteorologist Phil Hysell. In South Carolina, authorities urged motorists to avoid part of Interstate 26 — the main artery from Upstate through Columbia and all the way to Charleston — because downed trees had left the roadway scattered with debris.
In Georgia, the storm system knocked down trees, caused flooding and cut off power to tens of thousands of people.
A tree came down on an apartment complex in an Atlanta suburb, but only one person reported a minor injury and was treated at the scene, Gwinnett County fire spokesman Capt. Tommy Rutledge told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In Forsyth County northeast of Atlanta, three firefighters suffered minor injuries when their firetruck overturned during heavy rain and wind, Fire Department Division Chief Jason Shivers told the newspaper.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people cleaned up part of a central Mississippi town hit hard by a tornado on Thursday.
Volunteers and family members were swarming the north side of Morton, where the National Weather Service said a twister with winds as high as 132 mph hit a neighborhood. More than 20 homes were heavily damaged or destroyed. The town of 3,500 is about 30 miles east of Jackson.
Damage from the storm system was reported in at least 24 of Mississippi’s 82 counties.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Officials said they believe the contamination happened after the November firestorm created a “toxic cocktail” of gases in burning homes that got sucked into the water pipes as residents and firefighters drew water heavily, causing a vacuum in the system that sucked in the toxic fumes, the Sacramento Bee reported.
Officials say that may explain why benzene, which has been linked to anemia and leukemia, has been found in tests at various spots rather than from one source in Paradise, where 90 percent of the building were decimated by the blaze.
Paradise Irrigation District officials say they have taken about 500 water samples around town, and they have found benzene 30 percent of the time.
“It is jaw-dropping,” said Dan Newton of the state Water Resources Control Board. “This is such a huge scale. None of us were prepared for this.”
Those who have assessed the problem say the water district may be able to clean pipes to some homes later this year, but it will take two years and up to $300 million before all hillside residents can safely drink, cook or bathe in the water from their taps.
About 1,500 of the town’s 27,000 residents are living in the few surviving houses. Water officials have warned them not to drink, cook, bathe in or brush their teeth with tap water and to only take quick showers with warm water.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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But research has shown a substantial percentage of people can’t place themselves on a map, a potential problem if a tornado or violent storm is bearing down on their location.
James Spann, chief meteorologist for the ABC affiliate in Birmingham, Ala., addressed this problem head-on in a “fireside chat” on social media Sunday, a day after severe storms ripped across his home state. He tactfully urged his viewers to acquire this basic skill.
He began by laying out the problem — referencing limitations of his own so as not to condescend.
“Listen, we don’t expect people to be geographers or radar meteorologists . . . there are a lot of things I’m not good at,” he said. “But during severe weather, what do we use? Maps. We have learned a large percentage of people in our state and in many states cannot find themselves on a map.”
Then he explained just how pervasive the problem is.
“If I were to give you a blank map with no labels, no highways, just county lines and state lines, could you draw a dot within 50 miles of your house?” he asked. “We’ve seen some studies which show about 85 percent of the population cannot.”
He next conceded that the lack of map skills is understandable given today’s technology before concluding with a call to action.
“I understand with phones, it’s cool, you tell the phone, ‘I want to go to wherever,’ and it just gives you turn by turn directions . . . but you need some basic map skills to help us communicate some critical severe weather information,” he said. “It would really help if you could identify the county that you live in and the counties adjacent to you . ..”
While some people may well need to improve their map skills, a 2017 Al.com article explained part of the problem might be in the maps themselves. Some weather maps are not labeled well and have few or no points of reference.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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Storms that hit Ohio on Sunday and moved into New Jersey overnight into Monday brought heavy rains, lightning, strong winds and, in Ohio, at least one tornado. The storms followed worse conditions that had swept across the South, unleashing more than a dozen confirmed tornadoes and flooding, killing at least eight people, injuring dozens and flattening much of a Texas town.
In Virginia, about an hour south of Washington, authorities said a tree fell on a house and killed a woman early Monday morning. The Stafford County Sheriff’s Office said the unidentified woman, 78, had been asleep when the tree fell at 1:43 a.m. An 82-year-old man who was in the home was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life threatening.
In Shelby, Ohio, the National Weather Service said an EF2 tornado with winds of up to 125 mph touched down Sunday. No deaths were reported, but Richland County emergency officials said several homes and businesses were damaged and that at least six people were injured in the city roughly 90 miles southwest of Cleveland.
The weather service says an EF0 tornado with maximum winds of about 70 mph also swept through part of Clark County in western Ohio on Sunday, about 40 miles west of Columbus, and damaged some mobile homes. There were no immediate reports of injuries there.
Storms on Monday spawned a tornado watch and flooded roadways in some areas of New Jersey, causing a roof to collapse at an apartment complex in Camden, though no injuries were reported. The weather disrupted rail service in the mid-Atlantic region, caused delays at airports and left tens of thousands of utility customers without power.
More than 20,000 customers lost power in New Jersey when the storms hit, though crews were able to quickly restore service to most.
The weather service confirmed Monday that a tornado significantly damaged a lumber company Sunday evening in Starbrick, in northern Pennsylvania.
Vermont officials say flooding from spring rains closed a number of roads Monday. An emergency operations center has been activated to help communities respond to the flooding.
The weather service said Monday that a survey team found evidence of an EF3 twister with winds of at least 136 mph near Weches, Texas, and that two other smaller tornadoes touched down in the same region on Saturday. Another EF3 twister flattened part of Franklin, Texas.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Frigid north winds blow down from the Arctic Ocean, freeze saltwater and push sea ice south. The ice normally prevents waves from forming and locks onto beaches, walling off villages. But not this year.
In February, southwest winds brought warm air and turned thin sea ice into “snow cone ice” that melted or blew off. When a storm pounded Norton Sound, water on Feb. 12 surged up the Yukon River and into Kotlik, flooding low-lying homes. Lifelong resident Philomena Keyes, 37, awoke to knee-deep water outside her house.
“This is the first I experienced in my life, a flood that happened in the winter, in February,” Keyes said in a phone interview.
Winter storm surge flooding is the latest indication that something’s off-kilter around the Bering Strait, the gateway from the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic Ocean. Rapid, profound changes tied to high atmospheric temperatures, a direct result of climate change, may be reordering the region’s physical makeup. Ocean researchers are asking themselves if they’re witnessing the transformation of an ecosystem.
The Bering Sea last winter saw record-low sea ice. Climate models predicted less ice, but not this soon, said Seth Danielson, a physical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“The projections were saying we would’ve hit situations similar to what we saw last year, but not for another 40 or 50 years,” Danielson said.
Walruses and seals use sea ice to rest and give birth. Villagers use sea ice to hunt them. Sea ice is the primary habitat of polar bears. Algae that clings to the bottom of sea ice blooms in spring, dies and sinks to the ocean floor, sending an infusion of food to clams, snails and sea worms — the prey of gray whales, walruses and bearded seals.
Sea ice also affects commercially valuable fish. Sea ice historically has created a Bering Sea “cold pool,” an east-west barrier of extremely cold, salty water at the bottom of the wide, shallow continental shelf. The wall of cold water historically has concentrated Pacific cod and walleye pollock in the southeastern Bering Sea.
“It tends to extend from the Russian side to the northwest,” said Lyle Britt, a fisheries biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It kind of comes down almost like a little hockey stick shape through the center of the southeast Bering Sea.”
However, when Britt and other NOAA researchers last year conducted annual fish and ocean condition surveys, they got a big surprise: For the first time in 37 years, they found no cold pool.
It’s too soon to conclude that atmosphere and ocean changes are due simply to climate change, said NOAA physical oceanographer Phyllis Stabeno, who has studied the Bering Sea for more than 30 years. The southern Bering Sea since 2000 has undergone multiyear stanzas of low and extensive ice, she said.
But formation of the cold pool is again in doubt. It could return in the future, but temperatures are trending upward with the rate of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere.
Dean Stockwell, a research associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a specialty in phytoplankton, said the ocean changes have the potential to affect plant life at the bottom of the food web but it’s too soon to know.
(Dan Joling, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The Angelina County Sheriff’s Office said an 8-year-old and a 3-year-old died when strong winds toppled a tree onto the back of their family’s car in Lufkin while it was in motion. Capt. Alton Lenderman said the parents, who were in the front seats, were not injured. He said the parents were able to climb out of the vehicle.
Lufkin is about 115 miles northeast of Houston. Additional information was not immediately available.
Winds of up to 60 mph were reported Saturday in Cherokee County, damaging two homes in Alto but not injuring anyone in them. Five helicopters were also used to transport 25 people who were injured at a community gathering in Alto, about 140 miles north of Houston.
The National Weather Service had earlier issued a tornado warning for areas of Texas.
In Central Texas, Robertson County Sheriff Gerald Yezak told The Associated Press a suspected tornado hit the small city of Franklin, overturning mobile homes and damaging other residences. Franklin is about 125 miles south of Dallas, which saw more than 2 inches of rain on Saturday.
Two people were hospitalized for injuries not thought to be life-threatening, while others were treated at the scene for minor injuries, Yezak said. Some people had to be extricated from their homes.
National Weather Service meteorologist Monique Sellers said authorities received reports of downed trees, as well as damage to buildings and a transmission tower.
The storms are part of a large system moving through the southern United States.
Several inches of snow were expected to fall this weekend on parts of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.
The National Weather Service says a strengthening low pressure system moving northeast from the Ohio Valley to New England is expected to bring a rain-snow mix today across the peninsula. Lower Michigan’s mid-section, including Midland, Iosco, Bay and Gladwin counties, could get the heaviest snow, bringing 5 inches or more to some areas.
Meteorologist Alex Manion of the weather service’s office near Detroit says the state’s southernmost belt likely will see more rain and little to no snow.
Manion says it’s hard to pinpoint how much and what kind of precipitation will fall with this storm. Thirty miles, he adds, could be the difference between 2 and 5 inches.
The weather service said the system is expected to shift to the Ohio Valley and the Southeast today.
Meteorologist John Moore said a possible twister touched down Saturday in the Vicksburg, Miss., area. No injuries were reported, but officials said several businesses and vehicles were damaged.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The spring blizzard — the second “bomb cyclone” storm system to hit the region in a month — left behind hundreds of canceled flights at Denver International Airport, along with wintertime temperatures and snarled traffic before blanketing parts of the Upper Midwest with up to 2 feet of snow.
Hundreds of schools canceled classes in Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota, where the governor closed state offices in much of the state for a second day Thursday because of dangerous road conditions.
The Minnesota State Patrol said it had responded to more than 500 crashes statewide since Wednesday, while the National Guard stood ready to rescue any stranded motorists.
“It’s a mess out here. And that is an understatement,” Minnesota State Patrol Lt. Gordon Shank said.
In Nebraska, the State Patrol sent additional troopers into the state’s panhandle, and several highways were closed. Whiteout conditions were reported in western Nebraska and northwest Kansas.
Winter storm warnings were posted Thursday for northern Wisconsin and Michigan as heavy snow, strong winds, sleet and freezing rain moved into the region. The National Weather Service reported that daily snowfall records had already fallen in La Crosse, Wausau and Green Bay.
Records also were expected to fall in the Upper Midwest, Weather service meteorologist Steven Fleegel said. As much as 25 inches of snow had been reported in northeastern South Dakota, with snowfall forecast to continue into today in that state, Minnesota and southeastern North Dakota. Several highways and stretches of interstates were closed in the three states.
A “bomb cyclone” is a weather phenomenon that entails a rapid drop in air pressure and a storm strengthening explosively. Weather service meteorologist Mike Connelly said this week’s storm system drew up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico as it moved out of the Rocky Mountains. He described the potential snowfall as “historic.”
“This time of year (in) the central, southern Plains, you get severe weather — thunderstorms and tornadoes. Unfortunately in the Dakotas, we get feet of snow,” he said.
Nearly 77,000 homes and business were without power across Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Michigan Thursday, according to PowerOutage.us. The main culprit was snow and ice accumulating on power lines, along with strong winds, said Matt Lindstrom, spokesman for Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy.
In southwest Minnesota, the National Weather Service said there could be half an inch of ice accumulations and winds up to 50 mph. At least three highways in the region had to be closed Thursday due to fallen power poles or lines on the roadway.
The system also created hazardous wildfire conditions in parts of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.
The threat of severe weather will shift this weekend to southern states including Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, including the cities of Houston, Dallas and New Orleans, according to the weather service’s Storm Prediction Center. Threats will include damaging winds, large hail and tornadoes.
An unusual but not rare weather phenomenon known as “thunder snow” — snow accompanied by thunder and lightning — was reported Wednesday and Thursday in central South Dakota.
In addition to the immediate impacts, the storm threatened to swell rivers in the Midwest that flooded after March’s drenching, which caused billions of dollars in flood damage in Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa and South Dakota. Forecasters aren’t expecting similar flooding this time around thanks to the absence of a wet snowpack on frozen ground.
(Blake Nicholson, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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And in an era of climate change, breakup has been coming too soon, especially this year. The ice has become unpredictable, creating new, sometimes deadly hazards and a host of practical problems that disrupt the rhythms of everyday life.
The ice roads that carry freight in winter and spring have been going soft prematurely. Hunters cannot ride safely to their spring camps. Sled-dog races have been canceled. People traveling on frozen rivers by ATV or snowmobile are falling through; some have died. Rescuers trying to reach them have been stymied by thin ice.
Alaskans are not just accustomed to hard-frozen winters, they depend on them — for essential transportation, subsistence hunting, industry and recreation. Frozen rivers connect rural villages the way highways connect the rest of the country.
But Alaska is the fastest-warming state in America, heating up along with the rest of the Arctic at twice the global average rate, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Springtime temperatures are averaging 2 to 5 degrees higher now than 50 years ago, and record highs were set across the state in March.
“I don’t know anyone in Alaska who questions whether things have changed,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Everyone sees it. Everyone feels it.”
Mark Leary is part of a team that builds an ice road each winter along 200 miles of the Kuskokwim River, connecting 13,000 people in small communities in a region of Southwest Alaska that lacks ordinary roads.
When the ice road is open, trucks can haul supplies to the villages, and people can drive to Bethel, the biggest town in the area, for shopping and medical appointments. School basketball teams can travel to away games without having to fly in small planes.
“The river is our highway,” Leary said. “It’s everything to us.”
Later freezes and earlier thaws over the last decade have kept the ice on the river from getting as thick as it once did, so his team has switched to using a lightweight plow that can safely clear thinner ice.
“The river is always teaching us,” he said. “The more respectful and observant you are, the more you learn.”
Leary, who is also a volunteer team leader with Bethel Search and Rescue, said poor ice quality was a persistent public safety concern. People drive snowmobiles or ATVs over routes they have used for many years without thinking about the changing ice conditions, he said, and when people are drinking, they take more risks.
Five people have died falling through ice this spring in Leary’s region alone, including two on March 31.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Heavy snow began disrupting ground and air travel Wednesday afternoon. Roads became impassable and visibility was down to a few feet in northeastern South Dakota due to snowfall of up to 11 inches. About half of the daily flights at Denver International Airport were canceled.
Up to 2 1/2 feet of snow was expected to fall in parts of eastern South Dakota and southwestern Minnesota, the National Weather Service said. Winds in excess of 50 mph also were expected, creating life-threatening conditions.
“We’re calling it historic because of the widespread heavy snow. We will set some records,” said Mike Connelly, a weather service meteorologist in Aberdeen, S.D.
Transportation officials closed Interstate 29 from east-central South Dakota to the North Dakota border and said other stretches of major interstates were likely to close as conditions deteriorated. Numerous traffic crashes were reported in northeastern South Dakota.
The weather service posted an ice storm warning into this morning for a portion of southern Minnesota, saying up to three-fourths of an inch of ice could accumulate on power lines, leading to outages.
To the west, the looming spring blizzard in the Rockies was impacting flights, school classes and government functions.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Despite the calendar drifting deeper into April, the biggest story from this storm sequel might be the predicted heavy and wind-blasted snow from South Dakota to southern Minnesota and Wisconsin. But that’s just part of the story.
To the south of the snow in the Great Plains, the potent winds may also whip up fires.
Severe thunderstorms are also likely near the storm center in Kansas and Nebraska, as is additional flooding into the Upper Midwest affecting the Missouri and Mississippi River basins.
The storm rapidly takes shape tonight as a frigid river of air 30,000 feet off the ground moves through the Rockies. Into Wednesday, it spills out over the open Plains, uncorking the cap on a volatile situation.
Pressure at the storm’s center is expected to drop to 980 millibars or lower. The lower the pressure, the stronger the storm. Compared with low pressure of 968 millibars associated with the bomb cyclone a few weeks ago in Colorado, this latest storm may be slightly less intense. But it’s still about as low as pressure gets in the region this time of year.
A large zone from Wyoming to southern Minnesota is already under a winter storm watch. Minneapolis could see a historic April snowfall for a second straight year.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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In Santa Barbara County, officials hesitated to issue blanket evacuation orders before mudslides ripped through Montecito in 2018 because they worried they might trigger a panic.
And in Butte County in November, whole neighborhoods in Paradise were never told to evacuate as the Camp fire swept toward town.
In each case, local emergency preparedness agencies failed to adequately warn communities that death was approaching.
Experts say the failures point to an approach to emergency management — administered by individual counties — that has proved outdated in an era of massive, fast-moving wildfires and other extreme weather events.
“People imagine that all this public warning stuff has been handled. That somebody somewhere is in charge of it and it’s all getting done. … It isn’t,” said Art Botterell, who was an emergency services coordinator with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services before retiring last year.
In the wake of an unprecedented number of wildfire and mudslide deaths over the last two years — as well as demands from lawmakers — Cal OES has for the first time proposed a standard set of emergency alert protocols for counties throughout the state.
The guidelines were released to public agencies across California on March 22 and provide an outline of how they should prepare for and react to unfolding emergencies.
The 85-page document gives a list of best practices for agencies to consider, from general ideas like building an up-to-date list of residents’ contact information to specific points on how to word an evacuation order and how often emergency response staff should be trained.
“Recent disasters in California have highlighted troubling shortfalls, differences and inconsistencies among various alert and warning programs,” Cal OES director Mark Ghilarducci wrote to the state’s public safety agencies in a letter introducing the guidelines.
Repeated wildfires have spurred some counties — such as San Diego, Ventura and Lake — to adopt a forward-thinking approach to emergency planning. Those communities use several methods to communicate with residents, including social media, third-party software programs and the federal government’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System.
Others, meanwhile, have been slow to adopt technological advances. Some counties rely heavily on opt-in alert systems that few members of the public are aware of. Others haven’t prepared messaging for non-English speakers. Still others have not enrolled in the free IPAWS program, which can ping virtually all cellphones in a given area.
Napa County, for example, used only a subscriber-based alert system during the Atlas fire in 2017. Ventura County was slow to send out Spanish-language information during the Thomas fire two months later. During the Camp fire, flames moved faster than Paradise emergency planners anticipated and severed communications before everyone could be told to flee.
Although there’s no language in the guidelines requiring public safety agencies to comply with state protocols, a bill introduced last year by state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and signed by the governor would withhold state grants for emergency management support from agencies that don’t update their procedures and plans accordingly.
Reaction to the guidelines has been mixed.
“It really helps to provide a framework or road map for best practices,” said Andrew Freeborn, the public information officer for the Kern County Fire Department.
In rural Alpine County, however, officials said they hadn’t had a chance to read the recommendations. “I wear a lot of hats here,” said Christine Mills, Alpine County’s support services coordinator.
Holly Porter, director of San Diego County’s Office of Emergency Services, questioned whether the carrot-and-stick approach of McGuire’s law would work. She said, however, that she welcomed the state’s push for a cultural shift in disaster preparedness.
