P.Gosselin NoTricksZone Wed, 09 Oct 2024 16:50 UTC
North Africa seems to be greening as a result of climate change, which mostly occurs naturally.
Satellite photos and studies have shown that the Sahara desert has been shrinking over the past 40 years, e.g. read here and here.
The latest news is from the southeastern Moroccan desert, which is among the driest around the world, where it is reported to have gotten up to 100 mm of rain within a 24 hour period in September. Hard hit were villages 400 miles from the capital city of Rabat, including Tata, reports Al Jazeera here.
The Seveso river's anti-flood storage tank was activated while the Lambro river overflowed its banks early on Thursday due to torrential rain in Milan and in the Lombardy region.
Local authorities said an estimated 35-40 millimetres of rain had fallen since 3 in the morning in Italy's financial capital.
The park around the Lambro river was flooded and two communities living in the area were evacuated.
The weather is expected to improve in the afternoon, according to forecasts.
Hurricane Milton has left a trail of destruction in Florida as it whipped up tornadoes and brought torrential rains and raging winds that destroyed homes and knocked out power for millions of people in the US state.
While the National Hurricane Center said on Thursday that the storm, which made landfall on the state's western coast hours earlier, had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane, it was still hurtling through Florida with wind speeds of 150 km/h (93mph).
Milton made landfall at about 8:30pm (00:30 GMT) on Wednesday as a Category 3 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 195km/h (121mph) near Siesta Key, Florida.
The storm is expected to maintain hurricane strength as it crosses the Florida peninsula and emerges into the Atlantic on Thursday, forecasters said, despite it running out of steam.
At least 19 tornadoes ripped across the southern part of Florida, hundreds of miles from the centre of the storm, as it neared land.
More than 3 million people in Florida were left without power power as of 3:58am (07:58 GMT), according to Poweroutage.us, which tracks supplies, with the state's west coast worst affected.
Hurricane Milton plowed into the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday after cutting a destructive path across Florida that spawned tornados, killed at least 10 people and left millions without power, but the storm did not trigger the catastrophic surge of seawater that was feared.
Governor Ron DeSantis said the state had avoided the "worst-case scenario," though he cautioned the damage was still significant. The Tampa Bay area appeared to sidestep the storm surge that had prompted the most dire warnings.
US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at a White House briefing the government had reports of at least 10 deaths from Milton, adding it appeared they were caused by tornados.
In St. Lucie County on Florida's east coast, a spate of tornados killed five people, including at least two in the senior-living Spanish Lakes Communities, county spokesperson Erick Gill said. Search-and-rescue teams there are combing through hard-hit areas, including a mobile-home park.
There were 19 confirmed tornados in Florida as of 8 pm Wednesday, about the time Milton made landfall, DeSantis said. Some 45 tornados were reported throughout the day, mostly in the central and eastern parts of the state, the National Weather Service said.
A car fell into a huge pit that appeared on a street in Bucharest, which collapsed under the weight of a garbage truck (belonging to the waste management company URBAN).
The cobblestone street collapsed out of the blue on Wednesday morning in the Orhideelor area of Sector 6.
The images are impressive with the car completely fallen and the garbage truck partially submerged in this pit.
The firefighters are intervening to secure the area where the asphalt collapsed.
"We are intervening to secure the area at an event that occurred on Orhideelor Road in the Capital. The event involves a parked car and a garbage truck passing through the area at the time the pavement collapsed.
A newborn baby died after being bitten by a dog in Torrance Tuesday afternoon.
The unidentified baby was just a month old, according to the Torrance Police Department, which is investigating the dog attack, said Lieutenant F. Ahmad.
Paramedics were called to a home on the 2700 block of Martha Avenue at about 12:35 p.m. Tuesday, the Torrance Police Department announced Wednesday.
"The Torrance Fire Department arrived and discovered that a dog had bit a one-month-old
child," Ahmad announced in a written statement. "The Torrance Fire Department responded and transported the child to the hospital."
More than 80 Tornado Warnings had already been issued as of Wednesday afternoon. The NWS Miami office has broken its record for the most Tornado Warnings issued in a single day.
