Tag Archives: Environment and nature

US

California fire prompts evacuations; Oregon blaze balloons

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A rapidly growing wildfire south of Lake Tahoe forced the evacuation of a mountain town and the cancellation of an extreme bike ride through the Sierra Nevada, leaving thousands of riders and spectators stranded Saturday and rushing to flee the area.

The Tamarack Fire, which was sparked by lightning on July 4, exploded overnight to about 10 square miles (26 square kilometers) and was burning six miles (10 kilometers) south of Markleeville, a small town close to the California-Nevada state line. It has destroyed at least 3 structures, authorities said. A notice posted on the 103-mile (165-kilometer) Death Ride’s website said several communities in the area had been evacuated and ordered all riders to also evacuate immediately.

Kelli Pennington and her family were camping near the town Friday so her husband could participate in his ninth ride when they were told to pack up and leave. They had been watching smoke develop over the course of the day, but were caught off guard by the fire’s quick spread.

“It happened so fast,” Pennington said. “We left our tents, hammock and some foods, but we got most of our things, shoved our two kids in the car and left.”

Saturday’s ride was supposed to mark the 40th anniversary of the Death Ride, which attracts thousands of cyclists to the region each year to ride through three mountain passes in the so-called California Alps.

Meanwhile, the largest wildfire in the U.S. — burning in southern Oregon — grew significantly overnight as dry and windy conditions took hold in the area, but containment of the inferno more than tripled as firefighters began to gain more control along its western flank, authorities said Saturday. The fire was still burning rapidly and dangerously along its southern and eastern flanks, however, and authorities expanded evacuations in a largely rural area of lakes and wildlife refuges.

A red flag weather warning, signifying strong winds and hot, dry conditions, remained in effect through Saturday evening.

“This fire is large and moving so fast, every day it progresses 4 to 5 miles,” said Incident Commander Joe Hassel. “One of the many challenges that our firefighters face every day is working in new country that can present new hazards all the time.”

Extremely dry conditions and heat waves tied to climate change have swept the region, making wildfires harder to fight. Climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.

Firefighters said in July they were facing conditions more typical of late summer or fall.

The Bootleg Fire grew to 439 square miles (1,137 square kilometers) Saturday and was just one of numerous fires burning across the drought-stricken U.S. West, as new fires popped up or grew rapidly in Oregon and California.

There were 70 active large fires and complexes of multiple fires that have burned nearly 1,659 square miles (4,297 square kilometers) in the U.S., the National Interagency Fire Center said. The U.S. Forest Service said at least 16 major fires were burning in the Pacific Northwest alone.

A fire in the mountains of northeast Oregon was also growing rapidly and was 17 square miles (44 square kilometers) in size on Saturday. The Elbow Creek fire started Thursday and has prompted evacuations in several small, rural communities around the Grande Ronde River about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Walla Walla, Washington.

In southern Oregon, fire crews have dealt with dangerous and extreme fire conditions, including massive “fire clouds” that rise up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) above the blaze. The Bootleg Fire has destroyed at least 67 homes and 117 outbuildings and authorities Saturday said flames are surging up to 5 miles (8 kilometers) a day.

The conflagration has forced 2,000 people to evacuate and is threatening 5,000 buildings, including homes and smaller structures in a rural area just north of the California border. Containment of the fire more than tripled Saturday thanks to better conditions on the western edge of the fire that allowed crews to drop water and fire retardant on flames and secure fire breaks.

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Flaccus reported from Portland, Oregon.

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World

Death toll from Europe floods tops 150 as water recedes

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BERLIN (AP) — The death toll from disastrous flooding in Western Europe rose above 150 on Saturday as rescue workers toiled to clear up the devastation revealed by receding water and prevent further damage.

Police said that more than 90 people are now known to have died in western Germany’s Ahrweiler county, one of the worst-hit areas, and more casualties are feared. On Friday, authorities gave a death toll of 63 for Rhineland-Palatinate state, where Ahrweiler is located.