“Fire personnel are there to put out fires, law enforcement is there to initiate evacuations; there has to be somebody that’s linking all these things,” Porter said, “but also on a sunny day thinking about the big picture.”
The guidelines could be viewed as an upgrade to the Standardized Emergency Management System that California established after the Oakland Hills fire in 1991, which set up a framework for responding to and managing emergencies involving multiple jurisdictions and agencies, Botterell said. That system served as the model for the National Incident Management System established after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Both systems emphasize a bottom-up approach, with local agencies communicating with a regional command staff, which in turn communicates with the state and federal governments.
But California’s system was never applied consistently, which led to overlap and gaps in responsibility during unfolding events, Botterell said. The system focused on how to manage an ongoing event, yet barely touched on how to alert the public.
“Warning has not been viewed as a thing in itself. Instead, warning has generally been attached to particular programs and particular hazards … funded by one agency or revenue stream,” Botterell said. “So the idea that there was this overall generic thing called ‘public warning’ really has not had a lot of legs, historically.”
Since the civil defense system was touted during the Cold War era, the public has generally had faith that someone, somewhere, is ready and capable to respond during a crisis, Botterell said. But recent disasters have exposed the truth.
When gale-force winds drove fires from Sonoma County’s foothills into Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood in 2017, the person responsible for warning locals hesitated to use the federal government’s Wireless Emergency Alerts system, which communicates information to every cellphone in a given area. The official was afraid of making the wrong decision and triggering a mass panic.
“There’s a tendency for people in public safety to be afraid of warning. They usually see it as an opportunity to get in trouble,” Botterell said. “There is a significant political risk of being hauled in front of your county supervisors because they got a lot of angry phone calls because you interrupted the football game.”
The new guidelines leave no room for that kind of calculation.
“When dealing with uncertain or conflicting information about a threat, the Alerting Authority should choose to err on the side of protecting the public,” the guidelines state (the emphasis is theirs).
History shows that when people are alerted to an emergency, they don’t usually panic. They look around to see if other sources reinforce the alert — neighbors who are evacuating; a similar warning on TV, the radio or Internet — and then make decisions for themselves, said Lucien Canton, an emergency management consultant previously with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“A lot of these things we think about — social breakdowns — these things don’t happen … to the extent that people think,” he said. “Look at (Hurricane) Sandy — people were taking care of each other.”
What’s required is that agencies provide the public with necessary information. Any plan that accomplishes that must also address non-English speakers, people with hearing or physical disabilities and people beyond cellphone range who do not have landlines.
In San Diego County, Porter, the emergency operations center director, said this would be a challenge for many communities. She added, however, that the new Cal OES guidelines were a step in the right direction.
“I think it’s that important,” she said. “We’re talking about life-and-death situations.”
A series of recent fatal disasters involving wildfires and mudslides have “highlighted troubling shortfalls” in local warning systems, officials say.
(Joseph Serna, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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It has been almost five years since the state experienced its last earthquake of magnitude 6 or stronger — in Napa. Southern California felt its last big quake on Easter Sunday 2010, and that shaker was actually centered across the southern border, causing the most damage in Mexicali.
Experts know this calm period will eventually end, with destructive results. They just don’t know when this well-documented geological pattern will shift.
“Earthquake rates are quite variable: We have a decade or two where we don’t have many earthquakes, and people expect that’s what California is always like,” said Elizabeth Cochran, seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Eventually, “we’re going to dramatically see a change in earthquake rates.”
Scientists have been warning California of seismic dangers, be it the Big One on the San Andreas fault or catastrophes that could come from lesser-known faults, such as Hayward or Newport-Inglewood.
One reason for the urgent alerts: Memories of a truly destructive quake in many urban areas have faded. And with that, some fear, the urgency of pushing seismic safety has also faded.
Experts say California ignores these realities at its own peril.
“Along the main plate boundary faults, we are in a deficit of earthquakes in the last 100 years,” said Tom Rockwell, a San Diego State paleoseismologist. “At some point, that’s going to change. We’re going to have some big earthquakes.”
Consider how much quieter California has been in regard to earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater:
Disaster was ultimately averted during the 2017 downpours, but Oroville Dam needed repairs that totaled $1.1 billion.
The Department of Water Resources has “restored full functionality to the Oroville main spillway and is operating the reservoir to ensure public safety of those downstream,” the agency said in a statement.
No more than a relatively gentle 20,000 cubic feet per second will be released down the spillway during expected rains on Tuesday, the statement said. Triple that amount could be released later in the week as more water flows into Lake Oroville.
The state has been hinting for weeks that the spillway could be reused soon as an exceptionally wet winter starts to give way to the spring snowmelt season in the Sierra, according to the Sacramento Bee. The lake level, deliberately kept low during repairs, has risen to about 50 feet from the top.
The dam was releasing water at around 50,000 cubic feet per second in February 2017 when a giant crater erupted in the main spillway. Dam operators dialed back water releases to minimize the damage, causing lake levels to rise so high that water spilled over the adjacent emergency spillway several days later for the first time since the dam opened in 1968.
DWR and its contractor, Kiewit, spent the last two years making repairs. A panel of independent investigators blamed the crisis on “long-term systemic failure” dating to the original design and construction of the two spillways.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said in March that it was refusing to reimburse California for $306 million of the $1.1 billion repair bill, citing the investigators’ report and blaming the state for years of neglect. DWR officials said they plan to appeal the decision.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The five cholera cases were confirmed in Munhava, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the hard-hit port city, the national director of medical assistance, Ussene Isse, told reporters. The city of some 500,000 people is still struggling to provide clean water and sanitation after Cyclone Idai roared in on March 14.
“You know, cholera is an epidemic situation. When you have one case, you expect to have more cases in the community,” Isse said.
Cholera is a major concern for cyclone survivors now living in crowded camps, schools, churches and any land exposed by the still-draining floodwaters. The disease is spread by contaminated food and water, causes acute diarrhea and can kill within hours if not treated with oral rehydration solutions or intravenous fluids in severe cases.
The World Health Organization has warned of a “second disaster” if waterborne diseases like cholera spread in the devastated region. On Tuesday, it said 900,000 oral cholera vaccines were expected to arrive later this week.
The cyclone has killed more than 460 people in Mozambique and left 1.8 million people in need of urgent help. President Filipe Nyusi last week estimated that 1,000 people had been killed. The toll could be higher as floodwaters drain away and reveal more bodies.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Major flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and several smaller waterways has inundated states in the middle of America, from the Canadian border south to Kentucky. The National Weather Service has warned that with snowmelt in northern states only beginning, the threat of additional flooding persists well into spring.
The high water and swift current carries raw sewage from overburdened treatment plants, animal waste and pesticides from farm fields, and spilled fuel.
“Whatever was on the land is in the water now,” said Steve May, assistant chief of the Missouri Bureau of Environmental Epidemiology.
Contaminated water can carry bacteria such as E. coli that can cause gastrointestinal illness, reproductive problems and neurological disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infants, young children, pregnant women, elderly people, and people with compromised immune systems are particularly vulnerable.
The National Ground Water Association, a trade group for the industry that includes well systems, said there are 1.1 million private wells in 300 flooded counties in 10 states: Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Kentucky.
Stagnant water could linger for days or weeks even as flooding starts to subside in hard-hit areas, raising the risk that some of it will get into wells by flooding over the top, seeping through cracks or as a result of other flaws in the well structure.
Liesa Lehmann, of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said her state has an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 private wells. The National Ground Water Association said the current flood poses a risk to more than 280,000 Wisconsin wells, the most in any state.
“Anyone who has a private well within a flood plain area of a major river, those wells are certainly going to be vulnerable to contamination,” Lehmann said.
Some public water supplies use rivers, streams, lakes or other bodies of water. Others use water from the ground. Either way, public water supplies are government-regulated and have safeguards to protect against contamination.
But the federal government estimates that about 15 million U.S. households — most often in rural areas that don’t have access to public drinking water systems — rely on private wells, which are not typically regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Some 1.8 million people in Mozambique need urgent help after Cyclone Idai. The death toll remained at least 761 in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, and authorities have warned it is “very preliminary.” More bodies will be found as floodwaters drain away.
Emergency responders raced to contain deadly diseases such as cholera, which authorities have said will break out as more than a quarter-million displaced people shelter in camps with little or no clear water and sanitation. Many wells were contaminated by the floods.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Video footage showed people clinging to lampposts in an effort to avoid being washed away by water and mud, with cars and other debris swept along.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Energy demand around the world grew by 2.3 percent over the past year, marking the most rapid increase in a decade, according to the report from the International Energy Agency. To meet that demand, largely fueled by a booming economy, countries turned to an array of sources, including renewables.
But nothing filled the void quite like fossil fuels, which went toward nearly 70 percent of the skyrocketing electricity demand, according to the agency, which analyzes energy trends on behalf of 30 member countries, including the United States.
In particular, a fleet of relatively new coal plants located in Asia, with decades to go on their lifetimes, led the way toward a record for emissions from coal-fired power plants — exceeding 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide “for the first time,” the agency said. In Asia, “average plants are only 12 years old, decades younger than their average economic lifetime of around 40 years,” the agency found.
Monday’s report underscores an unnerving truth about the world’s collective efforts to stop climate change: Even as renewable energy rapidly expands, many countries — including the United States and China — are nevertheless still turning to fossil fuels to satisfy ever-growing energy demand.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
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The ongoing flooding along the Missouri River has damaged thousands of homes and inundated vast swaths of agricultural land with water in Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri. The flooding, which followed heavy rains and snowmelt this month, has also been blamed for three deaths.
Reynolds said she sent a letter asking President Donald Trump to quickly issue a disaster declaration for 57 counties in Iowa where businesses, homes and levees have been severely affected by flooding, including along the Missouri River. More counties may be added to the list.
More than 1,200 homes in Iowa have been destroyed or extensively damaged, while another 23,540 have at least minor damage, she said. Cost estimates indicate the flooding has caused more than $480 million in damage to homes, while businesses have suffered $300 million in damage. Agriculture damage is estimated at $214 million.
Flooding in Nebraska has caused an estimated $1.4 billion in damage. The state received Trump’s federal disaster assistance approval on Thursday.
About 70 miles of levees in Iowa operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are damaged or destroyed, and the cost to repair them is estimated at $350 million. About 175 miles of non-federal agriculture levees also need repair, at an additional cost of $175 million.
“We’re just beginning the season, so this isn’t something we can think about for two years,” Reynolds said. “We need to figure out a way to secure our communities and our farmland and start to repair the agricultural levees and focus on the Corps levees that have been compromised.”
Missouri officials have not yet said how much flooding has likely the cost the state.
The Missouri Department of Transportation said Friday that 120 roads were closed because of flooding, including stretches of Interstate 29 and U.S. 61.
The National Weather Service said the Missouri River was expected to crest Friday at levels just short of those reached during historic 1993 flooding in Atchison, Kan., and St. Joseph, Mo.
About 1,200 residents of the Kansas town of Elwood were urged to leave, and the governor eased restrictions on large vehicles carrying relief supplies. Across the river, parts of an industrial area in St. Joseph were inundated with water and people were evacuated from a low-lying area.
This year’s flooding is the worst ever at three locations in Nebraska.
National Weather Service hydrologist Kevin Low said during a conference call that the Missouri River reached record levels at Plattsmouth, Nebraska City and Brownville. It crested just short of a record at several other places, including St. Joseph, Mo., where the river reached 32.02 feet on Friday, inches short of the record of 32.07 feet set during the historic 1993 flood.
About 3,000 people in a low-lying area in and just outside of St. Joseph were evacuated Friday as a precaution, but Buchanan County Emergency Management Director Bill Brinton said the levee was holding strong.
“We do feel pretty confident we’ll make it through this,” Brinton said.
Crests are still coming farther south and east on the Missouri River, but flooding in Kansas City and other points in Missouri isn’t expected to be nearly as severe.
(David Pitt, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Eight days after Cyclone Idai struck southeast Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, touching off some of the worst flooding in decades, the homeless, hungry and injured slowly made their way from devastated inland areas to the port city of Beira, which was heavily damaged itself but has emerged as the nerve center for rescue efforts.
“Some were wounded. Some were bleeding,” said Julia Castigo, a Beira resident who watched them arrive. “Some had feet white like flour for being in the water for so long.”
Aid workers are seeing many children who have been separated from their parents in the chaos or orphaned.
Elhadj As Sy, secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said the relief efforts so far “are nowhere near the scale and magnitude of the problem,” and the humanitarian needs are likely to grow in the coming weeks and months.
“We should brace ourselves,” he said.
Pedro Matos, emergency coordinator for the World Food Program, said rescuers are sometimes spotting “just a hut completely surrounded by water.”
With water and sanitation systems largely destroyed, waterborne diseases are a growing concern.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Aid agencies and several governments continued to step up their deployments, with helicopters in short supply for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the cyclone.
Spokesman Herve Verhoosel of the World Food Program told reporters in Geneva of the “alarming news” that the Marowanyati dam in Zimbabwe was hit by heavy rains overnight, putting populations in the region at risk.
Zimbabwe’s defense minister said more than 120 bodies had been washed into neighboring Mozambique, where residents there buried them, and more bodies were still being recovered in rivers, raising the official death toll in the country to at least 259.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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More than 200 million Americans are at risk for some kind of flooding, with 13 million of them at risk of major inundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its spring weather outlook. About 41 million people are at risk of moderate flooding.
Major flooding now occurring in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Missouri and other Midwestern states is a preview of an all-too wet and dangerous spring, said Mary Erickson, deputy director of the National Weather Service. “In fact, we expect the flooding to get worse and more widespread,” she said.
This year’s flooding “could be worse than anything we’ve seen in recent years, even worse than the historic floods of 1993 and 2011,” she said. Those floods caused billions of dollars in damage, and officials said this year’s damage in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota has already passed the billion-dollar mark.
Forecasters said the biggest risks include all three Mississippi River basins, the Red River of the North, the Great Lakes, plus the basins of the eastern Missouri River, lower Ohio River, lower Cumberland River and the Tennessee River.
The Missouri River has already set records with historic flood marks measured in 30 places in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota, Kansas City forecaster Kevin Lao said.
The river “remains vulnerable to moderate flooding for the remainder of the spring and early summer,” Lao said. “People should be prepared for major flooding along the Missouri River going into the future.”
Several factors will likely combine to create a pulse of flooding that will eventually head south along the Mississippi: above-average rainfall this winter — including 10 to 15 inches earlier this year in a drenching along the Ohio and Tennessee valleys; the third wettest year in U.S. history; and rapidly melting snow in the Upper Midwest.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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But money needed to fix the levee never came, and, by Wednesday, the town, including much of Main Street, was underwater.
In Hamburg, home to about 1,100 people, the swollen Missouri River invaded houses, swamped the farm equipment dealership and even reached the flagpole in the center of town. It covered into diesel tanks and corrupted the drinking water plant. It turned streets into canals.
“All you can see is roofs,” said Josh Hayes, who works in Hamburg and took a boat through the flooded part of town.
Already, people were talking about what Hamburg might look like once the water receded. Would homes be salvageable? How many businesses and neighbors might leave? Would people donate to help rebuild? And most of all, would federal help come this time to save Hamburg from future floods?
“This will happen again if they don’t move the town,” said Mike Wells, the school superintendent, whose duties, as flooding swept across the Midwest in recent days, have included running an emergency shelter in his building, helping to evacuate a retirement complex and canoeing through floodwaters to save a missing cat. Low-lying parts of town could be relocated onto the hillside, he suggested.
Residents of Hamburg, wedged between the Nishnabotna and Missouri rivers in Iowa’s fertile southwest corner, speak with pride about enduring nature’s whims, about living in a place where people volunteer to fill sandbags and donate meals and make a silly music video about a levee.
“We all know, living between two rivers, that something like this can happen,” said Heather Garcia, who has not been able to return to her flooded house since Monday when she fled with her son and dog and pretty much nothing else. “But it’s our home. And we just keep going. I’m not really sure how to explain it.”
The town had long been protected by an approved levee as high as 18 feet designed to block floodwaters. But when still higher waters were threatening the town in 2011, residents and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers topped off the levee with a cobbled-together emergency addition: eight or nine more feet of protection.
It was just enough to spare the city through the floods that year, and so residents were eager to keep it forever. But the Corps said the improvised addition was not sufficient as it was. It needed to be removed or rebuilt to particular specifications — at a cost. When the money could not be found, the levee was cut back to its original size and residents were left gazing nervously toward the riverbank.
(Mitch Smith, NEW YORK TIMES)
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In Mozambique, the rapidly rising floodwaters created “an inland ocean,” endangering tens of thousands of families, aid workers said as they scrambled to rescue survivors and airdrop food, water and blankets to survivors of Cyclone Idai.
“This is the worst humanitarian crisis in Mozambique’s recent history,” said Jamie LeSueur, head of response efforts for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi said late Tuesday more than 200 people had been confirmed dead in his country. Earlier he said the death toll could reach 1,000.
At least 400,000 people were left homeless.
In Zimbabwe’s eastern mountain areas bordering Mozambique, residents struggled to cope with the disaster.
“There was a house there, it was buried and the owners may have been buried with it. They are missing,” said Zacharia Chinyai of the Zimbabwean border town of Chimanimani, who lost 12 relatives in the disaster.
The cyclone took residents by surprise, Chinyai said.
“We heard news on the radio” about the flooding in neighboring Mozambique, he said. “But we never thought we could also be victims. No one told us it was going to be this devastating.”
Chipo Dhliwayo lost her daughters, 4-year-old Anita and 8-year-old Amanda.
“I wasn’t able to save anything except this baby,” she said of her lone surviving child, a 6-month-old son, who suffered an eye injury and scars to his face.
The family was sleeping when their house collapsed, the 30-year-old said.
“Trees, rocks and mud were raining on us. I grabbed my son, my husband took Anita and we ran to a hut, but that also collapsed. Anita died there,” she said.
Amanda was trapped in the rubble of their house and her body was not found until the next day.
“I knew she was already dead. I cried the whole night,” Dhliwayo said. “I lost so much that I wish I had just died.”
The cyclone created southern Africa’s most destructive flooding in 20 years, said emergency workers. Heavy rains were expected to continue through Thursday.
Mozambique’s Pungue and Buzi rivers overflowed, creating “inland oceans extending for miles and miles in all directions,” said Herve Verhoosel of the World Food Program.
“This is a major humanitarian emergency that is getting bigger by the hour,” Verhoosel said.
He said people were “crammed on rooftops and elevated patches of land.”
(Farai Mutsaka & Andrew Meldrum, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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“It is a real disaster of great proportions,” President Filipe Nyusi said.
Cyclone Idai could prove to be the deadliest storm in generations to hit the impoverished southeast African country of 30 million people.
It struck Beira, an Indian Ocean port city of a half-million people, late Thursday and then moved inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi with strong winds and heavy rain. But it took days for the scope of the disaster to come into focus in Mozambique, which has a poor communication and transportation network and a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy.
Speaking on state Radio Mozambique, Nyusi said that while the official death toll stood at 84, “It appears that we can register more than 1,000 deaths.”
Emergency officials cautioned that while they expect the death toll to rise significantly, they have no way of knowing if it will reach the president’s estimate.
More than 215 people were killed by the storm in the three countries, including more than 80 in Zimbabwe’s eastern Chimanimani region and more than 50 in Malawi, according to official figures. Hundreds more were reported injured and missing, and nearly 1,000 homes were destroyed in eastern Zimbabwe alone.
Doctors Without Borders said rivers have broken their banks leaving many houses fully submerged and around 11,000 households displaced in Nsanje, in southern Malawi.
