Tag Archives: region

North Carolina-sized Hurricane Florence makes its way to North Carolina

by LindseyKempton Posted on September 11, 2018

Hurricane Florence is heading straight for the Carolinas, on course to slam into a region that hasn’t seen anything like it in a generation.

Florence is already one of the worst hurricanes ever to threaten the East Coast, and there’s nearly unanimous consensus among the most reliable weather models that the storm will grow larger and more fierce before it hits land. When it arrives in North Carolina on Thursday, it could be about the same size as North Carolina.

On Monday, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster ordered the complete evacuation of the state’s coastline, home to more than a million people, to prepare for what’s shaping up to be a historic storm. Large-scale evacuations have also been ordered in eastern North Carolina and southeast Virginia, home to a combined 3 million people, where states of emergency are already in effect. President Donald Trump cancelled a campaign rally in Mississippi and tweeted several messages urging people to prepare.

As of Tuesday evening, Florence had sustained winds of 140 mph — a strong Category 4. But it could soon get more powerful. On its current path, Florence will traverse the bathwater-warm Gulf Stream — source of rocket fuel for hurricanes — and likely strengthen further, perhaps reaching Category 5. That could turn Florence into one of the most powerful hurricanes in U.S. history.

Florence poses three main threats: wind, heavy rain, and storm surge (the wall of water pushed ashore when a storm makes landfall). All three could come in record quantities simultaneously.

Since 1851, only three other hurricanes have targeted the Carolinas at Category-4 strength or stronger, with Hugo in 1989 the most recent. In the generation since Hugo hit, millions more people have moved to the southeast coast — greatly increasing the region’s vulnerability. Winds as strong as Florence’s will produce “catastrophic” damage, according to the National Hurricane Center’s explanation of the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.”

But the biggest risk to lives and infrastructure will come from the water. More than 80 percent of hurricane-related deaths are due to flooding, either by rising coastal waters or heavy rainfall. Florence will pack both.

At the coast, Florence could bring 15 to 20 feet of storm surge, enough to eclipse the East Coast record and overwhelm fragile and densely-populated barrier islands.

After making landfall, the most reliable weather models show Florence stalling over the Carolinas and Virginia for up to four days, similar to what happened in Texas with Hurricane Harvey last year. The deluge could extend for hundreds of miles inland.

Florence’s slow movement after landfall is expected to bring 20 to 40 inches of rain to inland parts of North Carolina and Virginia, with floodwaters enhanced by the rainfall-squeezing effect of the Appalachian Mountains. If that forecast holds, North Carolina’s state hurricane rainfall record of 27 inches set during Floyd in 1999 could be shattered.

All that rain would fall on already wet soil, worsening the potential deluge. Over the past 60 days, parts of the region have received nearly double the amount of rain seen in a typical summer.

In short, Florence is a recipe for an abject flooding disaster. Much of North Carolina and Virginia could be dealing with its worst floods in history. It will take a week or more for rainwater to drain from the hills and mountains, channeling all that rainfall into rivers and streams — scouring away homes and highways in floodplains along the way.

There’s good reason to believe that a storm like Florence is made more likely by the warming atmosphere. Warmer air can hold more water vapor, making rainfall in hurricanes more intense. At peak hurricane season, ocean temperatures in Florence’s path would probably be strong enough to support its current intensity even without global warming, but the extra degree or two has made the storm’s rapid intensification that much more likely. And the foot or so of sea level rise that’s already occurred — no matter what the North Carolina legislature says — will obviously worsen coastal flooding. The latest research also suggests that intense hurricanes will migrate further north as the climate warms this century.

As Miami-based meteorologist John Morales recently wrote on Twitter, “There’s more strong hurricanes, and they ain’t where they used to be.”

For a region unaccustomed to a storm like Florence, its impact will arrive as a harbinger of a warmer — and more dangerous — future.

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North Carolina-sized Hurricane Florence makes its way to North Carolina

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The EPA failed Flint. Now we know exactly how.

by ThurmanBlock7 Posted on July 19, 2018

As if the EPA hasn’t disappointed us enough this year, a report released today by the Office of the Inspector General found that the agency consistently dropped the ball during the Flint water crisis.

