JULY 2024

ASIA

The death toll from a series of landslides in Kerala has risen to 166 and almost 200 people are still missing as the southern Indian state reels from one of its worst disasters in years (31^st).  Hundreds of homes were swept away and crushed by two huge consecutive landslides in the hilly district of Wayanad in the middle of the night on Tuesday. The landslides occurred after the steep terrain was hit by five times the normal amount of rain, with some regions reporting more than 300mm (1ft) of rainfall within 24 hours. Entire villages were submerged in mud as the large volume of rain caused the Eruvazhanji River to overflow and change course, gushing through places where hundreds of people were asleep in their homes. Several tea and cardamom plantations were also devastated.

The death toll from floods in Bangladesh this week has risen to eight, leaving more than two million affected after heavy rains caused major rivers to burst their banks, officials have confirmed. The south Asian country of 170 million people, crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, has experienced more frequent floods in recent decades.  The climate crisis has caused rainfall to become more erratic and melted glaciers upstream in the Himalayan mountains. Two teenage boys were killed when a boat capsized in flood waters in Shahjadur, the northern rural town’s police chief, Sabuj Rana, said.  “There were nine people in the small boat. Seven swam to safety. Two boys did not know how to swim. They drowned,” he said.  Bishwadeb Roy, a police chief in Kurigram, said that three others had been killed in two separate electrocution incidents after their boats became entangled with live electricity wires in flood water.  Another three died in separate flood-related incidents around the country, officials said earlier this week.  The government said it had opened hundreds of shelters for people displaced by the waters and sent food and relief to hard-hit districts in the country’s north region.  “More than 2 million people have been affected by the floods. Seventeen of the country’s 64 districts have been affected,” Kamrul Hasan, the secretary of the country’s disaster management ministry, said.  China has been experiencing heavy and widespread rainfall since the start of the rainy season, which runs from May to September (19^th). It has resulted in at least 20 floods in major rivers across the country, with 31 rivers surpassing their flood warning levels.  Dianjiang county, in Chongqing, received 269.2mm in one day last week, a single-day record there. It led to six deaths, more than 10,000 evacuations, and 40,000 people being affected, as well as severe disruptions to rail services and transport caused by flooding. At the beginning of this week, China’s national meteorological centre reissued a yellow alert for rainstorms and further warnings were issued from Beijing’s ministry of water resources as water levels at Lake Tai rose to 3.9 meters last weekend, 0.1 meters above the warning level.

EUROPE

The “heat dome” causing scorching temperatures across western Europe and north Africa, and boiling athletes and spectators at the Olympic Games in Paris, would have been impossible without human-caused global heating, a rapid analysis has found.  Scientists said the fossil-fuelled climate crisis made temperatures 2.5C to 3.3C hotter. Such an event would not have happened in the world before global heating but is now expected about once a decade, they said. Continued emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will make them even more frequent, the researchers warned.  “Climate change crashed the Olympics on Tuesday,” said Dr Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and part of the World Weather Attribution group behind the analysis. “The world watched athletes swelter in 35C heat. If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuels, Paris would have been about 3C cooler and much safer for sport.” Numerous athletes, including the gymnastics superstar Simone Biles, have suffered in the heat, with one tennis player having called it “crazy” and sailing competitors having worn ice vests to keep cool. Fans watching the beach volleyball near the Eiffel Tower were sprayed with hoses, while misting fountains have been set up at skateboarding and other venues and millions of bottles of water have been handed out at train and Métro stations. Thunderstorms and torrential rain brought another wave of violent floods Tuesday that caved in roads, crushed vehicles, pushed homes off their foundations and led to dramatic boat rescues in north-eastern Vermont, nearly three weeks after flooding from Hurricane Beryl.  Flash flood warnings remained in effect through Tuesday (30^th) afternoon hours after some areas got 6 to more than 8in (15 to more than 20cm) starting late the night before. In Lyndonville, a village about 40 miles (64km) north-east of Montpelier, the state capital, Deryck Colburn said he awoke before daybreak to a neighbor pounding on his door. Colburn said he heard the same surge of rushing water from an overflowing brook that he’d heard earlier in July, along with the unnerving sound of tumbling boulders carried by the water.