U.N. agencies and the Red Cross helped rush emergency food and medicine by helicopter to the stricken countries.
Mount Chiluvo in central Mozambique was badly hit by flooding. One resident said he heard a loud noise, like an explosion, and suddenly saw a river of mud rolling toward his home.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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About 200 miles of levees were compromised — either breached or overtopped — in four states, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said. Even in places where the water level peaked in those states — Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas — the current was fast and the water so high that damage continued to pile up. The flooding was blamed for at least three deaths.
“The levees are busted, and we aren’t even into the wet season when the rivers run high,” said Tom Bullock, the emergency management director for Missouri’s Holt County.
He said many homes in a mostly rural area of Holt County were inundated with 6 to 7 feet of water from the swollen Missouri River. He noted that local farmers are only a month away from planting corn and soybeans.
“The water isn’t going to be gone, and the levees aren’t going to be fixed this year,” said Bullock, whose own home was now on an island surrounded by floodwater.
One couple was rescued by helicopter after water from three breached levees swept across 40,000 acres, he said. Another nine breaches were confirmed in Nebraska and Iowa counties south of the Platte River, the Corps said.
In Atchison County, Mo., about 130 people were urged to leave their homes as water levels rose and strained levees, three of which had already been overtopped by water. Missouri State Highway Patrol crews were on standby to rescue anyone who insisted on staying despite the danger.
“The next four to five days are going to be pretty rough,” said Rhonda Wiley, Atchison County’s emergency management and 911 director.
The Missouri River already crested upstream of Omaha, Neb., though hundreds of people remained out of their homes and water continued to pour through busted levees. Flooding was so bad around Fremont, Neb., that just one lane of U.S. 30 was uncovered outside the city of 26,000. State law enforcement limited traffic on that road to pre-approved trucks carrying gas, food, water and other essential supplies.
In southwest Iowa, the Missouri River reached a level in Fremont County that was 2 feet above a record set in 2011. The county’s emergency management director, Mike Crecelius, said Monday that more water was flooding into low-lying parts of Hamburg, where a wall of sand-filled barriers was breached when one failed.
President Donald Trump tweeted Monday that he is staying in close contact with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem about the flooding.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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Heavy rainfall and snowmelt have led to dangerously high water in creeks and rivers across several Midwestern states, with the Missouri River hitting record-high levels in many areas. At least two deaths were blamed on flooding, and two men have been missing for days.
While river depths were starting to level off in parts of Nebraska on Sunday, the water is so high in many places that serious flooding is expected to remain for days. And downstream communities in Kansas and Missouri braced for likely flooding.
In Iowa, the Missouri River reached 30.2 feet Sunday in Fremont County in the state’s far southwestern corner, 2 feet above the record set in 2011. People in the towns of Bartlett and Thurman were being evacuated as levees were breached and overtopped.
County Emergency Management Director Mike Crecelius said it wasn’t just the amount of the water, it was the swiftness of the current that created a danger.
“This wasn’t a gradual rise,” Crecelius said. “It’s flowing fast, and it’s open country — there’s nothing there to slow it down.”
Thurman has about 200 residents. About 50 people live in Bartlett.
Lucinda Parker of Iowa Homeland Security & Emergency Management said nearly 2,000 people have been evacuated at eight Iowa locations since flooding began late last week. Most were staying with friends or family. Seven shelters set up for flood victims held just a couple dozen people Saturday night.
In Nebraska, the Missouri River flooded Offutt Air Force Base, with about one-third of it under water on Sunday. Spokeswoman Tech. Sgt. Rachelle Blake told the Omaha World-Herald that 60 buildings, mostly on the south end of the base, have been damaged, including about 30 completely inundated with as much as 8 feet of water.
Hundreds of people remained out of their homes in Nebraska, where floodwaters reached record levels at 17 locations. The Nebraska Emergency Management Agency highlighted some remarkably high crests. The Missouri River was expected to reach 41 feet in Plattsmouth on Sunday — 4 feet above the record set in 2011.
Downstream in St. Joseph, Mo., home to 76,000 people, volunteers were helping to fill sandbags to help secure a levee protecting an industrial area. Calls were out for even more volunteers in hopes of filling 150,000 sandbags by Tuesday, when the Missouri River is expected to climb to 27 feet — 10 feet above flood stage.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Cyclone Idai has affected more than 1.5 million people in the three southern African countries, according to the U.N. and government officials.
Hardest hit is Mozambique’s central port city of Beira where the airport is closed, electricity is out and many homes have been destroyed. The storm hit Beira late Thursday and moved westward into Zimbabwe and Malawi, affecting thousands more, particularly in eastern areas bordering Mozambique.
Homes, schools, businesses, hospitals and police stations have been destroyed by the cyclone. Thousands were marooned by the heavy flooding and, only caring for their lives, abandoned their possessions to seek safety on higher ground.
U.N. agencies and the Red Cross are helping with rescue efforts that include delivering food supplies and medicines by helicopter in the impoverished southern African countries.
Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi said the damage is “very worrisome” and said that the flooding made it difficult for aircraft to land and carry out rescue operations, according to Mozambique’s state radio.
In Zimbabwe, 31 people have died from the floods so far, according to the government. The deaths are mainly in Zimbabwe’s Chimanimani, a mountainous area along the eastern border with Mozambique that is popular with tourists. No tourist deaths were recorded, said government spokesman Nick Mangwana.
Roads and bridges were swept away, slowing rescue efforts by the military, government agencies and non-governmental organizations, he said.
In Malawi, people “are now facing a second threat of flash floods” following the cyclone, said the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on Twitter.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The high water, prompted by a massive late-winter storm, pushed some waterways to record levels in Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota. The flooding was the worst in nearly a decade in places, though the situation was expected to improve quickly in many places over the weekend, according to Mike Gillispie, National Weather Service hydrologist in Sioux Falls.
But in eastern Nebraska, flooding worsened Friday and remained a big concern in the lower Missouri River region — which is a major source for the Mississippi River — with the weather service issuing warnings of high water along the river and its tributaries from southeastern South Dakota to St. Louis in Missouri.
About 45 miles northwest of Omaha, the town of North Bend — home to nearly 1,200 along the banks of the Platte River — emergency workers used boats to evacuate residents. Also Friday afternoon, officials asked residents of Valley, home to nearly 1,900 people just west of Omaha, to evacuate. Within hours of that request, anyone left in the city found all access in and out cut off by floodwaters from the Elkhorn River.
Officials in eastern Nebraska said more than 2,600 people living along the Missouri, Platte and Elkhorn rivers there had been urged to evacuate, as waters breached levees in several rural spots.
“Things are moving and changing at a rapid pace,” Douglas County Commissioner Mary Ann Borgeson said Friday at a news conference. “We need you to follow instructions and evacuate when we say you need to evacuate.”
President Donald Trump on Friday tweeted that he had spoken to Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts about the flooding. The president also praised first responders and emergency response teams for doing “a great job dealing” with flooding, high winds and road closures.
Rising waters on the Missouri River also led Iowa officials on Friday to shut down much of Interstate 29 from the Missouri state line north about 85 miles to Missouri Valley, Iowa. The closure was reminiscent of historic flooding along the river in 2011 that saw segments of the interstate in western Iowa washed away. Officials on Friday said the river is expected to crest well below what was seen in 2011.
Wisconsin’s governor declared a state of emergency Friday as flooding worsened, and Iowa’s governor expanded an emergency proclamation issued a day earlier.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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“This is a very epic cyclone,” said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center. “We’re looking at something that will go down in the history books.”
In Colorado, a state patrol officer was hit and killed by a car as he was helping another driver who slid off Interstate 76 near Denver.
Corporal Daniel Groves, 52, was outside his patrol car when he was struck. He died at a hospital.
Hundreds of drivers were stranded on Colorado highways, including 500 in the Colorado Springs area alone. Gov. Jared Polis activated the National Guard to help find and rescue snowbound drivers.
Scores of motorists took refuge at truck stops in eastern Wyoming while blowing snow forced portions of major highways to close in Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota.
Hundreds of flights were canceled at Denver International Airport, and nearly 40 were grounded in Colorado Springs.
Many schools and government offices closed for the day. Xcel Energy said high winds caused about 184,000 homes and businesses to lose electricity, mostly in the Denver area.
A tornado in New Mexico ripped roofs from buildings in Dexter, about 200 miles southwest of Albuquerque. Authorities said five people were hurt, but none of the injuries were life-threatening. A dairy euthanized about 150 cows injured by the tornado.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The resulting arc ignited dry brush on Dec. 4, 2017, starting the blaze in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that resulted in two deaths and blackened more than 440 square miles, according to the investigation headed by the Ventura County Fire Department.
The arc “deposited hot, burning or molten material onto the ground, in a receptive fuel bed, causing the fire,” according to a statement accompanying the investigative report. Southern California Edison didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
The fire destroyed more than 1,000 structures before it was contained 40 days after it began. A firefighter and a civilian were killed.
A month after the blaze started, a downpour on the burn scar unleashed a massive debris flow that killed 21 people and destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes in the seaside community of Montecito. Two people have not been found.
NB: The fire mentioned here was the Thomas fire, at the time the largest fire in California history, surpassing the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego county. It was surpassed by the Mendocino Complex fires in northern California only 7 months later (the largest of those, the Ranch Fire by itself was the largest and burned 1.63 more area than the Thomas fire).
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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There were no reports of any deaths or injuries from the widespread storms, which came nearly a week after a large tornado killed 23 people in Alabama amid an outbreak of Southern twisters.
An apparent tornado touched down Saturday afternoon near Carlisle, about 30 miles east of Little Rock, and the second storm was near the unincorporated community of Slovak, southeast of Carlisle, said National Weather Service meteorologist Joe Goudsward.
Prairie County Sheriff Rick Hickman in Arkansas said several buildings were destroyed, power lines were brought down and at least one home was damaged.
In northeast Mississippi, strong winds tore away roofs and pulled down bricks from some buildings in the small community of Walnut, population about 3,000. Emergency Management Director Tom Lindsey, for the region’s Tippah County, said the area that was hit was very rural.
Weather service meteorologist Marlene Mickelson in Memphis, Tenn., said there were no reports of injuries from the storm in Walnut. But authorities said it was still too early to tell if the damage there was caused by a tornado or by straight-line winds.
The weather service’s Storm Prediction Center also warned of the possibility of damaging winds and large hail.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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According to the National Interagency Coordination Center’s year-end statistical roundup, more than 1.8 million acres of California were burned by wildfires in 2018, compared with last year’s total of 1.3 million acres, officials said.
“That’s the highest in the recorded history of California,” said Scott McLean, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
More than 100 people were killed and 17,000 homes and 700 businesses were destroyed in the state. Firefighters were called to more than 8,000 fires last year.
“It’s a surprise it’s that amount, but in a sense because of what I’ve seen over the last year, no it’s not,” McLean said. “It’s what we’ve been living through.”
The last time California had the most acres burned of any state in the nation was 2003, when a series of fires killed dozens and scorched more than 750,000 acres in a matter of weeks.
Last year’s Carr fire in Shasta and Trinity counties killed eight people and burned 230,000 acres in late July.
The Mendocino Complex fire in Lake and Mendocino counties blackened 459,000 acres and killed one firefighter. It was the largest fire in state history.
Then in early November, the Woolsey fire broke out in Ventura and Los Angeles counties while thousands of Northern California residents in Paradise fled for their lives from the Camp fire, which killed 85 people.
Those two fires burned a combined 250,000 acres and destroyed most of the homes lost in California last year.
About half the acres burned in the state in 2018 were on federal land with the rest on a mix of private, county and state lands, the report said. California accounted for 21 percent of all acres burned in the United States last year.
The fires were stoked by winds and fed on dead brush and trees left over from years of severe drought. This year’s wet winter is promoting even more fuel to grow, McLean said.
Federal and state fire agencies have said they are redoubling their efforts to reduce the wildfire threat in California with prescribed burns and treatments.
(Joseph Serna, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection released a list of 35 priority fuel-reduction projects it wants to start immediately across the state over roughly 90,000 acres. That’s double the acreage the agency aimed to cover in the current fiscal year, CalFire Deputy Chief Scott McLean said.
The agency is also seeking National Guard assistance to coordinate the work. McLean said it was the first time he could recall turning to the National Guard for help with clearing trees and vegetation.
“It just goes to show you how committed everybody is,” he said.
The deadliest U.S. fire in a century destroyed much of Paradise — a city of 27,000 people in Northern California — in November 2018 and killed 86 people. California also experienced devastating wildfires in 2017, including a blaze that killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,500 structures around the wine country city of Santa Rosa.
Republican President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized California’s Democratic officials for not doing a good enough job managing its forests and has threatened to cut off California’s federal disaster funding.
The 35 projects are based on input from local Calfire units and would reduce wildfire risk to more than 200 communities, according to Calfire. They include removing dead trees, clearing vegetation, and creating fuel breaks, defensible spaces and ingress and egress corridors.
The projects prioritize communities at high risk from wildfires but also with significant numbers of vulnerable groups such as the elderly or poor.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The youngest victim was a 6-year-old boy, Armondo Hernandez, and the oldest was Jimmy Lee Jones, 89. Three other children — ages 8, 9 and 10 — were also killed.
The seven family members, who were related by marriage, were living in separate houses on the same road, said Bill Harris, the Lee County coroner.
“There’s going to be some financial issues there,” he said. “They’ve got seven funerals that they’re going to have to finance somehow.”
Emergency officials said that they were still searching for victims and survivors of the storm. But their list of missing people had been winnowed to seven or eight, they said, down from “dozens” Monday.
“We haven’t given up hope,” said Byron Prather, fire chief in Opelika, Ala. “We’re still searching.”
At the White House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that he would visit Alabama on Friday. “It’s been a tragic situation,” he said, “but a lot of good work is being done.”
The tornado, which left a 70-mile path of destruction Sunday through Alabama and Georgia, was the deadliest to hit the United States in six years.
“When you see the devastation, it’s just hard to fathom that something can be this powerful,” Brian Hastings, director of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, said at a news conference in Beauregard.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Dozens were missing in Lee County nearly a day after the twister struck, according to the sheriff, who said that crews had combed the hardest-hit areas but that other places had yet to be searched.
The winds Sunday afternoon obliterated numerous homes, leaving huge, jumbled piles of wood and household belongings. Some homes were reduced to concrete slabs. Debris was scattered across the countryside, with shredded metal hanging from the pine trees.
“I’m not going to be surprised if we don’t come up with some more deceased. Hopefully we won’t,” Coroner Bill Harris said. He said the dead included almost entire families and at least three children, ages 6, 9 and 10.
A post on the Lee-Scott Academy’s Facebook page said fourth-grader Taylor Thornton was among those killed.
On the day after the disaster, volunteers used chain saws to clear paths for emergency workers. Neighbors and friends helped one another find some of their belongings in the ruins.
The National Weather Service said one and possibly two tornadoes struck the area, with a powerful EF-4 twister with winds estimated at 170 mph blamed for most of the destruction. It carved a path nearly a mile wide and 24 miles long, said meteorologist Chris Darden.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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“We are at 22 right now. Unfortunately, I feel like that number may rise yet again,” Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones said of the death toll.
Drones flying overheard equipped with heat-seeking devices had scanned the area for survivors but the dangerous conditions halted the search late Sunday, Jones said. An intense ground search would resume this morning.
Jones said the twister traveled straight down a key local artery in Beauregard and that the path of damage and destruction appeared at least a half mile wide. He said single-family homes and mobile homes were destroyed, adding some homes were reduced to slabs. He had told reporters earlier that several people were taken to hospitals, some with “very serious injuries.”
Lee County Coroner Bill Harris told The Associated Press that he had to call in help from the state, because there were more bodies than his four-person office can handle.
The National Weather Service confirmed late Sunday a tornado with at least an F3 rating and a track at least half a mile wide caused the deadly destruction in Alabama.
Dozens of emergency responders rushed to join search and rescue efforts in hard-hit Lee County after what forecasters said they think was a large tornado touched down Sunday afternoon, unleashed by a powerful storm system that also slashed its way across parts of Georgia, South Carolina and Florida.
Radar and video evidence showed what looked like a large tornado crossing the area near Beauregard shortly after 2 p.m. Sunday, said meteorologist Meredith Wyatt with the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service.
“It appears it stayed on the ground for at least a mile and maybe longer,” Jones told the AP.
After nightfall Sunday, the rain had stopped and pieces of metal debris and tree branches littered roadways in Beauregard. Two sheriff’s vehicles blocked reporters and others from reaching the worst-hit area. Power appeared to be out in many places.
President Donald Trump tweeted late Sunday, “To the great people of Alabama and surrounding areas: Please be careful and safe. To the families and friends of the victims, and to the injured, God bless you all!”
Rita Smith, spokeswoman for the Lee County Emergency Management Agency, said about 150 first responders had quickly jumped into efforts to search the debris after the storm struck in Beauregard. At least one trained canine could be seen with search crews as numerous ambulances and emergency vehicles, lights flashing, converged on the area.
No deaths had been reported Sunday evening from storm-damaged Alabama counties outside Lee County, said Gregory Robinson, spokesman for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency. But he said crews were still surveying damage in several counties in the southwestern part of the state.
Numerous tornado warnings were posted across parts of Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina on Sunday afternoon as the powerful storm system raced across the region. Weather officials said they confirmed other tornadoes around the region by radar alone and would send teams out early today to assess those and other storms.
In rural Talbotton, Ga., about 80 miles south of Atlanta, a handful of people were injured by either powerful straight-line winds or a tornado that destroyed several mobile homes and damaged other buildings, said Leigh Ann Erenheim, director of the Talbot County Emergency Management Agency.
Televised broadcast news footage showed smashed buildings with rooftops blown away, cars overturned and debris everywhere. Trees all around had been snapped bare of branches.
“The last check I had was between six and eight injuries,” Erenheim said in a phone interview. “From what I understand it was minor injuries, though one fellow did say his leg might be broken.”
She said searches of damaged homes and structures had turned up no serious injuries or deaths there.
Henry Wilson of the Peach County Emergency Management Agency near Macon in central Georgia said a barn had been destroyed and trees and power poles had been snapped, leaving many in the area without power.
Authorities in southwest Georgia are searching door-to-door in darkened neighborhoods after a possible tornado touched down in the rural city of Cairo, about 33 miles north of Tallahassee, Fla., on Sunday evening. There were no immediate reports of serious injuries.
Authorities said a tornado was confirmed by radar in the Florida Panhandle late Sunday afternoon. A portion of Interstate 10 on the Panhandle was blocked in one direction for a time in Walton County in the aftermath, said Don Harrigan, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Tallahassee.
“There’s a squall line moving through the area,” Harrigan told AP. “And when you have a mature line of storms moving into an area where low level winds are very strong, you tend to have tornadoes developing. It’s a favorable environment for tornados.”
The threat of severe weather continued into the late-night hours. A tornado watch was in effect for much of eastern Georgia, including Athens, Augusta and Savannah. The tornado watch also covered a large area of South Carolina, including the cities of Charleston and Columbia.
Meanwhile, states across the Northeast are preparing for a snowstorm that could disrupt commutes this morning.
A winter storm warning is in effect until 7 a.m. today in New York City, the lower Hudson Valley, northeastern New Jersey, and southwest and coastal Connecticut. The storm dropped several inches of snow on the Midwest and is expected to layer 5 to 8 inches on much of the Northeast, with northern New England anticipating up to 10 inches.
The Federal Aviation Administration was reporting delays at Newark International Airport in New Jersey averaging 2 hours as of Sunday evening. Philadelphia International Airport was experiencing delays of just under an hour, the administration reported.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has declared a state of emergency for all 21 counties, where the National Weather Service is predicting 4 to 8 inches of snow. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said schools will be closed today. Many other schools in the Northeast have canceled classes.