Another 43 people were confirmed dead in neighboring North Rhine-Westphalia state, Germany’s most populous. Belgium’s national crisis center put the confirmed death toll in that country at 24 and said it expects the number to rise.

By Saturday, waters were receding across much of the affected regions, laying bare the extent of the damage.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier planned to travel Saturday to Erftstadt, southwest of Cologne, where a harrowing rescue effort unfolded on Friday as people were trapped when the ground gave way. At least three houses and part of a mansion in the town’s Blessem district collapsed.

The German military used armored vehicles on Saturday to clear away cars and trucks overwhelmed by the floodwaters on a nearby road, some of which were still at least partly submerged. Officials feared that some people didn’t manage to escape in Erftstadt, but by Saturday morning no casualties had been confirmed.

In the Ahrweiler area, police warned people of a potential risk from downed power lines and urged curious visitors to stay away. They complained on Twitter that would-be sightseers were blocking some roads.

Many areas were still without electricity and telephone service — something that, along with multiple counting in some cases, appeared to have accounted in part for large numbers of missing people that authorities gave immediately after the floods hit on Wednesday and Thursday.

Around 700 people were evacuated from part of the German town of Wassenberg, on the Dutch border, after the breach of a dike on the Rur river.

Train lines and roads remained blocked in many areas of eastern Belgium. The national railway service said traffic would start returning to normal on Monday.

A cafe owner in the devastated town of Pepinster broke down in tears when King Philippe and Queen Mathilde visited Friday to offer comfort to residents.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo were visiting flood-damaged towns Saturday, according to Belgian state broadcaster RTBF.

In addition to worst-hit Germany and Belgium, southern parts of the Netherlands also have been hit by heavy flooding.

Volunteers worked through the night to shore up dikes and protect roads. Thousands of residents of the southern Dutch towns of Bunde, Voulwames, Brommelen and Geulle were allowed to return home Saturday morning after being evacuated on Thursday and Friday.

Caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who visited the region on Friday, said that the region faced “three disasters.”

“First, there was corona, now these floods, and soon people will have to work on cleanup and recovery,” he said. “It is disaster after disaster after disaster. But we will not abandon Limburg,” the southern province hit by the floods. His government has declared the flooding a state of emergency, opening up national funds for those affected.

Among other efforts to help the flood victims, Dutch brewery Hertog Jan, which is based in the affected area, handed out 3,000 beer crates to locals to help them raise their belongings off the ground to protect them from the flooding.

In Switzerland, heavy rain as caused several rivers and lakes to burst their banks, with authorities in the city of Lucerne closing several pedestrian bridges over the Reuss river.

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Angela Charlton in Paris, and Molly Quell in Amsterdam, contributed to this report.

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World

search for missing goes on as toll tops 90

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BERLIN (AP) — The death toll from devastating floods across parts of western Germany and Belgium rose above 90 on Friday, as the search continued for hundreds of people still unaccounted for and officials warned such disasters could become more common due to climate change.

Authorities in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate said 50 people had died there, including at least nine residents of an assisted living facility for people with disabilities. In neighboring North Rhine-Westphalia state officials put the death toll at 30, but warned that the figure could rise further.

Some 1,300 people in Germany were still reported missing, though authorities said efforts to contact them could be hampered by disrupted roads and phone connections.

In a provisional tally, the Belgian death toll has risen to 12, with 5 people still missing, local authorities and media report early Friday.

The flash floods this week followed days of heavy rainfall which turned streams and streets into raging torrents that swept away cars and caused houses to collapse across the region.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Joe Biden expressed their sorrow over the loss of life during a news conference at the White House late Thursday.

The long-time German leader, who was on a farewell trip to Washington, said she feared that “the full extent of this tragedy will only be seen in the coming days.”

Rescuers were rushing Friday to help people trapped in their homes in the town of Erftstadt, southwest of Cologne. Regional authorities said several people had died after their houses collapsed due to subsidence, and aerial pictures showed what appeared to be a massive sinkhole.

Three people were rescued from the Wurm River in Heinsberg county late Thursday.

The governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state, Armin Laschet, has called an emergency Cabinet meeting Friday. The 60-year-old’s handling of the flood disaster is widely seen as a test for his ambitions to succeed Merkel as chancellor in Germany’s national election on Sept. 26.

Malu Dreyer, the governor of neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate state, said the disaster showed the need to speed up efforts to curb global warming.

“We’ve experienced droughts, heavy rain and flooding events several years in a row, including in our state,” she told the Funke media group. “Climate chance isn’t abstract anymore. We are experiencing it up close and painfully.”

She accused the Laschet and Merkel’s center-right Union bloc of hindering efforts to achieve greater greenhouse gas reductions in Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and a major emitter of planet-warming gases.

The German army has deployed 900 soldiers to help with the rescue and clear-up efforts.

Thousands of people remain homeless after their houses were destroyed or deemed at-risk by authorities, including several villages around the Steinbach reservoir that experts say could collapse under the weight of the floods.

Across the border in Belgium, most of the drowned were found around Liege, where the rains hit hardest. Skies were largely overcast in eastern Belgium, with hopes rising that the worst of the calamity was over.

In the southern Dutch province of Limburg, troops piled sandbags to strengthen a 1.1 kilometer (0.7 miles) stretch of dike along the Maas river and police helped evacuate some low-lying neighborhoods.

Caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Thursday night that the government was officially declaring flood-hit regions a disaster area, meaning businesses and residents are eligible for compensation for damage.

Meanwhile, sustained rainfall in Switzerland has caused several rivers and lakes to break their banks. Public broadcaster SRF reported that a flash flood swept away cars, flooded basements and destroyed small bridges in the northern villages of Schleitheim und Beggingen late Thursday.

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Associated Press writers Raf Casert in Brussels and Mike Corder in The Hague contributed to this report.

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World

8 dead, dozens missing in Germany floods; 2 die in Belgium

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BERLIN (AP) — At least eight people have died and dozens of people are missing in Germany after heavy flooding turned streams and streets into raging torrents, sweeping away cars and causing some buildings to collapse.

Police in the western city of Koblenz said Thursday that four people had died in Ahrweiler county, and about 50 were trapped on the roofs of their houses awaiting rescue.

Six houses had collapsed overnight in the village of Schuld. “Many people have been reported missing to us,” police said.

Schuld is located in the Eifel, a volcanic region of rolling hills and small valleys southwest of Cologne.

The full extent of the damage in the region was still unclear after many villages were cut off by floodwater and landslides that made roads impassable. Videos posted on social media showed cars floating down streets and houses partly collapsed in some places.

Authorities have declared an emergency in the region after days of heavy rainfall that also affected large parts of western and central Germany, as well as neighboring countries, causing widespread damage.

Police said two men, aged 77 and 82, died after their basements were flooded in the western cities of Kamen and Wuppertal, where authorities warned that a dam threatened to burst.

Authorities in the Rhine-Sieg county south of Cologne ordered the evacuation of several villages below the Steinbachtal reservoir amid fears the dam there could also break.

A fireman drowned Wednesday during rescue work in the western German town of Altena and another collapsed during rescue operations at a power plant in Werdohl-Elverlingsen. One man was missing in the eastern town of Joehstadt after disappearing while trying to secure his property from rising waters, authorities said.

Rail connections were suspended in large parts of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state. Governor Armin Laschet, who is running to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor in this fall’s German election, was expected to visit the flood-hit city of Hagen later Thursday.

German weather service DWD predicted the rainfall would ease Thursday.

Relentless rains through the night worsened the flooding conditions in eastern Belgium, where one person was reported drowned and at least another was missing.

Some towns saw water levels rise to unprecedented levels and had their centers turned into gushing rivers.

Major highways were inundated and in the south and east of the nation, the railway service said all traffic was stopped, adding that “alternative transport is highly unlikely.”

In eastern Eupen, on the German border, one man was reported dead after he was swept away by a torrent, a local governor told RTBf network.