“I went down the road to her house, and there was no road. There was just a river,” he said.  The fresh flooding yielded similar scenes of catastrophe to the flooding weeks earlier, but on a smaller scale. Cars and trucks were smashed and covered in mud; several homes were destroyed and pushed downstream; utility poles and power lines were knocked down; and asphalt roads yielded to cliffs in spots where roadbeds were carved away.  Most of the rain fell in the Lyndon and Lyndonville areas, and in St Johnsbury, about 10 miles (16km) south. Police issued a “shelter in place” advisory Tuesday morning for St Johnsbury, a town of about 6,000 people. At least 5in (12.7cm) of rain fell farther north in the area of Morgan, which is near the Canada border.  Mark Bosma, a spokesperson for the Vermont emergency management agency, said swift water rescue teams in boats conducted approximately two dozen rescues in the dark in the hardest-hit areas late Monday and early Tuesday.

UNITED STATES

The largest wildfire in the US swelled to more than 380,000 acres (154,000 hectares) on Tuesday morning, an area bigger than the city of Los Angeles and three times the surface area of Lake Tahoe, as thousands of firefighters battled the blaze in a remote wilderness area in northern California.  Meanwhile, the destruction caused by wildfires raging across the US west came into sharp focus as photographers documented the destruction left by the Borel fire in southern California. The fast-growing fire tore through the historic mining town of Havilah, leaving burnt buildings, cars and forests.  About 2,000 people were ordered to evacuate because of the fire, which burned through the Sequoia national forest. By Tuesday morning, the fire had torn through more than 57,000 acres (23,000 hectares) and was 17% contained.  No fatalities have been reported.

n his 40 years in the emergency room, David Sklar can think of three moments in his career when he was terrified. “One of them was when the Aids epidemic hit, the second was Covid, and now there’s this,” the Phoenix physician said, referring to his city’s unrelenting heat. Last month was the city’s hottest June on record, with temperatures averaging 97F (36C), and scientists say Phoenix is on track to experience its hottest summer on record this year. “All three of these situations are sort of disasters, where we became overwhelmed by something that had really serious effects on a large part of our population.” In recent months, Sklar and his colleagues have seen waves of patients coming into the ER with heatstroke, dehydration and even asphalt burns.  He described seeing several patients in a single shift with heatstroke. “Typically people aren’t talking at all, they’re just breathing and gasping and are in very bad shape,” he said of the most severe cases.  As the climate crisis intensifies and shatters heat records, emergency rooms across the country are filling up with heat-sick patients. Officials recorded nearly 120,000 heat-related emergency room visits in 2023 alone, a “substantial” increase from previous years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A heatwave that impacted the US west coast over the past week is now moving east into the Midwest and south-east, as millions of Americans have been under a heat alert at some point in the past week (14^th). “Numerous near record-tying/breaking high temperatures are possible over the central High Plains and Southeast Sunday, and along much of the East Coast by Monday,” reported the National Weather Service.  Cities on the east coast such as Baltimore and Washington DC will experience temperatures up to 100F (38C) this Tuesday. Temperatures in the west are expected to fall to typical summer averages. New York City is expected to experience temperatures as high as the mid-90s on Tuesday, with a forecasted heat index between 95-100F (35-38C) from Monday to Wednesday. while some areas around the city could expect heat index of up to 105F (40C).

An immense wildfire in Oregon is now the largest active blaze in the US, and has grown so big that it’s creating its own weather. The so-called Durkee fire was sparked by lightning and has since grown to nearly 245,000 acres (97,000 hectares). The fire is threatening homes in and around the communities of Durkee, Huntington and Rye Valley, as well as a major highway, cell towers and power infrastructure in the area. Fire crews and equipment from 22 states were battling the blaze.  Stephen Parker, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Boise, Idaho, said the Durkee fire showed such extreme fire behavior on Saturday, Sunday and Monday that it began creating its own weather system with a “pyrocumulus cloud”.  “That can happen when a fire becomes plume-dominated,” Parker said. “It’s like a thunderstorm on top of the fire, generated by the heat of the fire.”  The pyrocumulus cloud allows the smoke and ash from the fire to travel much higher in the air than it would typically, he said. If there is enough moisture in the air above the fire, the pyrocumulus cloud can also generate rain and lightning, potentially causing new fire starts in the region.