(Kim Chandler, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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One National Weather Service station measured 20 inches of rain in 48 hours.
While no flood-related serious injuries or deaths were reported in Sonoma County, a man about 150 miles to the north in Ferndale died trying to reach three children.
The unidentified man was trying to walk from a barn to his home through up to 5 feet of water Wednesday evening when he was carried away by the fast-moving current, said Samantha Karges, a spokeswoman with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
In Sonoma County, Guerneville and Monte Rio remained cut off by floodwaters that swamped the communities. Water was chest-high in some places, several feet in others.
In downtown Guerneville, some residents stood on the roofs of their flooded two-story houses, watching neighbors and others paddling kayaks, canoes and rowboats down watery streets. Oversized National Guard trucks occasionally sloshed by.
Drone video showed a sign reading “Monte Rio awaits your return” hanging over muddy water that hid any trace of the road beneath.
In Sonoma County, Sheriff Mark Essick said Thursday that three women had to be rescued. Two were on a boat without paddles, and one was rescued from a tree after driving her car into floodwaters, he said.
About 2,000 homes, businesses and other structures were flooded.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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In one Mississippi Delta hamlet, the mayor says water has cut off all but one road into the town and forced some residents to flee. Runoff is pooling behind a Mississippi levee and could cause record flooding. And the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened a spillway to relieve pressure on New Orleans.
Nearly the entire state of Tennessee has seen 10-20 inches of rain this month, the National Weather Service said. The Tennessee Department of Transportation is building temporary lanes on Interstate 24 northeast of the city after a landslide closed the highway’s eastbound lanes Saturday. Authorities Wednesday estimated 800-900 homes flooded in and around Knoxville.
The Tennessee River was cresting Wednesday at Perryville, Tenn., at the third-highest level ever, with waters predicted to abate gradually. Many riverside buildings are submerged in a string of small towns, and drinking water is cut off in a few areas.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The small city of Guerneville north of San Francisco “is officially an island,” with the overflowing Russian River forecast to hit its highest level in about 25 years, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
“Nobody is coming or going from the Guerneville area at this time,” said sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Crum. The nearby town of Monte Rio was also isolated by floodwaters and all roads leading to it were swamped.
The still rising Russian River was engorged by days of rain from western U.S. storms that have also dumped heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada, throughout the Pacific Northwest and into Montana, where Gov. Steve Bullock signed an emergency order to help keep up the supply of heating fuel amid frigid temperatures.
Snow from the storms closed roads and schools and toppled trucks and trees from Oregon to Montana and an avalanche in the Sierra prompted Amtrak to suspend rail service between Sacramento and Reno, Nev.
The Russian River topped 42 feet Wednesday afternoon, when television helicopter footage showed homes underwater and cars submerged. About 4,000 residents in two dozen river communities were ordered to evacuate Tuesday evening but officials estimate only about half heeded the orders, Crum said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Wind gusts of hurricane force — 74 mph — or higher were reported around the region, including West Virginia and New York. While atop Mount Washington, the Northeast’s highest peak of 6,288 feet in New Hampshire, a gust of 144 mph was recorded.
Toppled trees and power poles, easy targets for strong winds that uprooted them from ground saturated by rain and snowmelt, plunged homes and businesses into darkness, though in most places power was expected back quickly as winds died down by the end of Monday. Hundreds of schools were delayed or canceled in New York alone.
The wind peeled off roofs in places. In Syracuse, N.Y., scaffolding blown off a building knocked down power lines.
Giant chunks of ice spilled over the banks of the Niagara River across from Buffalo on Sunday, creating a jagged, frosty barrier between the river and a scenic road.
Dramatic footage captured by park police in Ontario showed the massive chunks roiling onto shore. High winds had raised water levels on the eastern end of Lake Erie in a phenomenon known as a seiche and then, according to the New York Power Authority, driven ice over a boom upstream from the river.
Ice mounds 25 to 30 feet high also came ashore farther south, piling up on several lakefront properties in suburban Hamburg.
“We’ve had storms in the past, but nothing like this,” resident Dave Schultz told WGRZ. “We’ve never had the ice pushed up against the walls and right up onto our patios.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A woman was killed when a tornado hit Columbus, Miss., and a man died when he drove into floodwaters in Tennessee, officials said.
Columbus Mayor Robert Smith Sr. said 41-year-old Ashley Glynell Pounds of Tupelo and her husband were renovating a house Saturday evening, and when the husband went to get them something to eat, the building collapsed in the storm and killed her.
Smith said 12 other people were injured, but the injuries did not appear to be major. City spokesman Joe Dillon said the tornado also seriously damaged a school and two community center buildings.
“There was pretty extensive damage,” Dillon said Sunday, a day after the Columbus twister struck. “But the streets today have been filled with workers and volunteers, all working hard to clean up the mess.”
In Knox County, Tenn., officials said a man died after his vehicle became submerged in high water.
Saturday afternoon’s tornado in Columbus was confirmed on radar, said meteorologist Anna Wolverton with the National Weather Service in Jackson. She told The Associated Press that experts were dispatched Sunday to the east Mississippi city of about 23,000 people to gauge the tornado’s intensity. Officials said a second, smaller twister damaged a mobile home.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The system led to the closure of five school districts, including two in Julian, which received 8 inches of snow by noon, as did Palomar Mountain.
The storm hit Mount Laguna harder, dropping at least 13 inches of snow, giving roads an icy texture that bedeviled motorists.
By midday, cities from San Diego to Chula Vista to Ramona and San Marcos were briefly peppered with graupel — or ice-covered snowflakes. They are brittle, making them different from hail, which is solid. However, hail also fell in San Marcos.
Significant rain also fell, though not uniformly, across the county. Descanso in East County received 2.07 inches of rain over 48 hours through 8 p.m. Henshaw Dam had 1.84 inches, and Alpine had 1.46 inches. San Diego International Airport reported only 0.27 of an inch.
The system’s cold air was expected to settle into the county’s inland valleys and foothills overnight, dropping temperatures into the 20s and 30s this morning. The National Weather Service issued a freeze warning that will expire at 9 a.m.
Forecasters had expected the storm to curl ashore from the southwest and drop significant rain in San Diego and other coastal communities. But the stream of moisture largely took a different track, and it remained unseasonably cold from the coast to the desert.
“Everyone is ready for warmer weather,” said Casey Oswant, a weather service forecaster.
And that’s apparently what San Diego County will get. The daytime high will begin to tick back up by Sunday or Monday and should be a little above average by late next week. After this morning, forecasters aren’t expecting significant rain for about a week.
On Thursday, such change didn’t seem possible.
California Highway Patrol officers were making sure vehicles headed to the mountains on state Route 79 were equipped with chains to keep them from sliding off roads.
“We are keeping the chain restrictions the same as we did last night and at the same locations: SR-79 at Mile Post Marker 5.5 and SR-79 at SR-78 (and) Sunrise Highway at Olde Hwy 80,” CHP Officer Travis Garrow said. “Even vehicles with (four-wheel drive) must at minimum carry chains, all others will be required to have them on.”
Sunrise Highway was closed at Mile Marker 29.
Schools were closed in the Julian Union School District, Julian Union High School District, Mountain Empire Unified School District, Spencer Valley School District and Warner Springs School District because of the storm, county education officials said.
(Gary Robbins & Karen Kutcher, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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That’s because several feet of white powder have accumulated across the range since the beginning of the month, adding to what has become one of the most bountiful winters California has had in a decade.
The entire Sierra snowpack sits at 141 percent of its seasonal average, and is already above its April 1 benchmark, which is considered the end of California’s rainy season and when plans for how to allocate the snowmelt to farmers through the summer kicks into high gear.
Heavenly ski resort at Lake Tahoe received 15 inches of snow Saturday and Sunday and more than 9 feet in the past week, the resort said on Twitter.
But it isn’t all glowing news. Not only are several mountain passes across the mountains closed because of poor conditions or visibility or even avalanches, but even parked vehicles are at risk.
The Placer County Sheriff’s Office published a video Sunday morning showing one of their SUVs crunched under a felled, snow-covered tree.
In Southern California, the California Highway Patrol was forced to pace vehicles traveling the Tejon Pass after this weekend’s storm dropped snow levels to 2,500 feet, enough to trigger black ice and snow concerns on the Grapevine.
Since Feb. 1, California has received roughly 18 trillion gallons of water, enough to fill up 45 percent of Lake Tahoe, the National Weather Service said.
The winter has also helped keep much of the state out of drought that plagued California for years.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Several people saw a roughly 30-foot-long section of the bluff collapse shortly after noon, said Jon Edelbrock, Del Mar’s director of community services.
No one was hurt, he said.
The collapse went a few feet deep into the rain-saturated cliff, which had “a lot of opportunistic cracks,” Edelbrock said.
The slide came the day after a storm packed with subtropical moisture soaked the region, a dousing that went down as one of the wettest winter days in decades.
The train service through the area was put on pause until officials could get a look at the cliff and assess its stability. The tracks were reopened shortly after 2 p.m.
Couple inside tent on bluff when it collapsed
CARLSBAD - A couple who’d pitched a tent atop a Carlsbad beach bluff found themselves tumbling down the hill when the ground gave way beneath them on Valentine’s night, a Carlsbad fire official said.
About 11:20 p.m., Carlsbad firefighters were called to the clifftop overlooking the ocean along Carlsbad Boulevard near Palomar Airport Road, Battalion Chief Jeff Chumbley said.
They were met by a man who said he and a woman were in a tent that fell down the roughly 30-foot cliff. He had been able to crawl out and up the hill, while the woman was able to crawl out but was stuck on a ledge.
A rising tide ruled out rescue from the beach at the bottom of the cliff, so firefighters had to go from the top down. They placed the woman in a basket and brought her topside, he said.
Chumbley said the extent of her injuries was unknown. Television outlets reported that she had back injuries.
Firefighters did not assess the stability of the cliff after the nighttime rescue. A state park ranger was called to the scene.
(Teri Figureroa, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The “atmospheric river” streamed ashore from east of Hawaii and dropped more than 10 inches of rain on Palomar Mountain, more than 6 inches in Julian and close to 3.5 inches in Oceanside.
The system produced one of wettest winter days in decades, breaking daily rainfall records in seven communities, including Palomar. The mountain received 10.10 inches, snapping the record of 9.58 inches, set on Feb. 14, 1991. Ramona got 4.05 inches, nearly 2 inches more than the record set in 1995.
The winds were just as daunting, gusting to nearly 80 mph south of Julian and more than 40 mph at San Diego International Airport, where controllers had pilots take off and land west to east instead of the usual east to west.
The storm — which will be followed by more precipitation this weekend — also contributed to a fire engine accident near Bonsall, the rescue of horses in Fallbrook, and to the gritting of teeth as commuters navigated big pools of water on local freeways.
Several schools let students out early because of the storm, while Vallecitos Elementary School in Bonsall canceled classes entirely. The county Office of Education said schools in the Bonsall Unified School District, Fallbrook Union Elementary School District, Mountain Empire Unified School District and Fallbrook Union High School District would be closed on Friday.
Thursday’s closures “led to power outages, flooding, road closures, and dangerous travel conditions,” county Office of Education spokeswoman Music Watson said in a statement.
The storm also had deep impact statewide, snarling air traffic in the Bay area, melting snow at ski resorts near Los Angeles, and forcing the evacuation of a group of residents in Laguna Beach, where it appeared mudslides might occur.
By late Thursday afternoon, the lower San Diego River had risen to more than 12 feet, causing minor flooding that slowed traffic in and around the Fashion Valley Mall. Floodwaters also were rushing down the Santa Margarita River on Camp Pendleton.
The storm also led to a tragedy.
A person who apparently was using a paddleboard to cross a flood channel in Escondido was found dead.
A spokesman for Escondido Fire Department said that emergency personnel found the body, possibly that of a male, in the area of West Valley Parkway and Tulip Street. As of 5:30 p.m., firefighters were still working to safely remove the body from the culvert, the spokesman said.
A command post had been set up at the city’s Fire Station No. 1, on North Quince Street, near the flood control channel.
The individual had not been identified.
Earlier in the day, around 10 a.m., a woman was swept into Chollas Creek near Home Avenue near Euclid in San Diego.
Witness Brenda Walker told reporters, including OnScene TV, that the water had a strong current, and that the woman “was scared.”
“She was hollering for help and trying to grab things,” Walker said. “It was scary.”
The woman was able to get to the riverbank on the other side. A crew from San Diego Fire-Rescue put in a raft and brought her back to the other side of the creek. She was taken to a hospital to be checked out.
The deep, wide plume of moisture from the subtropics was pulled into California by a low pressure system in the North Pacific. Weather forecasters marveled at its impact.
A weather balloon released from Miramar Marine Corps Air Station at 4 a.m. Thursday showed the moisture content of the atmosphere was the highest seen in winter since 1948, said Matt Moreland, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service office in Rancho Bernardo.
He said the balloon measured 1.68 inches “precipitable water” in the column of air it traveled though. By comparison, the atmosphere typically has about 1.2 inches of precipitable water during a humid day in the summer.
The storm was expected to move off to the east by early today. However, forecasters said another round of wet weather will move in during the long Presidents Day weekend. Moreland said that 1 to 3 inches of snow could fall in the San Diego mountains on Sunday night and early Monday, and that the snow level could drop as low as 3,500 feet.
Thursday’s wild rains drenched local freeways and roads, making travel hazardous at times.
A Cal Fire/Deer Springs Fire Protection fire engine went off the side of Old Highway 395 south of Camino Del Rey near Bonsall as it was raining. The vehicle went into a ditch, where it ended up on its side around 6:15 a.m.
The three Cal Fire firefighters on the engine were evaluated at a hospital and later released uninjured, Cal Fire spokesman Issac Sanchez said.
A car flipped over on westbound Interstate 8 shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday, one of several incidents on area roads and freeways during the storm.
A number of incidents slowed or shut area roads and freeways, particularly between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m, including a rollover crash on westbound Interstate 8 near Waring Road. Authorities initially shut down two lanes to address the crash.
By early afternoon, the deluge of rain was creating problems around the county. In Fallbrook, Hoof Haven Equestrian Center was flooded, and its horses were being moved to safety, News 8 reported.
Video posted on Twitter by the TV station showed deep water cutting through the middle of the center, which offers day camps and riding lessons.
Shortly after 11 a.m., Caltrans reported all lanes of westbound state Route 78 were closed at Bandy Canyon Road due to a downed telephone pole.
Around 12:30 p.m., all lanes of State Route 94 were closed between Jamul Indian Village and Honey Springs Road due to flooding.
In the early afternoon, a large boulder unearthed by the rain blocked Highway 78 between Haverford and Indian Oaks roads in Ramona, prompting a closure that was expected to last four to six hours.
Winds brought a light pole down onto a car in Point Loma around 11:30 a.m., and a palm tree fell onto vehicles and a home in Ocean Beach around 7:30 a.m. Police said other downed trees blocked roads in Mission Hills and near Balboa Park.
Rain hit hard at Camp Pendleton, and officials at the North County base closed several roads. A posting on the base website at 2:45 p.m. noted that the Las Pulgas entrance gate had been closed because of flooding, and a stretch of Las Pulgas Road was closed due to a mudslide.
By the middle of the afternoon, in nearby Oceanside, at the city’s border with Carlsbad, police shut down South Coast Highway/Carlsbad Boulevard where the road crosses Buena Vista Lagoon, because the water had risen high enough to reach the road.
Before a meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography created the term
'atmospheric river', warm, soggy storms along the West Coast were often called 'Pineapple Express'. The term expressed that the atmospheric moisture came for the tropics where Hawaii is located and pineapples are grown. The jet stream moving eastward pushes the moisture to feed a storm system moving down the West Coast, causing more (and warmer) rain than usual.
(Gary Robbins, Karen Kutcher & Teri Figureroa, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Seattle’s metro area had already been hit by three snow storms this month and the National Weather Service reports that Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has received 20.2 inches of snow in February, the snowiest month in more than 50 years.
The storm that hit Seattle on Sunday dumped up to 4 inches of snow. More than 6 inches of snow fell on Monday with rain and snow expected today as a lingering jet stream drives cold arctic air into the normally temperate region, and was part of a larger cycle that has also driven snow as far away as Hawaii.
In the state capital of Olympia, lawmakers canceled meetings and the University of Washington in Seattle and Washington State University in Pullman called off classes.
And as far away as Northern California, Humboldt County beaches that have not had snow in more than 15 years received a dusting, and blizzard conditions caused whiteouts on mountain roads.
Hawaii officials said the blanket of snow at Polipoli Spring State Recreation Area is likely the first for any state park. Polipoli is at 6,200 feet and is possibly the lowest elevation snow ever recorded in the state.
Officials on Maui reported snow drifts of about 4 feet on the slopes of Haleakala.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A study by state and federal forest officials released Monday noted that the 18 million dead trees since the fall of 2017 marks a major decline from the last study in 2016, which detected 62 million dead trees, and 2017, which found 27 million dead trees.
Officials credited the shift to more rain, which has lessened drought conditions in California forests and strengthened trees’ ability to fight off beetles.
In the past few years, California has seen the most devastating wildfires in its history as a result of the drought and beetle epidemic that, combined, kill off trees and generate more fuel for fires.
The beetles had been rapidly killing trees in the 4,500- to 6,000-foot elevation band of the central and southern Sierra range. It could take centuries for the trees to repopulate, if they ever do.
Beetle-ravaged trees on either side of the Merced River contributed to the damage done by the Ferguson fire last year, and the dead trees have made for hotter, more intense fires that have resulted in the devastation of the Thomas, Mendocino Complex and Camp fires.
Fire “moves very fast through dead needles, and dead trees produce a lot of dead needles,” said Mike Beasley, a fire behavior analyst for the U.S. Forest Service. “The dead pine needles, no matter where they end up, whether they’re still in the tree or draped in some old, decadent brush, or laying on the ground, they contribute significantly to rapid rates of spread.”
In all, more than 147 million trees have died across 9.7 million acres of federal, state, local and private land in the state since the drought began in 2010, according to the study.
The slower tree mortality rate is encouraging, but it’s no cause to breathe a sigh of relief yet, experts say.
“Eighteen million trees is still a lot of trees,” said Randy Moore, regional forester for the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service.
To make a difference in the forests’ density, 500,000 acres of national forest land would have to be treated annually. To come up with that number, experts calculate how much forest management it would take to make the forest resilient enough to do minimal damage every time forest fires recur, about every 12 years, Moore said.
Since 2016, federal, state, and local agencies have felled 1.5 million dead trees in areas that pose the greatest risk to life and property, according to the U.S. Forest Service, the state’s Forest Management Task Force and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The devastation of recent fires has put the pressure on, encouraging agencies to work together on forest management.
As a result, this past year officials got closer to the 500,000-acre annual goal than ever before, treating about 300,000 acres of national forest land, Moore said.
“The community has come together,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s federal, private or state. It’s been working really well in a way I’ve not seen it in the past.”
Thom Porter, director of the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said it helps that the beetle population has been dying off as well.
“This has been an absolute epidemic in the southern Sierras to the point where there are no trees left,” he said. “They ran out of trees to eat.”
In other areas, tree health is improving enough that they’re able to ward off the beetles, he said.
But Porter said people should make no mistake: The next wildfire season will probably be just as devastating as the last despite the improvement in forest health. There may be fewer dead trees, but they’re adding to the existing dead trees that will be around for decades or until they’re burned up or removed.
The lower tree mortality “does not change that at all,” he said.
“Regardless of rain or shine, we’re going to have large and damaging fires in California,” he said.