In a blistering 74-page report, the agency watchdog critiqued EPA Region 5, the district responsible for protecting human health and the environment in Michigan, for an inadequate response to the water crisis that exposed thousands to lead and caused a 58 percent spike in fetal deaths in the largely black community.

The mistakes are sobering. Despite receiving 87 citizen complaints about water quality between May 2014 and January 2016 — including many that directly referenced lead — the EPA did not take any significant action before releasing an emergency order on Jan. 21, 2016.

Instead, the report says, the EPA sent the residents form letters which recommended that they contact the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality or Flint water officials. In 11 cases, the EPA sent no response at all.

“As I have said before, the Flint water crisis was a failure of all levels of government,” said Dan Kildee, Democratic representative from the Michigan district that includes Flint, in a statement reacting to the report.

EPA officials had the chance to save Flint residents from months of exposure to toxins. The report cites five possible oversight actions that the EPA could have taken under the Safe Drinking Water Act, including alerting Flint residents about possible harms and acting in the place of state authorities when there is “substantial endangerment” to human health.

But in almost every case, officials deferred to their state counterparts, rather than using their legal authority to step in. As the report’s authors note, such oversight tools — like most tools out there — are “only effective when used.”

The OIG also pointed to a memo written by Region 5 scientist Miguel Del Toral, who repeatedly warned the region’s Director Susan Hedman that the lead levels in Flint water were at sky-high levels. (Anything over 15 ppb is considered unsafe — one home tested at 13,000 ppb). Hedman later resigned when it became clear that she had attempted to suppress Del Toral’s findings.

According to the report, Hedman and other EPA officials “lacked a sense of urgency” to address the water issues. Instead they failed to communicate with state officials, displayed significant “management weaknesses,” and ultimately delayed the federal response to the crisis.

And while they waited, thousands of residents were exposed to unsafe water. The consequences, for some, could last a lifetime.

“Justice for Flint families comes in many forms,” Kildee said in his statement. “The release of this report is one form of holding those responsible accountable.”

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The EPA failed Flint. Now we know exactly how.

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The Bering Sea’s ice has never melted this early before

by ThorsteKnudsen Posted on May 1, 2018

On Alaska’s West Coast, the feeble April sun is shining this week on a fresh spot of open water. The sea ice found there for ages every spring is gone.

Ice in the Bering Sea, the narrow body of water between Russia and Alaska, has dropped to its lowest springtime level since at least 1850. In all that time, no other year has come close. After a winter filled with unusually high temperatures, sea ice now sits at less than 10 percent of what could previously be considered “normal”.

“We’ve fallen off a cliff,” said Rick Thoman, a climatologist at the National Weather Service in Alaska, in a tweet.

University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Coming on the heels of the warmest winter in the Arctic since records began, the loss of ice is at once predictable and shocking. The ice disappears every summer but never so early. It’s the latest sign of what scientists have been calling the New Arctic — a novel landscape that’s replacing the ecosystem that has existed at the top of the world for millennia. Arctic temperatures are rising at a rate twice that of the global average, which means that for the foreseeable future, the region will continue to showcase the effects of climate change at their extreme, with repercussions across the world.

For residents of western Alaska, this new record hits home. Waves on the Bering Sea are crashing into their houses and ports with unusual ferocity this spring. Huge ocean storms — commonplace at the far northern reaches of the Pacific — now bring waves the size of five-story apartment buildings.

In late February, an ocean storm ravaged the community of Little Diomede Island, knocking out power and damaging the town’s water treatment plant. The lack of protective sea ice means even storms of average strength hit the town of Shishmaref hard this winter, even as locals there have decided to permanently relocate further inland, away from the encroaching sea.

For native people around the Bering Sea, climate change is already an an existential threat.

“The sea ice loss has disrupted community’s timeframes, schedules, and areas where we normally hunt ice-associated marine mammals,” said Austin Ahmasuk, a community advocate for the Bering Straits Native Association, in an email to Grist.

Hunts for walrus, whales, and seals have historically provided native people in western Alaska with an ample source of food, but warmer weather has threatened catches. In some places, walrus catches have plummeted. Ahmasuk says that few communities have been spared the new reality of an ice-free spring.

