ISLAMABAD – Flash floods from unusually heavy seasonal rains in Afghanistan have killed more than 300 people and destroyed over 1,000 houses, the U.N. food agency said Saturday.
The World Food Program said it was distributing fortified biscuits to the survivors of one of the many floods that hit Afghanistan over the last few weeks, mostly the northern province of Baghlan, which bore the brunt of the deluges Friday.
In neighboring Takhar province, state-owned media outlets reported the floods killed at least 20 people.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief spokesman for the Taliban government, posted on the social media platform X that “hundreds … have succumbed to these calamitous floods, while a substantial number have sustained injuries.”
Mujahid identified the provinces of Badakhshan, Baghlan, Ghor and Herat as the worst hit. He added that “the extensive devastation” has resulted in “significant financial losses.”
He said the government had ordered all available resources mobilized to rescue people, transport the injured and recover the dead.
The Taliban Defense Ministry said in a statement Saturday that the country’s air force has already begun evacuating people in Baghlan and has rescued a large number of people stuck in flooded areas and transported 100 injured people to military hospitals in the region.
Richard Bennett, U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, said on X that the floods are a stark reminder of Afghanistan’s vulnerability to the climate crisis and both immediate aid and long-term planning by the Taliban and international actors are needed.
Videos posted on social media showed dozens of people gathered Saturday behind the hospital in Baghlan looking for their loved ones. An official tells them that they should go and start digging graves while their staff are busy with preparing bodies for the burial ceremony.
Officials previously said that in April at least 70 people died from heavy rains and flash flooding in the country. About 2,000 homes, three mosques, and four schools were also damaged.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
ISLAMABAD – Flash floods from unusually heavy seasonal rains in Afghanistan have killed more than 300 people and destroyed over 1,000 houses, the U.N. food agency said Saturday.
The World Food Program said it was distributing fortified biscuits to the survivors of one of the many floods that hit Afghanistan over the last few weeks, mostly the northern province of Baghlan, which bore the brunt of the deluges Friday.
In neighboring Takhar province, state-owned media outlets reported the floods killed at least 20 people.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief spokesman for the Taliban government, posted on the social media platform X that “hundreds … have succumbed to these calamitous floods, while a substantial number have sustained injuries.”
Mujahid identified the provinces of Badakhshan, Baghlan, Ghor and Herat as the worst hit. He added that “the extensive devastation” has resulted in “significant financial losses.”
He said the government had ordered all available resources mobilized to rescue people, transport the injured and recover the dead.
The Taliban Defense Ministry said in a statement Saturday that the country’s air force has already begun evacuating people in Baghlan and has rescued a large number of people stuck in flooded areas and transported 100 injured people to military hospitals in the region.
Richard Bennett, U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, said on X that the floods are a stark reminder of Afghanistan’s vulnerability to the climate crisis and both immediate aid and long-term planning by the Taliban and international actors are needed.
Videos posted on social media showed dozens of people gathered Saturday behind the hospital in Baghlan looking for their loved ones. An official tells them that they should go and start digging graves while their staff are busy with preparing bodies for the burial ceremony.
Officials previously said that in April at least 70 people died from heavy rains and flash flooding in the country. About 2,000 homes, three mosques, and four schools were also damaged.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Sam Altman is now chairman of a public company. But it’s not OpenAI.
On Friday, advanced nuclear fission company Oklo started trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which has yet to generate any revenue, went public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called AltC Acquisition Corp., founded and led by Altman.
Under the ticker symbol “OKLO,” shares plummeted 54% on Friday to $8.45, valuing the company at about $364 million. Oklo received roughly $306 million in gross proceeds in the transaction, according to a release.
Oklo’s business model is based on commercializing nuclear fission, the reaction that fuels all nuclear power plants. Instead of conventional reactors, the company aims to use mini nuclear reactors housed in A-frame structures. Its goal is to sell the energy to end users such as the U.S. Air Force and big tech companies.
Oklo is currently working to build its first small-scale reactor in Idaho, which could eventually power the types of data centers that OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies need to run their AI models and services.
Altman is co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which has been valued at over $80 billion by private investors. He’s said that he sees nuclear energy as one of the best ways to solve the problem of growing demand for AI, and the energy that powers the technology, without relying on fossil fuels. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also invested in nuclear plants in recent years.
“I don’t see a way for us to get there without nuclear,” Altman told CNBC in 2023. “I mean, maybe we could get there just with solar and storage. But from my vantage point, I feel like this is the most likely and the best way to get there.”
In an interview with CNBC Thursday, Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte confirmed that the company has yet to generate revenue and has no nuclear plants deployed at the moment. He said the company is targeting 2027 for its first plant to come online.
Going the SPAC route is risky. So-called reverse mergers became popular in the low-interest rate days of 2020 and 2021 when tech valuations were soaring and investors were looking for growth over profit. But the SPAC market collapsed in 2022 alongside rising rates and hasn’t recovered.
AI-related companies, on the other hand, are the new darlings of Wall Street.
“SPACs haven’t exactly had the best performances in the past couple of years, so for us to have sort of the outcome that we’ve had here is obviously a function of the work we put in, but also what we’re building and also the fact that the market sees the opportunity sets here,” said DeWitte, who co-founded the company in 2013. “I think it’s very promising on multiple fronts for [the] nuclear, AI, data center push, as well as the energy transition piece.”
The company has seen its fair share of regulatory setbacks. In 2022, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied Oklo’s application for an Idaho reactor. The company has been working on a new application, which it isn’t aiming to submit to the NRC until early next year, DeWitte said, adding that it’s currently in the “pre-application engagement” stage with the commission.
Altman got involved with Oklo while president of the startup incubator Y Combinator. Oklo went into the program in 2014 after an earlier meeting between Altman and DeWitte. In 2015, Altman invested in the company and became chairman.
It’s not Altman’s only foray into nuclear energy or other infrastructure that could power large-scale AI growth.
In 2021, Altman led a $500 million funding round in clean energy firm Helion, which is working to develop and commercialize nuclear fusion. Helion said in a blog post at the time that the capital would go toward its electricity demonstration generator, Polaris, “which we expect to demonstrate net electricity from fusion in 2024.”
Altman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In recent years, Altman has also poured money into chip endeavors and investments that could help power the AI tools OpenAI builds.
Just before his brief ouster as OpenAI CEO in November, he was reportedly seeking billions of dollars for a chip venture codenamed “Tigris” to eventually compete with Nvidia.
Altman in 2018 invested in AI chip startup Rain Neuromorphics, based near OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters. The next year, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on Rain’s chips. In December, the U.S. compelled a Saudi Aramco-backed venture capital firm to sell its shares in Rain.
DeWitte told CNBC that the data center represents “a pretty exciting opportunity.”
“What we’ve seen is there’s a lot of interest with AI, specifically,” he said. “AI compute needs are significant. It opens the door for a lot of different approaches in terms of how people think about designing and developing AI infrastructure.”
Making your home hurricane resistant can be a significant financial undertaking. But it’s one that has the potential to pay off as such storms become more intense amid climate change.
In 2024, the national average cost to upgrade an entire house with hurricane windows runs between $1,128 and $10,293, or $100 and $500 per window, including installation, according to This Old House. And that’s just one project.
Upgrades could help consumers protect their home, typically one of their most valuable assets, from windstorms and other natural disasters.
About $8.1 billion could be saved annually in physical damages from windstorms if homes had stronger connections between roofs and walls, or tighter nail spacing, according to a 2022 analysis on hurricane-resistant construction by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hurricanes are among the most expensive natural disasters in the U.S., and experts say the storm-related damage is likely to become more significant as storms become more severe.
Some of the projected effects of global warming on hurricane activity include sea level rise increasing coastal flooding, higher rainfall rates and storms that are more intense and strengthen rapidly, according to a research overview from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
“Warmer sea surface temperatures intensify tropical storm wind speeds, giving them the potential to deliver more damage if they make landfall,” notes the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a think tank.
Projections from reinsurer Swiss Re show that since the 1970s, hurricane residential-loss expectations have been on the rise, in part due to an increase in hurricane activity and changes in property value from population growth. Improvements in building standards have offset some of that increase, however.
Scientists anticipate an “extremely active” hurricane season in 2024 due to record-warm tropical and eastern subtropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures, according to hurricane researchers at Colorado State University.
The latest forecast calls for 23 named storms, 11 of which are slated to spiral into hurricanes. Of those, five are expected to reach “major” levels, or category 3, 4 or 5 storms with sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour.
This year, the water temperature across the tropical Atlantic on average are about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.5 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. While it doesn’t sound like much, it’s a big difference, said Phil Klotzbach, a senior research scientist at the Department of Atmospheric Science of Colorado State University.
“The tropical Atlantic right now is record warm,” he said. “That means more fuel for the storms that are trying to form.”
While atmospheric and water conditions may change, it’s wise for residents of storm-prone areas to think about undertaking home projects sooner rather than later.
“Now’s the time to prepare and have a plan in place,” said Klotzbach. “You don’t want to be making these preparations at the last minute.”
Hurricanes are different and unpredictable storms, said Jeff Ostrowski, a housing analyst at Bankrate.
“You don’t know if you’re going to be dealing with storm surge, or high winds or heavy rains. You’re trying to prepare for all those things at once,” he said.
It’s like a balloon that blows up, and when it blows up so much … it pops.
Leslie Chapman-Henderson
president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Federal Alliance for Safe Homes
There are two key elements in your home to help prevent wind-related damage in a hurricane, according to Leslie Chapman-Henderson, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, or FLASH. You want to:
Make sure the structural strength between the roof and the wall can withstand wind pressure and impact of debris.
Protect all the openings in your home: the doors, windows and the garage.
“What we’re working to prevent is pressurization. It’s like a balloon that blows up, and when it blows up so much … it pops,” she said. “That’s what happens to your house when the wind comes in.”
Having an inspector come out to see your house is a good starting point for your projects. They will provide a report of what areas in your home need to be redone or reinforced against harsh weather.
2. Reinforce your roof
The average cost to replace a roof in the U.S. is about $10,000, but the exact cost will depend on multiple factors, like the size of your roof, according to the Department of Energy.
For someone getting ready to re-roof their house, Fortified, a nonprofit organization re-roofing program that helps strengthen homes against severe weather, will offer guidelines on how to make the roof sturdy to withstand challenges in your area, said Jennifer Languell, president and founder of Trifecta Construction Solutions, a sustainable consulting firm in Florida.
“It tells you want you need to do to make your roof more sturdy,” she said.
If you’re not ready to completely re-roof your house, adding caulk or an adhesive to strengthen the soffits of your house (that is, the material connecting the roof edge to the exterior walls) will reduce the probability of wind and water gushing into your attic in a storm, said Chapman-Henderson of FLASH. Repair jobs for the soffit and fascia, a horizontal board usually outside the soffit, can cost between $600 to $6,000, according to Angi.com.