So far, forest management has been focused on areas near people — along roads, trails and campgrounds, Moore said. Deep forest land has remained largely untouched.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for $1 billion toward a forest management plan over the next five years. That’s welcome news, and it would ensure the state has enough money to clear out forests, rather than spend on the purely reactive approach of fighting fires, Porter said.
“So, we are wanting to continue to invest in fuel reduction work that will protect the citizens of California, the forest ecosystem and watersheds of California,” he said. “But it’s going to take many many years for us to get to where we need to be relating to forest health.”
(Alejandra Reyes-Velarde, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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The data means that the five warmest years in recorded history have been the past five, and that 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2001. The quickly rising temperatures over the past two decades cap a much longer warming trend documented by researchers and correspond with the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by human activity.
"We're no longer talking about a situation where global warming is somethings in the future," said Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA group that conducted the analysis. "It's here. It's now."
While this planet has seen hotter days in prehistoric times, and colder ones in the modern era, what sets recent warming apart in the sweep of geologic time is the relatively sudden rise in temperatures and its clear correlation with increasing levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane produced by human activity.
The results of this rapid warming can be seen from the heat waves in Australia and extended droughts to coastal flooding in the United States, disappearing Arctic ice and shrinking glaciers. Scientists have linked climate change to more destructive hurricanes like Michael and Florence last year, and have found links to such phenomena as the polar vortex,[sic] which last week delivered bone-chilling blasts to the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.
The Earth's temperature in 2018 was more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average temperature of the late 19th century, when humans started pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists say that if the world is to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, global temperatures must not rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.
It appears highly likely, at least from today's perspective, that the line will be crossed, despite the fact that more than 190 nations have signed the Paris climate agreement, which sets targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The warmest year was 2016, its record-setting temperature amplified by the Pacific Ocean phenomenon known as El Niño. In 2018, the world experienced the opposite phenomenon, a rolling La Niña with a weak El Niño toward the end of the year.
NB: The polar vortex is a natural and normal phenomenon that keeps the Arctic air near the poles in winter. The weakening of the polar vortex allows this Arctic air to move south.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Since Jan. 26, there has been close to 2 feet of rain in Townsville, a coastal city in the state of Queensland, and up to twice that in surrounding areas, eclipsing records set in 1998 during a flood known as the “Night of Noah.”
“In seven days, we’ve received our annual total rainfall,” said Jenny Hill, the mayor of Townsville. “We’ve never seen weather like this.”
Hill said that about 18,000 residents had lost power and that hundreds of others had evacuated, including some who left their suburb on a garbage truck. Elsewhere, two police officers were stuck clinging to trees for half an hour after their car was washed away by floodwaters, while residents reported snakes and crocodiles roaming the streets.
“Cannot stress it enough stay out of the water,” one woman urged on Facebook.
The downpour pushed the nearby Ross River Dam to almost 250 percent of its capacity, forcing the floodgates open as officials instructed people to move to higher ground. Emergency crews, including about 1,500 members of the Australian military, helped rescue people and their pets with inflatable boats and treat others who were injured.
As of Monday, state schools in Townsville and the surrounding areas were closed. Officials also urged residents to save water after the flooding burst pipes and put pressure on local treatment plants.
“This continued heavy rain and flooding has damaged homes, isolated communities and displaced people from their homes,” Shannon Fentiman, the acting communities minister in Queensland, said in a statement.
The floods have been declared a catastrophe by the Insurance Council of Australia.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Parts of California and Montana braced for the threat of mudslides and avalanches this week, while the Midwest warmed up from a dangerous blast of cold last week that is linked to at least 30 deaths in several states.
The Pacific Northwest’s first major winter snowstorm hit western Washington hardest, closing numerous schools in Seattle and nearby cities, canceling ferry service, and causing car crashes but no major injuries.
Some areas north and east of Seattle got 8 to 10 inches of snow. Temperatures were expected to be 15 degrees below normal this week, with lows in the teens, the National Weather Service said.
More than 200 flights at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport were canceled and over 450 delayed.
Communities on the northern Oregon coast got several inches of unusual snow, and it was falling steadily in Portland, Ore. A cold spell in Portland was expected to last for about 10 days, with overnight temperatures dipping well below freezing and more snow later in the week.
The storm system lingering over the Northwest has sent waves of snow into the Northern Rocky Mountains.
Snow and rain throughout California has threatened flash flooding where massive wildfires roared through communities last year and dangerous driving conditions in the latest of a series of storms over the past few days.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The failure of the dam holding back iron ore mining waste on Jan. 25 unleashed an avalanche of mud that buried buildings and contaminated water downstream. At least 121 people have died, and another 226 people remain missing.
But one of the cruelest parts of the tragedy in Brumadinho is that it has happened before: In 2015, a mining dam burst about 80 miles away in Mariana, in what is considered Brazil’s worst environmental disaster.
What’s more, it could happen again, as many Brazilian states and the federal government move to ease regulation in the name of economic development.
In the three years since the Mariana rupture killed 19 people, the regulation of the industry has gotten less, not more, rigorous in Minas Gerais state.
“It felt like it was just a matter of time before something bigger would happen,” said Josiele Rosa Silva Tomas, the president of the Brumadinho residents’ association.
Problems that existed when the dams in Mariana burst, like dramatic short-staffing, have persisted, while a new law has reduced the say of environmental groups in the project licensing process.
And the danger remains widespread: A 2017 report from the National Water Agency classified more than 700 dams nationwide as at high risk of collapse, with high potential for causing damage.
In fact, some fear the risk may only increase. Environmental groups accused the previous Congress and president of rolling back significant protections, and many expect further weakening under President Jair Bolsonaro, who has said environmental regulation hamstrings several industries, including mining.
But the politics that contributed to the collapses in Minas Gerais are much more local. For centuries, the mineral-rich state has revolved around the mining industry — its name, given by Portuguese colonizers, translates to “General Mines.”
More than 300 mines employ thousands in the state, often in poor, rural areas.
Civil society groups often struggle to achieve basic guarantees. For instance, Tomas’ group has long fought to prevent mining projects from contaminating drinking water.
“Minas Gerais has a centuries-long history of being lenient with the mining sector. It’s cultural,” Joao Vitor Xavier, a state deputy, told The Associated Press. “The industry creates a discourse where they dangle jobs and economic growth in front of people, but they put profit over safety.”
The CEO of Vale SA, which owned and operated the Brumadinho mining complex, acknowledges their regulatory measures fell short.
“Apparently to work under the (current) rules has not worked,” Flavio Schvartsman said during a news conference several hours after the dam breach.
Vale officials have said they don’t yet know why the dam collapsed.
Arrest warrants have been issued for five people responsible for safety assessments of the dam, including three Vale employees. Vale was also involved in the Mariana rupture: The dams there were administered by the Brazilian giant and Australia’s BHP Billiton.
The Mariana collapse unleashed nearly 80 million cubic yards of mining waste into rivers and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. While its environmental impact is considered the worst in Brazilian history, Brumadinho has already far surpassed its death toll.
In the wake of the Mariana tragedy, Minas Gerais was already struggling to implement what regulation it had: A 2016 audit found the state had only 20 percent of the staff needed at the agency charged with regulating mines. Environmentalists say mining regulation has gotten even weaker since.
In 2015, the state approved a new process for licensing mining projects. It shifted responsibility from a board that included several environmental organizations to the state environmental secretary, who created a new board with a majority of participants favorable to mining industry interests.
(Anna Jean Kaiser, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A winter storm sweeping across California and Nevada has dumped as much as 8 feet of snow over the past two days. Much more is expected in the next two days as additional cold weather systems will bring widespread snow and showers.
The National Weather Service said 8 feet fell at the June Mountain Ski resort north of Mammoth Lakes and up to 3 feet were reported in the resorts around Lake Tahoe since Friday.
Forecasters said a blizzard from Sunday night through tonight could bring another 5 feet around Lake Tahoe and another 8 feet to the highest elevations, and light snow down to the foothills.
The forecast called for winds gusting as high as 50 mph at the lake level, and up to 100 mph over mountain ridges.
“Do not attempt to travel!” the warning said. “Road crews and first responders may not be able to rescue you. Stay indoors until the snow and wind subside. Even a short walk could be deadly if you become disoriented.”
The avalanche warning was issued for the backcountry areas on the Nevada side of the range as well as in the greater Lake Tahoe area.
“There’s been so much snow at once, it doesn’t have a chance to pack down, leading to very unstable ground,” said Cassie Leahy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Reno.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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In Illinois alone, hospitals reported more than 220 cases of frostbite and hypothermia since Tuesday, when the polar vortex moved in and overnight temperatures plunged to minus 30 or lower — with wind chills of minus 50 or worse in some areas.
Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis normally sees around 30 frostbite patients in an entire winter. It admitted 18 in the past week, spokeswoman Christine Hill said Friday.
“I definitely saw more frostbite than I’ve ever seen in my entire career just in the last three days,” said Dr. Andrea Rowland-Fischer, an emergency department physician at Hennepin Healthcare.
Most of those patients, she said, had underlying problems that made it difficult for them to take care of themselves: the developmentally delayed, the mentally ill, the very young and the very old. They also included people with injuries related to drugs and alcohol — people who passed out or did not realize they were cold or injured.
“It’s heartbreaking when there are people who can’t take care of themselves and get exposed, just because they either escape from the care that they’re being given or because they’re not being supervised.”
Another danger was from carbon monoxide. A family of nine in Wheeling, Ill., about 30 miles northwest of Chicago, was taken to local hospitals after heating their home with a charcoal grill. In Rockford, Ill., four people were treated because they had warmed up cars in a closed garage or because a furnace vent became blocked by ice and snow.
By Friday, the deep freeze had mostly abated, with temperatures climbing as high as the low 20s in Minneapolis and Chicago. In western North Dakota, the temperature in Dickinson climbed above freezing by midmorning — a jump of nearly 60 degrees compared with Tuesday’s low of minus 17 degrees.
The weather was thought to be a factor in at least 27 deaths, including a 90-year-old Michigan woman who died of hypothermia after locking herself out of her home while feeding birds — one of at least nine people who were found outdoors. A motorist also died during a snowstorm Friday after striking a salt truck that had pulled off the side of Interstate 70 in central Indiana.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The polar vortex that brought many cities to a standstill was expected to end with a rapid thaw that experts say could be unprecedented. But the sudden swing from long johns to light jackets and short sleeves could create problems of its own.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a case where we’ve seen (such a big) shift in temperatures,” in the winter, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the Weather Underground firm. “Past record-cold waves have not dissipated this quickly. Here we are going right into spring-like temperatures.”
On Thursday, the system marched east, spreading arctic conditions over an area from Buffalo to Brooklyn. In western New York, a storm that dumped up to 20 inches of snow gave way to subzero temperatures and face-stinging wind chills. In New York City, about 200 firefighters battling a blaze in a commercial building took turns getting warm on buses. The number of deaths that could be blamed on the cold climbed to at least 15.
For the nation’s midsection, relief was as close as the weekend.
Rockford, Ill., was at a record-breaking minus 31 on Thursday morning but should be around 50 on Monday. Other previously frozen areas could see temperatures of 55 or higher.
The dramatic warm-up will offer a respite from the bone-chilling cold that canceled school, closed businesses and halted trains. But potholes will appear on roads and bridges weakened by the freeze-thaw cycle. The same cycle can crack water mains and homeowners’ pipes. Scores of vehicles will be left with flat tires and bent rims.
Joe Buck, who manages Schmit Towing in Minneapolis and spent about 20 hours a day outdoors this week responding to stranded vehicle calls, said he’s already taking calls for Monday to deal with a backlog of hundreds of stalled vehicles.
“Sunday is going to be 39 degrees ABOVE zero,” said Buck, who has had 18 trucks running around the clock in wind chills that dropped to minus 50.
In Detroit, where some water mains are almost 150 years old, city workers were dealing with dozens of breaks, said Palencia Mobley, deputy director of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department.
“We’ll have all hands on deck. Hopefully, we’ll be able to address as many of the issues as possible over the next week,” Mobley said.
The thawing of pipes can sometimes inflict greater damage than the initial freeze. Bursts can occur when ice inside starts to melt and water rushes through the pipe, or when water in the pipe is pushed to a closed faucet by expanding ice.
Elsewhere, a bridge in the western Michigan community of Newaygo, 40 miles north of Grand Rapids was closed as the ice-jammed Muskegon River rose above flood stage. Officials in Buffalo, N.Y., watched for flooding on the Upper Niagara River because of ice.
In other signs that the worst of the deep freeze was over, Xcel Energy on Thursday lifted a request to its Minnesota natural gas customers to temporarily lower their thermostats to ease concerns about the fuel supply.
Earlier in the day, several cities set record lows. Rockford saw a record low temperature of minus 31 on Thursday. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, set a daily record low of minus 30 degrees.
Chicago’s temperature dropped to a low of around minus 21 degrees on Thursday, slightly above the city’s lowest-ever reading of minus 27 degrees in January 1985. Milwaukee’s low was minus 25 degrees, and Minneapolis recorded minus 24 degrees. Wind chills were lower still.
In Michigan, efforts to conserve heat during the extreme cold reduced usage by 10 percent following a fire at a major natural gas facility, officials said. Consumers Energy, the state’s largest supplier of natural gas, asked its 1.7 million customers and others to set their thermostats at 65 degrees or lower until late Thursday.
“In our 130 years, we’ve never experienced this kind of demand or these kinds of temperatures,” CEO Patti Poppe said.
Masters, from Weather Underground, said the polar vortex was “rotating up into Canada” and not expected to return in the next couple of weeks. If it does return in late February, “it won’t be as intense.”
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The nearly unthinkable temperatures caused airline gas lines to freeze and electrical grids to collapse, and they kept much of the northern United States homebound. Power outages roiled swaths of Wisconsin and Iowa, plunging thousands into a brief, unheated darkness. The dry, frigid air froze exposed water instantly, led to spontaneous nosebleeds, and made even brief forays outdoors extremely hazardous.
Officials in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota had linked eight deaths to the weather as of Wednesday night, including several people who probably froze to death. Governors in Wisconsin and Michigan declared states of emergency and ordered all state government offices closed; some state agencies in Illinois were closed Wednesday, as well.
“I am urging people to prepare for this severe weather and to exercise caution when traveling or going outdoors,” Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said.
The capitol building here, where people sought shelter during business hours, remained open as the temperatures outside plunged to minus 24; the estimated wind chill made it feel like minus 48 degrees.
It was colder than Alaska’s North Slope in many places, including Norris Camp, Minn., where temperatures dropped to minus 48 degrees Wednesday morning — with the wind chill pegged at minus 65 — making the town the coldest reporting location in the United States and one of the coldest spots on Earth.
Even Hell, Mich., froze over. The community outside of Ann Arbor was expected to see temperatures drop to minus 26 overnight into today. The nearby University of Michigan took the rare step of canceling classes through today.
From Minnesota to Michigan, the polar vortex brought with it a slew of school closures, mail service interruptions and more than 1,000 airline flight cancellations. Scores of restaurants, grocery stores and coffee shops shuttered for the day or shortened business hours. In Chicago, “Disney on Ice” and the musical “Hamilton” were among many to go dark; in this weather, the show could not go on.
For the region’s most vulnerable — even those hardened to the Upper Midwest’s long winters — this polar vortex has been especially perilous.
Karen Andro, director of Hope’s Home Ministries at the First United Methodist Church in Madison, has spent much of the past few days coordinating with other nonprofits and government agencies to arrange transportation, hot meals and warming centers for the city’s homeless residents. She reflected on past winters, when one person froze to death on the steps of a local church and another had a heart attack walking between shelters, and said that services here have improved.
“The cold exacerbates everything,” Andro said, noting that homeless people with mental illness, disabilities and health problems are at extreme risk.
Early Wednesday morning, there remained a small but dangerous gap in service. An hour before sunrise, dozens of men, bundled up and carrying their belongings in grocery bags and suitcases, ventured into the frigid morning air. It was minus 24 degrees, and winds made it feel like minus 48.
They had spent the night in two shelters that required them to leave by 5:30 a.m., forcing them to traipse through an ice-slicked downtown, past the Wisconsin state capitol building, to the headquarters of the Porchlight Men’s Shelter. There they were served breakfast before relocating again to other city shelters.
Even some Midwestern homes were not cold-proofed refuges for hardened residents.
Brian Wallheimer, a science writer for Purdue University, corralled his three young children at home in Rockford, Ill., after schools closed their doors Wednesday. The freezing air infiltrated his two-story home northwest of Chicago, he said, and frost has accumulated on the window sills and door hinges.
“I’ve never seen that happen,” Wallheimer, 39, said, as his children — 9, 6 and 4 years old — hatched plans to build a blanket fort in the basement.
In addition to grade school and university closures throughout the Midwest, districts and colleges from Pittsburgh to Buffalo also canceled classes because of extreme weather.
Wind chill estimates plummeted to minus 50 in the Dakotas and northern Minnesota on Wednesday. The Arctic air will loosen its grip on the Midwest by this afternoon; temperatures might even approach zero degrees in Chicago and Milwaukee. By the weekend, daytime temperatures will be above freezing across most of the Midwest.
As Chicago neared record lows ahead of the expected thaw, the Chicago area’s Metra commuter rail suspended some train service after extreme temperatures caused wiring problems. Some Chicago Transit Authority buses were being turned into mobile warming shelters for the homeless, the Associated Press reported, while Lyft said it would offer free rides to warming centers in the city, as well as in the Twin Cities, Madison, Milwaukee and Detroit.
In Rochester, Minn., where temperatures dropped to minus 27 degrees Wednesday, all municipal transit services were suspended after buses began experiencing mechanical difficulties. Xcel Energy asked Minnesota customers to lower their thermostats to 63 degrees until this morning, “if possible,” to help “ensure that all of our customers continue to have gas service during this bitterly cold weather.”
In Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Wednesday night urged people living in the lower peninsula of the state to turn their thermostats down to 65 degrees or less until Friday, in light of the high demand for natural gas for heating.
As many as 13,500 customers experienced power outages in Wisconsin and Iowa by midday Wednesday, according to utility company outage maps. Workers scrambled to restore electricity in a race to keep homes and businesses warm in the dangerous cold.
Most outages were resolved in a matter of hours.
Nine hundred We Energies customers were without power for about an hour and a half on Wednesday afternoon in West Allis, Wis., after neighbors on a residential street heard a transformer bang and saw a spark immediately before the lights went out.
They closed their curtains to keep cold air from leaking in around window panes and opened cabinet doors to prevent pipes from freezing.
“I was amazed how fast they got it back,” said Dan Bark, whose house sits diagonally across from the damaged power lines. “We were trying to figure out contingency plans.”
He pondered taking his family and cats to his mother’s home nearby. Bark has a generator, but it was in the garage — and frozen. He conceded that was not ideal, but he also had never seen the temperatures dip quite so low.
“This is the coldest it’s ever been,” Bark said.
(Katie Mettler & Amy B. Wang, WASHINGTON POST)
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The dam that held back iron-ore waste, owned and operated by big mining company Vale SA, collapsed on Friday — burying a company cafeteria, other Vale buildings and inundating part of the small southeastern city of Brumadinho.
Grieving relatives of the dead buried some of the victims in Brumadinho and rescue teams continued a delicate search through swaths of muck for more victims or survivors. One official said the death toll was sure to rise.
Three of the arrested worked for Vale, the company said, adding that it was cooperating with investigating authorities.
A German company that has inspected the dam said two of its employees were arrested.
Minas Gerais state judge Perla Saliba Brito wrote that the disaster could have been avoided.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Temperatures plunged as low as minus 26 in North Dakota with wind chills as low as minus 62 in Minnesota. It was nearly that cold in Wisconsin and Illinois. Governors in Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan declared emergencies as the worst of the cold threatened on Wednesday.