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The Bering Sea’s ice has never melted this early before

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Ryan Zinke wants Trump to downsize even more national monuments.

by WalkerFocken Posted on December 6, 2017

Today, the president signed two proclamations drastically cutting land from two federal monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, by 80 percent and 45 percent, respectively.

When President Obama designated Bears Ears a national monument last year, it was a huge victory for five Utah tribes — the Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, Hopi, and the Pueblo of Zuni — who came together in 2015 to push for the preservation of what they estimate are 100,000 cultural and ancestral sites, some dating back to 1300 AD, in the region.

“More than 150 years ago, the federal government removed our ancestors from Bears Ears at gunpoint and sent them on the Long Walk,” Navajo Nation Council Delegate Davis Filfred said in statement. “But we came back.”

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president authority to establish national monuments, largely to thwart looting of archaeological sites. Trump is the first president to shrink a monument in decades.

The five tribes have said they will bring a legal case against the administration — the outcome could redefine the president’s powers to use the Antiquities Act. “We know how to fight and we will fight to defend Bears Ears,” Filfred said.

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Ryan Zinke wants Trump to downsize even more national monuments.

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Let’s check in on some of the brands increasingly running your life.

by SelenaKirsova Posted on December 5, 2017

Today, the president signed two proclamations drastically cutting land from two federal monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, by 80 percent and 45 percent, respectively.

When President Obama designated Bears Ears a national monument last year, it was a huge victory for five Utah tribes — the Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, Hopi, and the Pueblo of Zuni — who came together in 2015 to push for the preservation of what they estimate are 100,000 cultural and ancestral sites, some dating back to 1300 AD, in the region.

“More than 150 years ago, the federal government removed our ancestors from Bears Ears at gunpoint and sent them on the Long Walk,” Navajo Nation Council Delegate Davis Filfred said in statement. “But we came back.”

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president authority to establish national monuments, largely to thwart looting of archaeological sites. Trump is the first president to shrink a monument in decades.

The five tribes have said they will bring a legal case against the administration — the outcome could redefine the president’s powers to use the Antiquities Act. “We know how to fight and we will fight to defend Bears Ears,” Filfred said.

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Let’s check in on some of the brands increasingly running your life.

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Energy Transfer Partners has until April to develop an oil-spill response plan for the Dakota Access Pipeline.

by AmberMsq38 Posted on December 5, 2017

Today, the president signed two proclamations drastically cutting land from two federal monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, by 80 percent and 45 percent, respectively.

When President Obama designated Bears Ears a national monument last year, it was a huge victory for five Utah tribes — the Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, Hopi, and the Pueblo of Zuni — who came together in 2015 to push for the preservation of what they estimate are 100,000 cultural and ancestral sites, some dating back to 1300 AD, in the region.

“More than 150 years ago, the federal government removed our ancestors from Bears Ears at gunpoint and sent them on the Long Walk,” Navajo Nation Council Delegate Davis Filfred said in statement. “But we came back.”

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president authority to establish national monuments, largely to thwart looting of archaeological sites. Trump is the first president to shrink a monument in decades.

The five tribes have said they will bring a legal case against the administration — the outcome could redefine the president’s powers to use the Antiquities Act. “We know how to fight and we will fight to defend Bears Ears,” Filfred said.

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Energy Transfer Partners has until April to develop an oil-spill response plan for the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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Syria is joining the Paris Agreement, leaving the U.S. alone in rejecting it.

by NHFTroymkwprj Posted on November 7, 2017

At a hearing on the federal response to the 2017 hurricane season, New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler questioned the EPA’s decision to declare water drawn from the Dorado Superfund site OK to drink.

In 2016, the agency found that water at Dorado contained solvents that pose serious health risks, including liver damage and cancer. Yet after CNN reported that Hurricane Maria survivors were pulling water from the site’s two wells, the EPA conducted an analysis and found the water fit for consumption.

When Nadler asked Pete Lopez, administrator for Region 2 of the EPA, why his agency changed its position, Lopez responded that the chemicals are present in the water, but are within drinking water tolerance levels.

The EPA’s standards for drinking water are typically higher than international norms, John Mutter, a Columbia University professor and international disaster relief expert, told Grist. Nonetheless, he believes it is unusual for the EPA to declare water safe to drink just one year after naming it a Superfund site.