The roof-to-wall connection is another thing to secure in an existing home with an attic. Installing metal clips and straps strengthens the hold-down effect, essentially anchoring your house, she said. While the exact cost will depend on factors like the size of your home and the scale of the project, such retrofitting costs span from $850 to $1,350, according to Kin, a home insurance company.
You can do all this stuff in terms of hardening the house, but you’re still kind of at the mercy of whatever storm comes.
Jeff Ostrowski
housing analyst at Bankrate
3. Secure your windows and doors
“Do you have hurricane-impact windows? If not, can you put them in?” said Melissa Cohn, regional vice president of William Raveis Mortgage.
If installing new hurricane windows aren’t in the budget, shutters are lower-cost options to protect windows and other openings, said Chapman-Henderson.
Different types of shutters vary by material, installation and price. Removable galvanized storm panels made of steel are $5 to $6 per square foot, making them the most affordable option, according to information compiled by FLASH.
It may be worth installing shutters as an extra layer of protection, even with impact-proof windows, said Trifecta Construction Solutions’ Languell.
Meanwhile, garage doors are the “largest and weakest opening,” said Chapman-Henderson. Replacing the entire garage door for a wind-rated or impact-resistant version can span from $2,000 to $9,000, according to FLASH.
Emergency bracings can be a lower-cost solution: temporary 2-by-4 wood braces can reinforce your nonwind-resistant door for approximately $150 for materials and installation. A garage door storm kit can run up to $750, FLASH data found.
“You can do all this stuff in terms of hardening the house, but you’re still kind of at the mercy of whatever storm comes,” said Bankrate’s Ostrowski.
4. Talk to your insurer about possible discounts
Strengthening your home against disasters may help lower your insurance cost.
Insurers typically factor in natural-disaster risks when deciding what properties to underwrite and at what cost. That’s why some are pulling back in high-risk areas, or raising prices significantly.
Insurance costs also tend to be higher for existing homes than newly built ones, because such properties were constructed under less stringent building codes.
Once you have an inspector visit your house and recommend projects to make your home more hurricane resistant, talk to your insurance agent about which of the suggestions are most likely to reduce your premium, Ostrowski said.
Keep in mind that each state is different in terms of what premium reductions are available and to what extent, and it depends on the risks, the company’s exposure and the regulatory environment, said Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute.
Homeowners’ insurance premium rates are based on measurable risk and while mitigation efforts might help reduce the risk, the scientific measurement of catastrophe risk and mitigation efforts is still evolving, she said.
“All analysis of premium pricing related to mitigation efforts is a question of degree of risk, and not removal of risk entirely from the policy,” Worters said.
If the cost to prepare your home against hurricanes is daunting, there may be grants, tax credits and other programs to help lessen the burden.
Some states have set up matching grant programs for disaster retrofits, said Chapman-Henderson.
In Florida, residents may be eligible to apply for matching grants that go up to $10,000 dollar-for-dollar match for approved upgrades like shutters, roofing and strengthening your garage door roof-to-wall connections, she said. There are similar programs in Alabama and Louisiana.
To find out more, homeowners can search for loans, grants or tax credits available in their state through dsireusa.org, which lists all of the funding opportunities and incentives to harden your home against disasters, Languell said.
For people with poor credit or who live in states that don’t have matching-dollar programs, Property Assessed Clean Energy programs allow a homeowner to finance upfront costs of eligible improvements on a property and pay the costs over time through the property tax bill, said Chapman-Henderson.
Energy-efficient mortgages, also referred to as green mortgages, may also be worth exploring. These loans are meant to help homeowners finance eco-friendly home upgrades or outright buy homes that help reduce energy consumption and lower utility bills, although they often have strict loan limits and require additional information during your application, according to LendingTree.
Depending on your hurricane-resistance project, that might be a fit: Sometimes, energy efficiency goes hand-in-hand with durability, Languell said.
“Sealing the underside of your roof sheathing would also help you from an energy standpoint because it’s sealing all the cracks and crevices,” she said, as this repair both keeps your roof on your house and helps avoid water or air leaks.
The same goes with window replacements: “If you are going to replace your windows from a single-pane window to an impact window that has a better energy performance, it’s saving you on energy,” Languell said.
In this new series, CNBC will examine what climate change means for your money, from retirement savings to insurance costs to career outlook.
Has climate change left you with bigger or new bills? Tell us about your experience by emailing annie.nova@nbcuni.com.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom will travel to the Vatican in May to participate in a climate solutions summit, his office said. The trip is planned for May 15 to 17. Newsom will speak at the summit and “advance subnational climate work with a region in Italy.” A Vatican press release about the summit said that mayors and governors “form the core” of transdisciplinary partnerships with researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs, along with science, faith and community leaders. Last year, Newsom spoke alongside world leaders at a United Nations climate summit in New York City. In 2015, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown also traveled to the Vatican to speak about climate change. This story is developing. Stay with KCRA 3 for updates. See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom will travel to the Vatican in May to participate in a climate solutions summit, his office said.
The trip is planned for May 15 to 17. Newsom will speak at the summit and “advance subnational climate work with a region in Italy.”
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You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
New: Gov. Newsom’s office says the governor is heading to the Vatican May 15 – 17th to participate in a climate summit.
His office says he’ll make remarks at the summit and “advance sub national climate work with a region in Italy”
A Vatican press release about the summit said that mayors and governors “form the core” of transdisciplinary partnerships with researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs, along with science, faith and community leaders.
Last year, Newsom spoke alongside world leaders at a United Nations climate summit in New York City.
In 2015, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown also traveled to the Vatican to speak about climate change.
This story is developing. Stay with KCRA 3 for updates.
Demonstrators try to break through the blockade created by police officers to enter the city at Piazzale Roma, opposing the charge for tourists to enter the city on April 25, 2024 in Venice, Italy. Today Venice authorities launched a pilot program charging visitors a 5-euro entry fee in the hope that it will discourage at peak time, making the city more livable for its residents.
Venice isn’t only sinking, it’s shrinking. In the 1970s, there were about 175,000 residents in Centro Storico, the main island and historic center of Venice. As of last year, that number was below 50,000. What has been growing steadily is tourism, which due to economic and quality-of-life pressure, has been pushing out residents. In fact, there are now more tourist beds in Venice than there are residents. Last year, 20 million people visited, winding their way through its two square miles.
Last week, Venice took action on overtourism, introducing a 5€ fee to day trippers who want to access the city. The aim, Venice’s Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said in a press conference, “is not to close the city, but not let it explode.”
The program, officially launched on April 25 — a historically significant day, as it is both Italy’s Liberation Day and the feast day of the city’s patron saint, St. Mark — took the mayor’s words in a direction he hadn’t intended, with roughly a thousand protestors gathered in Piazzale Roma to oppose the measure, ultimately clashing with police in riot gear.
Residents voiced a range of concerns despite the measure being designed in part to help make their city more livable. They objected to the idea of living in a closed city. Some argued that selling tickets reduces their city to an amusement park — Veniceland. There’s also a central irony, critics say, in a government that at the same time is considering multiple ways to increase tourism, from weighing the idea of cruise ships returning to the lagoon to relaxation of limits on Airbnbs.
A once-in-a-lifetime destination for many travelers from around the world, the most important criticism may be that the cost is unlikely to deter anyone from visiting the city.
“Almost the entire city is against it,” Matteo Secchi, leader of a residents’ activist group, told the Guardian. “You can’t impose an entrance fee to a city; all they’re doing is transforming it into a theme park. … I mean, are we joking?”
On the first day of its implementation, according to data from the mayor’s office, 113,000 people registered, and of those 16,000 paid the fee — others were exempt for various reasons, including hotel stays, being a commuter, a student, or visiting family or friends.
Tourists stand in front of Santa Lucia train station in Venice as they wait to pass controls and buy the five-euro ticket to enter the historic city center on April 25, 2024.
Marco Bertorello | Afp | Getty Images
Despite its many detractors, the day fee is a significant move on the part of Venice’s government to confront the challenge of overtourism, which has become a significant global problem since the pandemic. “This administration is the first one after 30 years of chit-chat on putting a brake to tourism growth that has actually done something,” said Antonio Paolo Russo, who was born in Venice and is a professor of urban geography at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain.
But Russo, offering a view representative of many experts, said the measure seems likely to fall short in terms of effectiveness, and smacks of political gestures, as well as obscure profit motives. “5€ won’t make any difference with such a large demand. … the tourist destiny of the city is scripted in the way it is regulated,” he said.
The program is in its experimental phase and has been in its planning stages since 2019. Covid and travel restrictions associated with the pandemic first paused the action, and then accelerated it once travel resumed. “Covid made us realize that what was an everyday occurrence before Covid isn’t acceptable anymore — the mentality has changed, as has the sensitivity [towards crowds],” Simone Venturini, the city councilor for tourism, told CNN in 2023. “Aware of the urgency to find a new balance between the rights of those who live, work and study in Venice, and those who visit the city, we are setting ourselves up as global frontrunners,” he said.
Although plans initially included different fee structures — from higher fees, to sliding scales, to fees charged on more days — and the possibility of raising funds to help offset the cost of spikes in visitors, the current plan will serve only to cover the administrative costs of the program.
Veniceis the first location to require a ticket to enter a city — to make the city itself the attraction — and legal challenges could still be ahead, in national or EU courts, under laws covering freedom of movement in public places. Other popular tourist destinations have similar programs, but limited to locales and attractions within a city, such as Barcelona’s Park Guell.
Charging tourists to enter popular destinations has worked around the world, but only when there is a clear indication of where the money will go, such as environmental preservation, and when the revenue is kept separate from the general government ledger. Belize’s Protected Area Conservation Trust was a pioneering movement 25 years ago which met these criteria, and programs of this type are on the rise. Bali recently introduced a tourist tax to protect the destination’s environment, nature and culture. Barcelona just increased its tourist tax, while Amsterdam recently raised its tourist tax to the highest rate in Europe. The various taxation schemes being applied to tourists are likely to continue to grow around the world.
But Venice is Venice, and it remains singular in conversations surrounding overtourism, owing in part to its small size, its historic nature, its beauty, and, in many ways, the symbolic impact of seeing enormous cruise ships pulling up to it like Godzilla. All of which makes the stakes for the new fee greater, and the hope for its success higher.
Experts say good data is essential to success in combating overtourism. Existing programs — such as those in the Balearic Islands or Amsterdam — collect thorough data for analysis. Russo said this makes him concerned about the Venice program, which was not been matched by published studies leading up to its implementation. “I am not aware of any kind of prior study commissioned by the city to evaluate the effects from the introduction of this system on visitation behavior. They might exist, but the academic and the local community have not been informed,” Russo said.