The U.S. Postal Service said it will not deliver mail in parts of the Midwest today because of the cold.
The bitter cold is the result of a split in the polar vortex that allowed temperatures to plunge much farther south in North America than normal.
The National Weather Service forecast for tonight called for temperatures in Chicago as low as minus 28, with wind chills to minus 50. Detroit’s outlook was for overnight lows around minus 15, with wind chills dropping to minus 40.
“These are actually a public health risk and you need to treat it appropriately,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Tuesday. “They are life-threatening conditions and temperatures.”
A wind chill of minus 25 can freeze skin within 15 minutes, according to the National Weather Service.
At least four deaths were linked to the weather system, including a man struck and killed by a snow plow in the Chicago area, a young couple whose SUV struck another on a snowy road in northern Indiana and a Milwaukee man found frozen to death in a garage.
Officials in large Midwestern cities including Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit were desperately trying to get the homeless off the streets.
Minneapolis charitable groups that operate warming places and shelters expanded hours and capacity, and ambulance crews handled all outside calls as being potentially life-threatening, according to Hennepin County Emergency Management Director Eric Waage. MetroTransit said it wouldn’t remove people from buses if they were riding them simply to stay warm, and weren’t being disruptive.
Emanuel said Chicago was turning five buses into makeshift warming centers moving around the city, some with nurses aboard, to encourage the homeless to come in from the cold.
“We’re bringing the warming shelters to them, so they can stay near all of their stuff and still warm up,” said Cristina Villarreal, spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Family and Support Services.
Shelters, churches and city departments in Detroit worked together to help get vulnerable people out of the cold, offering the message to those who refused help that “you’re going to freeze or lose a limb,” said Terra DeFoe, a senior adviser to Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan.
Nineteen-year-old Deontai Jordan and dozens of others found refuge from the cold in the basement of a church in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“You come here, you can take a nap, you can snack, you can use the bathroom, you might even be able to shower,” he said. “And then they’re feeding you well. Not to mention they give out clothes, they give out shoes, they give out socks.”
Hundreds of public schools from North Dakota to Missouri to Michigan canceled classes Tuesday, and some today as well. So did several large universities.
Closing schools for an extended stretch isn’t an easy decision, even though most school districts build potential makeup days into their schedules, said Josh Collins, spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Education.
“Many students, they might have two working parents, so staying home might mean they’re not supervised,” he said. “For some low-income students, the lunch they receive at school might be their most nutritious meal of the day.”
American Indian tribes in the Upper Midwest were doing what they could to help members in need with heating supplies.
Many people on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas live in housing that’s decades old and in disrepair, or in emergency government housing left over from southern disasters such as hurricanes.
“They aren’t made for this (northern) country. The cold just goes right through them,” said Elliott Ward, the tribe’s emergency response manager.
The extreme cold was “a scary situation” for the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, said Chris Fairbanks, manager of the northern Minnesota tribe’s energy assistance program.
“We have many, many calls coming in. We’re just swamped trying to get everybody what they need,” she said.
The cold was even shutting down typical outdoor activities. A ski hill in the Minneapolis area said it would close through today. So did an ice castle attraction.
The cold weather was even affecting beer deliveries, with a pair of western Wisconsin distributors saying they would delay or suspend shipments for fear that beer would freeze in their trucks.
The unusually frigid weather is attributed to a sudden warming far above the North Pole. A blast of warm air from misplaced Moroccan heat last month made the normally super chilly air temperatures above the North Pole rapidly increase. That split the polar vortex into pieces, which then started to wander, said Judah Cohen, a winter storm expert for Atmospheric Environmental Research.
One of those polar vortex pieces is responsible for the subzero temperatures across the Midwest this week.
(Blake Nicholson, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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By late in the day, the death toll rose to 65, with 279 people still missing, said Lt. Col. Flavio Godinho of the civil defense department in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.
In a sign of the risks posed by the deep mud, Col. Alexandre Ferreira, a doctor with the military police of Minas Gerais, advised rescue crews, volunteers and journalists to take antibiotics to prevent cholera, the bacterial infection leptospirosis and other diseases.
Officials said the death toll was expected to grow “exponentially,” since no had been rescued alive since Saturday.
Search efforts were extremely slow because of the treacherous sea of reddish-brown mud that surged out when the mine tailings dam breached Friday afternoon. The mud was up 24 feet deep in some places, forcing searchers to carefully walk around the edges of the muck or slowly crawl onto it so they would not sink and drown.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The latest tally adds to growing concerns about the future availability of home insurance in wildfire-prone areas.
More than $8 billion of the November 2018 losses stem from the fire that leveled the town of Paradise, killing 86 people and destroying roughly 15,000 homes. The other $3 billion in losses are from two Southern California wildfires that ignited the same week.
The numbers were expected to rise, state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said. Damage for 2018 wildfires is close to $12.4 billion.
“These are massive numbers for us,” Lara said.
California’s wildfire season is stretching longer. A series of 2017 wildfires in Northern California’s wine country and in parts of Southern California became the state’s most expensive in history at $11.8 billion.
It has already become harder for people in fire-prone areas to get or keep insurance, although Lara said the state is not at a point where it’s impossible for homeowners to find it. A recent law requires insurers who do not renew policies to notify customers of other options, including a pooled insurance plan of last resort known as the “FAIR plan.”
“We want to make sure that we’re monitoring the situation, and right now we don’t feel this is an area we should be alarmed about,” he said.
Still, he said the worsening fires put California “in uncharted territory.” The insurance department is beginning to collect information on non-renewed policies to assess patterns such as location, he said.
Representatives from the insurance industry acknowledged that some insurers may stop doing business in certain areas. But they said plans should still be widely available.
(Kathleen Ronayne, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Three people were dead and hundreds injured, at least 12 in critical condition, after the tornado touched down with estimated winds of 200 mph in three neighborhoods across eastern Havana.
Members of the Provincial Defense Council of Havana said 90 homes collapsed completely and 30 suffered partial collapse.
A quarter of the city’s roughly 2 million people were without power Monday afternoon and more than 200,000 people had lost water service because of a broken main and power cuts that left pumps out of service. Some 100 underground cisterns close to the coastal section of Havana were contaminated by seawater.
Three electric substations were knocked out by the tornado, the strongest to hit Cuba since Dec. 26, 1940, when a Category F4 tornado hit the town of Bejucal, in what is now Mayabeque province, officials said. It also appeared to be the first tornado to hit the capital in at least as many years.
Residents of the three relatively poor boroughs hit by the tornado were bracing for further calamity once the tropical sun started to dry sodden buildings, which can often lead to structures shifting and collapsing.
Julio Menendez, a 33-year-old restaurant worker, said his neighborhood in Havana’s 10 de Octubre district looked “like a horror movie.”
“From one moment to the next, we heard a noise like an airplane falling out of the sky. The first thing I did was go hug my daughters,” who are 9 and 12, he told The Associated Press.
Driver Oster Rodriguez said that amid a fierce storm, what looked like a thick, swirling cloud touched down in the central plaza of the Reparto Modelo neighborhood “like a fireball.” He saw a bus blown over, though he said the driver escaped unharmed.
Miguel Angel Hernandez of the Cuban Center for Meteorology said the tornado was a Category F3, with winds between 155 and 199 miles per hour, produced when a cold front hit Cuba’s northern coast. Other meteorologist told state media that the tornado may have been even stronger.
Some of the heaviest damage from Sunday night’s rare tornado was in the eastern borough of Guanabacoa, where the twister tore the roof off a shelter for dozens of homeless families.
Cubans enduring long waits for government housing often live in such multifamily shelters for years.
Dianabys Bueno, 31, was living in the shelter with her husband and son after they were forced to relocate by the collapse of their home in Central Havana. Much of the housing in Havana is in dire condition due to years without maintenance, and building collapses are routine even in ordinary storms.
“This has already happened to us once,” Bueno said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Around Havana, cars were crushed by fallen light posts and vehicles were trapped in floodwaters.
Leanys Calvo, a restaurant cook in the 10th de Octubre borough, said she was working Sunday night despite heavy rain and wind when she heard a rumbling noise outside and looked out to see what appeared to be a tornado touching down.
“It was something that touched down, and then took off again. It was like a tower,” she said, describing it as displaying colors of red and green. “It was here for two-three seconds, nothing more. They were the most frightening seconds of my life.”
The tornado tore the concrete roof off an apartment building in the Regla section of Havana and dumped it into an alleyway, briefly trapping residents in their homes.
Marlene Marrero Garcia, 77, said she was in her ground-floor apartment with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren Sunday night when she heard electrical transformers begin to explode. Then the tornado passed.
“It looked like fire, everything was red, then everything began to fall,” she said.
Marrero said she and her family were trapped by debris for about half an hour before firefighters arrived.
(Andrea Rodriguez & Michael Weissenstein, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Already on Monday, the misery was on full display. In Chicago, where an overnight snow covered the streets and snarled the commute to work, cars spun their tires at major intersections and could be seen struggling to move at all on side streets. In Milwaukee, St. Paul and Minneapolis, public schools called off classes. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan sent most state workers home early. By midday, more than 1,600 flights across the country had been canceled, according to FlightAware, the majority of them bound to or from one of Chicago’s two airports.
“We are getting a lot of snow in very little time,” Mayor Andy Schor of Lansing, Mich., said in a statement Monday as he declared a snow emergency. “People need to stay off of the streets so that we can clear them properly.”
The snow was expected to push east, but the danger in the Midwest was only expected to grow as temperatures plunged dozens of degrees. In northern Indiana, the University of Notre Dame announced that it was closing from this evening until Thursday afternoon because of the cold. In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers declared a state of emergency and told the National Guard to be ready to assist.
Forecasters expect Wednesday’s high temperature to be minus 14 in both Chicago and Minneapolis, with wind chills as low as minus 50 in Chicago and minus 60 in Minneapolis.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Authorities evacuated several neighborhoods in the southeastern city of Brumadinho that were within range of the B6 dam owned by the Brazilian mining company Vale. An estimated 24,000 people were told to get to higher ground, but by the afternoon, civil engineers said the second dam was no longer at risk.
Areas of water-soaked mud appeared to be drying out, which could help firefighters get to areas previously unreachable.
“Get out searching!” a woman yelled at firefighters near a refuge set up in the center of Brumadinho. “They could be out there in the bush.”
On Sunday, authorities lowered the confirmed death toll to 37 from 40, giving no explanation, though that number was expected to increase as rescue and recovery teams got to the hardest hit areas.
Even before the half-day suspension of rescue efforts, hope that loved ones had survived a tsunami of iron ore mine waste from Friday’s dam collapse in the area was turning to anguish and anger over the increasing likelihood that many of the hundreds of people missing had died.
There was also mounting anger at Vale and questions about an apparent lack of an alarm system on Friday.
Caroline Steifeld, who was evacuated, said she heard warning sirens on Sunday, but no such alert came on Friday, when the first dam collapsed.
“I only heard shouting, people saying to get out. I had to run with my family to get to higher ground, but there was no siren,” she said, adding that a cousin was still unaccounted for.
Several others made similar complaints when interviewed by The Associated Press. An email to Vale asking for comment was not immediately answered.
“I’m angry. There is no way I can stay calm,” said Sonia Fatima da Silva, as she tried to get information about her son, who had worked at Vale for 20 years. “My hope is that they be honest. I want news, even if it’s bad.”
Da Silva said she last spoke to her son before he went to work on Friday, when around midday a dam holding back mine waste collapsed, sending waves of mud for miles and burying much in its path.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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How the state regulates utilities is under growing scrutiny after unprecedented fires some suspect were caused by power-line issues that have destroyed thousands of homes and killed dozens of people.
Lacking the manpower and technology necessary to monitor more than 250,000 miles of power lines that crisscross the state, regulators rely on something of an honor system, with utilities responsible for ensuring all trees and vegetation are cut back far enough from electrical equipment before the onset of fire danger conditions.
Destructive blazes in Paradise, wine country, Ventura County and other areas have prompted California lawmakers to consider new ways to improve regulatory oversight and hold utilities more accountable for fire prevention.
The California Public Utilities Commission has never fined an electrical utility company for failing to meet safety standards before a wildfire strikes. Instead, the agency fines the utilities for violations after investigations into fires find wrongdoing — and the process can drag on for years.
“The CPUC oversight of investor-owned utilities to prevent electrical or utility-caused wildfires is devastatingly absent,” said John Fiske, a lawyer who represents wildfire victims. “When you’re looking at areas that look like they’ve been bombed in a war zone, and to know that can be prevented with enforcement and oversight, it’s widely upsetting.”
Investor-owned utilities are required to file annual reports with state regulators detailing even the smallest of spot fires linked to electrical equipment. Most of the blazes are less than 10 acres in size. And many of the most destructive wildfires in recent years are not included in the data because utilities are hesitant to tie their equipment to costly blazes before state investigations conclude.
Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility providing electricity from Eureka to Bakersfield, reported 1,553 equipment-related fires from June 2014 through the end of 2017. Southern California Edison, the electricity supplier for 15 million people mostly south of Fresno County, reported 347 fires in that time. Serving a 4,100-square-mile area from San Clemente to the U.S.-Mexico border, San Diego Gas & Electric disclosed 115 fires in the time period.
Elizaveta Malashenko, the director of the safety and enforcement division at the commission, said the agency uses the data to gain insight into the cause of ignitions and found that electrical lines making contact with vegetation and other line malfunctions sparked most of the fires. The data does not include any determinations on fault or show if the utilities violated safety laws.
Malashenko said that simply because the data show there were fires related in some way to a utility’s equipment, does not mean those fires are connected to safety violations and should trigger a fine or citation. But lawmakers suggest the severity of recent blazes and high number of fires prove the state’s methods to prevent disaster aren’t working.
In most cases, enforcement follows investigations into massive wildfires that decimate towns and neighborhoods. In a three-and-a-half-year period ending in 2017, CPUC said it issued nine citations and fines related to electrical safety violations against the utilities — including $8.3 million against PG&E for the Butte fire and another $15 million against Edison for multiple power outages in Long Beach in 2015.
As another form of punishment, the commission has also denied requests by utilities to recover losses from ratepayers if investigations discover negligence, and district attorneys can file criminal charges for wrongdoing. If utility equipment is tied to wildfires, the companies also face civil suits for damages. Fire-related costs led PG&E this month to announce plans to file for bankruptcy, potentially facing $30 billion in legal liability from the recent wildfires.
This year, lawmakers in Sacramento are raising questions about wildfire prevention and electrical safety oversight and considering new legislation to address the issues.
Ideas include small adjustments, such as providing CPUC with more explicit prevention guidelines and assigning a state representative to monitor safety at the utilities. More radical changes, including the creation of a new state entity to enforce safety or investing in sweeping technological advancements to provide regulators with better data, may require additional taxpayer dollars and would be more difficult to accomplish.
“We are in a new reality now,” said Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego. “No one has felt that more than the IOUs, the insurance companies and more importantly, the victims in these cases. It is our responsibility to evaluate it all. Working together with the governor, I think we realize changes need to happen.”
Years-long drought, dry brush, dead trees, strong winds and outdated electrical infrastructure have made California more prone to combustion. More than 1.6 million acres burned and 100 lives were lost in 2018. Under mounting political pressure, state legislators asked for information from CPUC, the agency responsible for making sure public utilities operate safely.
Some couldn’t believe what they learned.
Michael Picker, president of the CPUC, testified at a state Capitol hearing last year that the commission is primarily an economic regulator with a central focus of making sure companies provide energy to consumers at reasonable rates. Picker told lawmakers the agency had neither the technology nor manpower to ensure safety compliance on its own.
“I was stunned,” said state Sen. Bill Dodd, a Napa Democrat who led the committee. “To me, we don’t have any bigger issue than this.”
A team of 19 people at the California Public Utilities Commission conducts on-the-ground preventive safety audits and spot checks, while also investigating wildfires. But inspections only cover a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of miles of power lines and 4.2 million utility poles that deliver electricity to homes and businesses throughout the state. Malashenko has requested another 13 positions dedicated to wildfire safety and enforcement next year.
“It’s not as if we actually go out in the same way that we do for rail lines, for electric and telecommunication lines,” Picker said to lawmakers last year. “There’s just too many miles for us to be able to match the 37,000-person workforce, say, at PG&E.”
Unsatisfied with PG&E’s management of its electrical infrastructure, U.S. District Judge William Alsup proposed this month that the company inspect all 100,000 miles of its power lines and trim vegetation before the 2019 fire season begins.
Alsup cited the susceptibility of PG&E’s distribution lines coming into contact with trees during high-wind events as the most prevalent cause of 2017 and 2018 wildfires linked to the company’s equipment. On Wednesday, the company said performing inspections and cutting back vegetation could cost at least $75 billion, and the job would be impossible to complete in the given time.
Concerns over wildfire safety are not limited to enforcement. Some say new technology is vital to solving the crisis.
In his first week in office, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to modernize the state’s system for procuring technology contracts, and emphasized working with the private sector to address fire detection. Newsom’s state budget proposes $9.2 million for the CPUC to address “oversight of investor-owned utility compliance with legislative requirements to reduce the risk of utility-caused wildfires” and review new wildfire mitigation plans required by the Legislature.
Malashenko applauded the governor’s attention to technology. The state and companies such as PG&E need more data and better systems to understand wildfire risks and address prevention, she said.
CPUC officials can’t say if fires linked to utility equipment in the data on wildfire ignitions were caused by safety violations, or if the policies requiring the companies to maintain vegetation clearances around power lines are working. The agency is currently matching its records to investigative findings from Cal Fire to gain a clearer picture of the problem, although Malashenko says the efforts have taken a back seat to the 2018 wildfires.
Technological advancements, such as better real-time weather modeling, would more accurately determine the conditions that drive wildfires. Aerial drone patrols could ensure that required vegetation clearance is constantly maintained.
Malashenko argues that California already has the most stringent safety requirements and the largest electric safety program in the nation. At least for now, state regulators are largely drawing a road map to prevent wildfires as they go.
“Yes, maybe there’s some opportunity to do more inspections, but ... what is the end goal here?” Malashenko said. “We need to take a step back and really rethink it and design a program that addresses this challenge.”
(Taryn Luna, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Parts of the city of Brumadinho were evacuated, and firefighters rescued people by helicopter and ground vehicles. Local television channel TV Record showed a helicopter hovering inches off the ground as it pulled people covered in mud out of the waste.
Photos showed rooftops poking above an extensive field of the mud, which also cut off roads. The flow of waste reached the nearby community of Vila Ferteco and an administrative office for Brazilian mining company Vale SA, where employees were present.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Josiele Rosa Silva Tomas, president of the Brumadinho residents association, said.
Silva Tomas said she was awaiting news of her cousin, and many people she knew were trying to get news of loved ones.
Seven bodies had been recovered by late Friday, according to a statement from the governor’s office of Minas Gerais state.
Vale CEO Fabio Schvartsman said he did not know what caused the collapse. About 300 employees were working when it happened. About 100 had been accounted for, and rescue efforts were under way to determine what had happened to the others.
“The principal victims were our own workers,” Schvartzman told a news conference Friday evening. He said a restaurant was buried by the mud at lunchtime.
Another dam administered by Vale and Australian mining company BHP Billiton collapsed in 2015 in the city of Mariana in Minas Gerais state, resulting in 19 deaths and forcing hundreds from their homes.
Considered the worst environmental disaster in Brazilian history, it left 250,000 people without drinking water and killed thousands of fish. An estimated 60 million cubic meters of waste flooded rivers and eventually flowed into the Atlantic Ocean.
