Mexican Flood Another Disaster That Did Not Get Enough Attention

Destruction in Mexico after deadly flooding this month.

 A huge flood and a series of mudslides last week in Mexico killed at least 76 people and caused widespread damage across huge swaths of the country. 

At last report, more than three dozen people were still missing. 

The torrential rains came last week from the remains of Hurricane Priscilla and Tropical Storm Raymond, which sent moisture streaming across central and eastern Mexico. 

Reports Mexiconewsdaily.com:

"The government announced a relief plan of 10 billion pesos (US $543.2 million) to cover damages in Veracruz, Hidalgo, Puebla, Queretaro and San Luis Potosi, pledging rapid reconstruction along with a new cell phone alert for floods and storms."

The storms and flooding damaged 70,445 home. Of those, 43,578 were in Veracruz state. In some areas of Veracruz, two feet of rain fell within four days. 

In some places the devastation was catastrophic. The entire village of Chapula, population 400, was wiped off the map by a wall of water and mud. 

In one incident, a floating seafood restaurant in Tuxpan, in the state of Veracruz was swept free of its moorings along the raging Tuxpan River and and was launched into the Gulf of Mexico. 

In the Gulf, the restaurant broke into two parts, one of which traveled in the Gulf southward a total of about 350 miles. 

It's hard to say whether this had anything to do with climate change. It's consistent with a warming world. Rainfall can get more intense than they otherwise would be. So perhaps the rain wouldn't have been as intense had the world not warmed up so much. 

This was one of those disasters that were really huge, but didn't get much media attention. Maybe it's all too much to cover. Or, nobody is interested. Or the media outlets that should cover it don't want to. Not enough clicks on line? Too expensive to cover?  Or maybe we, me, haven't been paying enough attention.

In any event,  I've barely heard about it. There is some coverage from outlets like NBC, like you'll see below. 

Video:

NBC News report from when the confirmed death toll was 60. It gives you a sense of the breadth of this flooding. Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

 

California Wildfire Nightmare Brings Latest Deadly Climate Calamity; Breadth of Disaster Extreme

Another likely climate-driven mega-disaster.
Enormous wildfires raging now in the Los
Angeles area causing massive destruction.

The Los Angeles area was in flames overnight and this morning. 

Three major wildfires were racing through neighborhoods, destroying an as-yet unknown number of homes and businesses, likely killing and injuring a number of people and causing chaos in the region.

It's the latest climate-related disaster. Strong Santa Ana winds, gusting in the worst instances to 100 mph, are fanning the flames, turning them into blowtorches. Santa Ana winds are usually at the worst in October, November and early December, not in January. 

Although it's too soon to concretely attribute climate change to this calamity, the circumstantial evidence is there. 

Climate change has seemed to turn California's winter's into something much more unpredictable. Either the winter rains are extreme, it seems, or they are nonexistent. 

So far in southern California, the rains are missing. By now, in January,  the hillsides around Los Angeles should have been wet and damp and drippy and green. These horrendous winds should be knocking down some trees and power lines. But the fires should be nonexistent.

Those fires are anything but. 

The reports on the fire early this  morning were hard to keep up with, there was so much new, tragic information coming in.  Worse, since yesterday, the firefighters couldn't keep up with the flames, either completely overwhelmed by the size of the fires, the panicked evacuations, the lack of water, the extreme winds. 

Given the speed of the fires, and the dense neighborhoods they invaded, I'm sadly pretty sure there have been deaths, but as of this writing, there's nothing confirmed. 

The news reports are horrifying. Fox 11 in Los Angeles reported that badly burned people were found staggering along the Pacific Coast Highway overnight.

Early this morning, a Good Morning America reporter stood in a parking lot of the largest supermarket in downtown Pacific Palisades surrounded by flames. The supermarket was reduced to a wall of flame, and all the businesses surrounding the normally busy neighborhood were in flames. 

The first of the fires broke out in Pacific Palisades around 10:30 a.m. local time Tuesday. I watched live news reports in horror as the disaster escalated in the blink of an eye.  Panicked residents fleeing that fire clogged a road, then abandoned their cars and fled on foot. 

The abandoned cars blocked emergency vehicles, so bulldozers were called in to push the Bentleys, Mercedes, Teslas and BMWs from the roads in the wealthy enclave so firetrucks could get to the scene.

Once firefighters got there, they could only watch helplessly as the flames hopscotched from home to home. Hydrants weren't working - for some reason water wasn't coming out of many of them. There wasn't nearly enough personnel to handle the calamity, and the erratic winds send embers flying for miles, starting new fires. 

Buildings all along Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades - one of the most famous streets in the world - were in flames.

Overnight a new fire erupted around Altadena and Pasadena, and that one quickly invaded neighborhoods too. A little while later, a third fire appeared in Sylmar, and the same thing happened.

The L.A. Fire Department called in all off-duty firefighters to come in and help. More than 1,400 firefighters were trying, and so far failing to stop the flames. That's not a knock against these heroes. It's just that no human could stop the exceptionally erratic winds and flames in and near Los Angeles.

The bad stories keep coming:  Residents of an assisted living facility, some on gurneys or in wheelchairs, were huddled in a Pasadena 7-Eleven parking lot in strong gusty winds, having fled an assisted living facility and awaiting transport to....somewhere. Nobody was quite sure. 

The Pacific Palisades fire burned all the way down to the beaches. Video showed life guard stations on the beaches of Malibu up in flames. Numerous beachfront homes along the Pacific Coast Highway  in and near Malibu were also reportedly in flames. 

The Getty Villa Art Museum was also threatened. 

Distressing moments keep popping up on news broadcasts. Like the quick interview of the panicked, tearful man saying he'd been trying for five hours to get to his house to rescue his dogs. (Thankfully, he was eventually reunited with his now-safe pups.) 

The most extreme winds with this Santa Ana event were ongoing early this morning. The winds were forecast to only slowly subside between now and Thursday, so this catastrophe will continue to get worse today. 

This is obviously a developing story and there will be more sad updates to come. It's going to be a long, tragic day in California as yet another likely climate fueled disaster puts us all on edge. 

 Videos: Scary report via Good Morning America had my nerves soaring and my heart breaking. Click on this link to view or if you see the image below, click on that.  

The Today show also showed some heartrending, scary reports. Again, click on this link or if you see the image below, click on that. 

Worries Grow About Isolated North Carolina/Tennessee Wracked By Helene

 I, along with lots of other people, are especially worried about the people in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. 

Western North Carolina's 
road network is virtually
destroyed by the Helene
flooding, as can be seen here 

It's isolated from the catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene. I'm not just talking about a few backwoods hollows in the mountains. It's virtually the whole region. The crisis is worsening, and I fear the death toll up there will skyrocket.

Much like Vermont, there's tons of narrow, winding mountain roads in the region leading to an unknown number of houses, trailers, camps, resorts and local tourist attractions.  The flooding and mudslides up there were cataclysmic. Since there's no communications and electricity working, and nobody can get up there, nobody knows how many people have passed away, or are dying while they wait.

"This is looking to be Buncombe County's own Hurricane Katrina," Avril Pinder, the manager of the county which includes Asheville, told the Washington Post.  

And this from CNN:

"Officials in Buncombe County, North Carolina have received more than a thousand missing person reports through an online form, County Manager Avril Pinder said Sunday, cautioning that figure likely includes duplicate submissions and that communications outages mean people are struggling to reach one another, 

Gov. Cooper echoed that, telling reporters in a news conference, 'We know that a lot of these people are simply out of communication and are OK,"

In other words, there are certainly not 1,000 people out there that have lost their lives. The vast majority - I hope - just can't be reached via roads or phone or any means. 

But that doesn't mean everybody. Social media posts described people being swept away and not found. As the Washington Post tells us:

"The toll from the storm is likely to rise. Taylor Jones, Buncombe County's director of emergency management, said there had been multiple fatalities there, though he declined to provide exact figures. He said officials were resorting to their 'mass fatality plan' and trying to notify relatives, a process complicated by service outages."

 At 10 a.m. today, officials at a press conference confirmed at least 10 deaths in Buncombe County, reports the Asheville Citizen Times. 

As of Sunday morning, Asheville, an absolutely lovely, artsy city of about 94,000 at the foot of the Smokey Mountains, is pretty much cut off.  (Think Burlington, Vermont, only somewhat bigger and generally more upscale).

Most roads in and out of the city were still impassable. True, only parts of the city were inundated and destroyed by flood waters. But the entire metro area had no electricity, no cell service, in internet, no water through Saturday and into today at least.  

A scene from western North Carolina this week that 
almost exactly matches a similar photo taken after
devastating floods in Lyndonville, Vermont on July 30.

One news crew from Raleigh found a long roundabout way out of Asheville via South Carolina, but the service station was almost out of gas and probably is by now.  

Crowds gathered at the public library in downtown Asheville Sunday morning because wifi was available there. It was perhaps the only place in town where wifi was reachable. It does look like a crew arrived in Asheville this afternoon to set up Starlink so that other people could access wifi.

Still, it might be two or more days before electricity is restored. Power lines are down everywhere, and the city's water treatment plant was badly damaged by the flooding. 

As of Sunday morning, water and food distribution sites had not yet been set up, mostly because of transportation problems caused by the flooding. Helicopters have begun dropping supplies in remote areas. 

Small towns outside of Asheville like Castle Rock, Old Fort, Roan Mountain and Swannanoa have been almost completely destroyed. Accessing them will be harder than getting into Asheville.

I've vacationed in this part of North Carolina in the past and absolutely loved it. I hope the death toll doesn't really go up, and I hope, like everyone, that adequate aid gets there right away. As bad as the flooding and the suffering from it was in Vermont in the summers of 2023 and 2024, North Carolina and surrounding areas are far worse. 

Turkish Earthquake Tragedy Brings Cold Weather Risks; Strange Lights, And Weird Conspiracies

A still from a video taken during the giant earthquake
in Turkey earlier this week. That blue in the sky is
a large power flash, as either a transformer or 
transmission line failed during the quake. 

The news, as most of us know, has been gawd awful coming out of Turkey and Syria.

A 7.8 earthquake, and a series of powerful aftershocks has left widespread devastation and thousands of people dead. It's one of the world's worst earthquake disasters in memory. At last count, 11,000 people were thought to have perished. 

An earthquake isn't a meteorological or climate issue, so it's not a topic I usually cover in this blog thingy. But there are weather-related issues that further endanger victims. And there's questions about some odd phenomenon people saw in the sky. 

Plus, this calamity is bringing out the nut jobs, as disasters tend to do. We'll get into that in a bit. 

BAD WEATHER WORSENS THINGS

The biggest worry I have is how cold it is in the earthquake zone. Since the earthquake hit, daytime temperatures have generally been just above freezing, while nighttime lows have been close to 20 degrees.

People awaiting rescue beneath the rubble are already under extreme physical stress, as you might imagine. The cold makes it worse. Remember, the earthquake hit before dawn. People were in bed, certainly not dressed for winter. 

These survivors can easily die of hypothermia, or freeze to death under these conditions. 

Hope is obviously fading for finding more survivors.

The cold can slow down rescue efforts, too.  Even worse, as Fox Weather reports, patches of freezing rain and sleet are roaming the heart of the earthquake zone. The northern part of the disaster area is experiencing moderate snow.

The ice that's accumulating can only make the rescue effort more difficult. It could also slow down the aid flowing in from foreign nations, including the United States. 

In the second half of this week, precipitation should end in the disaster zone, but overnight lows will continue to drop to near 20 degrees, while daytime highs only get up to the 35-40 degree range. 

Thousands of survivors are also outdoors in the frigid weather, since emergency shelters are lacking and so many buildings are destroyed. There could be additional deaths because of inadequate shelter in the aftermath of the quake. 

This is as bad as a situation can get. 

ODD LIGHTS

Video taken during the first and strongest earthquake, at 4:17 a.m. local time,  show frequent flashes of light in the sky as the earth shook violently. 

I'm quite sure all, or almost all of those flashing lights were power lines snapping, transformers collapsing and power substations suffering damage during the shaking. 

Those power flashes look like lightning, but it was the power grid collapsing. You can see in some of the videos neighborhoods losing power at the time of nearby flashes.

You see the same sort of thing in the United States and elsewhere during nighttime tornadoes or extreme winds. 

Still, it's possible some of the flashes could have come from other sources. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey:

"Phenomena such as sheet lightning, balls of light, streamers and steady glows reported in association with earthquakes are called earthquake lights (EQL). Geophysicists differ on the extent to which they think individual reports of unusual lighting near the time and epicenter of an earthquake actually represent EQL; some doubt that any of the reports constitute solid evidence for EQL, whereas others think that at least some reports plausibly correspond to EQL"

Whatever might or might not be going on with lights during earthquakes remains a mystery.  

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The earthquake was really dumb, awful luck. 

Like almost all earthquakes, this one occurred along a fault. Plates of the earth crusts beneath the surface are ever so slowly grinding past each other. Sometimes, parts of the fault get stuck. Pressure builds and builds, and finally the sticking point breaks. And you get an earthquake. Some of them are huge, like this one.

It's all basic geology and physics, tragic as it is. 

This one hit in an area that doesn't have a recent history of enormous quakes. Building codes weren't up to date. So a lot of structures collapsed. This just made everything worse.

 Lots of people have intense anxiety about the state of the world. Institutions they should trust have let them down. So, as Scientific American states:

"In such situations, a conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem more straightforward and controllable,"

There's apparently no limit to how outlandish these conspiracy theories can get. People will believe anything. 

Against that backdrop, grifters gotta grift.  

These scammers get on social media to promote the most outlandish conspiracies, knowing that will generate tons of clicks. Which means revenue. And they're convincing emotionally vulnerable people to believe the conspiracies, alienating them further from friends and families.

Plus, the conspiracy theories are endangering innocent people by making them targets of people who believe these whacked out stories. 

I don't know how to combat this, other than mock these scumbags. 

So, apparently, the "globalists" are mad that Turkey wasn't thrilled with the idea of Sweden and Finland  joining NATO.

Which inspired the "globalists" including the United States to trigger the earthquake, through HARRP, whatever that is, or a nuclear detonator deep within the ground to trigger the quake.

The wacko grifters don't explain how the U.S. or somebody else would insert a giant nuclear device beneath the ground in Turkey and Syria without somebody in  either nation noticing. 

The HARRP crowd seems to be let on Twitter by some moron who goes by the name of Snezhina Boahen.  

Here's their genius post:  

As even the now loose-goosy Twitter alerts us after that post, those lightning flashes are, as noted above, the power grid failing in the earthquake. 

I'm also comforted by the fact that this post was met with tons of derision in the comments. 

The conspiracy theories get tragic-comic.  The most outlandish one is that God killed all those people in Turkey and Syria because he was mad at Sam Smith for performing a song with a satanic theme during the Grammys.  I wish I was making this up. 

The God I believe in doesn't do mass murders because he gives two thumbs down for a brief awards show performance. But maybe that's just me.