More taxes, more marketing, more tourists
“One of the biggest concerns is how the money is used and protected,” said Megan Epler Wood, managing director of Cornell’s Sustainable Tourism Asset Management Program. In the case of Venice, the fee won’t deter visitors, but she said that does not mean it isn’t necessary: “There is a real need for these funds,” Epler Wood said. But the majority of tourism taxes goes into tourism marketing, and the more taxes go into marketing, the more tourists come, raising more taxes to pump back into marketing, leading to more tourists still. “The longer that goes on, the harder it becomes to manage those numbers, as we’ve seen in Venice,” Epler Wood said.
Taxation won’t necessarily help if it doesn’t specifically deal with the “invisible burden” of tourists, particularly in vulnerable locations. In Venice, Epler Wood said, that can only be done by having good data on how much each tourist “costs” in impact to the places they visit, including the pressure they put on infrastructure. This is particularly true in Venice, where the presence of cruise ships in recent years and thousands of people disembarking on the small, historic city, has made it a poster child for over-tourism.
“Managing utilities is part of the invisible burden of tourism, because no one accounts for it, and that’s the problem with Venice’s new fee. They’re guessing. They don’t know how much money they need per tourist to combat associated costs,” Epler Wood said.
Lack of initiatives systematically adopted on the demand side leads to overtourism in the high season months to a few internationally renowned cities, places and attractions, and very low demand for the rest, said Max Starkov, a hospitality and technology consultant. If the desire is to curb the number of visitors, then it comes down to applying typical supply/demand algorithms to high seasons and popular destinations via a centralized booking system, much like airlines, and theme parks, already do.
Venice is trying to accomplish something like this with its booking system, Venturini said, from allowing the city to know ahead of time how many people to expect on particular days, to warning visitors that their selected day is particularly high traffic. “We can say, ‘Dear visitor, we don’t advise coming on this date because it’s Ferragosto [August public holiday] or Easter – there’ll be a lot of people so it will hinder you from having a peaceful visit, and if you make it a week later you can enjoy your visit more,’” he told CNN.
The access fee will, at this stage, only apply to certain days during certain periods — 30 days in total, spread across the high travel season — according to the city’s website. On those days, travelers will need to purchase access to the city, and have a QR code to access it.
The city’s statement released in May 2023 when its municipal council voted to enact the order described the objective as “to discourage daily tourism in certain periods, in line with the delicacy and uniqueness of the City.”
“Overtourism is becoming the new normal,” Starkov said. Travel, in his view, has “become figured into people’s sense of basic human needs. After you take care of your physiological needs: food, shelter, clothing, sleep, etc., next comes health, family and … travel.”
Compounded in the aftermath of the pandemic through the phenomenon known as revenge travel, the Venice day-trip fee may become an emblematic symptom of overtourism, rather than solution to it.
“Overtourism is more than simply too much tourism. It’s about a failure of government policy and an inability to regulate and shape the way tourism manifests,” said Joseph Cheer, professor of sustainable tourism at Western Sydney University, Australia, & co-chair of World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Future of Sustainable Tourism.
The Venice fee, he said, arrived at the end of an already troubled process, rather than entering on the demand side to better control it. “Taxes and fees are a blunt instrument based on the premise tourists are price-sensitive. This is problematic when it comes to destinations like Venice that are ‘once in a lifetime’ places to visit,” Cheer said.
A preliminary 79 tornadoes were reported Friday across six states, most occurring in Nebraska and Iowa, where homes were leveled and buildings collapsed.
Omaha, Nebraska, Mayor Jean Stothert said in a Facebook post early Saturday that no deaths had been reported and there were a few minor injuries after a destructive tornado moved through rural farmland before hitting the suburbs.
Omaha police Lt. Neal Bonacci said hundreds of homes were damaged, mostly in the Elkhorn area in the western part of the city.
“You definitely see the path of the tornado,” Bonacci said.
Police and firefighters went door-to-door to help residents and to search areas where people could be trapped, Omaha Fire Chief Kathy Bossman said.
“We’ll be looking throughout properties in debris piles, we’ll be looking in basements, trying to find any victims and make sure everybody is rescued who needs assistance,” Bossman said.
Pat Woods, who lives in Elkhorn, told The Associated Press, that he and his wife took shelter but could hear the tornado “coming through.”
“When we came up, our fence was gone and we looked to the northwest and the whole neighborhood’s gone,” he said.
His wife, Kim Woods, said the neighborhood to the north of them was “pretty flattened.”
Two women help carry a friend’s belongings out of their damaged home after a tornado passed through the area in Bennington, Neb., on Friday.Josh Funk / AP
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds declared a disaster emergency for Pottawattamie County after video posted on social media showed parts of Minden, about 30 miles northeast of Omaha, Nebraska, completely flattened.
Jeff Theulen, the chief deputy of the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office, said at a Friday evening news conference that 40 or 50 homes were “completely destroyed.” There have been two reports of injuries, one “fairly severe but not life-threatening,” he told reporters.
“It’s a very dangerous right now. We’ve shut off entrance to the city except for the people that live here,” he said, noting that “50% of the town is damaged badly and then there’s light damage everywhere else.”
In nearby Shelby County about 40 homes were damaged, said county emergency coordinator Alex Londo. Officials were assessing the destruction, he said, noting there have been no reports of fatalities.
There were also more than 30 damaging wind reports and 60 hail reports Friday afternoon and overnight. National Weather Service offices are surveying the damage ahead of more severe weather expected Saturday.
More than 30 million people in Oklahoma City; Dallas; Wichita, Kansas; Omaha; Milwaukee; and Madison, Wisconsin, are in the path of severe weather.
Northwestern Texas and western Oklahoma are under tornado watches for Saturday, according to The National Weather Service.
“Numerous strong to severe thunderstorms are expected over parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and North Texas today into tonight,” the agency’s Storm Prediction Center said in a Facebook post. “Strong, potentially long-track tornadoes, very large hail, and damaging winds are likely.”
Google.org Announces Six-Figure Funding for Youth-Led Climate Cardinals, Signaling a Shift Among Climate Funders
NEW YORK, April 22, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Climate Cardinals, a youth-led nonprofit focused on breaking language barriers in the climate movement, is proud to announce that it has received significant anchor funding from Google.org. This landmark initiative marks Climate Cardinals as one of the first youth-led organizations supported by Google’s philanthropic arm. The shift underlines the importance of empowering young voices in the global fight against climate challenges.
“Because young people stand to lose the most if we fail to combat climate change, youth-led organizations like Climate Cardinals have to be at the forefront of the fight for climate justice,” explains Sophia Kianni, founder of Climate Cardinals.
“So far, that hasn’t translated into adequate funding,” Vice President Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa adds. “We hope this recognition from Google.org signals a broader understanding of the vital role young activists play and encourages others to redirect more resources towards empowering the next generation of environmental leaders.”
In a world where youth-led climate organizations receive only 0.76% of climate funding, Climate Cardinals has succeeded against the odds. Founded in 2020, the organization educates and empowers a diverse coalition of young people to tackle the climate crisis by translating climate information into more than 100 languages. It has developed a global network of 14,000 student volunteers who dedicate their time to the cause amidst their busy schedules of lectures and exams.
Climate Cardinals is in the midst of broadening its vision, extending its activities beyond its foundational mission of translating climate information to grassroots climate education. The funding from Google.org will help to professionalize the organization and prepare it for future growth.
“We have already used the funding to onboard our first full-time employee,” says Sophia Suganuma, Special Projects Director. “It has also expanded our translation program in partnership with Translators Without Borders, increasing our capacity to an estimated million words per year.”
The funding agreement marks the next chapter in Climate Cardinals’ ongoing partnership with Google. Since 2023, the nonprofit’s volunteers have been using Translation Hub, Google Cloud’s AI-powered self-serve translation platform, which has enabled the team to translate at a much faster pace.
For Google, supporting organizations like Climate Cardinals is part of a broader strategy of empowering organizations with the tools to drive positive action and accelerate innovation to combat climate change.
“Our aim is to ensure that we are diversifying, expanding, and ensuring the overall sustainability of climate solutions, and our funding for Climate Cardinals is a step in that direction,” Google Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt adds.
This Earth Week, Climate Cardinals is gearing up for another year of action — excited to leverage the new funds to expand its roster of employees, keep growing its volunteer base, and sustain itself well into the future.
Caden O’Kellylee, 12, remembers what it was like sitting in his elementary classroom when temperatures hit 90 degrees for hours a day.
“It’s pretty exhausting,” he said, thinking back to his time at Teller Elementary, one of more than 30 schools in Denver Public Schools without air conditioning. “Sometimes it’s hard to think.”
There was a portable AC unit in the window, “but they were very loud and weren’t very fun to listen to.It was just uncomfortable.”
Denver Public Schools has gradually added traditional AC units to most of the schools. This November, voters may decide on air conditioning for the remaining 30 schools.
When O’Kellylee learned about an efficient way to both heat and cool in the same unit, something called a heat pump, he wondered: “Why don’t we have these?”
O’Kellylee is a member of Earth Rangers, the middle school extension of DPS Students for Climate Action, which is comprised mostly of high school students. They are lobbying for climate-conscious heat pumps to be installed in schools that don’t yet have air conditioning. They hope to get this option on the city’s November ballot.
Earth Rangers Oscar Park, Caden O’Kellylee, Calloway Jackson, Halle Jackson (left to right), and DPS Students for Climate Action members Amelia Fernandez and Farah Djama pose for a picture after speaking at the DPS Community Planning and Advisory Committee in support of heat pumps in school buildings on April 9, 2024.
Get the gas out
“It’s more efficient and it uses electricity instead of fossil fuels,” said Earth Ranger and sixth-grader Halle Jackson.
The kids did their research. Earth Rangers knew that focusing on heating and cooling in their schools would have the biggest bang for the buck. Energizing buildings accounts for 84 percent of DPS’s carbon emissions. Forty-one percent comes from heating through natural gas, said Jackson.
They toured DPS’s Evie Dennis multi-school campus in the city’s northeast. It has solar panels and is heated and cooled using geothermal high-efficiency heat pumps. They take the place of natural gas boilers and traditional air conditioners.
Aerial photo of solar panels on the roof of GALS Denver school. Students would like Denver Public Schools to make use of Inflation Reduction Act incentives for more solar panel projects like this one.
Water is pumped into the ground through a set of large pipes and they split into a series of smaller horizontal pipes, kind of like radiant heating in a home. The pipes then either transfer heat to the ground or absorb heat from the ground.
“The pipes switch back and forth and allow heat exchange,” said Adam West, a DPS energy engineer. “So, you’re either pushing heat into the ground or allowing heat to be exchanged in the ground when you’re in cooling mode — or when you’re in heating mode, you’re absorbing heat from the ground and putting it into the buildings.”
Most schools use natural gas heating and traditional AC units. A heat pump is two in one.
Control box for one set of heat pumps at the Evie Dennis campus of DPS schools on April 9, 2024.
“When the district adds AC, it gives us an opportunity to electrify heating,” West said. “Using electricity to heat our schools allows us to power heating with renewable electricity or carbon-free electricity from the grid.”
The cost of installing heat pumps can vary compared to AC units depending on the school system, said West. The district currently has about 20 buildings with some use of heat pumps.