Schvartsman said what happened Friday was “a human tragedy much larger than the tragedy of Mariana, but probably the environmental damage will be less.”
There were no official reports of deaths, but the state fire department told The Associated Press that about 200 people were missing. The company said it did not have any further information.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Some 73 percent of Americans polled late last year said that global warming was happening, the report found, a jump of 10 percentage points from 2015 and 3 points since last March.
The rise in the number of Americans who say global warming is personally important to them was even sharper, jumping 9 percentage points since March to 72 percent, another record over the past decade.
The survey is the latest in a series from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. It was conducted online in November and December by Ipsos, which polled 1,114 American adults.
The results suggest that climate change has moved out of the realm of the hypothetical for a wide majority of Americans, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program.
“It is something that is activating an emotion in people and that emotion is worry,” he said. The survey found that 69 percent of Americans were “worried” about warming, an 8-point increase since March.
“People are beginning to understand that climate change is here in the United States, here in my state, in my community, affecting the people and places I care about, and now,” Leiserowitz said. “This isn’t happening in 50 years, 100 years from now.”
Asked whether people in the United States were being harmed by global warming “right now,” 48 percent of the respondents agreed, an increase of 9 percentage points since March. And 49 percent said they believed they would be personally harmed by global warming, a 7-point jump over the same period.
“I’ve never seen jumps in some of the key indicators like this,” Leiserowitz said.
Americans’ growing understanding of global warming is part of a long-term trend, he said. But he attributed the recent increase to a number of extreme weather events with plausible connections to a warming planet, and to the publicity that surrounded two major scientific reports on climate change last year.
Those reports, from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change and the U.S. government, laid out grim prospects for the future if action is not taken to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that warm the planet.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The National Weather Service issued weather advisories and warnings Tuesday across a large swath of the Midwest, from Kansas to Michigan.
Fatal accidents involving vehicles sliding off icy roadways have been reported in Wisconsin and Illinois, and more than 500 flights have been canceled at Chicago’s two major airports.
Forecasters estimate up to 8 inches of snow in parts of Iowa and as many as 12 inches in Wisconsin, where several schools have also closed.
Chicago is bracing for a chilly rest of the week, with snow and icy conditions making travel hazardous today and Thursday.
On Friday, the city expects a high temperature of 3 with the low of 5 below zero.
Meanwhile, a 100-mile stretch of Interstate 80 was closed in Wyoming, and dozens of accidents were reported in the Denver area.
South of the snowy weather, heavy rain will pelt much of the Southeast and mid-Atlantic today and into Thursday. Due to the rain, urban flooding is possible in the major I-95 cities from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia, New York City and Boston.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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“We have at least $25 million in delayed research project payments and several large-scale studies that are time sensitive with regard to data collection that are on hold and may not be able to be initiated until next year,” said Sandra Brown, vice chancellor of research at UC San Diego.
The university also said Tuesday that the shutdown has led some of its postdoctoral researchers to consider, or actively seek, personal loans because they are currently working without salaries.
The shutdown is now in its 33rd day, the longest in history. In addition to the immediate pain felt by those such as the postdoctoral researchers, it may be starting to inflict long-term damage, said Joe Panetta, CEO of Biocom, a La Jolla-based trade group for California’s life sciences industry.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration can’t accept applications to market new drugs and may delay authorizing new clinical trials. (Existing clinical trials are continuing as normal). This may create a regulatory backup affecting companies that have announced such plans, or have recently filed for approval.
“The toll of the shutdown is being felt in many, many ways,” said Stanley T. Crooke, chairman and CEO of Ionis Pharmaceuticals, on Twitter. The Carlsbad company has numerous drugs in clinical trials, including a highly anticipated treatment for Huntington’s disease.
Others potentially affected include Synthorx, a San Diego company that wants to test a new cancer drug, and Celgene, a New Jersey company with San Diego operations.
“One of our CEOs mentioned to me that it affects filings that companies have to make to the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission,” Panetta said. That could hinder their ability to raise money.
The shutdown quickly affected UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the world’s largest oceanographic institutes. Biologist Brice Semmens was supposed to lead a major expedition off California, starting on Jan. 6.
But there wasn’t enough money to pay for the operation of the Reuben Lasker, the NOAA research ship assigned to the study. The Lasker remains tied up at a dock in San Diego.
The study is part of a decades-long effort by Scripps, NOAA and the California Department of Fish and Game to study everything from fish populations to the quality of offshore waters to whether there are tangible signs that climate change is, or will, affect the West Coast.
Scripps officials say they currently have enough money to keep their research ship Roger Revelle operating off New Zealand. But it’s possible the mission could get cut short if the money runs out. And they say it’s unclear whether another of its ships, the Sally Ride, will be able to do oceanographic research in the western Pacific and off India later this year. The ship, among other things, would study the nature of monsoons.
“We have to go through the U.S. State Department months ahead of time to get permits to operate off other countries, and those offices are currently closed,” said Bruce Applegate, a geologist who oversees the Scripps research fleet.
“This could leave some scientists in limbo. These projects can take years to develop. They end up wondering when, if ever, they get to do them.”
San Diego State University said in a statement it “is not receiving payments for any awards that are currently active and funded by agencies that are shut down. Fortunately, we are in a position to advance the funding to ensure research programs can continue.”
Panetta said an FDA delay is the No. 1 concern of company CEOs he has talked with.
San Diego-area companies that have announced plans to begin clinical trials this year include Synthorx, which said last year it expected to ask permission by the second quarter to begin testing its cancer drug.
Celgene is readying to ask marketing approval for ozanimod, its drug for multiple sclerosis. Ozanimod was acquired in Celgene’s $7.3 billion purchase of San Diego’s Receptos in 2015.
A prolonged shutdown could delay that process, said Keith Speights, a writer for the Motley Fool.
“Ozanimod had been expected to be one of the biggest new drugs launched last year,” Speights wrote Tuesday. “Now, however, it’s possible that the drug won’t be approved until 2020 if the government shutdown drags on for too much longer.”
The shutdown could also delay another San Diego-developed drug, the cancer drug fedratinib. Celgene got the drug a year ago in its $1 billion purchase of San Diego’s Impact Biomedicines. Celgene filed for marketing approval in December. The New Jersey company said it expected to get FDA approval by year’s end. A prolonged shutdown could push back that timetable, Speights said.
Panetta cited reports that federal contractors are losing an estimated $200 million a day due to the shutdown.
“That’s not going to be paid back,” Panetta said. “Nobody expected it to last this long, but I think we’re at the point now where we’ve got to be concerned about the longer-term damage.”
(Gary Robbins & Bradley J. Fikes, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and the new research adds to the evidence that the ice loss in Greenland, which lies mainly above the Arctic Circle, is speeding up as the warming increases. The authors found that ice loss in 2012 was nearly four times the rate in 2003, and after a lull in 2013-14, it has resumed.
The study is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative. Just a week ago, a separate study of ice loss in Antarctica found that the continent is contributing more to rising sea levels than previously thought.
Another new analysis suggested that the oceans are warming far faster than earlier estimates. Warming oceans are the leading cause of sea-level rise, since water expands as it warms.
Rising sea levels are one of the clearest consequences of global warming; they are caused both by thermal expansion of the oceans and by the melting of ice sheets on land. Current projections say that if the planet warms by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial times, average sea levels will rise by more than 2 feet, and 32 million to 80 million people will be exposed to coastal flooding.
The new study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used satellite data and ground-based instruments to measure Greenland’s ice loss in the 21st century.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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The National Weather Service had forecast that temperatures would be more than 20 degrees below normal across the Northeast, with wind gusts up to 30 mph and wind chills approaching minus 40 degrees in northern New York and Vermont.
Those wind gusts caused flight disruptions at LaGuardia Airport in New York City on Monday, and FlightAware reported hundreds of delayed flights. And after a few weather-related delays Sunday, Amtrak restored all scheduled service Monday.
Atop the Northeast’s highest mountain, the temperature fell to minus 23 degrees Monday morning and dropped to minus 31 later in the afternoon, according to the Facebook page for Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire. Wind chills were hovering around minus 80.
In New York, Coast Guard crews moved quickly to rescue a 21-year-old man left stranded on an island in the Navensink River after his small boat broke down. The Coast Guard said two members waded through 34-degree water to bring the man to safety. The air temperature was 7 degrees with 30 mph winds.
The weather contributed to seven deaths over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.
In suburban Chicago, the temperature was about 14 degrees Sunday when a 12-year-old girl died after a snow fort collapsed on her. Police in Arlington Heights, Ill., said Esther Jung had been playing with a younger girl outside Rothem Church. Their families began looking for them about an hour later and found them under the snow. The younger girl survived.
In Connecticut, a utility company subcontractor died Sunday after being struck by a falling tree while working on a power line in Middletown. Thousands of homes and businesses in Connecticut remained without power Monday afternoon as temperatures dropped below zero in some locations.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Some of the coldest temperatures felt so far this season started to set in across the Midwest and Northeast Sunday and were expected to plunge further overnight.
Wind chills will bring temperatures into teens in the New York City area and down to minus 40 degrees in upstate New York, the National Weather Service predicted.
In New England, they’ll fall to as low as 20 below zero around Boston and as low as 35 below zero in parts of Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire, the service said.
Temperatures across the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley and the Mid-Atlantic will drop 10 to 20 degrees below average, the service said.
“It’s life-threatening,” said Ray O’Keefe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albany. “These are dangerous conditions that we’re going to be in and they’re prolonged, right through tomorrow.”
The freeze will follow the weekend’s run-ins with power outages, canceled trains and planes, overnight stays at the airport and traffic jams.
Local officials warned residents to limit their time outside to prevent frostbite and to avoid treacherous travel conditions. They also said places could see strong wind gusts, flooding and further power outages.
Utilities in Connecticut reported more than 20,000 customers without power by Sunday afternoon.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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They shake the earth far less than the 7.0 magnitude quake that sent a mirror, TV and dishes crashing to the ground in the Anchorage home where Connor lives with his mother, father and 11-year-old brother.
But the seemingly never-ending aftershocks deepen quake anxiety for the second-grader and many other Alaska residents in the wide swath of the state shaken by the Nov. 30 quake.
When the big aftershocks hit, Connor fears his home will collapse.
“I feel like the house won’t hold up,” he said.
Many of the aftershocks are so small that people don’t notice them, like a recent one that Connor didn’t feel at school — but his teacher made all the students dive under their desks to be safe.
The latest big aftershock happened last Sunday — a magnitude 5.0 jolt that flared already frayed nerves and prompted panicky posts on social media.
That one “reminded people again that it’s not over yet,” said seismologist Natalia Rupert at the Alaska Earthquake Center.
There have been more than 7,800 aftershocks since the main earthquake struck 7 miles north of Anchorage, the state’s most populous city. Most were too small to feel, but 20 have had magnitudes of 4.5 or greater. Rupert expects the temblors to continue for months, although the frequency has lessened, from about 200 daily to a couple dozen a day.
With no end to the seismic action in sight, Laura Dykes said her upcoming vacation trip to Las Vegas will be a huge relief from the stress she experiences. The Anchorage law firm worker still has vivid memories of her basement office in a building swaying back and forth during the November earthquake. It was built on rollers to protect it from seismic events.
“I can’t get out of here fast enough,” Dykes said. “It’ll be five days I can get sleep.”
The earthquake buckled roads and some homes and buildings sustained heavy damage, with initial estimates to repair damage and other costs at $100 million.
But most parts of Anchorage and other areas escaped the type of widespread catastrophic damage that happened in a devastating 1964 earthquake because of strict building codes that were put in place after that quake, which had a magnitude of 9.2 and was the second most powerful quake recorded on the planet.
No deaths or serious injuries were reported after the quake seven weeks ago, but federal officials soon declared a public health emergency and mental health aid was made available for people traumatized by the disaster. School counselors were swamped and crisis counselors were brought in from Oregon to help at several Anchorage-area schools.
Mental health providers say the rush of new patients has slowed, but they still treat clients rattled by the aftershocks, which strike without warning or any apparent pattern.
“It’s overwhelming for people, and they feel emotionally out of control,” said Deborah Gonzales, a licensed clinical social worker in Anchorage.
Gonzales said people tell her they can’t stand the shaking and don’t feel safe anywhere. Some are considering moving out of state while others say they feel “crazy” — feelings Gonzales called “100 percent normal.”
For Connor, every noticeable shake triggers feelings of vulnerability, said his mother, Tamra Cartwright, adding that many of her friends’ children also struggle with quake-related fears.
Tamra Cartwright said her husband was at work when the main quake struck, but she and her sons ran out of the house and hugged each other as they huddled together outside. Along with broken family items, the only damage to their home was an existing hairline wall crack that was made wider. But Connor couldn’t sleep in his own bed for weeks and only just returned to it.
His mother said she “totally” hates the aftershocks, but tries to “be strong for my kids.”
Lifelong Alaskan Robert Bell was 12 during the 1964 earthquake and remembers it as a rolling action while the recent quake was more of a back-and-forth movement that felt more violent even though it wasn’t as powerful. The recent quake and its aftershocks have been like reliving that youthful experience over and over, Bell said.
Bell, who worked in construction for years, built his own home and says it’s safe and solid. But his heart races when the aftershocks hit.
“You don’t know when the next one’s going to hit — that’s been unnerving,” he said.
(Rachel D'Oro, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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In Kansas, officials dispensed warnings to ranchers about how to keep their horses from freezing to death. Small towns notified residents that their plows might not keep up with the rapid snowfall, leaving streets impassable. And, in a foretaste of the chaos likely to ensnarl the country’s transportation networks, hundreds of flights were canceled at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, before a single snowflake had fallen there.
The storm was also expected to further strain the National Weather Service, where many employees have been furloughed as part of the partial government shutdown. Others — including those putting out the storm warnings that state and local officials rely on for their planning — are considered essential and are working without pay.
The weather system has already deluged the West, causing power losses, flooding, mudslides and deaths. About 80 million people, from the Dakotas to Maine, were under some form of winter weather advisory, and meteorologists warned against driving during the height of the storm.
“Where you show up Saturday night, you should plan on staying there until Monday morning,” Derek Schroeter, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Gray, Maine, advised people in the Northeast.
The storm will be followed by numbing temperatures, 15 to 25 degrees below normal across the Plains and the Upper Midwest. Some areas near Albany, N.Y., were predicted to have low temperatures between minus 10 and minus 20.
NB: This is the same storm system that caused extended rainfall in California, fed by an atmospheric river (less formally called a Pineapple Express).
(THE NEW TORK TIMES)
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Waves carrying sand and rocks are likely to wash over The Strand in Oceanside, the parking lots at Tamarack Avenue beach in Carlsbad and Cardiff State Beach in Encinitas, and other low spots along the coast.
Parts of Highway 101 have been closed temporarily to clean up debris and repair damage left by the seasonal tides and waves in recent years.
Saturday’s tide will peak at 8.1 feet above mean sea level at 7:01 a.m., followed by a high of 8.4 feet at 7:47 a.m. Sunday and another 8.4 feet at 8:34 a.m. Monday, according to online tide charts. Extreme low tides will occur about 12 hours after the high tides, when the ocean ebbs to nearly 9 feet below the highest level.
Tides greater than 7 feet usually bring rocks and minor flooding onto The Strand, a narrow street that goes past beachfront homes and beneath the pier in Oceanside.
“When this happens, we are prepared to close the street as needed until the water subsides and we can clean the roadway with equipment,” said Kiel Koger, Oceanside’s public works division manager.
At the southern end of the county, in Imperial Beach, city workers filled and placed about 500 sandbags Thursday morning in key locations along Seacoast Drive.
“We have prepared an incident plan that has been distributed to the elected officials and department heads and placed a lot of information on our webpage and social media,” said Imperial Beach City Manager Andy Hall.
“I hope we have over-prepared and that the flooding will be minimal, but we are prepared for a pretty big storm,” Hall said.
The effects of king tides vary based on the ocean temperature, the size of the waves, atmospheric pressure and other factors.
In December 2015, a big ocean swell combined with the high tides to erode several vulnerable spots along the North County coast.
That year, the waves ate away a big chunk of the shoulder of Carlsbad Boulevard, also called Coast Highway or old Highway 101, just south of Palomar Airport Road. As a result, one southbound lane remained closed for months until repairs costing $841,000 were completed.
Last month, Carlsbad closed the same lane again in “an abundance of caution” during the high tides, but no problems were reported.
Based on that experience, both southbound lanes will remain open this weekend, city officials said. The area will be monitored in case any action is needed.
Fortunately for coastal residents, this week’s series of storms and big surf is expected to subside by Saturday. The ocean swell is predicted to stay within normal ranges, which will lessen the hazard of the extreme tides.
“Fire and lifeguard resources will be on standby, but are not anticipating any significant property damage,” said Capt. Nate Pearson of the Carlsbad Fire Department.
“Low-lying coastal properties should prepare early with sandbags if they have experienced flooding during previous king tide periods,” Pearson said in an email Wednesday.
This weekend will not be a good time to swim in the ocean for at least two reasons. The water will be cold, in the high 50s to low 60s, which quickly saps a swimmer’s energy. Also, experts advise people to stay out of the water for several days after a storm because of pollution carried into the ocean by stormwater runoff.
The annual extremes, also known as spring tides, occur because of the increased gravitational pull when the sun, moon and Earth line up in space.
NB: this explanation is not correct, otherwise we would have King tides every month (spring tides occur twice a month). King tides occur when Earth is closest to the Sun so that Sun's pull is the greatest throughout the year. During Full Moon (or New Moon) the Sun then enhances the pull of the Moon the most in a given year.
The California Coastal Commission is encouraging people to observe the king tides to visualize the likely effects of future sea-level rise.
People can take photographs of the areas affected and post them on the commission’s website to help document flood risks in coastal areas.
A king tide hike is planned for 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. Monday, beginning at the Tijuana River Visitor Center, hosted by the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve and the San Elijo Lagoon Conservancy.
(Phil Diehl, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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The National Weather Service said the winter storm is forecast to drop its heavy rain, snow and wind in Colorado next and move across much of country in coming days.
“It will be slamming the East Coast by Sunday,” NWS forecaster Steve Anderson said. “From Maine to Florida.”
Anderson said most of California should be dry and sunny today.
The three-day drenching did put a dent in California’s drought.
Government and university researchers who maintain the U.S. Drought Monitor map downgraded most of the state’s drought classification from abnormally dry to some level of drought, mostly of moderate intensity.
Californians endured canceled flights, falling trees, downed power lines and threats of localized flooding.
“Our tree crews have been working around the clock to clear downed trees and large branches during the heavy rains and high winds,” San Francisco’s Department of Public Works said. Fallen trees blocked the city’s iconic cable car tracks for hours Thursday and similarly delayed other commuter trains in the region.
The California Highway Patrol said a falling tree killed a 42-year-old homeless man in Oakland on Wednesday.
The CHP said the victim may have been trying to take shelter under some trees near an Oakland freeway when he was crushed by a 30-foot-long branch.
The man may have been “just trying to stay dry,” CHP officer Herman Baza said.
A few hours later, a pedestrian who went into the street to avoid a falling tree was struck and killed by a van in Mill Valley about 15 miles north of San Francisco.
CHP reported that four people were killed in two separate Northern California auto accidents caused by rain-slickened roads this week, including a family of three killed Tuesday in the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Placerville.
Southern California authorities concerned with rising streams and excessive runoff ordered evacuations in parts of Malibu and other areas scarred by wildfires. Malibu schools canceled classes. Santa Anita racetrack canceled its slate of horse races Thursday.
Northern California authorities warned of imminent floods and debris flows in the wildfire-ravished city of Paradise and the surrounding region denuded of protective trees and vegetation, telling residents to prepare to flee on a moment’s notice.
