Rampaging Nature : COVID, Wildfires, Floods : America Assailed
"The fact that these fires are emitting so much pollution into the atmosphere that we can still see thick smoke over 8,000 kilometres away reflects just how devastating they have been in their magnitude and duration."Senior Scientist Mark Parrington, CAMS [Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service], EU
"We had a body wash up, we believe it was hurricane related, but we have no definite proof of that right now."
Trent Johnson, police lieutenant, Orange Beach, Alabama"Normally, it goes away. But with this one it was first the anxiety of it coming and then when it finally came, it didn't move.""It was just constant rain and wind."Preity Patel, 41, Pensacola resident
Firefighting crews may be weary but they're continuing to battle deadly wildfires in the western United States while thousands of evacuees in Oregon and other states confront a daily struggle. In Europe, scientists now track the thick, stifling smoke as it spreads intercontinentally. An astonishing 1.8 million hectares of brush, grass and woodlands in Oregon, California and Washington State has burned since August. In the fires' wake, small towns have been left smouldering, no sign of life, nothing to come back to. Although there are people listed as 'missing', 34 people, found dead, will never 'come back'.
FEMA, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency has gone into emergency mode, tasking mission assignments deploying five urban search-and-rescue teams to the region torn asunder by wildfires. Their mission is to scour through the incinerated homes, and to search for the missing, even as firefighters focus on their exhausting battle against heat, wind and leaping sparks firing up new areas.
The region's skies have been filled with dense, acrid smoke that has been pronounced the worst air pollution on the globe. It has drifted over to British Columbia, where the air quality there has also become injurious to health. With the presence of the novel coronavirus, this represents a double health threat under trying conditions.
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Now, scientists in Europe are tracking the smoke bearing down on the continent, emphasizing the magnitude of the fire-borne disaster. CAMS is monitoring the scale and intensity of the fires along with the wind-borne transport of smoke drifting across the United States and beyond. In mid-August, wildfires had roared into existence, erupting across Oregon and Washington at the beginning of September, many fires sparked by lightning storms augmented by record-breaking heat waves and howling winds.
Compounding the misery in the West, is Hurricane Sally that has swept along the Gulf Coast, uprooting trees, flooding streets and cutting power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, responsible for "historic and catastrophic" flooding to the Alabama-Florida coast, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center. Making landfall early Wednesday near Gulf Shores, Alabama as a Category 2 storm it slowed to a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 113 km/h.
Parts of the Gulf Coast were inundated as over 45 centimetres of rain fell within 24 hours and no end in sight as the storm's winds stalled, according to the National Hurricane Center, leaving the coastal community of Pensacola, Florida with up to 1.5 metres of flooding. Roads have been damaged along with bridges, cutting off traffic access. Over 500,000 homes and businesses in the broad area had their power cut off as the storm knocked over oak trees and tore down power lines.
Hurricane Sally's winds were clocked at 155 kn/h when it hit landfall at Gulf Shores. Piers were ripped away by surges caused by the storm and high winds.A section of the Pensacola Bay Bridge is missing a "significant section", in the words of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis whose state once again is in need of all the good luck and help it can conceivably muster. Truth is, there's more on the way gathering steam...
Labels: Flooding, Gulf Coast, Hurricane, U.S. Pacific Northwest, Wildfires
posted by Pieface @ Friday, September 18, 2020
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