Students are asking that when an HVAC system is updated or if new AC systems are installed, the district uses climate-conscious heat pumps. They say that’s consistent with the DPS Climate Policy and the DPS Climate Action Plan, which came about through student advocacy. The plan has a goal to reduce the district’s overall greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2050 from 2010 levels. One of the key strategies to doing that is eliminating the use of natural gas in DPS buildings.
If you ask any child or youth about climate change, anxiety often comes pouring out. Many of the students in Earth Rangers or DPS Students for Climate Action remember exactly when they realized the depth of the crisis.
At the beginning of the pandemic, O’Kellylee discovered a book in the library on climate change.
“I just couldn’t stop,” he said. “I checked out more and more and more and then I realized the problem that we were creating for ourselves to deal with.”
Listen to the radio version of this story
Amelia Fernandez, 16, said she learned about the climate crisis at age 13.
“I knew I had to do something. I started very small.”
She said climate anxiety among youth is very prevalent.
“We are inheriting a crisis that is threatening our very existence, it’s threatening the existence of all the creatures that we could coexist with.”
DPS Students for Climate Action members Farah Djama and Amelia Fernandez (left to right) advocated for DPS’ climate policy and the DPS Climate Action Plan on April 9, 2024.
Farah Djama, 17, recalls that when she was 15, she had a lot of climate anxiety. A friend advised her to attend an online conference with The Climate Reality Project. Djama eventually joined DPS Students for Climate Action and advocated for the district’s climate plan, one of the strongest in the nation. She said that the plan can inspire students around the country.
“Thinking back to when I wasn’t involved how much anxiety I felt and how powerless I felt. Now I feel a lot more empowered.”
Her school Thomas Jefferson High hasn’t finished installing traditional AC. She remembers sweating and being distracted at the beginning of the school year. She said in the winter, the heating system didn’t work when her friends on the robotics team met on weekends.
“They had to wear parka coats with gloves … that are flammable. And for anyone who works with power tools or electricity, that’s a hazard. Someone could get hurt.”
The students have their sights on heat pumps in all DPS schools. They are starting with a first goal of getting heat pumps for the 30 DPS schools that still need air conditioning.
Will heat pumps for schools go before voters?
One recent Tuesday, students showed up to where any child wants to go on a Tuesday night – a DPS Community Planning and Advisory Committee meeting!
The 72-person committee will decide what goes on a potential bond ballot measure this November.
“Electric buildings are the future and we want Denver to lead the way in making that future a reality for school children everywhere,” sixth-grader Oscar Park told the committee.
Sixth graders Oscar Park (left) and Caden O’Kellylee (right) speak in support of installing heat pumps in 30 school buildings without air conditioning at a DPS CPAC meeting that decides what will go into a proposed bond measure. April 9, 2024.
Amelia Fernandez, 16, encourages the district and bond committee to investigate federal Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for solar and geothermal power on April 9, 2024. She is a member of DPS Students for Climate Action.
A cost analysis found that for 13 of the 30 schools, heat pumps would be cheaper than traditional AC. For eight more schools, it’s still cost-effective but would require the district to tap into another fund for an extra $7 million.
The district has proposed spending $247 million to add AC to 21 of the 30 schools. For the remaining nine, the analysis found it would take another $43 million for construction costs.
Fernandez wants heat pumps in all 30 schools. During the CPAC meeting, she asked the district to consider tapping federal tax credits for solar and geothermal through the Inflation Reduction Act, which could help with upfront costs. If the district waits, “it’s just going to make the climate problem worse.”
But the bond is a flat amount, and DPS has a lot of capital needs districtwide. It’s up to the committee to decide next month how to allocate the money.
“I fully understand where students are coming from with saying, ‘let’s do all 30 schools,’” said the district’s energy engineer West. “Ultimately, funding schools for climate action can’t just be done locally, especially in Colorado.”
He said it would take municipal, state, and federal support. He estimates that changing out160 plus main school buildings with electrified heating will be a multi-decade effort.
Adam West, an energy engineer with Denver Public Schools, stands in the main heat pump room at the Evie Dennis campus in northeast Denver on April 9, 2024. A heat pump either absorbs heat from the or pushes heat into the ground to warm and cool a building. It is much more efficient than a traditional AC system and natural gas boilers and dramatically reduces carbon emissions.
The kids want to see quicker progress
They’re driven to give something back to the Earth instead of destroying it because it gives us so much, said Earth Ranger Park.
“It gives us somewhere to live, it gives us food, it gives us us,” he said. “Without it, we wouldn’t exist.”
Right now, they’re focused on getting more youth involved in the bond measure, one cog in the biggest issue of their lifetimes. They’re hoping to grow Earth Rangers (they have fun cheers like the “colossal squids,” one where they yell “chomp chomp!”) to tackle more issues like getting climate and renewable energy issues into the curriculum.
Along with the DPS Students for Climate Action, they are helping host a Climate Summit on Friday, April 19, at East High School from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. All students and community members are invited. It will focus on how students can contribute to climate actions and build leadership and advocacy skills. The keynote speaker is Madhvi Chittoor, 13, the youngest UN child advisor and founder of Madhvi4EcoEthics and the EcoEthics Global Movement.
“If you are a youth right now experiencing eco-anxiety, worrying about the present and the future, you have to know that the only antidote is action,” said Fernandez. “There’s no point in wallowing in your own despair.”
The Northeast Early College 309-kilowatt solar array is a parking lot canopy that also serves as a power station to help reduce utility costs for local families. Students are advocating for more projects like this one to reduce the district’s carbon emissions.
Climate change will reduce future global income by about 19% in the next 25 years compared to a fictional world that’s not warming, with the poorest areas and those least responsible for heating the atmosphere taking the biggest monetary hit, a new study said.
Climate change’s economic bite in how much people make is already locked in at about $38 trillion a year by 2049, according to Wednesday’s study in the journal Nature by researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. By 2100 the financial cost could hit twice what previous studies estimate.
“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany and the U.S., with a projected median income reduction of 11% each and France with 13%,” said study co-author Leonie Wenz, a climate scientist and economist.
These damages are compared to a baseline of no climate change and are then applied against overall expected global growth in gross domestic product, said study lead author Max Kotz, a climate scientist. So while it’s 19% globally less than it could have been with no climate change, in most places, income will still grow, just not as much because of warmer temperatures.
For the past dozen years, scientists and others have been focusing on extreme weather such as heat waves, floods, droughts, storms as the having the biggest climate impact. But when it comes to financial hit the researchers found “the overall impacts are still mainly driven by average warming, overall temperature increases,” Kotz said. It harms crops and hinders labor production, he said.
In the United States, the southeastern and southwestern states get economically pinched more than the northern ones with parts of Arizona and New Mexico taking the biggest monetary hit, according to the study. In Europe, southern regions, including parts of Spain and Italy, get hit harder than places like Denmark or northern Germany.
Only Arctic adjacent areas — Canada, Russia, Norway, Finland and Sweden — benefit, Kotz said.
It also means countries which have historically produced fewer greenhouse gas emissions per person and are least able to financially adapt to warming weather are getting the biggest financial harms too, Kotz said.
The world’s poorest countries will suffer 61% bigger income loss than the richest ones, the study calculated.
“It underlies some of the injustice elements of climate,” Kotz said.
This new study looked deeper than past research, examining 1,600 global areas that are smaller than countries, took several climate factors into account and examined how long climate economic shocks last, Kotz said. The study examined past economic impacts on average global domestic product per person and uses computer simulations to look into the future to come up with their detailed calculations.
The study shows that the economic harms over the next 25 years are locked in with emission cuts producing only small changes in the income reduction. But in the second half of this century that’s when two different possible futures are simulated, showing that cutting carbon emissions now really pays off because of how the heat-trapping gases accumulate, Kotz said.
If the world could curb carbon pollution and get down to a trend that limits warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, which is the upper limit of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, then the financial hit will stay around 20% in global income, Kotz said. But if emissions increase in a worst case scenario, the financial wallop will be closer to 60%, he said.
That shows that the public shouldn’t think it’s a financial “doomsday” and nothing can be done, Kotz said.
Still, it’s worse than a 2015 study that predicted a worst case income hit of about 25% by the end of the century.
Marshall Burke, the Stanford University climate economist who wrote the 2015 study, said this new research’s finding that the economic damage ahead is locked in and large “makes a lot of sense.”
Burke, who wasn’t part of this study, said he has some issues with some of the technical calculations “so I wouldn’t put a ton of weight on their specific numerical estimates, but I think the big picture is basically right.”
The conclusions are on the high end compared to other recent studies, but since climate change goes for a long time and economic damage from higher temperatures keep compounding, they “add up to very large numbers,” said University of California Davis economist and environmental studies professor Frances Moore, who wasn’t part of the study. That’s why fighting climate change clearly passes economists’ tests of costs versus benefits, she said.
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Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The Biden administration on Wednesday finalized strict limits on certain so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water that will require utilities to reduce them to the lowest level they can be reliably measured. Officials say this will reduce exposure for 100 million people and help prevent thousands of illnesses, including cancers.
The rule is the first national drinking water limit on toxic PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are widespread and long-lasting in the environment.
Health advocates praised the Environmental Protection Agency for not backing away from tough limits the agency proposed last year. But water utilities took issue with the rule, saying treatment systems are expensive to install and that customers will end up paying more for water.
Water providers are entering a new era with significant additional health standards that the EPA says will make tap water safer for millions of consumers — a Biden administration priority. The agency has also proposed forcing utilities to remove dangerous lead pipes.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan says the rule is the most important action the EPA has ever taken on PFAS.
“The result is a comprehensive and life-changing rule, one that will improve the health and vitality of so many communities across our country,” said Regan.
PFAS chemicals are hazardous because they don’t degrade in the environment and are linked to health issues such as low birth weight and liver disease, along with certain cancers. The EPA estimates the rule will cost about $1.5 billion to implement each year, but doing so will prevent nearly 10,000 deaths over decades and significantly reduce serious illnesses.
They’ve been used in everyday products including nonstick pans, firefighting foam and waterproof clothing. Although some of the most common types are phased out in the U.S., others remain. Water providers will now be forced to remove contamination put in the environment by other industries.
“It’s that accumulation that’s the problem,” said Scott Belcher, a North Carolina State University professor who researches PFAS toxicity. “Even tiny, tiny, tiny amounts each time you take a drink of water over your lifetime is going to keep adding up, leading to the health effects.”
PFAS is a broad family of chemical substances, and the new rule sets strict limits on two common types — called PFOA and PFOS — at 4 parts per trillion. Three other types that include GenEx Chemicals that are a major problem in North Carolina are limited to 10 parts per trillion. Water providers will have to test for these PFAS chemicals and tell the public when levels are too high. Combinations of some PFAS types will be limited, too.
Regan will announce the rule in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Wednesday.