Meanwhile, blizzard conditions blanketed the higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada and the region’s ski resorts with as much as four feet of snow just in time for the three-day Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A series of storms have hit this week, and the latest one could be the strongest in Northern California.
“A powerful Pacific storm will hammer the West Coast into Friday with strong winds, heavy rain and heavy mountain snow,” the National Weather Service said. “Heavy rain will bring a threat of flash flooding along recent burn scars while blizzard conditions are expected” in the Sierra Nevada.
Heavy snowfall and crashes shut down westbound Interstate 80 at the Nevada border, blocking one of the two routes to the Sierra Nevada and most of Northern California’s ski resorts, authorities said.
In Southern California, fog on a mountain highway triggered a 19-vehicle crash. Thirty-five people were evaluated for injuries after the pileup on Interstate 15 in Cajon Pass, but most declined to be taken to hospitals, the San Bernardino County Fire Department said.
A mudslide on a major Northern California freeway just north of the Golden Gate Bridge disrupted the morning commute. The slide closed southbound Highway 101 across the bridge for about an hour, shutting off the only direct access to San Francisco for drivers north of the city.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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An overnight avalanche in Ramsau, central Austria, slammed a hotel. All 60 visitors and staff, most of whom were from a Danish ski club, got out of the building unharmed.
Niels Leth-Soerensen, chairman of the Hobro Skiklub, praised the hotel staff in Ramsau and local rescue teams for swiftly evacuating all guests to another hotel.
Leth-Soerensen who himself was part of the party, said on the club website that the 200-year-old hotel had never been hit by an avalanche before.
In a series of dramatic videos posted on Swiss news portal 20 Minuten, a group of soldiers posted to the Davos area ahead of next week’s World Economic Forum narrowly escaped harm from an avalanche triggered by a controlled explosion. The soldiers can be heard yelling and seen running as masses of snow hurtle toward the base area where they are standing and filming.
Dozens of people have already died in avalanches since the start of the year.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The Kearny Villa Road ramp — which provides access to Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, Sharp Memorial and Sharp Mary Birch Hospital as well as other businesses in the area — isn’t expected to reopen to traffic until this morning, Caltrans spokeswoman Cathryne Bruce-Johnson said.
Heavy runoff and a failing drainage pipe likely combined to create the gaping sinkhole, Bruce-Johnson said.
“A failed drainage pipe caused the sinkhole over time. It is likely that water runoff from several rain events eroded the soil underneath the pavement and caused the sinkhole,” she said.
The hole was discovered shortly after 8:15 a.m. Monday when drivers reported to the California Highway Patrol that part of the right lane of the ramp had “chipped off,” according to the CHP website.
Access to the ramp was closed immediately, creating additional traffic headaches for commuters already finding a slow drive on a rainy morning.
After officers got a good look at the sinkhole, they realized they had a major problem on their hands: The hole, which covered the right lane of the exit ramp, was estimated to be 20 feet long, 10 feet wide and 20 feet deep.
The large hole is “an extreme hazard to the motoring public,” CHP Sgt. Joseph Aboy told Fox 5.
(Karen Kucher, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
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Scientists used aerial photographs, satellite measurements and computer models to track how fast the southern-most continent has been melting since 1979 in 176 individual basins. They found the ice loss to be accelerating dramatically — a key indicator of human-caused climate change.
Since 2009, Antarctica has lost almost 278 billion tons of ice per year, the new study found. In the 1980s, it was losing 44 billion tons a year.
The recent melting rate is 15 percent higher than what a study found last year.
Eric Rignot, a University of California Irvine ice scientist, was the lead author on the new study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He said the big difference is that his satellite-based study found East Antarctica, which used to be considered stable, is losing 56 billion tons of ice a year. Last year’s study, which took several teams’ work into consideration, found little to no loss in East Antarctica recently and gains in the past.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Representatives of the White House and Federal Emergency Management Agency have not responded to daily requests for clarification of whether funds are being cut off for California as thousands of people recover from the worst fire in state history, and what precedent or legal authority there might for such a move.
Trump said on Twitter last week that he ordered FEMA not to send more disaster funding to state officials “unless they get their act together, which is unlikely.” Trump is pushing the state to allow more logging and timber sales. He says that will reduce the risk of forest fires, though experts disagree.
Trump’s post sent shock waves through the communities still recovering from two major fires that killed 89 people and burned more than 15,000 structures, with state and local lawmakers of both parties expressing outrage and concern.
More than a dozen members of California’s congressional delegation, all Democrats except for Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, met Thursday to compare notes and discuss how to respond.
“We want to get more information about whether that was just the president popping off or whether in fact the funds are being cut off,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, chairwoman of the California caucus.
Lofgren said the members also discussed the possibility of a lawsuit if Trump does try to restrict the fire recovery funds.
Several California members said they are trying to figure out if the president can legally withdraw funds once a disaster declaration is made, or if Trump was perhaps referring to not making a new declaration for future disasters.
Congress has yet to approve a disaster aid package, and many Californians are relying on money from FEMA to assist in the recovery. The House is scheduled to vote on an aid package as soon as Wednesday. Its chances in the Senate are uncertain.
Much of the forestland in California is managed privately or by the federal government, not the state. Trump this year issued an executive order increasing the amount of timber that could be cut in federal forests and he has been critical of how California manages its lands.
LaMalfa, whose district includes the town of Paradise, which was destroyed, said he thinks the president was simply tweeting out of frustration with California forest management practices, or with criticism made against him by state legislators and the governor.
“Maybe that just caused him to sit down and tweet something,” LaMalfa said. “I haven’t seen any actual action be pushed out through FEMA or any of our White House contacts.”
(Sarah D. Wire, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Virginia State Police said they responded to more than 300 traffic crashes and helped nearly 200 disabled vehicles in Virginia from midnight to late Sunday afternoon.
The storm knocked out power to nearly 200,000 people in Virginia and North Carolina at its height Sunday, according to PowerOutage.us.
Meanwhile, the storm caused headaches for travelers into and out of airports in the region, including more than 250 flight cancellations Sunday at the three main airports serving the nation’s capital. Washington’s Dulles International Airport tweeted that the Federal Aviation Administration had implemented a ground stop there on Sunday evening, impacting both inbound and outbound flights.
For air travelers, the Dullest airport authority subsequently tweeted tips for flying on a snow day, including frequently checking for airline flight changes and packing “patience, a good dose of snow humor & a packet of hot chocolate.”
In Illinois, residents were trying to dig out from under heavy snowfall in some areas.
Springfield’s State Journal-Register reported the state capital broke a 55-year record for daily snowfall on Saturday. It cited the National Weather Service as saying the 8.4 inches of snow that day in Springfield broke the previous record for a Jan. 12 in 1964 of 6.6 inches.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A new analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that the oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a U.N. panel estimated five years ago. The researchers also concluded that ocean temperatures have broken records for several straight years.
“2018 is going to be the warmest year on record for the Earth’s oceans,” said Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst at independent climate research group Berkeley Earth and an author of the study. “As 2017 was the warmest year, and 2016 was the warmest year.”
As the planet has warmed, the oceans have provided a critical buffer. They have slowed the effects of climate change by absorbing 93 percent of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases humans pump into the atmosphere.
“If the ocean wasn’t absorbing as much heat, the surface of the land would heat up much faster than it is right now,” said Malin Pinsky, an associate professor in the department of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University. “In fact, the ocean is saving us from massive warming right now.”
But the surging water temperatures are already killing off marine ecosystems, raising sea levels and making hurricanes more destructive.
As the oceans continue to heat up, those effects will become more catastrophic, scientists say. Rainier, more powerful storms like Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Hurricane Florence in 2018 will become more common, and coastlines around the world will flood more frequently. Coral reefs, whose fish populations are sources of food for hundreds of millions of people, will come under increasing stress; a fifth of all corals have already died in the past three years.
People in the tropics, who rely heavily on fish for protein, could be hard hit, said Kathryn Matthews, deputy chief scientist for the conservation group Oceana. “The actual ability of the warm oceans to produce food is much lower, so that means they’re going to be more quickly approaching food insecurity,” she said.
Because they play such a critical role in global warming, oceans are one of the most important areas of research for climate scientists. Average ocean temperatures are also a consistent way to track the effects of greenhouse gas emissions because they are not influenced much by short-term weather patterns, Hausfather said.
“Oceans are really the best thermometer we have for changes in the Earth,” he said.
But, historically, understanding ocean temperatures has been difficult. An authoritative U.N. report, issued in 2014 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, presented five different estimates of ocean heat, but they all showed less warming than the levels projected by computer climate models — suggesting that either the ocean heat measurements or the climate models were inaccurate.
Since the early 2000s, scientists have measured ocean heat using a network of drifting floats called Argo, named after Jason’s ship in Greek mythology. The floats measure the temperature and saltiness of the upper 6,500 feet of the ocean and upload the data via satellites.
But before Argo, researchers relied on temperature sensors that ships lowered into the ocean with copper wire. The wire transferred data from the sensor to the ship for recording until the wire broke and the sensor drifted away.
That method was subject to uncertainties, particularly around the accuracy of the depth at which the measurement was taken. Those uncertainties hamper today’s scientists as they stitch together 20th century temperature data into a global historical record.
In the new analysis, Hausfather and his colleagues assessed three recent studies that better accounted for the older instrument biases. The results converged at an estimate of ocean warming that was higher than that of the 2014 U.N. report and more in line with the climate models.
The waters closest to the surface have heated up the most, and that warming has accelerated over the past two decades, according to data from the lead author of the new study, Lijing Cheng of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing.
As the oceans heat up, sea levels rise because warmer water takes up more space than colder water. In fact, most of the sea level rise observed to date is because of this warming effect, not melting ice caps.
Absent global action to reduce carbon emissions, the authors said, the warming alone would cause sea levels to rise by about 1 foot by 2100, and the ice caps would contribute more. That could exacerbate damage from severe coastal flooding and storm surge.
The effects of the warming on marine life could also have broad repercussions, Pinsky said. “As the ocean heats up, it’s driving fish into new places, and we’re already seeing that that’s driving conflict between countries,” he said. “It’s spilling over far beyond just fish, it’s turned into trade wars. It’s turned into diplomatic disputes. It’s led to a breakdown in international relations in some cases.”
A fourth study reviewed by the researchers strengthened their conclusions. That study used a novel method to estimate ocean temperatures indirectly, and it also found that the world’s oceans were heating faster than the authors of the 2014 study did.
Though the new findings provide a grim forecast for the future of the oceans, Hausfather said that efforts to mitigate global warming, including the 2015 Paris climate agreement, would help. “I think there’s some reason for confidence that we’ll avoid the worst-case outcomes,” he said, “even if we’re not on track for the outcomes we want.”
(Kendra Pierre-Louis, THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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At least 13 people have been killed in weather-related accidents in Europe over the last week, most of them from avalanches.
In Norway, attempts to find the bodies of four skiers were again put on hold due to poor visibility and heavy snowfall. A 29-year Swedish woman and three Finns, aged 29, 32 and 36, were presumed dead after a 330-yard wide avalanche hit a valley near the northern city of Tromsoe last week.
Romanian police on Tuesday found the frozen body of a 67-year-old man in a parking lot in the southern city of Slatina after his wife reported he hadn’t returned from work. Temperatures in Romania plunged to a low of minus 11.2.
In Austria, hundreds of residents were stuck in their homes due to blocked roads and some regions experienced power outages after snow-laden trees took down power lines.
Schools in some Austrian regions remained closed for a second day and homeowners were advised to remove snow from their roofs after several buildings collapsed. One 78-year-old man was severely injured when he fell off his roof in Turrach while shoveling snow, Austrian public broadcaster ORF reported.
On Monday night, 11 German hikers had to be rescued by mountaineers from a cabin near Salzburg, after having been snowed in without electricity and little food since Friday. Other people have also been killed by avalanches in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, and authorities warned that continuing snowfall is increasing the risk of more avalanches.
In the Netherlands, Amsterdam’s busy Schiphol Airport saw nearly 25 percent of its flights canceled Tuesday. Dutch carrier KLM canceled 159 flights to and from European destinations.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Strikingly, the sharp uptick in emissions occurred even as a near-record number of coal plants around the United States retired last year, illustrating how difficult it could be for the country to make further progress on climate change in the years to come, particularly as the Trump administration pushes to roll back federal regulations that limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The estimate, by research firm Rhodium Group, pointed to a stark reversal. Fossil fuel emissions in the United States have fallen significantly since 2005 and declined each of the previous three years, in part because of a boom in cheap natural gas and renewable energy, which have been rapidly displacing dirtier coal-fired power.
Yet even a steep drop in coal use last year wasn’t enough to offset rising emissions in other parts of the economy. Some of that increase was weather-related: A relatively cold winter led to a spike in the use of oil and gas for heating in areas like New England.
But, just as important, as the U.S. economy grew at a strong pace last year, emissions from factories, planes and trucks soared. And there are few policies in place to clean those sectors up.
“The big takeaway for me is that we haven’t yet successfully decoupled U.S. emissions growth from economic growth,” said Trevor Houser, a climate and energy analyst at the Rhodium Group.
As U.S. manufacturing boomed, for instance, emissions from the nation’s industrial sectors — including steel, cement, chemicals and refineries — increased by 5.7 percent.
Policymakers working on climate change at the federal and state level have largely shied away from regulating heavy industry, which directly contributes about one-sixth of the country’s carbon emissions. Instead, they’ve focused on decarbonizing the electricity sector through actions like promoting wind and solar power.
But even as power generation has gotten cleaner, those overlooked industrial plants and factories have become a larger source of climate pollution. The Rhodium Group estimates that the industrial sector is on track to become the second-biggest source of emissions in California by 2020, behind only transportation, and the biggest source in Texas by 2022.
There’s a similar story in transportation: Since 2011, the federal government has been steadily ratcheting up fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks, although the Trump administration has proposed to halt the toughening of those standards after 2021. There are signs that those standards had been effective.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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But the question remains: Where will it all go?
Disaster officials are scrambling to secure a place to sort and process the remnants of nearly 19,000 structures destroyed in the wildfire that began on Nov. 8 and killed 86 people. The mammoth undertaking has been slowed by staunch opposition in nearby communities eyed as potential sites for a temporary scrapyard, which would receive 250 to 400 truckloads of concrete and metal each day.
First it was Chico, where in late December residents persuaded the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the California Office of Emergency Services — the agencies responsible for the cleanup — to look elsewhere.
Now officials are considering Oroville, where they’ve proposed opening a scrapyard at a Superfund site near Highway 70 that served as the Koppers wood treatment plant for decades. Federal officials argue that, after years of soil and groundwater cleanup, the land is safe enough for industrial use. The site would be open for at least a year.
But some residents do not trust that the land is as clean as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it is and worry that such intense operations could kick up toxic dust and damage local roadways.
“We’ve been through enough already,” Oroville Councilwoman Linda Draper said. “We’re hoping that they will listen to our concerns and think about putting it elsewhere.”
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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Saturday’s deluge loosened hillsides where a major blaze burned last year in and around Malibu, clogging the Pacific Coast Highway with mud and debris.
A stretch of the scenic route northwest of Los Angeles was expected to remain closed in both directions until today while crews tow away stuck vehicles and clear lanes. No injuries were reported.
The rapper Soulja Boy was among those whose cars were mired in the muck that was up to 4 feet deep in some areas.
The 28-year-old retweeted a photo of the mudslide and posted: “My car got stuck too almost went into the ocean,” along with a prayer emoji.
An automated rain gauge in the western Santa Monica Mountains showed nearly three-quarters of an inch of rainfall in one hour, said the National Weather Service.
“These are heavy rates,” the weather service tweeted.
Up to 1 1/2 inches of rain fell in coastal and valley areas, while mountain communities got heavy snow.
Flash-flood watches and warnings were eventually lifted for areas burned by the fires that scorched more than 155 square miles of brush and timber acres in November, destroyed about 1,600 structures and claimed three lives.
The sun emerged in Los Angeles on Sunday, but to the north, wind and rain forced delays or cancellations of flights out of San Francisco International Airport for a second day. A wind advisory was in place until 10 p.m. Sunday.
The San Francisco Bay Area could get up to 1 1/2 inches of rain by this morning.
Strong winds and downed trees knocked out electricity for at least 20,000 customers across the Sacramento region Sunday night. The National Weather Service said Sunday that winds gusted up to 49 mph.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The rover, weighing 300 pounds, rolled off a ramp on the lander at 10:22 p.m. Beijing time, laying deep tracks in the moon’s soft soil, its solar panels spread like wings, according to a photograph released to state media. The rover is now programmed to roam across a barren vista toward a distinct crater.
Chinese scientists hailed the landing of the Chang’e-4 probe as evidence of the country’s growing stature in space exploration. “It is human nature to explore the unknown world,” Wu Weiren, chief designer of the lunar mission for the China National Space Administration, said in an interview on the state television network, CCTV. “And it is what our generation and the next generation are supposed to do.”
Compared with previous missions, however, the reaction to Thursday’s milestones seemed strikingly restrained, both in the country’s state-run news outlets and on social media. On China’s most-watched TV news program early Thursday evening, the landing — declared a success by officials at mission control — was not even one of the four top stories.
The doodle of China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, paid subtle homage to the lander and its rover, but the news was relegated to the fifth item on CCTV’s 7 p.m. news program.
In interviews, several people said they had paid little attention to the moon landing.
A woman in a cafe in Beijing, Liu Ying, expressed pride in the space program, but said she had not followed the landing closely. She then expressed wonder about the costs. “The economy is bad,” she said. “Is it really a good thing for the country to spend recklessly?”
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Rain was already falling around the Gulf of Thailand, and officials warned that torrential downpours, strong winds and rough seas were expected in 16 provinces when Tropical Storm Pabuk makes its expected landfall late today.
There are fears that the storm will be the worst to hit Thailand since 1989, when Typhoon Gay left more than 400 dead. A tropical storm in 1962 killed more than 900 people in the south.
In an incident possibly related to the storm, a Russian tourist in Koh Samui died Wednesday as he tried to rescue his daughter, who was struggling in strong surf. Thai PBS television reported that the daughter survived but her father lost consciousness after being tossed against some rocks and couldn’t be revived by rescuers.
Thailand’s Meteorological Department said the storm will lash southern Thailand’s east coast from Thursday to Saturday, with the two provinces of Surat Thani and Nakhon Si Thammarat expected to be hardest hit. Surat Thani is home to the popular tourist islands of Koh Samui, Koh Tao and Koh Phangan.
Army trucks were driving around remote seaside areas in Nakhon Si Thammarat on Thursday evening, searching for stragglers who had not yet been evacuated.
“We have prepared three shelters and currently have about 1,000 people in them,” said local official Kriangsak Raksrithong.
Fishing is another major industry in the south, and small boat owners were heeding the warning. Many dragged their vessels ashore, attaching ropes to the boats and having friends help tug them on to beaches.
The Meteorological Department said the storm was moving west into the Gulf of Thailand with maximum winds of 40 miles per hour, and that waves 10 to 16 feet high were possible in the Gulf of Thailand, and 6 to 10 feet high in the Andaman Sea on the west coast. It warned of strong winds and storm surges on the gulf side and said all ships should stay berthed on land through Saturday.
“There will be heavy rainfall and we have to prepared for flooding or an impact on transportation,” Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said. “We are ready ourselves, but if the rainfall is high, we will need some time to resolve problems.”
Southern Thailand’s tourist industry is a huge moneymaker, and authorities have become particularly sensitive to visitors’ safety since last July, when 47 Chinese tourists drowned when the boat they were on sank in rough seas near the popular resort of Phuket in the Andaman Sea.
(Sumeth Panpetch, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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