At the hearing, Nadler said the situation was “eerily similar” to the EPA’s response after 9/11 in New York. One week after the attacks, the agency said the air in the neighborhood was safe to breathe. But since then, 602 people who initially survived the attack have died from cancer or aerodigestive issues like asthma, and thousands more have become sick.

“The [EPA’s] history of making mistakes makes you feel like perhaps they should be challenged,” says Mutter, citing the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan.

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Syria is joining the Paris Agreement, leaving the U.S. alone in rejecting it.

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Harvey’s record rains just triggered Houston dams to overflow

by caringk63 Posted on August 29, 2017

In 1935, a storm swept through Houston, turning parts of the city into a lake. It was a wake-up call to city officials; they needed to get serious about flood control. About a decade later, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finished building two massive reservoirs west and upstream of the city. For the better part of a century, the Addicks and Barker dams have held back water that would have otherwise surged through Buffalo Bayou, the flood-prone waterway that snakes through downtown Houston before dumping into the Ship Channel.

This week, for the second time in as many years, a storm has pushed the Addicks and Barker dams to their limit. Early Monday morning, as Tropical Storm Harvey lingered over Houston and drowned whole swaths of the city, the Army Corps of Engineers began controlled releases from the dams, the first time they’ve done so during a major storm. By Monday afternoon, several neighborhoods near the reservoirs were under voluntary or mandatory evacuation as officials announced that releases from Addicks and Barker would continue for the foreseeable future. By early Tuesday morning, Addicks had topped the dam’s 108-foot spillway, leading to what officials call “uncontrolled releases” from the reservoir. Some homes could be inundated for a month.

Harris County Flood Control District meteorologist Jeff Linder called the releases the least-worst decision officials could make in light of floodwaters that continue to fill the reservoirs faster than they can safely drain. “If you are upstream of the reservoir, the worst is not over,” Linder said at a Monday afternoon press conference, warning that “water is going to be inundating areas that have currently not been inundated.” When someone asked him, via Twitter, whether the dams could break and trigger a Katrina-like disaster, Linder offered a one-word response: “No.”

That assurance comes despite the Corps of Engineers labeling the dams an “extremely high risk of catastrophic failure” after a 2009 storm that saw only a fraction of the rain Harvey poured on Houston this week. Officials insist that the hair-raising label has more to do with the breathtaking consequences of any major dam failure upstream of the country’s fourth-largest city than the actual likelihood of such a breach. In 2012, they detailed how a dam failure during a major storm would cause a multi-billion dollar disaster that turns the city into Waterworld.

Still, the Corps in recent years has implemented only piecemeal fixes to the earthen dams, including a $75 million upgrade that was underway before Harvey hit this weekend. Officials are barely even discussing how to fund a third reservoir that some experts say the region desperately needs.

This is the second year in a row that severe floodwaters have tested Addicks and Barker. Just last year, during 2016’s so-called Tax Day Flood, for the first time, the reservoirs hit and surpassed the level of a 100-year flood. That happened again this weekend, meaning the dams have seen two extremely rare flood events (at least one-in-a-100-year events) in just as many years. Last year was also the first time the National Weather Service ever issued a flood warning for the Addicks and Barker watersheds.

The dams are in some ways emblematic of how flood planning in the Bayou City hasn’t kept up with the region’s booming population and development, even as experts predict that climate change will dump increasingly severe storms on Houston’s doorstep with greater frequency. They were built in a region of water-absorbing prairie grasses that have in recent years been paved over by water-impermeable parking lots, driveways and suburban streets. The Sierra Club even sued the Corps in a failed attempt to stop construction on a nearby stretch of the Grand Parkway, a major toll road project that some opposed fearing it would coax development in an area that’s critical to the region’s flood control efforts.

Still, as the Texas Tribune and ProPublica pointed out in this 2016 investigation, Houston-area flood officials refuse to connect the region’s flooding problems to poorly planned development. As a result, every year people will keep building hundreds, if not thousands, of additional structures in Harris County’s 100-year floodplains, even as those “rare” storms start to hit year after year.