Environmental and health advocates praised the rule, but said PFAS manufacturers knew decades ago the substances were dangerous yet hid or downplayed the evidence. Limits should have come sooner, they argue.
“Reducing PFAS in our drinking water is the most cost effective way to reduce our exposure,” said Scott Faber, a food and water expert at Environmental Working Group. “It’s much more challenging to reduce other exposures such as PFAS in food or clothing or carpets.”
Over the last year, EPA has periodically released batches of utility test results for PFAS in drinking water. Roughly 16% of utilities found at least one of the two strictly limited PFAS chemicals at or above the new limits. These utilities serve tens of millions of people. The Biden administration, however, expects about 6-10% of water systems to exceed the new limits.
Water providers will generally have three years to do testing. If those test exceed the limits, they’ll have two more years to install treatment systems, according to EPA officials.
Some funds are available to help utilities. Manufacturer 3M recently agreed to pay more than $10 billion to drinking water providers to settle PFAS litigation. And the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes billions to combat the substance. But utilities say more will be needed.
For some communities, tests results were a surprise. Last June, a utility outside Philadelphia that serves nearly 9,000 people learned that one of its wells had a PFOA level of 235 parts per trillion, among the highest results in the country at the time.
“I mean, obviously, it was a shock,” said Joseph Hastings, director of the joint public works department for the Collegeville and Trappe boroughs, whose job includes solving problems presented by new regulations.
The well was quickly yanked offline, but Hastings still doesn’t know the contamination source. Several other wells were above the EPA’s new limits, but lower than those the state of Pennsylvania set earlier. Now, Hastings says installing treatment systems could be a multi-million dollar endeavor, a major expense for a small customer base.
The new regulation is “going to throw public confidence in drinking water into chaos,” said Mike McGill, president of WaterPIO, a water industry communications firm.
The American Water Works Association, an industry group, says it supports the development of PFAS limits in drinking water, but argues the EPA’s rule has big problems.
The agency underestimated its high cost, which can’t be justified for communities with low levels of PFAS, and it’ll raise customer water bills, the association said. Plus, there aren’t enough experts and workers — and supplies of filtration material are limited.
Work in some places has started. The company Veolia operates utilities serving about 2.3 million people across six eastern states and manages water systems for millions more. Veolia built PFAS treatment for small water systems that serve about 150,000 people. The company expects, however, that roughly 50 more sites will need treatment — and it’s working to scale up efforts to reduce PFAS in larger communities it serves.
Such efforts followed dramatic shifts in EPA’s health guidance for PFAS in recent years as more research into its health harms emerged. Less than a decade ago, EPA issued a health advisory that PFOA and PFOS levels combined shouldn’t exceed 70 parts per trillion. Now, the agency says no amount is safe.
Public alarm has increased, too. In Minnesota, for example, Amara’s Law aims to stop avoidable PFAS use. It’s been nearly a year since the law’s namesake, Amara Strande, died from a rare cancer her family blames on PFAS contamination by 3M near her high school in Oakdale, although a connection between PFAS and her cancer can’t be proven. Biden administration officials say communities shouldn’t suffer like Oakdale. 3M says it extends its deepest condolences to Amara’s friends and family.
Losing Amara pushed the family towards activism. They’ve testified multiple times in favor of PFAS restrictions.
“Four parts per trillion, we couldn’t ask for a better standard,” Amara’s sister Nora said. “It’s a very ambitious goal, but anything higher than that is endangering lives.”
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Associated Press data journalist Camille Fassett in San Francisco and reporter Matthew Daly in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.
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The NJDEP held a press conference on Tuesday morning to discuss updates and safety tips during the current wildfire season.
Last year was the most active fire year in more than a decade for N.J., with nearly 1,200 wildfires.
As of this January, almost 220 wildfires have occurred burning a total of about 170 acres.
New Jersey authorities are warning residents of the potential risks and preparation steps as the state enters peak wildfire season this month.
Last year was the most active fire year in more than a decade for the Garden State, with nearly 1,200 wildfires burning over 18,000 acres statewide, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP).
Fourteen of the fires were considered major, with the most damaging one spanning over 3,400 acres in Ocean County — forcing 170 evacuations.
The NJDEP held a press conference Tuesday morning to discuss updates on the 2024 wildfire season, as the forest fire service teams provided the latest statistics and new tracking tools.
“New Jersey has some of the most volatile wildland fuels in the country,” said William Donnelly, New Jersey Forest Fire Service Chief, who continued to note the fires by the numbers.
Since January 2024, almost 220 wildfires have occurred, burning a total of about 170 acres. In comparison, during the same time in 2023, the state had already reached over 350 fires with 970 acres burned.
In 2021, from Jan. 1 to April 8, New Jersey had over 360 wildfires burning a total of 500 acres.
This year, the state has executed more than 14,200 prescribed burns, or pre-planned and purposefully set fires to remove underbrush and organic material that could act as brush fire fuel.
The team brought up wildfire prevention tips for residents to be mindful of during the season, such as properly discarding cigarettes and other smoking materials, as well as not leaving campfires unattended.
“Protecting your home and other structures from wildland by creating defensible space, basically, space around your home that in the event of wildfire impinges on it, our folks [NJDEP] have room to work to get in between the fire and prevent any damage to improve the property,” Donnelly said.
Low humidity, high winds and temperatures are perfect conditions for a brush fire to spread.
Gregory McLaughlin is the administrator for NJDEP, Forests and Natural Lands, and announced a new online platform called the Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal where land managers, town officials and residents can check their exact location for fire risk.
Testing done by ADEM, Butler said, also did not assess water samples taken from sites closest to the dump. And while PFAS compounds are certainly common, he said, experts have concluded that elevated levels in the human body can be a warranted health concern.
At this month’s meeting, many residents agreed with Butler, expressing a lack of confidence that ADEM—or any government officials—are looking out for residents in and around the Moody site.
Courtesy of Lee Hedgepeth/Inside Climate News
Jeff Wickliffe, chair of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, told those gathered that he believes more data is needed to fully understand what impacts the site could have had on those living nearby.
Because there are no natural sources of forever chemicals, Wickliffe said, it’s difficult to believe claims that only vegetative material was burned at the site given the levels present in the water. Other waste was likely present, he argued, in order to produce the levels of PFAS compounds present in discharge from the Moody site.
Questions around the source of PFAS in residents’ blood, if present, can be addressed by taking background measurements of individuals who weren’t exposed to the impacts of the fire and resulting pollution, for example, Wickliffe said.
Testing residents’ blood or urine for the presence of such compounds, then, may allow locals to document at least one avenue of potential impacts from the Moody site on their health, he said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), increases in exposure to PFAS compounds can increase cholesterol, decrease birth weight, lower antibody responses to vaccines, and increase risks of pregnancy-induced hypertension, preeclampsia, and kidney and testicular cancer.
The risk of health impacts from PFAS is determined by exposure factors like dose, frequency, and duration, as well as individual factors like sensitivity or disease burden, according to the federal agency.
NEW YORK – An earthquake centered between New York and Philadelphia shook skyscrapers and suburbs across the northeastern U.S. for several seconds Friday morning, causing no major damage but startling millions of people in an area unaccustomed to such tremors.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported a quake at 10:23 a.m. with a preliminary magnitude of 4.8, centered near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, or about 45 miles (72 kilometers) west of New York City and 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Philadelphia. The agency’s figures indicated that over 42 million people might have felt the rumbling.
People from Baltimore to the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border reported feeling the ground shake. While there were no immediate reports of serious damage, officials were checking bridges and other major infrastructure, Amtrak slowed trains throughout the busy Northeast Corridor, and a Philadelphia-area commuter rail line suspended service out of what it said was “an abundance of caution.”
Pictures and decorative plates tumbled off the wall in Christiann Thompson’s house in Whitehouse Station, she said. Thompson was volunteering at the local library when the quake hit, leaving few effects, but she got a report from her husband on the scene at home.
“The dogs lost their minds and got very terrified and ran around,” she said.
It was “pretty weird and scary” for Shawn Clark, who felt the quake in his 26th-floor midtown Manhattan office. Clark, an attorney, initially feared an explosion or construction accident. His colleague Finn Dusenbery worried the ceiling or even the building would collapse.
The earthquake slowed travel along the East Coast, with some flights diverted and traffic snarled on roads and rails for runway, bridge, and tunnel inspections. Flights to the Newark, New York and Baltimore airports were held at their origins for a time while officials inspected runways for cracks. At least five flights en route to Newark were diverted and landed at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pennsylvania, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.
Among the affected travelers: Seton Hall University’s men’s basketball team, which was stuck in Indianapolis, where it won the National Invitational Tournament on Thursday. The team said its flight to Newark was being held because of the earthquake-related ground stop, likely delaying a welcome-home celebration scheduled for Friday afternoon on Seton Hall’s campus in South Orange, New Jersey.
Traffic through the Holland Tunnel between Jersey City, New Jersey, and lower Manhattan was stopped for about 10 minutes for inspections, the Port Authority of New York and Jersey said.
In midtown Manhattan, motorists blared their horns on shuddering streets. Some Brooklyn residents heard a boom and felt their building shaking. Cellphone circuits were overloaded for a time as people tried to reach loved ones and figure out what was going on.
At U.N. headquarters in New York, the shaking interrupted the chief executive of Save The Children, Janti Soeripto, as she briefed an emergency Security Council session on the threat of famine in Gaza and the Israeli drone strikes that killed aid workers there.
“Is it an earthquake?” Soeripto wondered aloud, then asked if it was all right to go ahead. She did, but soon diplomats’ phones blared with earthquake alerts.
In New York City’s Astoria neighborhood, Cassondra Kurtz was giving her 14-year-old Chihuahua, Chiki, a cocoa-butter rubdown for her dry skin. Kurtz was recording the moment on video when her apartment started shaking hard enough that a large mirror banged audibly against a wall.
Kurtz assumed at first it was a big truck going by. The video captured her looking around, perplexed. Chiki, however, “was completely unbothered.”
Earthquakes are less common on the eastern than western edges of the U.S. because the East Coast does not lie on a boundary of tectonic plates. The biggest Eastern quakes usually occur along the mid-Atlantic Ridge, which extends through Iceland and the Atlantic Ocean.
Quakes on the East Coast can still pack a punch, as its rocks are better than their western counterparts at spreading earthquake energy across long distances.
“If we had the same magnitude quake in California, it probably wouldn’t be felt nearly as far away,” said USGS geophysicist Paul Caruso.
A 4.8-magnitude quake isn’t large enough to cause damage, except for some minor effects near the epicenter, the agency posted on X.
Robert Thorson, a University of Connecticut earth sciences professor, said the quake resulted from the constant compression of the earth’s hard, brittle crust in New Jersey.
“It’s like having a big block of ice in a vise, and you are just slowly cranking up the vise,” he said. Eventually, you’re going to get some crackling on it.”
Friday’s quake was felt as far as Vermont and New Hampshire, where some residents initially figured it was snow falling off their roofs or plow trucks rumbling by.