TROPICAL

Typhoon Gaemi has been wreaking havoc, with the Philippines government forced to declare a state of calamity last week in its capital Manila, and flooding and at least three deaths in Taiwan. . Manila received more than 300mm of rainfall, with resulting floods reaching as high as one-story buildings in places. More than half a million people have been evacuated or displaced, with 21 deaths confirmed so far. Gaemi initially developed on Sunday as a tropical storm to the east of the Philippines and then tracked north-west, strengthening until it achieved typhoon status on Monday as it drew level with the northernmost tip of the Philippines. Despite not making landfall in the Philippines, the typhoon interacted with existing monsoon weather systems, worsening the already heavy rains across the island of Luzon and causing several landslides.

Nearly 1.7 million people in Texas are entering a third day without power in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl. The acting governor, Dan Patrick, said in a statement that bringing back power will be a “multi-day restoration event”. Governor Greg Abbott, who is on a trip to Asia, is facing criticism for his absence from the state during a natural disaster. Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas on Monday, taking down power lines that left nearly 3 million people without electricity at the peak of the outages. Much of south-east Texas including Houston is enduring dangerously high temperatures with no air conditioning amid an ongoing heatwave. “With power outages continuing across south-east Texas, the lack of air-conditioning will aggravate the risk for heat-related illnesses as high temperatures warm into the lower and mid-90s,” warns National Weather Service in Houston, where the heat index reached 106F (41C) yesterday and is expected to reach 105F today.

Tropical Storm Beryl made landfall in south-east Texas on Monday with howling winds and torrential rains, causing the deaths of at least three people, closing oil ports, and knocking out power to more than 2.5m homes and businesses.  Before making landfall in Texas, the storm had already carved a path through the Caribbean as a category 5 hurricane, where it killed 11 people. It continued on to Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula as a category 2, temporarily dropped in intensity to a tropical storm but again strengthened to a hurricane over the weekend.  A 53-year-old man and a 74-year-old woman in the Houston area were killed on Monday in two incidents by trees that fell on their homes. A third person drowned, according to local officials.  The storm, which approached Texas with sustained winds of 75mph (120km/h), was moving north-west at 10mph and made landfall near Matagorda, a coastal town about 95 miles south of Houston, according to the US National Weather Service (NWS).

Hurricane Beryl has hit Jamaica after leaving an “Armageddon-like” trail of devastation in Grenada and St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) and killing at least seven people across the region (3^rd).  The category 4 storm hit the island’s southern coast on Wednesday afternoon with maximum sustained winds of 140mph (225km/h), pummeling communities and knocking out communications as emergency groups evacuated people in flood-prone communities.  “It’s terrible. Everything’s gone. I’m in my house and scared,” said Amoy Wellington, a 51-year-old cashier who lives in Top Hill, a rural farming community in Jamaica’s southern St. Elizabeth parish. “It’s a disaster.”

Almost 500 Jamaicans were in shelters by Wednesday afternoon, prime minister Andrew Holness told reporters, urging people in high-risk areas to move. “We have not seen the worst of what could happen,” Holness said. “We can do as much as we can do, as [is] humanly possible, and we leave the rest in the hands of God.”  “Life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides from heavy rainfall are expected over much of Jamaica and southern Haiti through today,” the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said online, adding that dangerous winds and storm surge were also expected in the Cayman Islands through early Thursday.  Jamaica’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management warned of dangerous storm surges potentially raising water levels to as high as 2.75 metres (9ft).  At least three people have been reported dead amid floods in Venezuela, three in Grenada, and one in St Vincent and the Grenadines.  A hurricane warning was issued for Jamaica, Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac. A hurricane watch was also in effect for Haiti’s southern coast and the Yucatan’s east coast. Belize issued a tropical storm watch stretching south from its border with Mexico to Belize City.

CLIMATE

World temperature reached the hottest levels ever measured on Monday, beating the record that was set just one day before, data suggests.  Provisional data published on Wednesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which holds data that stretches back to 1940, shows that the global surface air temperature reached 62.87F (17.15C), compared with 62.76F (17.09C) on Sunday.  Earlier this month, Copernicus found that global temperatures between July 2023 and July 2024 were the highest on record. The previous record before this week was set a year ago on 6 July. Before that, the previous recorded hottest day was in 2016.