In a Monday press conference, Edmond Russo, an engineer with the Corps’ Galveston district, said officials wanted to keep high water from building up and going over the Addicks and Barker spillways, “because in that case, we do not have control over the water.” He’d hoped releases would stay low enough so that the already overtaxed Buffalo Bayou stays at the same level in the short term. In the long term, officials say it could take one to three months to totally drain the reservoirs.

Of course, that all depends on what happens in the coming days. Updating reporters on the reservoirs’ status Monday evening, Linder said more heavy rainfall or levee breaches upstream could change how fast the dams must release water downstream.

“Our infrastructure is certainly being tested to its limits,” Linder said.

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Harvey’s record rains just triggered Houston dams to overflow

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Hurricane Harvey brings some of the heaviest downpours anyone has ever seen

by MeganCalderone Posted on August 26, 2017

This story has been updated. 

Hurricane Harvey made landfall late Friday night on the Texas coast as one of the most intense hurricanes in U.S. history, spawning as many as 50 tornado warnings in the Houston area alone.

But its worst feature is still unfolding: several days of what could be some of the most intense rainfall this nation has ever recorded, a clear signal of climate change.

After a destructive storm surge washed away homes, and winds as strong as 132 mph blew away roofs and left hundreds of thousands without power, Harvey is expected to stall, drastically worsening the risk of catastrophic inland flooding from relentless rains.

The dire National Weather Service forecast for catastrophic flooding appears to have come true. Overnight, parts of Houston received as much as two feet of rain, causing widespread devastation. Another two feet of rain is on the way, according to the latest forecasts.

Through mid-week, Harvey is expected to move at an exceedingly slow 1 mph, pushing its rainfall forecast off the charts. For the first time in its history, the National Weather Service is forecasting seven-day rainfall totals as high as 40 inches in isolated pockets — equal to what’s normally a year’s worth or rain for coastal Texas.

Some high-resolution models predict even more. (For reference, the estimated 1-in-100-year seven-day rainfall total for the region is just 18 inches.) Meteorologist Ryan Maue estimated that 20 trillion gallons of water will fall on Texas over the next seven days, which is equal to about one-sixth of Lake Erie.

Virtually every river and stream between San Antonio and Houston is expected to experience record or near-record flooding over the next few days. Forecasters racked their brains to recall a scenario so dire anywhere in the world; a 2015 typhoon hitting the Philippines produced a similar amount of rain, but over a much smaller area.

Although the exact impact of global warming on the strength and frequency of hurricanes remains undetermined, there’s a clear climate connection when it comes to higher rainfall. All thunderstorms, including hurricanes, can produce more rain in a warmer atmosphere, which boosts the rate of evaporation and the water-holding capacity of clouds.

Heavy downpours have increased by 167 percent in Houston since the 1950s, and flooding there has been heightened by unfettered development and urban expansion. Some of the worst flooding in the region’s history has come from slow-moving storms like Harvey.

We don’t yet know if climate change will bring more slow-moving, rapidly intensifying tropical storms like Harvey. But flooding is what kills most people in hurricanes, and that will only get worse.

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Hurricane Harvey brings some of the heaviest downpours anyone has ever seen

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A climate research expedition was halted by … climate change.

by TrudiNeubauer Posted on June 13, 2017

There’s been much high-profile gushing over the spaceship-in-Eden–themed campus that Apple spent six years and $5 billion building in Silicon Valley, but it turns out techno-utopias don’t make great neighbors.

“Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general,” writes Adam Rogers at Wired, in an indictment of the company’s approach to transportation, housing, and economics in the Bay Area.

The Ring — well, they can’t call it The Circle — is a solar-powered, passively cooled marvel of engineering, sure. But when it opens, it will house 12,000 Apple employees, 90 percent of whom will be making lengthy commutes to Cupertino and back every day. (San Francisco is 45 miles away.)

To accommodate that, Apple Park features a whopping 9,000 parking spots (presumably the other 3,000 employees will use the private shuttle bus instead). Those 9,000 cars will be an added burden on the region’s traffic problems, as Wired reports, not to mention that whole global carbon pollution thing.

You can read Roger’s full piece here, but the takeaway is simple: With so much money, Apple could have made meaningful improvements to the community — building state-of-the-art mass transit, for example — but chose to make a sparkly, exclusionary statement instead.

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A climate research expedition was halted by … climate change.

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