A dangerous tornado outbreak has emerged from the outer bands of Hurricane Milton, posing a significant threat to Florida as the massive storm approaches.
More than 80 Tornado Warnings had already been issued as of Wednesday afternoon. This comes following the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center's (SPC) issuance of a Tornado Watch for parts of Central and South Florida.
The NWS Miami office has broken its record for the most Tornado Warnings issued in a single day, with more than 40 issued as of Wednesday afternoon. The previous record for that office was set during Hurricane Ian.
This hurricane season is shaping up to be one of the most intense of recent years with many powerful storms that displayed rapid formation, fast intensification, and incredible amounts of damage due to heavy rain and floods. Here's a summary of the most significant storms on September:
Hurricane Francine rapidly intensified into a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 100 mph (155 km/h), making landfall in southern Louisiana, torrential rains and severe flooding caused widespread damage, submerging homes and infrastructure, and resulting in $1.5 billion in damages. Fortunately, there were no fatalities.
Storm Boris reached wind speeds of 75 mph (120 km/h) and rainfall of up to 14 inches (360 mm) in some areas of Central and Eastern Europe, causing the Elbe and Danube rivers to overflow, submerging entire communities, collapsing bridges, damaging homes, and sweeping away cars. The floods caused at least 19 deaths and significant economic losses, making it one of the worst flooding events in the region in decades.
Zhanna Nurmaganbetova en.inform.kz Tue, 08 Oct 2024 12:28 UTC
Some 200 people may have been buried after a landslide occurred Monday in a port area of Manacapuru, Brazil's Amazonas state, according to official sources, Xinhua reports.
The Military Firefighters Corps of the State of Rio de Janeiro said that the land supporting part of the Terra Preta Port, located on the banks of the Amazon River, slid due to unknown reasons. Although the area was under construction, the port continued to operate as a key transportation point.
It is estimated that over 200 people were loading and unloading goods at the site when the accident occurred. Initial reports confirmed that an entire family on a floating boat was buried. Additionally, debris from boats, pipes, houses, and vehicles has been found in the waters of the Amazon River.
The landslide could be related to riverbank erosion, which has been worsened by the severe drought affecting the Amazon region.
The Manacapuru's city council issued a statement, deeply regretting the accident, and detailed that teams of the Civil Defense, the Military Firefighters Corps and other sectors are working intensively at the site to rescue those trapped.
There are also some news reports about the event, both in Portuguese and in English.
The site of this landslide appears to be [-3.2950, -60.6374]. This is a Google Earth image of the location, collected in February 2024:-
Google Earth image of the site of the 7 October 2024 landslide at Porto da Terra Preta, in Manacapuru, Brazil.
This image does not give any obvious indications as to why a landslide might have occurred. However, many of the local reports suggest that construction work was under way at the site.But, significantly, the Solimões River is at a historically low level currently, and the banks of the rivers in the Amazon region suffer a phenomenon known locally as "terras caídas" (fallen lands), which describes river bank landslides. There is a literature on this type of failure - a good starting point is Bandeira et al. (2018). These failures can occur in periods when the river level is falling, and under such circumstances are generally caused by toe erosion.
A search operation is ongoing at Porto da Terra Preta - it is to be hoped that those on the site managed to escape. But this event illustrates the risks of landslides along rivers, and highlights that failures are not always due to rainy conditions.
Five sperm whales have died after becoming stranded on an island off Australia's south coast.
The whales were found on a beach on the coast of Flinders Island, which is located between the Australian mainland and the island state of Tasmania, on Sunday night and were reported to Tasmania's Marine Conservation Program, according to Xinhua news agency.
Authorities arrived at the beach on Monday morning to inspect the whales and found three of them dead.
The remaining two were administered palliative care and died on Monday night.
The great danger is that under the pressures of anxiety and fear, the alternation of crisis and relaxation and new crisis, the people of the world will come to accept gradually the idea of war, the idea of submission to total power, and the abdication of reason, spirit and individual conscience. The great peril of the...cold war is the progressive deadening of conscience.
Comment: Update
NDTV.com reports: