The United States has been getting pummeled this year by natural disasters and honestly, it doesn’t look like the hammer is going to stop dropping on us anytime soon. If you look at the news, it seems as if there’s a new disaster striking somewhere around the country on a daily basis. What gives? We’ve already had several new ones this week. Last week there was a massive 7.0 earthquake off the coast of California. The southeast is struggling to get back on its feet after Hurricane Helene and Milton. It’s insane.
A report from the folks at NOAA said that the beginning of the month of November, the U.S. had been slammed with 24 different “billion dollar disasters” this year alone.
In 2024 (as of November 1), there have been 24 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect United States. These events included 17 severe storm events, 4 tropical cyclone events, 1 wildfire event, and 2 winter storm events.
If we end up hitting 30 of these suckers before the end of the year it would end up being an all-time record. I’m all for being ambitious and setting records, but I think this is one title we should pass on, don’t you think?
On Wednesday of this week, a “bomb cyclone” that was “expected to unleash hurricane conditions” on a total of 8 states on the east side of the nation was pulling in a ton of news coverage.
An urgent weather warning has been issued for eight East Coast states with a bomb cyclone expected to unleash hurricane conditions in the region.
Meteorologists predict that states from Maine to New York will see the worst impacts, with dangerous flooding and widespread power outages predicted to start on Wednesday evening.
Heavy rains and super high winds are par for the course with a bomb cyclone. We’ve been told that this will be “amplified by an atmospheric river stretching 2,000 miles along the coast”
This super-charged storm will bring wind gusts of up to 60 miles per hour, as well as torrential rainfall of eight inches in places, which will be amplified by an atmospheric river stretching 2,000 miles along the coast.
An atmospheric river is a long and narrow region of the atmosphere that carries warmth and moisture from the tropics toward Earth’s poles.
We just witnessed both of these phenomena on the West coast of the country too. Extreme weather events used to be a rare occurrence, but nowadays they seem rather common.
Add to the list a wild fire that just popped up in southern California and is making news.
A ferocious wildfire fanned by strong winds burned through Malibu on Tuesday, destroying homes, triggering power outages and forcing thousands to evacuate along the coast in the dark while firefighters struggled to contain the flames.
The eastern half of Malibu remained under an evacuation order. The rest of the city and portions of unincorporated Los Angeles County were under an evacuation warning affecting roughly 20,000 people.
Lots of celebrities call Malibu home and several such individuals, Cher and Dick Van Dyke, were were forced to evacuate.
Among those that were ordered to flee the enclave near Los Angeles were the performers Cher and Dick Van Dyke.
The Franklin fire erupted late on Monday and grew to more than 6 sq miles (15.8 sq km) by Wednesday morning. It was just 7% contained.
More than 1,500 firefighters were assigned to battle the fire, with many climbing in steep canyons near lines of flames and others hosing down collapsed roofs of horse stables and charred homes.
On Monday, there was a series of seven earthquakes along the New Madrid fault that caught the media’s attention.
Officials with the Evansville/Vanderburgh County Emergency Management Agency in Indiana say seven earthquakes happened Monday morning around the New Madrid fault line.
According to Missouri’s State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), five earthquakes were detected near Marston, Missouri, while two were detected near Ridgley, Tennessee.
Thankfully, these quakes were small. However, if this particular fault is beginning to stir like an infant after a long nap, we should prepare for the fit soon to follow.
Does all of this mean we’re living through the end of days? Nobody can say with complete certainty, but we definitely seem to match a lot of what the prophecies of the end allude to when it comes to natural disasters. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
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