Stacy Santa Cruz, a paralegal, watched her computer screen shake at her office in Hartford, Connecticut.
“I kind of was taken aback, but then I kind of processed that it might have been an earthquake,” she said, noting that she’d experienced a significant quake in her native Peru.
Earthquakes with magnitudes near or above 5 struck near New York City in 1737, 1783 and 1884, the USGS said. And Friday’s stirred memories of the Aug. 23, 2011, earthquake that jolted tens of millions of people from Georgia to Canada. With an epicenter in Virginia, it left cracks in the Washington Monument and rattled New Yorkers ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Registering magnitude 5.8, it was the strongest earthquake to hit the East Coast since World War II.
On Friday, President Joe Biden said he had had spoken to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy about the earthquake. The White House said the administration would provide help if needed to state and local officials.
As of noon, New York City had no indications of major safety or infrastructure problems from the earthquake, said Mayor Eric Adams, who said he didn’t feel the quake himself. City Buildings Commissioner James Oddo said officials would watch out for any delayed cracks or other effects on the Big Apple’s 1.1 million buildings.
A Chinatown art gallery owner, Kristen Thomas, worried for the fate of a sculpture that features five real eggs poised on a candelabra-like base. But the piece, by Carlos Estévez, was unbroken.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the quake was felt throughout the state, but officials had no reports of any life-threatening problems.
Solomon Byron felt it as he sat on a park bench in Manhattan’s East Village.
“I was just like, ‘Where is that vibration coming from?’” Byron recalled. He was especially puzzled since there were no subways running nearby.
But he didn’t realize there had been an earthquake until he got the alert on his cellphone.
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Catalini reported from Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Associated Press journalists around the country contributed to this report, including Jake Offenhartz, Bobby Caina Calvan, Michael R. Sisak and Karen Matthews in New York City, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Seth Borenstein in Washington, Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut, and Pat Eaton-Robb in Storrs, Connecticut.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
FRYEBURG, Maine – A major spring storm was expected to drop more than a foot of snow in parts of New England on Wednesday night, while heavy rains soaked the East Coast and cleanup work continued in several states wracked by tornadoes and other severe weather blamed for at least two deaths.
The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for several states in New England, where 7 to 18 inches (18 to 46 centimeters) of snow were expected with some local amounts topping 24 inches (61 centimeters) at higher elevations. Parts of New Hampshire and Maine were expected to see the highest amounts.
A mix of rain and snow was falling throughout the region by early evening and was expected through Thursday night in many areas.
“It is now a rain/snow mix at the office, and we have received our first trace of snow for the storm ahead,” the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine, said Wednesday night via X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “It won’t be long before our ground turns white!”
Maine officials warned the storm was expected to cause difficult travel conditions, power outages and minor coastal flooding.
“Travel is discouraged during this storm due to unfavorable driving conditions,” Pete Rogers, director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said in a statement. “Folks need to be prepared at home for the possibility of an extended power outage with emergency supplies, alternate power sources, and should charge their mobile devices in advance.”
In New Hampshire, the U.S. Forest Service issued an avalanche watch through Friday afternoon for parts of the White Mountains including Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast at 6,288 feet (1,917 meters). The service warned backcountry hikers and skiers of the possibility that 30 inches (76 centimeters) of snow or more could fall in higher elevations and create dangerous avalanche conditions.
School districts and government offices throughout both states announced Thursday closures because of the storm.
Coastal flood warnings and watches were in effect in many areas stretching from Maine to Long Island, N.Y., while wind gusts of up to 60 mph (about 97 kph) were expected in eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and coastal Connecticut. Heavy rains and severe thunderstorms were also expected to impact the Mid-Atlantic states and Florida.
Forecasters said heavy, wet snow would persist across Wisconsin and Upper Michigan into Thursday, with 6 to 10 inches (15 to 20 centimeters) overall possible in far-northern Wisconsin and 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimeters) in Madison, but just a trace in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, residents in some of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula had already seen several inches of snow, with overall accumulations of 2 feet (0.6 meters) or more expected.
The severe weather comes a day after thousands of homes and businesses were left without power after strong storms roared through several states across the nation.
Storms in northeastern Oklahoma on Tuesday unleashed three suspected tornadoes and dumped heavy rain that was blamed for the death of a 46-year-old homeless woman in Tulsa who was sheltering inside a drainage pipe.
In Kentucky, storms that spawned at least five tornadoes led to one death and widespread damage in several counties, Gov. Andy Beshear said Wednesday afternoon.
The weather-related death came from a traffic crash in Campbell County, Beshear said. No other major injuries were reported, he said.
Tornadoes touched down in Nelson, Anderson and Jessamine counties and the city of Prospect on Tuesday, according to the weather service.
Along with the confirmed tornadoes, Beshear said surveyors were looking at damage in four other counties to determine whether tornadoes were spawned there. More than a dozen additional counties reported damage from the storms, he said.
“We will get through this, and we’ll get through it together,” he said. “So many are hurting right now, and we want you to know we will be there for you.”
In Rockdale County, Georgia, crews planned to survey damage to determine whether a tornado touched down during the overnight hours, according to the weather service.
“My living room has been impaled by a tree,” Carolyn Gillman told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Gillman said she rode out the storm in her bathroom and then heard rain coming into her house east of Atlanta.
“I just knew that that big ‘whoosh’ that I heard, that big crash I heard, was the tree coming through,” Gillman told the newspaper.
An EF-1 tornado also touched down in the northeast Tennessee town of Sunbright on Tuesday, according to the weather service.
The tornado’s path was about 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers), and it was 150 yards (137 meters) wide, the weather service added. The twister damaged numerous residential and commercial structures, in addition to barns and hardwood trees, in the city of about 500 people. No injuries or deaths were reported.
Sunbright Mayor Karen Melton told the Knoxville News Sentinel that she drove downtown once the tornado had passed, and she found a family there.
“We had a young mother and father holding their babies, an infant and a 4-year-old ,(when) the tornado ripped the roof of their apartment. … It was just horrific and sad,” Melton said. “But they were safe, she had some scratches, but the babies were safe.”
In West Virginia, more than 103,000 homes and businesses remained without power on Wednesday, mostly in the southern part of the state, according to poweroutage.us. Some Appalachian Power customers may not get their service back until Thursday night, the utility said.
Schools were closed in eight of West Virginia’s 55 counties Wednesday, and a state of emergency declared Tuesday by Gov. Jim Justice remained in place for several counties. Moderate flooding was forecast on the Ohio River, which was expected to crest nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) above flood stage Thursday at Wheeling.
In Crisp County, Georgia, roads were closed as emergency workers assessed damage to multiple homes and buildings after a storm early Wednesday morning, authorities said.
Photos shared by the sheriff’s office showed large trees atop one home and power lines draped across yards and roads. Residents were advised to limit travel due to the damage and possible gas leaks.
“We’ve been in there all morning surveying the damage, trying to make sure everybody in the homes are OK,” Crisp County Sheriff Billy Hancock said via Facebook.
Crisp County is about 140 miles (225 kilometers) south of Atlanta.
Between 2 and 3 1/2 inches (5.1 and 8.9 centimeters) of rain fell in western Pennsylvania since late Monday night led to flooding, and several homeless encampments along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail in Pittsburgh were abandoned due to flood concerns.
Several counties in northeastern Ohio also saw minor to moderate flooding after three days of nearly continuous rain. Flood watches and warnings remained in effect, though conditions were expected to improve by Wednesday night.
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Associated Press writers Rebecca Reynolds in Louisville, Kentucky, Dave Collins in Hartford, Conn., John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia, Jeff Martin in Atlanta, Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, and Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
FRYEBURG, Maine – A major spring storm was expected to drop more than a foot of snow in parts of New England on Wednesday night, while heavy rains soaked the East Coast and cleanup work continued in several states wracked by tornadoes and other severe weather blamed for at least two deaths.
The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for several states in New England, where 7 to 18 inches (18 to 46 centimeters) of snow were expected with some local amounts topping 24 inches (61 centimeters) at higher elevations. Parts of New Hampshire and Maine were expected to see the highest amounts.
A mix of rain and snow was falling throughout the region by early evening and was expected through Thursday night in many areas.
“It is now a rain/snow mix at the office, and we have received our first trace of snow for the storm ahead,” the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine, said Wednesday night via X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “It won’t be long before our ground turns white!”
Maine officials warned the storm was expected to cause difficult travel conditions, power outages and minor coastal flooding.
“Travel is discouraged during this storm due to unfavorable driving conditions,” Pete Rogers, director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said in a statement. “Folks need to be prepared at home for the possibility of an extended power outage with emergency supplies, alternate power sources, and should charge their mobile devices in advance.”
In New Hampshire, the U.S. Forest Service issued an avalanche watch through Friday afternoon for parts of the White Mountains including Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast at 6,288 feet (1,917 meters). The service warned backcountry hikers and skiers of the possibility that 30 inches (76 centimeters) of snow or more could fall in higher elevations and create dangerous avalanche conditions.
School districts and government offices throughout both states announced Thursday closures because of the storm.
Coastal flood warnings and watches were in effect in many areas stretching from Maine to Long Island, N.Y., while wind gusts of up to 60 mph (about 97 kph) were expected in eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and coastal Connecticut. Heavy rains and severe thunderstorms were also expected to impact the Mid-Atlantic states and Florida.
Forecasters said heavy, wet snow would persist across Wisconsin and Upper Michigan into Thursday, with 6 to 10 inches (15 to 20 centimeters) overall possible in far-northern Wisconsin and 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimeters) in Madison, but just a trace in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, residents in some of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula had already seen several inches of snow, with overall accumulations of 2 feet (0.6 meters) or more expected.
The severe weather comes a day after thousands of homes and businesses were left without power after strong storms roared through several states across the nation.
Storms in northeastern Oklahoma on Tuesday unleashed three suspected tornadoes and dumped heavy rain that was blamed for the death of a 46-year-old homeless woman in Tulsa who was sheltering inside a drainage pipe.
In Kentucky, storms that spawned at least five tornadoes led to one death and widespread damage in several counties, Gov. Andy Beshear said Wednesday afternoon.
The weather-related death came from a traffic crash in Campbell County, Beshear said. No other major injuries were reported, he said.
Tornadoes touched down in Nelson, Anderson and Jessamine counties and the city of Prospect on Tuesday, according to the weather service.
Along with the confirmed tornadoes, Beshear said surveyors were looking at damage in four other counties to determine whether tornadoes were spawned there. More than a dozen additional counties reported damage from the storms, he said.
“We will get through this, and we’ll get through it together,” he said. “So many are hurting right now, and we want you to know we will be there for you.”
In Rockdale County, Georgia, crews planned to survey damage to determine whether a tornado touched down during the overnight hours, according to the weather service.
“My living room has been impaled by a tree,” Carolyn Gillman told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Gillman said she rode out the storm in her bathroom and then heard rain coming into her house east of Atlanta.