In Liege, the main city in eastern Belgium, the Meuse river could break its banks by early afternoon and spill into the heart of the city. Police warned the citizens to take precautionary measures.

Authorities in the southern Dutch town of Valkenburg, close to the German and Belgian borders, evacuated a care home and a hospice overnight amid flooding that turned the tourist town’s main street into a river, Dutch media reported.

The Dutch government sent some 70 troops to the southern province of Limburg late Wednesday to help with tasks including transporting evacuees and filling sandbags as rivers burst their banks. There were no reports of injuries linked to flooding in the Netherlands.

Unusually intense rains have also inundated a swath of northeast France this week, downing trees and forcing the closure of dozens of roads. A train route to Luxembourg was disrupted, and firefighters evacuated dozens of people from homes near the Luxembourg and German border and in the Marne region, according to local broadcaster France Bleu.

The equivalent of two months of rain has fallen on some areas in the last one or two days, according to the French national weather service. With the ground already saturated, the service forecast more downpours Thursday and issued flood warnings for 10 regions.

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Raf Casert in Brussels, Angela Charlton in Paris and Mike Corder in The Hague contributed to this report.

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US

Northwest heat wave impossible without climate change

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The deadly heat wave that roasted the Pacific Northwest and western Canada was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change that added a few extra degrees to the record-smashing temperatures, a new quick scientific analysis found.

An international team of 27 scientists calculated that climate change increased chances of the extreme heat occurring by at least 150 times, but likely much more.

The study, not yet peer reviewed, said that before the industrial era, the region’s late June triple-digit heat was the type that would not have happened in human civilization. And even in today’s warming world, it said, the heat was a once-in-a-millennium event.

But that once-in-a-millennium event would likely occur every five to 10 years once the world warms another 1.4 degrees (0.8 degrees Celsius), said Wednesday’s study from World Weather Attribution. That much warming could be 40 or 50 years away if carbon pollution continues at its current pace, one study author said.

This type of extreme heat “would go from essentially virtually impossible to relatively commonplace,” said study co-author Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University climate scientist. “That is a huge change.”

The study also found that in the Pacific Northwest and Canada climate change was responsible for about 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) of the heat shock. Those few degrees make a big difference in human health, said study co-author Kristie Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

“This study is telling us climate change is killing people,” said Ebi, who endured the blistering heat in Seattle. She said it will be many months before a death toll can be calculated from June’s blast of heat but it’s likely to be hundreds or thousands. “Heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer of Americans.”

In Oregon alone, the state medical examiner on Wednesday reported 116 deaths related to the heat wave.

The team of scientists used a well-established and credible method to search for climate change’s role in extreme weather, according to the National Academy of Sciences. They logged observations of what happened and fed them into 21 computer models and ran numerous simulations. They then simulated a world without greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. The difference between the two scenarios is the climate change portion.

“Without climate change this event would not have happened,” said study senior author Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford.

What made the Northwest heat wave so remarkable is how much hotter it was than old records and what climate models had predicted. Scientists say this hints that some kind of larger climate shift could be in play — and in places that they didn’t expect.

“Everybody is really worried about the implications of this event,” said study co-author Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a Dutch climate scientist. “This is something that nobody saw coming, that nobody thought possible. And we feel that we do not understand heat waves as well as we thought we did. The big question for many people is: Could this also happen in a lot of places?”

The World Weather Attribution team does these quick analyses, which later get published in peer-reviewed journals. In the past, they have found similar large climate change effects in many heat waves, including ones in Europe and Siberia. But sometimes the team finds climate change wasn’t a factor, as they did in a Brazilian drought and a heat wave in India.

Six outside scientists said the quick study made sense and probably underestimated the extent of climate change’s role in the heat wave.

That’s because climate models used in the simulations usually underestimate how climate change alters the jet stream that parks “heat domes” over regions and causes some heat waves, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.

The models also underestimate how dry soil worsens heat because there is less water to evaporate, which feeds a vicious cycle of drought, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the Nature Conservancy.

The study hit home for University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn’t part of the research team.

“Victoria, which is known for its mild climate, felt more like Death Valley last week,” Weaver said. “I’ve been in a lot of hot places in the world, and this was the worst I’ve ever been in.

“But you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he added. “It’s going to get a lot worse.”

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Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/Climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.



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US

Grizzly bear attacks, kills camper in western Montana

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HELENA Mont. — A grizzly bear attacked and killed a person who was camping in western Montana early Tuesday, after previously wandering into the area where the person was camping, the Powell County sheriff said.

The attack happened between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. in Ovando, a town of fewer than 100 people about 60 miles (97 kilometers) northwest of Helena, said Greg Lemon, a spokesperson with Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks.

“There was an earlier contact with the bear prior to the event,” Sheriff Gavin Roselles said. “The bear basically came back into the campsite. It wandered into a campsite a couple different times.”

A team of law enforcement and wildlife specialists has been assembled to track down the bear, officials said.

An initial report said the victim had been riding a bicycle at the time of the attack. That is not the case, Roselles said.

Lemon said his understanding is that the victim was part of a group on a bike trip.

The identity of the victim was not immediately released and further circumstances surrounding the attack were under investigation.

“Our first concern is the community’s well-being. The next step is to find the bear,” Lemon said.

Officials did not say exactly where the attack occurred, but Roselles said there were other people camping in the vicinity of the attack.

A video camera from an Ovando business caught footage of a grizzly bear Monday night, wildlife officials said. A bear also got into a chicken coop.

Ovando saloon owner Tiffanie Zavarelli said it was the first fatal bear mauling that she knew of in the community, located along the Blackfoot River beneath a mountain range that rises into the remote Bob Marshall Wilderness, a 1,500-square mile (4,000-square kilometer) expanse of public forests. Residents of the area are accustomed to living in proximity to bears and know the risks, but the attack left them rattled, said Zavarelli, whose family owns Trixi’s Antler Saloon, which is named after a well-known trick horseback rider and roper.

“Everybody’s pretty shaken up right now. The population here is 75 — everybody knows everybody,” Zararelli said, “The people from Montana, we know how to be ‘bear aware.’ But anything can happen.”

Blackfoot Inn and general store owner Leigh Ann Valiton said the people of Ovando were “absolutely devastated” by the fatal attack.

Grizzly bears have run into increasing conflict with humans in the Northern Rockies over the past decade as the federally protected animals expanded into new areas and the number of people living and recreating in the region grew. That’s spurred calls from elected officials in Montana and neighboring Wyoming and Idaho to lift protections so the animals could be hunted.

In April, a backcountry guide was killed by a grizzly bear while fishing along the Yellowstone National Park border in southwestern Montana.

Ovando is on the southern edge of a huge expanse of wilderness that stretches to the border of Canada and is home to an estimated 1,000 bears — the largest concentrations of the bruins in the contiguous U.S. The area includes Glacier National Park.

In 2016, an off-duty U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer was fatally mauled in the region after he collided with a grizzly while mountain biking in the Flathead National Forest.

Grizzly bears involved in attacks on humans can be trapped and killed if they are considered a continued public safety threat. Bears involved in non-fatal attacks are often spared in the case of a surprise encounter or if they are protecting their young.

Wildlife managers have sought to lessen the hazards with campaigns encouraging people who live near grizzlies to install bear-resistant garbage cans so the animals don’t come looking for human food scraps. They’ve also educated hunters and hikers on how to travel safely in grizzly country and the importance of carrying bear spray — Mace-like canisters of pepper spray that can be used to deter attacking bruins.

It was not immediately known if the victim in Tuesday’s attack had bear spray or even any chance to use it.

An estimated 50,000 grizzlies once inhabited western North America from the Pacific Ocean to the Great Plains. Hunting, commercial trapping and habitat loss wiped out most by the early 1900s.

Grizzly bears have been protected as a threatened species in the contiguous U.S. since 1975, allowing a slow recovery in a handful of areas.

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Brown reported from Billings.

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