OCTOBER 2024

EUROPE

Home to more than 120 shops, a cinema and 34 restaurants, the Bonaire shopping Centre had long been known as one of the largest in the Valencia region. After flood waters coursed through the municipality of Aldaia last week, it began making headlines for another reason: disinformation over the fate of its vast underground car park.  Online personalities, including one with more than 10 million followers, along with a prominent TV host and a far-right activist, seized on the fact that rescuers had been unable to enter the car park, falsely claiming that it contained hundreds – if not thousands – of bodies.  This week, as the flood waters receded, they were roundly discredited by Spanish police and the army, who said the car park had been searched and no bodies had been found.  It was a glimpse of the speculation, false claims and hoaxes that have surged after the deadly storm, straining a country already wrestling with the deaths of more than 200 people. “The disinformation started on Tuesday night,” said Ximena Villagrán of Maldita.es, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to factchecking. “And from that moment onwards, there was a significant explosion.”

Rescue teams are searching for survivors after flash floods and landslides hit parts of Bosnia, killing at least 16 people and injuring dozens more.  Construction machines worked to remove piles of rocks and debris covering the central town of Jablanica after the rainstorm early on Friday.  Huge volumes of rain fell in the area around Jablanica and nearby Konjic, causing sudden flooding that inundated people’s homes as they were sleeping.

UNITED STATES

By now, the canvassers at Make the Road Nevada know how to prepare themselves for the record-breaking heat.  Members of the progressive group – which focuses on mobilising Black and Latino voters – layer on white, UPF-protective shirts, and sweat-wicking performance wear. They fill their 50-quart coolers with ice-cold water. And they pack lots and lots of chips – barbecue Lays, and Cheetos and Doritos – for the road. The salt helps stave off dehydration.  “Hey, at least it hasn’t broken 100[F] yet,” said Marco Rangel, an electoral campaign manager for the group, as the canvassers made their way outside, into the boiling autumn sun. By 10am, the temperature had already ticked past 90F, but a mid-October heatwave was expected to bring highs of 105F. “Be careful out there,” Rangel warned.  Residents of this desert city are used to searing summers, but this year Las Vegas endured a string of record-breaking heatwaves. This June was Las Vegas’s hottest ever, and in July the city endured a record seven days when temperatures registered at 115F or higher. It also marked an all-time temperature record of 120F.

Hurricane Milton has been wreaking havoc across Florida in recent days, with millions of people evacuating and 70,000 moving to government shelters, but its impact began even before it made landfall.  Severe thunderstorms associated with the outer bands of the system produced an outbreak of tornadoes, some unusually powerful. While tornadoes are often produced by hurricanes, the number and severity before Milton arrived were out of the ordinary. In all, 130 tornado warnings were issued on Wednesday, and four people were killed by a tornado at a mobile home community in Fort Pierce.

AUSTRALIA

On Wednesday, the Australian state of Victoria was hit by thunderstorms. The town of Casterton was particularly badly affected, receiving 21mm of rain in just 30 minutes, followed by large hailstones.  Vehicles and properties were severely damaged, with reports of broken windows and tiles blown off roofs due to strong winds.  The hail swath was estimated at 120 miles (200km), affecting vegetation and agricultural land in western Victoria. Some farmers reported that as much as 70% of canola crops were destroyed. Some hail accumulation layers up to 15cm deep were also reported. However, the largest hailstones to have been reported by the Bureau of Meteorology measured 5cm in diameter, and fell in the rural district of Wonwondah at about 8.30pm.  Over the following few days, Australia is likely to experience further severe weather as a cold front sweeps across the country from the west. This will probably bring strong winds and dust storms, alongside further incidents of storms producing large to very large hail across much of the south of the country.

TROPICAL

The number of dead and missing after tropical storm Trami caused extensive flooding and landslides in the Philippines has exceeded 100, as the president said many areas remained isolated.  Trami blew away from the north-western Philippines on Friday, leaving at least 81 people dead and 34 others missing in one of the south-east Asian archipelago’s deadliest and most destructive storms so far this year, the government’s disaster response agency said. The death toll was expected to rise as reports come in from previously isolated areas.  Dozens of police, firefighters and other emergency personnel, backed by three backhoes and search dogs, dug up one of the last two missing villagers in the lakeside town of Talisay in Batangas province on Saturday.

Hurricane Oscar has dumped heavy rain across the eastern end of Cuba, adding to a list of woes already besetting the Caribbean’s biggest island, which was hit over the weekend by a huge power cut.  The deluge caused landslides, and winds of 75mph tore the roofs off houses, making work even more difficult for the engineers trying to get Cuba’s electricity grid up and running again, after a weekend when the entire country of about 10 million people was plunged into darkness.  “The winds have been very high,” said a resident of the eastern city of Baracoa. “The sea is very dangerous and tiles have been ripped from the roof.”  As Hurricane Oscar was reduced to a tropical storm and began to turn north towards the Bahamas on Monday, the focus returned to the collapse of Cuba’s electrical grid, caused by the country’s antiquated electricity plains.  In recent months blackouts have become so severe that people have been losing the food they store, a disaster in a country with soaring inflation and prices. Over the weekend Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s president, appeared in the military style uniform of the National Defense Council, which only happens in times of national emergency and usually due to severe weather. The latest crisis began last week when all non-essential workers in the vast bureaucracy were ordered home, in the forlorn hope of saving power and keeping the grid operating.  On Sunday it was announced that schools would be closed until Thursday, another very unusual event on an island that prides itself on keeping children in class.  Electricity was restored across much of the Centre of the island on Monday, but reports suggest the lights are out in both the far eastern reaches – where Oscar hit – and Pinar del Río in the far west.

A weakening but still tremendously powerful Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida’s west coast on Wednesday night as a category 3, leaving millions of homes without power, while bringing “catastrophic” winds likely to cause significant property damage. The hurricane, described earlier in the day by Joe Biden as “the storm of the century”, made landfall near Sarasota, Florida, just after 8.30pm ET, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami said. The storm brought potentially deadly storm surge to much of Florida’s Gulf coast, particularly Sarasota and Fort Myers, but largely spared more densely populated areas such as Tampa and St Petersburg to the north.  Despite losing some of its potency to wind shear as it neared the coast, Milton, which had churned in the Gulf of Mexico over the last two days as a category 5 storm, was still one of the strongest hurricanes to strike the US mainland in recent memory. It was also the second direct hit on Florida in 12 days, after Hurricane Helene’s deadly rampage through the state’s panhandle towards Georgia and the Carolinas beginning on 27 September. Areas devastated by Helene received another pounding as Milton swept ashore with winds above 120mph.  On Wednesday night, a flash flood emergency was in effect for the Tampa Bay area including the cities of Tampa, St Petersburg and Clearwater, the hurricane center said, with St Petersburg already receiving 16.6in (42cm) of rain on Wednesday.

“Measures have been taken in each place to protect our people and material resources,” he added. “As we have always done since the Revolution, we will overcome this situation.”