“I just knew that that big ‘whoosh’ that I heard, that big crash I heard, was the tree coming through,” Gillman told the newspaper.
An EF-1 tornado also touched down in the northeast Tennessee town of Sunbright on Tuesday, according to the weather service.
The tornado’s path was about 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers), and it was 150 yards (137 meters) wide, the weather service added. The twister damaged numerous residential and commercial structures, in addition to barns and hardwood trees, in the city of about 500 people. No injuries or deaths were reported.
Sunbright Mayor Karen Melton told the Knoxville News Sentinel that she drove downtown once the tornado had passed, and she found a family there.
“We had a young mother and father holding their babies, an infant and a 4-year-old ,(when) the tornado ripped the roof of their apartment. … It was just horrific and sad,” Melton said. “But they were safe, she had some scratches, but the babies were safe.”
In West Virginia, more than 103,000 homes and businesses remained without power on Wednesday, mostly in the southern part of the state, according to poweroutage.us. Some Appalachian Power customers may not get their service back until Thursday night, the utility said.
Schools were closed in eight of West Virginia’s 55 counties Wednesday, and a state of emergency declared Tuesday by Gov. Jim Justice remained in place for several counties. Moderate flooding was forecast on the Ohio River, which was expected to crest nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) above flood stage Thursday at Wheeling.
In Crisp County, Georgia, roads were closed as emergency workers assessed damage to multiple homes and buildings after a storm early Wednesday morning, authorities said.
Photos shared by the sheriff’s office showed large trees atop one home and power lines draped across yards and roads. Residents were advised to limit travel due to the damage and possible gas leaks.
“We’ve been in there all morning surveying the damage, trying to make sure everybody in the homes are OK,” Crisp County Sheriff Billy Hancock said via Facebook.
Crisp County is about 140 miles (225 kilometers) south of Atlanta.
Between 2 and 3 1/2 inches (5.1 and 8.9 centimeters) of rain fell in western Pennsylvania since late Monday night led to flooding, and several homeless encampments along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail in Pittsburgh were abandoned due to flood concerns.
Several counties in northeastern Ohio also saw minor to moderate flooding after three days of nearly continuous rain. Flood watches and warnings remained in effect, though conditions were expected to improve by Wednesday night.
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Associated Press writers Rebecca Reynolds in Louisville, Kentucky, Dave Collins in Hartford, Conn., John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia, Jeff Martin in Atlanta, Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, and Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
GOTHIC — Four miles from the nearest plowed road high in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, a 73-year-old man with a billowing gray beard and two replaced hips trudged through his front yard to measure fresh snow that fell during one mid-March day.
Billy Barr first began recording snow and weather data more than 50 years ago as a freshly minted Rutgers University environmental science graduate in Gothic, near part of the Colorado River’s headwaters.
Bored and looking to keep busy, he had rigged rudimentary equipment and each day had jotted the inches of fresh snow, just as he had logged gas station brands as a child on family road trips.
Unpaid but driven by compulsive curiosity and a preference for spending more than half the year on skis rather than on foot, Barr stayed here and kept measuring snowfall day after day, winter after winter.
His faithful measurements revealed something he never expected long ago: snow is arriving later and disappearing earlier as the world warms. That’s a concerning sign for millions of people in the drought-stricken Southwest who rely on mountain snowpack to slowly melt throughout spring and summer to provide a steady stream of water for cities, agriculture and ecosystems.
“Snow is a physical form of a water reservoir, and if there’s not enough of it, it’s gone,” Barr said.
So-called “citizen scientists” have long played roles in making observations about plants and counting wildlife to help researchers better understand the environment.
Barr is modest about his own contributions, although the once-handwritten snow data published on his website has informed numerous scientific papers and helped calibrate aerial snow sensing tools. And with each passing year, his data continues to grow.
“Anybody could do it,” said the self-deprecating bachelor with a softened Jersey accent. “Being socially inept made me so I could do it for 50 years, but anyone can sit there and watch something like that.”
Two winters ago, Barr’s legs started buckling with frustrating frequency as he’d ski mellow loops through spruce trees looking for animal tracks — another data point he collects. He feared it might be his last year in Gothic, a former mining town turned into a research facility owned by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, where he worked full time for decades and is now a part-time accountant.
“I was running out of time to live here,” he said. “That’s why I went through the hip replacements to prolong it.”
Two hip replacement surgeries provided an extended lease on high-altitude living. Barr cross-country skied more this past December than he did the entire previous winter.
“Unless something else goes wrong, which it will, but unless it’s severe, I think I can last out here a while longer,” he said.
A lot could go wrong. As Barr sat on a bench beside at the research lab on an unseasonably warm March day, a heavy slab of snow slid off the roof and launched the bench forward, nearly causing him to fall.
Not all risks are avoidable, but some are. If the ski track is too icy, he’ll walk parallel in untracked snow to get better footing. He grows produce in a greenhouse attached to his home, and most of his non-perishable goods — stocked the previous autumn — are organic. He wears a mask when he’s around others indoors.
“I can’t get a respiratory disease at this altitude,” he said.
For Barr, longevity means more time for the quiet mountain lifestyle he enjoys from his rustic two-room house heated by passive solar and a wood stove. He uses a composting toilet and relies on solar panels to heat water, do laundry and enable his nightly movie viewing.
When he eventually retires from the mountains, Barr hopes to continue most of his long-running weather collection remotely.
He has been testing remote tools for five years, trying to calibrate them to his dated but reliable techniques. He figures it will take a few more years of testing before he’ll trust the new tools and, even then, fears equipment failure.
For now, he measures snow in his tried and true way:
Around 4 p.m., he hikes uphill from his home to a flat, square board painted white, and sticks a metal ruler into accumulated snow to measure its depth. Next he pushes a clear canister upside down into the snow, uses a sheet of metal to scrape off the rest of the snow, then slides the sheet under the canister to help flip it over. He weighs the snow, subtracting the canister’s weight, which lets him calculate the water content.
So far, manual measuring remains the best method, scientists say. Automated snow measurements introduce a degree of uncertainty such as how wind spreads snow unevenly across the landscape, explained Ben Pritchett, senior forecaster at the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
“Nothing replaces observing snow in person to understand how it’s changing,” Pritchett said.
But Barr’s data collection has always been unpaid volunteer work — and that complicates any succession plan when he eventually leaves his home in Gothic.
“If environmental science were funded like the way we fund cancer research or other efforts, we would absolutely continue that research and data collection,” said Ian Billick, executive director for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. “It would be super valuable.”
The lab has winter caretakers who could ski the half mile (.8 kilometer) to Barr’s home to manually measure new snow at the same site with his same method, but someone would still need to foot the bill for their time.
Barr is well aware that his humble weather station is just a snapshot of the Colorado River basin, and that satellites, lasers and computer models can now calculate how much snow falls basin-wide and predict resulting runoff. Yet local scientists say some of those models wouldn’t be as precise without his work.
Ian Breckheimer, an ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, measures snow from space using satellites. Given the distance, Breckheimer needed on-the-ground data to calibrate his model.
“Billy’s data provides that ground truth,” Breckheimer said. “We know that his data is right. So that means that we can compare all the things that we think we can see to the things that we know are right.”
Between measuring the snow and noting animal sightings, Barr created a body of work that no one asked him to assemble and that hasn’t brought him a dime.
Although it’s helped inspire scientists who work with the nearby mountainside lab, Barr said he started measuring snowfall out of a simple desire to relate to the world around him. He felt out of place in the city and choked by social expectations.
“I didn’t fit into anything and it doesn’t make me a miscreant,” he said. “You have to look for what will work for you. And sometimes that means trying different things and going different places.”
Just as he engineered a lifestyle that bucks societal norms, Barr hopes the high-tech water forecasting tools scientists have today will lead to unconventional solutions for rationing the dwindling resource.
“It could lead to things like, well, we really can’t have green lawns in the middle of Arizona anymore, because that’s not a good use of the limited water resource,” Barr said. “And water is more precious than gold.”
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MANGWE – Delicately and with intense concentration, Zanyiwe Ncube poured her small share of precious golden cooking oil into a plastic bottle at a food aid distribution site deep in rural Zimbabwe.
“I don’t want to lose a single drop,” she said.
Her relief at the handout — paid for by the United States government as her southern African country deals with a severe drought — was tempered when aid workers gently broke the news that this would be their last visit.
Ncube and her 7-month-old son she carried on her back were among 2,000 people who received rations of cooking oil, sorghum, peas and other supplies in the Mangwe district in southwestern Zimbabwe. The food distribution is part of a program funded by American aid agency USAID and rolled out by the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
They’re aiming to help some of the 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe threatened with hunger because of the drought that has enveloped large parts of southern Africa since late 2023. It has scorched the crops that tens of millions of people grow themselves and rely on to survive, helped by what should be the rainy season.
They can rely on their crops and the weather less and less.
The drought in Zimbabwe, neighboring Zambia and Malawi has reached crisis levels. Zambia and Malawi have declared national disasters. Zimbabwe could be on the brink of doing the same. The drought has reached Botswana and Angola to the west, and Mozambique and Madagascar to the east.
In Mangwe, the young and the old lined up for food, some with donkey carts to carry home whatever they might get, others with wheelbarrows. Those waiting their turn sat on the dusty ground. Nearby, a goat tried its luck with a nibble on a thorny, scraggly bush.
Ncube, 39, would normally be harvesting her crops now — food for her, her two children and a niece she also looks after. Maybe there would even be a little extra to sell.
The driest February in Zimbabwe in her lifetime, according to the World Food Programme’s seasonal monitor, put an end to that.
“We have nothing in the fields, not a single grain,” she said. “Everything has been burnt (by the drought).”
The United Nations Children’s Fund says there are “overlapping crises” of extreme weather in eastern and southern Africa, with both regions lurching between storms and floods and heat and drought in the past year.
In southern Africa, an estimated 9 million people, half of them children, need help in Malawi. More than 6 million in Zambia, 3 million of them children, are impacted by the drought, UNICEF said. That’s nearly half of Malawi’s population and 30% of Zambia’s.
“Distressingly, extreme weather is expected to be the norm in eastern and southern Africa in the years to come,” said Eva Kadilli, UNICEF’s regional director.
While human-made climate change has spurred more erratic weather globally, there is something else parching southern Africa this year.
El Niño, the naturally occurring climatic phenomenon that warms parts of the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years, has varied effects on the world’s weather. In southern Africa, it means below-average rainfall, sometimes drought, and is being blamed for the current situation.
The impact is more severe for those in Mangwe, where it’s notoriously arid. People grow the cereal grain sorghum and pearl millet, crops that are drought resistant and offer a chance at harvests, but even they failed to withstand the conditions this year.
Francesca Erdelmann, the World Food Programme’s country director for Zimbabwe, said last year’s harvest was bad, but this season is even worse. “This is not a normal circumstance,” she said.
The first few months of the year are traditionally the “lean months” when households run short as they wait for the new harvest. However, there is little hope for replenishment this year.
Joseph Nleya, a 77-year-old traditional leader in Mangwe, said he doesn’t remember it being this hot, this dry, this desperate. “Dams have no water, riverbeds are dry and boreholes are few. We were relying on wild fruits, but they have also dried up,” he said.
People are illegally crossing into Botswana to search for food and “hunger is turning otherwise hard-working people into criminals,” he added.
Multiple aid agencies warned last year of the impending disaster.
Since then, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema has said that 1 million of the 2.2 million hectares of his country’s staple corn crop have been destroyed. Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera has appealed for $200 million in humanitarian assistance.
The 2.7 million struggling in rural Zimbabwe is not even the full picture. A nationwide crop assessment is underway and authorities are dreading the results, with the number needing help likely to skyrocket, said the WFP’s Erdelmann.
With this year’s harvest a write-off, millions in Zimbabwe, southern Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar won’t be able to feed themselves well into 2025. USAID’s Famine Early Warning System estimated that 20 million people would require food relief in southern Africa in the first few months of 2024.
Many won’t get that help, as aid agencies also have limited resources amid a global hunger crisis and a cut in humanitarian funding by governments.
As the WFP officials made their last visit to Mangwe, Ncube was already calculating how long the food might last her. She said she hoped it would be long enough to avert her greatest fear: that her youngest child would slip into malnutrition even before his first birthday.
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Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa.
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The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
RENO, Nev. – In what will be a tiny big-game hunt for some of the largest animals in North America, Nevada is planning its first-ever moose hunting season this fall.
Wildlife managers say explosive growth in Nevada moose numbers over the past five years, increasing to a population of more than 100, justifies the handful of harvests planned.
Scientists say the experiment of sorts should also provide a real-time peek at how the complexities of climate change affect wildlife, and why these majestic — some say goofy-looking — mammals the size of a horse have unexpectedly expanded their range into warmer territory.
“Moose are newcomers to North America,” said Cody McKee, a Nevada Department of Wildlife specialist.
The last deer species to cross the Bering Sea land bridge into Alaska and Canada, McKee said the movement of moose into the Lower 48 has occurred almost exclusively in the past 150 years.
“Their post-glacial range expansion isn’t really complete,” McKee said. “And that’s what we’re currently seeing in Nevada right now, is those moose are moving into the state and finding suitable habitat.”
Only a few Nevada moose, perhaps just one, will be killed across an area larger than Massachusetts and New Jersey combined. But state officials expect thousands of applications for the handful of hunting tags, and it’s already controversial.
“Why a moose hunt at all?” Stephanie Myers of Las Vegas asked at a recent wildlife commission meeting. “We want to see moose, view moose. Not kill moose.”
The first moose was spotted in Nevada in the 1950s, not long before the dim-witted cartoon character “Bullwinkle” made his television debut. Only a handful of sightings followed for decades, but started increasing about 10 years ago.
By 2018, officials estimated there were 30 to 50, all in Nevada’s northeast corner. But the population has more than doubled and experts believe there’s enough habitat to sustain about 200, a level that could be reached in three years.
Bryan Bird, Defenders of Wildlife’s Southwest program director, is among the skeptics who suspect it’s a short-lived phenomenon.
“I believe the moose story is one of `ghost’ habitat or `ghost’ range expansion. By that I mean, these animals are expanding into habitat that may not be suitable in 50 years due to climate change,” Bird said.
Government biologists admit they don’t fully understand why the moose have moved so far south, where seasonal conditions are warmer and drier than they traditionally prefer.
“It seems to be opposite of where we would expect to see moose expansion given their ecology,” said Marcus Blum, a Texas A&M University researcher hired to help assess future movement. He analyzed aerial surveys, individual sightings and habitat to project growth trends.
Six feet (1.8 meters) tall at the shoulder and up to 1,000 pounds (453.5 kilograms), moose live in riparian areas where they munch on berry bushes and aspen leaves along the edges of mountain forests native to the northern half of Nevada.
They usually avoid places where temperatures regularly exceed 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 Celsius).
The Nevada study documented moose spending nearly half their time in areas where that “thermal threshold” was exceeded about 150 days a year, while climate change models suggest the threshold will be surpassed by another 14 days annually by 2050, Blum said.
To be clear, the valleys beneath the snow-capped winter mountain ranges with moose are 500 miles (805 kilometers) from the Las Vegas Strip in the desert many people picture as Nevada.
Researchers have more questions than answers about why moose continue to expand their range into Nevada where extended drought has taken a toll on other wildlife, McKee said.
“There’s a lot of speculation and questions about why they are here, given concerns about the changing environment and how it’s probably getting warmer and dryer,” McKee said. “Why is it that our extensive drought cycles haven’t seemed to be affecting the moose population?”
Populations along the U.S.-Canada border have oscillated for more than a century. Several states, from Idaho to Minnesota and Maine, have dramatically reduced hunting quotas at times to allow populations to recover.
Alaska is home to the vast majority of U.S. moose, upwards of 200,000, with about 7,000 harvests annually. Maine has nearly 70,000, which is five times more than any other Lower 48 state, and issued 4,100 permits last year. Neighboring New Hampshire offered only 35 for 3,000-plus moose and Idaho issued about 500 for its 10,000 to 12,000.
No moose were observed in Washington state before the 1960s but its growing population now exceeds 5,000. The state issued three hunting permits in 1977 and now tops 100 annually.
Nevada’s research suggests its population could sustain more harvests than planned, McKee said, but “conservative is the name of the game here.”
Aerial surveys are now backed by radio-tracking collars biologists have fitted on four bull moose and nine cows since 2020. In some spots, males significantly outnumber females. Removing a bull or two might improve herd dynamics, he said.
The exact number of permits will be determined in the coming weeks, but McKee anticipates no more than three. Only Nevadans can apply for the inaugural hunt, which will help guide decisions about future endeavors.
Successful hunters must present the skull and antlers for state inspection within five days. That will give scientists more insight into herd health, body conditions, disease and parasites.
Bill Nolan of Sparks, who first hunted ducks at age 12, says he intends to apply for a chance he describes as “slim and none” to draw a moose tag.
“For hunters, it would be like hitting the lottery,” he said.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
RENO, Nev. – In what will be a tiny big-game hunt for some of the largest animals in North America, Nevada is planning its first-ever moose hunting season this fall.
Wildlife managers say explosive growth in Nevada moose numbers over the past five years, increasing to a population of more than 100, justifies the handful of harvests planned.
Scientists say the experiment of sorts should also provide a real-time peek at how the complexities of climate change affect wildlife, and why these majestic — some say goofy-looking — mammals the size of a horse have unexpectedly expanded their range into warmer territory.
“Moose are newcomers to North America,” said Cody McKee, a Nevada Department of Wildlife specialist.
The last deer species to cross the Bering Sea land bridge into Alaska and Canada, McKee said the movement of moose into the Lower 48 has occurred almost exclusively in the past 150 years.
“Their post-glacial range expansion isn’t really complete,” McKee said. “And that’s what we’re currently seeing in Nevada right now, is those moose are moving into the state and finding suitable habitat.”
Only a few Nevada moose, perhaps just one, will be killed across an area larger than Massachusetts and New Jersey combined. But state officials expect thousands of applications for the handful of hunting tags, and it’s already controversial.
“Why a moose hunt at all?” Stephanie Myers of Las Vegas asked at a recent wildlife commission meeting. “We want to see moose, view moose. Not kill moose.”
The first moose was spotted in Nevada in the 1950s, not long before the dim-witted cartoon character “Bullwinkle” made his television debut. Only a handful of sightings followed for decades, but started increasing about 10 years ago.
By 2018, officials estimated there were 30 to 50, all in Nevada’s northeast corner. But the population has more than doubled and experts believe there’s enough habitat to sustain about 200, a level that could be reached in three years.
Bryan Bird, Defenders of Wildlife’s Southwest program director, is among the skeptics who suspect it’s a short-lived phenomenon.
“I believe the moose story is one of `ghost’ habitat or `ghost’ range expansion. By that I mean, these animals are expanding into habitat that may not be suitable in 50 years due to climate change,” Bird said.
Government biologists admit they don’t fully understand why the moose have moved so far south, where seasonal conditions are warmer and drier than they traditionally prefer.
“It seems to be opposite of where we would expect to see moose expansion given their ecology,” said Marcus Blum, a Texas A&M University researcher hired to help assess future movement. He analyzed aerial surveys, individual sightings and habitat to project growth trends.
Six feet (1.8 meters) tall at the shoulder and up to 1,000 pounds (453.5 kilograms), moose live in riparian areas where they munch on berry bushes and aspen leaves along the edges of mountain forests native to the northern half of Nevada.
They usually avoid places where temperatures regularly exceed 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 Celsius).
The Nevada study documented moose spending nearly half their time in areas where that “thermal threshold” was exceeded about 150 days a year, while climate change models suggest the threshold will be surpassed by another 14 days annually by 2050, Blum said.
To be clear, the valleys beneath the snow-capped winter mountain ranges with moose are 500 miles (805 kilometers) from the Las Vegas Strip in the desert many people picture as Nevada.
Researchers have more questions than answers about why moose continue to expand their range into Nevada where extended drought has taken a toll on other wildlife, McKee said.
“There’s a lot of speculation and questions about why they are here, given concerns about the changing environment and how it’s probably getting warmer and dryer,” McKee said. “Why is it that our extensive drought cycles haven’t seemed to be affecting the moose population?”
Populations along the U.S.-Canada border have oscillated for more than a century. Several states, from Idaho to Minnesota and Maine, have dramatically reduced hunting quotas at times to allow populations to recover.
Alaska is home to the vast majority of U.S. moose, upwards of 200,000, with about 7,000 harvests annually. Maine has nearly 70,000, which is five times more than any other Lower 48 state, and issued 4,100 permits last year. Neighboring New Hampshire offered only 35 for 3,000-plus moose and Idaho issued about 500 for its 10,000 to 12,000.
No moose were observed in Washington state before the 1960s but its growing population now exceeds 5,000. The state issued three hunting permits in 1977 and now tops 100 annually.
Nevada’s research suggests its population could sustain more harvests than planned, McKee said, but “conservative is the name of the game here.”
Aerial surveys are now backed by radio-tracking collars biologists have fitted on four bull moose and nine cows since 2020. In some spots, males significantly outnumber females. Removing a bull or two might improve herd dynamics, he said.
The exact number of permits will be determined in the coming weeks, but McKee anticipates no more than three. Only Nevadans can apply for the inaugural hunt, which will help guide decisions about future endeavors.
Successful hunters must present the skull and antlers for state inspection within five days. That will give scientists more insight into herd health, body conditions, disease and parasites.
Bill Nolan of Sparks, who first hunted ducks at age 12, says he intends to apply for a chance he describes as “slim and none” to draw a moose tag.
“For hunters, it would be like hitting the lottery,” he said.
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